She received her B.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering, California Institute of Technology, 1983, a S.M. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1985, and a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1987. In 1988, she joined the faculty of EECS, UC Berkeley.
She is interested in computer vision, robotics and deep learning.
Honors and awards she has received include the General Motors Scholarship, 1982-3; Henry Ford Engineering Award, 1983; Hertz Fellowship, 1984-1988; Analog Devices Junior Faculty Development Award 1990-1995; IBM Junior Faculty Development Award 1990-1991; Presidential Young Investigator (PYI) Award, 1990; Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, 1992; IEEE Signal Processing Society Transactions Young Paper Award (with S. Hein) 1997; IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Video Technology Transactions Best Paper Award (with D. Taubman), 1997; IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Video Technology Transactions Best Paper Award (with R. Neff), 1999; International Conference on Image Processing best paper award (with R. Neff). 1999; Packet Video Workshop best paper award (with T. Ngyuen), 2002; Okawa Foundation Prize 2004; IEEE Workshop on Multimodal Sentient Computing: Sensors, Algorithms, and Systems, in conjunction with CVPR (with C. Freuh) 2007; IEEE Transactions on Semiconductor Manufacturing Best paper award for the papaer (with A. Gu) 2008; IEEE Transactions on Multimedia Best paper award for the paper (with M. Chen) 2009.