Vani Mandava, the Director of Data Science at Microsoft Research, has written an article about the innovative course Foundations of Data Science taught by CS Assistant Teaching Prof. John DeNero and Ani Adhikari, a Teaching Professor in the Department of Statistics.  Mandava examines the motives and experiences of the students, and describes the aim of Berkeley’s Data Science Education Program (supported in part by Microsoft) to make data science an integral feature of a liberal education and a core interdisciplinary capacity available to all Berkeley undergraduates.

CS Assistant Prof. Anca Dragan and EECS alumna Yoky Matsuoka (B.S. '93) are among Interesting Engineering's "17 Awesome Women Engineers" who are revolutionizing the engineering field in 2017.  Anca is described as "one of the rising stars of the robotics scene" as the head of the InterACT Lab at UC Berkeley which specializes in human/robotics interactions, algorithms and compatible artificial intelligence systems."  Yoky is "a hot commodity among major tech companies" as the CTO of Alphabet Nest.

Prof. Ruzena Bajcsy and EECS alumus student (now post doc in the HART Lab)  Robert Matthew (M.S. EE '15) are featured in a Berkeley Research article titled “Engineering to Restore Power to the People”. Supported by the Signature’s Innovation Fellows Program, Matthew and Prof. Bajcsy have developed mathematical models of the body allowing for measurement of upper and lower limb movement. This provides the foundation for wearable assistive devices to serve a range of physical limitations. With teams of undergraduate students, they fabricate lightweight exoskeletons and strap them onto volunteers to test their effectiveness. Their goal is to make assistive devices as lightweight and inexpensive as possible using commercially available parts and 3-D printing.

CS postdoctoral scholar Philip Isola (Associate Prof.  Alyosha Efros) is profiled in an an article in The Cornell Daily Sun titled "Computer Science Colloquium: Do Machines See What I See?" in which he discusses strategies that might allow systems to understand the visual world.  “My ultimate goal is to make systems that really have the kind of abilities that human babies have and I think this requires understanding the type of input that biological systems get, the structure of the environment and also the structure of our brains” he says.

UC Berkeley has joined Honeywell and GE as initial participants in the 5G Innovators Initiative (5GI2), an open industry initiative designed to create transformative experiences that change lives, businesses and society, launched by Ericsson  and Intel Corporation.  The first segment of 5GI2 will focus on the Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT) and develop pilots for application of technologies including augmented and virtual reality for first responder drone surveillance of hazardous environments and other uses.  CS Prof. Ion Stoica, Director of RISELab, says "We pride ourselves for interdisciplinary collaboration and believe we are in a unique position to explore new applications, use cases, and business models for 5G that will ultimately realize its potential."

Assistant Prof. Ren Ng has been selected to receive the 2017 Sloan Research Fellowship in the category of Computer Science. 126 early-career scholars are chosen to receive this prestigious award and represent the most promising scientific researchers working today. Since 1955, Sloan Research Fellows have gone on to win 43 Nobel Prizes, 16 Fields Medals, 69 National Medals of Science, 16 John Bates Clark Medals, and numerous other distinguished awards.

Prof. Marti Hearst has been elected into the Association of Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI) Academy. The SIGCHI Academy is an honorary group of individuals who have made substantial contributions to the field of human-computer interaction. These are the principal leaders of the field, whose efforts have shaped the disciplines and/or industry, and led the research and/or innovation in human-computer interaction. Prof Hearst's HCI research includes user interfaces for search, information visualization of text, web site usability, and innovation in education.  She wrote Search User Interfaces, the first academic book on this topic and her search projects include usability analysis of search results clustering, the TileBars query term visualization, BioText search over the bioscience literature, and the Flamenco project that investigated and the promoted the use of faceted metadata for navigation and search.  Faceted navigation became the standard search interface for e-commerce, digital libraries and image collections for at least a decade.

At the Spark Summit East 2017, CS Prof. Ion Stoica was interviewed  by theCUBE about The challenges of securing data on the move.   Prof. Stoica, who is the executive chairman at Databricks Inc, says that “Security is always a difficult topic. It means so many things to so many people."  He describes some interesting research and new technologies for detecting and identifying a variety of security problems to better guard data in the cloud.

Prof. Michel Maharbiz, Prof. Yun Song, Associate Prof. Laura Waller, Assistant Prof. Rikky Muller, and Assistant Prof. Nir Yosef are among the  thirteen UC Berkeley faculty chosen to receive up to $1.5 million each over the next five years by the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub.   The investigator awards are the first individual grants by the CZ Biohub as it seeks to foster unconventional scientific exploration and encourage researchers to invent new tools to accelerate the pace of discovery.  “I am humbled and speechless,” said Prof. Maharbiz. “This is an ambitious endeavor and I can’t wait to get started and be part of it. I really do believe we, collectively, can make a big impact on diseases over the next decade, and I’m really excited to be a part of this.”

Alumnus Yongdong Wang (CS Ph.D. '92),  currently Chief Technology Officer of Microsoft Asia-Pacific R&D Group, has been named Microsoft's Global Senior Vice President.  Wang joined Microsoft in 2009, founding the Microsoft Asia-Pacific R&D Group in Beijing, and took on the additional role of managing director of Applications & Services Group East Asia.