When I glanced at the title of a recent New York Times piece on automated essay grading, “Facing a Robo-Grader? Just Keep Obfuscating Mellifluously,” I assumed it was just another fluffy popular science article. Surely no serious organization would use a computer program to grade essays. Not long into the article, however, I discovered that the “robo-grader,” named the E-rater, was developed not by university scientists but by the Educational Testing Service — the organization that administers the GRE and the TOEFL, among other exams.

For now, E-rater only grades essays that are also read by a human grader. Though the grades given by humans and E-rater have been remarkably similar, Les Perelman, an MIT professor, has his reservations about the software. After a month of testing, he has determined that E-rater favors long paragraphs and sentences, connecting words like “moreover,” and words with many syllables. Most troubling is that the E-rater can’t determine the truth or intellectual coherence of statements in the essay, used to hilarious effect in an example essay  by Perelman.

Computer scientists have made great strides towards shedding their stereotypical “nerd” image in the last decade. By facilitating the meteoric rise of social media, smart phones, and streaming entertainment, it seems that they have finally unlocked the secret to doing things that mainstream society finds useful, intuitive and exciting. More than ever before, we enjoy the fruits of their labor and actually feel cool doing it. It begs the question: where will they be taking their talents next?

For one group of computer scientists here at Berkeley, the answer is as bold as it is simple: they will be curing cancer. In an essay published in the New York Times, one of the team’s leaders, David Patterson, writes, “Computer scientists may have the best skills to fight cancer in the next decade — and they should be signing up in droves.” The team — which currently consists of about 50 researchers in the electrical engineering and computer sciences department — is called the Algorithms, Machines, and People Laboratory (AMP Lab). Their name reflects their goal of using computers to extract meaning from extraordinarily large and complex collections of information about people, such as clinical data or genetic code. An accurate analysis of the available information could result in prescriptive actions that mitigate or even cure diseases like cancer.

The transistor, rich in both cutting-edge physics and practical applications, is one of my favorite topics to write about (see BSR issue 17 for my feature article on transistors).  So when Intel Corporation, whose best-selling computer chips each contain billions of transistors, announced this month that it had radically reengineered the transistor for its next generation of microprocessors, I immediately knew my next blog topic was in the bag.

My choice of topic was especially easy because Intel’s new transistor design was invented right here at Berkeley, by a group of electrical engineering professors and graduate students in the late 1990s/early 2000s. Back then, microchip manufacturers were worried that their traditional method for improving transistors – by shrinking them – could only continue until the end of the decade, or perhaps slightly longer.  Transistor dimensions would reach a point that they simply could not be made any smaller without degrading their functionality.