Mentors

Saurabh Amin is a second year graduate student in the Civil Systems program working with Prof. S. Shankar Sastry and Prof. Alexandre M. Bayen. He is broadly interested in control and estimation of hybrid, stochastic and distributed systems.

He is serving for the first time as a SUPERB mentor and along with Alessandro Abate, he is working with Nandita Mitra on development of a toolbox for probabilistic verification of stochastic hybrid systems.

Elaine Cheong is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is advised by Prof. Edward A. Lee. Her research interests include software for embedded systems, especially operating system and programming language support. She is a member of the Berkeley Ptolemy Project and Chess, the Berkeley Center for Hybrid and Embedded Software Systems. She earned a bachelor's degree (B.S.) in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2000 and a master's degree (M.S.) in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from the University of California, Berkeley in 2003. She has been awarded the NDSEG, NSF, Lucent GRPW, AAUW, and Intel Open Collaborative Research Fellowships.

This is her first summer serving as a SUPERB mentor, and she is working with Heather Taylor on Viptos, an integrated graphical development and simulation environment for TinyOS-based wireless sensor networks.

Alex Kurzhanskiy is a PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, working with Prof. Pravin Varaiya. This is his first summer to serve as Mentor for a CHESS SUPERB student, and he is working with Dominique Duncan.

Todd Templeton is a third-year graduate student in Electrical Engineering working with Prof. Shankar Sastry. Prior to coming to Berkeley, Todd received his B.S.E in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University in June, 2004. This is his first summer serving as a SUPERB mentor, and he is working with Nashlie Sephus.

Todd's research interests include computer vision, particularly terrain reconstruction and vehicle motion estimation; artificial intelligence; control; embedded systems; and robotics, particularly unmanned aerial vehicles. He is currently working on a project to find a good landing location for an unmanned rotorcraft using computer vision.

Prof. S. Shankar Sastry is the Director of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS), in the University of California, and is NEC Distinguished Professor, and former Chairman, in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at Berkeley (2001-04). In 2000-01, he was Director of the Information Technology Office (now divided into IXO and IPTO) at DARPA. He is one of the directors of the Center for Hybrid and Embedded Software Systems (Chess) at UC Berkeley.

His areas of research are networked, embedded and autonomous software, computer vision, control of adaptive, nonlinear and hybrid systems. He has coauthored over 350 technical papers and 9 books.

Dr. Sastry was elected into the National Academy of Engineering in 2001 "for pioneering contributions to the design of hybrid and embedded systems." He was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (AAAS) in 2004. He also received the President of India Gold Medal in 1977, the IBM Faculty Development award for 1983-1985, the NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1985 and the Eckman Award of the of the American Automatic Control Council in 1990, an M. A. (honoris causa) from Harvard in 1994, Fellow of the IEEE in 1994, the distinguished Alumnus Award of the Indian Institute of Technology in 1999, and the David Marr prize for the best paper at the International Conference in Computer Vision in 1999.

Prof. Edward A. Lee is a Professor, Chair of the Electrical Engineering (EE) Division and Associate Chair of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) Department at UC Berkeley. His research interests center on design, modeling, and simulation of embedded, real-time computational systems. He is a director of Chess, the Berkeley Center for Hybrid and Embedded Software Systems, and is the director of the Berkeley Ptolemy project. In 2003, Prof. Lee was the faculty advisor for the Chess SUPERB students.

He is co-author of five books and numerous papers. His bachelors degree (B.S.) is from Yale University (1979), his masters (S.M.) from MIT (1981), and his Ph.D. from U. C. Berkeley (1986). From 1979 to 1982 he was a member of technical staff at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, in the Advanced Data Communications Laboratory. He is a co-founder of BDTI, Inc., where he is currently a Senior Technical Advisor, and has consulted for a number of other companies.

Prof. Lee is a Fellow of the IEEE, was an NSF Presidential Young Investigator, and won the 1997 Frederick Emmons Terman Award for Engineering Education.

Dr. Jonathan Sprinkle is the Executive Director of the Center for Hybrid and Embedded Software Systems (CHESS), and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests and experience are in systems control and engineering, through modeling and metamodeling. In the summers of 2004-05, he has been faculty advisor and mentor for the SUPERB program.

Dr. Sprinkle is a graduate of Vanderbilt University (PhD, MS) and Tennessee Technological University (BSEE). In 2005, Dr. Sprinkle was selected as one of 108 Regional Finalists for 11-19 highly competitive positions of White House Fellow. In 2002-2003, he was named a Master Teaching Fellow by the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching. In 2002 he participated in the 52nd Meeting of the Nobel Laureates. As an undergraduate, in 1998-99, he served as the President of the Student Government Association. In 1997-98 he was honored as Campus Leader of the Year and Legislator of the Year by the SGA of Tennessee Tech University.