When Dan Garcia first attended UC Berkeley as a graduate student, he was amazed at the many different faces and key spaces that make up the world's top public research university.  “I can’t imagine being anywhere else," says Garcia, adding that part of what makes Berkeley special is the confluence of its diverse urban setting, large size, and a campus culture that fosters and celebrates diversity.  Today, as a professor, Garcia is passionate about broadening participation in computer science: “If you want to move the needle on diversity, come join us at UC Berkeley!” The university just announced its membership in the NSF-funded FLIP Alliance (Diversifying Future Leadership In the Professoriate), which consists  of eleven top Computer Science departments that produce over half of new URM CS faculty. FLIP aims to quickly and radically change the demographic diversity of the CS professoriate by sharing best practices for recruiting, retaining, and developing URM graduate students at member institutions. Current Berkeley faculty and students talk about the Department’s welcoming and collaborative atmosphere, and why Berkeley is eager to attract talented URM applicants and stop “leaving so much talent on the table,” in the words of Cuban-American professor Armando Fox.

United Microelectronics Corporation Distinguished Prof. Randy Katz (also alumnus, Ph.D. '80) has been appointed Vice Chancellor for Research at UC Berkeley.  Katz helped pioneer many technologies that are ubiquitous today, like  wide-area wireless networks for mobile devices, cloud-based applications and cloud storage,  and ways of managing and protecting computer networks.  The vice chancellor for research search committee was impressed with Katz’s "vision, his ability to lead the campus in identifying new research and funding opportunities, and his dedication to providing outstanding research administration support to our community."  “Trust in higher education, the level of support for public higher education and belief in the importance of research to the excellence of an institution like ours are being undermined in the current social and political context,” he said. “I am very excited to be given the responsibility as vice chancellor for research, and hopefully I can make some positive advances in reversing that direction.”   He will begin his tenure on Jan. 1, 2018.

Prof. Doug Tygar and his CS 194 Cybewar class are the focus of a New Yorker article titled "At Berkeley, a New Generation of “Ethical Hackers” Learns to Wage Cyberwar." The students have teamed up with the white hat hackers at HackerOne, a vulnerability coordination and bug bounty platform.  Companies, organizations, and government agencies use HackerOne to solicit help identifying vulnerabilities in their products––or, as Tygar put it, “subject themselves to the indignity of having undergraduate students try to hack them.”  Junior Vy-An Phan decided to focus on various secretary-of-state Web sites around the country, which house tools central to the electoral process—voter registration, ballot measures, candidate information, Election Day guidelines.  She has already found eight bugs spread across four sites.  “I could trick someone into registering for the wrong party, or not registering at all,” Phan said.

Prof. Randy Katz has been inducted into the Silicon Valley Engineering Hall of Fame "for his contributions to storage and computer systems, distinguished national service, and by his exemplary mentorship and teaching that have contributed to the Silicon Valley technical community and industries."  Katz, who is also an alumnus (M.S. '78/Ph.D. '80), co-developed the redundant array of inexpensive disks (RAID) concept for computer storage along with Prof. Emeritus David Patterson and fellow alumnus Garth Gibson, in their 1988 SIGMOD Conference paper "A Case for Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID)."  Silicon Valley Engineering Council (SVEC) Hall of Fame inductees have demonstrated significant engineering or technical achievements, provided significant guidance in new and developing fields of engineering-based technology, and/or have managed or directed an organization making noteworthy contributions in design, manufacturing, production, or service through the uses of engineering principles and applications.

Dr. Jennifer Listgarten will join the EECS faculty effective Jan 1, 2018.  Listgarten received her B.S. in CS and Physics at Queen's University in Canada, and her M.S. (CS/computational vision) and Ph.D. (CS/bioinformatics/machine learning) from the University of Toronto.  She has spent the past 10 years as a researcher at Microsoft; her area of expertise is machine learning and applied statistics for computational biology.   She is interested in both methods development as well as application of methods to enable new insight into basic biology and medicine.  She will be co-teaching CS189 Introduction to Machine Learning with Prof. Anant Sahai starting in January.

Prof. Stuart Russell teamed up with Autonomousweapons.org to create a provocative video called Slaughterbots, which shows what can go wrong when autonomous weapons are designed to target humans.  "This short film is more than just speculation" Russell says. "It shows the results of integrating and miniaturizing technology that we already have."

The School of Information (I School) is now accepting applications for its new, online Master of Information and Cybersecurity (MICS) program, also known as cybersecurity@berkeley.  MICS is an accredited program designed to train students with professional experience for a career in cybersecurity. Delivered online, MICS provides the technical skills and contextual knowledge students need to assume leadership positions in private sector technology companies as well as government and military organizations.  The program was developed in partnership with the College of Engineering and in collaboration with the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity (CLTC).  A number of EECS faculty are involved with the CLTC, which seeks to create effective dialogue among industry, academia, policy makers, and practitioners around a future-oriented conceptualization of cybersecurity — what it could imply and mean for human beings, machines, and the societies that will depend on both.  The first application deadline is January 30, 2018, and the first cohort of students will begin classes in May 2018.

UC Berkeley is ranked #3 overall in the U.S. and global computer science rankings (CSRankings) for 2017.  CSRankings is designed as a more meaningful and transparent alternative to the US News and World Report computer science ranking system--which is entirely reputation-based and relies on surveys sent to department heads and directors of graduate studies.  The CSRankings system is entirely metrics-based: it weighs departments by their presence at the most prestigious publication venues.    Berkeley ranked in the top 10 in all 4 fields:  Theory (1), Artificial Intelligence (3), Systems (6) and Interdisciplinary Areas (6).  And of the 26 areas ranked, Berkeley made the top 10 in 11 of them: computer vision(2), robotics(2), machine learning and data mining(3), computer security(3), cryptography(3), design automation(3), operating systems(4), natural language processing(5), software engineering(6), algorithms & complexity(7), computer networks(8).

CS students enrolled in CS 194, an experimental “cyberwar” course led by Prof. Doug Tygar,  have joined forces with the white hat hackers at HackerOne, a vulnerability coordination and bug bounty platform.  This is the first time that HackerOne--which connects hackers with tech companies, private businesses and federal agencies to hunt for vulnerabilities--has partnered with a university.  Students are gaining real-world cyberwar experience. “Unless students can learn to ‘think like a hacker,’ they will not be able to effectively defend systems” says Tygar.

Teaching Prof. Dan Garcia is quoted in a WBRC Fox 6 News article  which discusses how a group of Alabama teachers are working to expand computer science education opportunities for students in rural Alabama and inner-city Birmingham.  Garcia, who was part of the 2017 Alabama Teachers Computer Science Summit at The University of Alabama, praised efforts of teachers and advocates in Alabama and across the country, for their work to expand CS education. "Graduation day is the happiest day of my life, when I see all of the people who took my course four years ago, and got hooked on it," Garcia said. "They can do anything. Every single industry is being affected by data."