Prof. Ken Goldberg’s “People and Robots” CITRIS (Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society) initiative is in Part 2 of Rolling Stone’s “Inside the Artificial Intelligence Revolution: A Special Report”. One of the projects Prof. Goldberg is working on is the development of surgical robots to do the tedious work, allowing surgeons to focus on the important tasks.

Prof. Pieter Abbeel is featured in a Rolling Stone article titled “Inside the Artificial Intelligence Revolution: A Special Report, Pt. 1.”  Algorithms are the basis for modern day computing – data goes in, the computer does its thing, and the algorithm spits out a result. What’s new is that scientists have developed algorithms that reverse this process, allowing computers to write their own algorithms. This is called machine learning and is the idea behind the science of artificial Intelligence.

EECS alumna Diane Greene (Computer Science M.S. ’88) was ranked #1 of 26 most powerful female engineers in 2016 by Business Insider. Greene was a co-founder of VMware that sold to EMC for $635M. She then went on to become a big angel investor while working on her new startup BeBop, which Google bought for $380M while she was on the board at Google. Greene is currently running Google’s cloud computing business and on the boards of Intuit and MIT. She is also recipient of the 2016 EECS Distinguished Alumni Award in Computer Science and will be this year's CS commencement speaker.

The latest rankings from U.S. News & World Report, “America’s Best Graduate Schools 2017” has placed our Electrical Engineering program at #1, tied with Stanford and MIT, and our “Computer Engineering” program ranked #2, tied with Stanford. For the U.S. News rankings of graduate engineering programs, 215 engineering schools that grant doctoral degrees were surveyed.

It is with sadness to announce that Prof. Chitoor V. Ramamoorthy (“Ram”) passed away on Thursday, March 10 at UCSD’s Thornton Hospital. All extended family members and friends are being directed to a workshop which will be held on May 5th in La Jolla for a memorial: www.TransKS.org. Sympathy cards may be sent to Mrs. Ramamoorthy at 558 Blackhawk Club Drive, Danville, CA 94506. Donations may be directed to the C.V. Ramamoorthy Distinguished Research Award.

Prof. Dan Garcia has been selected to receive a National Center for Women in Information Technology (NCWIT) 2016 Undergraduate Research Mentoring (URM) Award. This award recognizes Academic Alliance representatives at non-profit U.S. Institutions for their outstanding mentorship, high-quality research opportunities, recruitment of women and minority students, and efforts to encourage and advance undergraduates in computing-related fields.

Kay Ousterhout recently won the Google Ph.d. Fellowship. This is one of the highest honors a CS grad student can win. It is extremely selective, with only a small number universities invited to submit two nominees each. Kay is a 5th year student of Prof. Sylvia Ratnasamy. The Google Phd Fellowship was created in 2009 to recognize and support outstanding graduate students doing exceptional work in Computer Science (CS) and related disciplines.

Prof. Ruzena Bajcsy and her team have been selected for a 2016-17 award from the Signatures Innovation Fellow Program. This program supports innovative research by UC Berkeley faculty on projects that hold commercial promise and supports visionary faculty entrepreneurs and leadership teams on their journey to building great companies. Prof. Bajcsy’s project is Individualized Human Modeling for Medical Diagnosis and Prescription of Assistive Devices.

EECS alumni Gene Luen Yang (CS B.A. '95) has been selected as the new national ambassador for Young People’s Literature. This literary ambassador program was created in 2008 “to raise national awareness of the importance of young people’s literature as it relates to literacy, education and the betterment of the lives of young people”. After graduating UC Berkeley in 1995, Yang went to work as a computer engineer for two years but came to the realization he was meant to teach. He left his job as an engineer to teach computer science at a high school. During this time he also wrote stories and began self-publishing comic books and in 2006 began winning awards and gaining notoriety for his graphic novels.

The Level Playing Field Institute (LPFI) honored Teaching Prof. Dan Garcia as a Tech Diversity Champion at their Annual Fairness Matters Forum 2015 held at Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco. LPFI is committed to eliminating the barriers faced by underrepresented people of color in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) and fostering their untapped talent for the advancement of our nation. This event focused on the progress toward diversifying tech and celebrated those who are working to create a more inclusive tech ecosystem.