Prof. Michel Maharbiz and Jose Carmena's paper on Neural Dust is featured by the online journal Neuron (Vol. 91, Issue 3, August 2016) in an article titled "Wireless Recording in the Peripheral Nervous System with Ultrasonic Neural Dust". They, with Profs. Elad Alon and Jan Rabaey and a team of engineers,  have built the first dust-sized, wireless sensors that can be implanted in the body that could monitor internal nerves, muscles or organs in real time. And because they are batteryless, they could also be used to stimulate nerves and muscles, opening the door to “electroceuticals’ to treat disorders such as epilepsy , to stimulate the immune system or bring down inflammation. Articles have also appeared in:

Scientific American -  "Neural Dust" Could Enable a Fitbit for the Nervous System

UC Berkeley News - Sprinkling of neural dust opens door to electroceuticals

C|NET - Beyond Fitbit: 'Neural dust' puts invisible cyborg tech deep inside you

Popular Science - Wireless 'Neural Dust' Could Monitor Your Brain

The Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation was spotlighted in an article in the California Council on Science & Technology (CCST) website titled “UC Berkeley and UC San Diego Explore Engineering Education of the Future through Making”. The Jacobs Institute is UC Berkeley’s interdisciplinary hub for students, teachers and practitioners who work at the intersection of design and technology to turn insights into prototypes and through testing and iteration design solutions that benefit people and society.  Prof. Björn Hartmann is the interim faculty director.

Prof. Dave Patterson has won the 2016 Richard A. Tapia Achievement Award for Scientific Scholarship, Civic Science and Diversifying Computing. This award is awarded yearly to an individual who demonstrates significant leadership, commitment and contributions to diversifying computing. This award will be presented at the 2016 Tapia Conference.

Prof. Sanjam Garg and Nir Yosef have been awarded Okawa Foundation Research Grants for 2016. This award recognizes promising young faculty members in the fields of information and telecommunications. Prof. Garg, whose research interests are in cryptography, security and more broadly theoretical computer science is awarded for his work on software obfuscation. Prof. Yosef, whose research interests are in utilizing high-throughput genomic data sets, and immune cells, covering various aspects of their biology, is awarded for his work on annotating the regulatory genome of mammalian cells.

EECS Prof. Tsu-Jae King Liu and Belle Wei (Chair of Engineering Education and Innovative Learning at San Jose State) penned an article for the Mercury News titled "Closing tech workforce gap calls for interdisciplinary model."   In it, they argue that there is a desperate need to increase the future number of computer scientists in the US workforce and this need can be met by women if Silicon Valley companies increase their efforts to collaborate with university educators. "Our educators are up to the task. What they need is incentive and support, along with resources to help them transcend outdated disciplinary divides...We need leaders across a broad spectrum of industry to identify the knowledge and skill sets that new employees will need to succeed."

The L&S Computer Science Division is featured in a Tech Crunch article titled "How generation Z females could be the answer to tech’s gender diversity problem."  The article discusses challenges in closing the gender gap and new initiatives designed to attract and retain girls to science and technology fields.  The CS Division was singled out for having almost doubled it's percentage of female CS majors  between 2009 and 2013.  By 2014, 21% of CS majors were women.  "Berkeley emphasized the impact computing has in the world, and worked to tone down elements that may put females off."

Alumni Sumit Gulwani (CS Ph.D. 2005) is at the centre of an effort to bring the power of computer code to those who are unable to write it themselves.   Sumit's research is featured in a Financial Times article which describes how his team at Microsoft developed Flash Fill for Excel which uses "programming by example" to automatically fill in outputs without entering a formula.

EECS Ph.D. student Nick Carlini (advisor Prof. David Wagner) in collaboration with a team of researchers from Georgetown University are featured in a number of news articles. They have revealed how secret commands could use voice-control tools like Siri and Google Now to take over your smartphone without your knowledge. They ran a series of tests to see just how easily these assistants could be tricked.

EECS Alumna Fang Yu (Ph.D. CS 2006), co-founder of DataVisor and expert in "big-data for security," joins with Yinglian Xie to answer questions posed by Laura Dunn of the Huffington Post.  "It’s important to remember that true innovation is a process, as long as you continue to learn and grow throughout it, you can make yourself, and your company, better."

Prof. Stuart Russell is featured in an article on the Tech Republic’s online forum titled “We can't prevent AI changing the world but we can stop robots cooking cats”. With the prospect that computers and robots will become as smart as humans and eventually surpass human intelligence, Prof. Russell says it’s time to begin working on how to get these intelligent machines to share our values.