Looking at the entrepreneurial aspirations of UC Berkeley’s students in what is often called around campus the “innovation ecosystem”, EECS alumni Cameron Baradar (B.S. ’15) has opened the doors to The House, a startup institute across the street from campus on Bancroft Ave. Currently on campus there are over 40 clubs across engineering, design and entrepreneurship, two entrepreneurship centers, a design institute, a maker space and the world’s largest collegiate hackathon. Under the mentorship of Prof. Scott Shenker, Cameron sees The House as a backbone for the emerging infrastructure providing startup founders with what they need and when they need it to be successful.

A new undergraduate program that integrates the study of engineering and business, the Management, Entrepreneurship, & Technology Program (M.E.T.), will be taught at Berkeley’s top-ranked Haas School of Business and the College of Engineering.  The Business + EECS track combines study in these two areas so that students can pursue interests in creating new technologies, software or mobile apps, as well as ventures that take these products to market and deliver significant social impact.

M.E.T. students will enroll in one program but earn two Bachelor of Science degrees, one in engineering and one in business administration. The integrated curriculum consists of liberal arts, engineering and business courses and can be completed in four years.

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 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."

The AMP (Algorithms, Machines and People) Lab was featured in the NEA Venture Capital Firm’s blog by Peter Sonsini, in a post titled "Veriflow: The next great startup with Cal connections”. Veriflow is the 3rd and latest EECS UC Berkeley startup to join the NEA portfolio. The successes surrounding Cal’s computer science program stem from the uniqueness of its “lab” model--the open and collaborative project-based approach that focuses on specific objectives over a specific period of time.

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.

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 Michael George Luby (CS Ph.D. ’83), VP of Technology at Qualcomm is among the class of 2015 ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) Fellows. In 1996-1997, while at ICSI (International Computer Science Institute) he led the team that invented Tornado codes. He is recognized for his contributions to coding theory, cryptography, parallel algorithms and derandomization.

Venture capital firm Pejman Mar Ventures has created a new competition for UC Berkeley entrepreneurs who demonstrate passion and dedication to making their vision a reality. They are offering $250,000 to back up a startup founded by a Berkeley student, faculty member or alum in exchange for 10 percent of the company. In the past 18 months they have funded 7 companies in which the founders were from Stanford, MIT and Carnegie Mellon. Applicants have until Oct. 1 to apply and a winner will be chosen by Oct. 30.

An article featured in Bloomberg Business titled “Five of the Best Computer Science Classes in the U.S” has named EECS CS 61A in the top 5. The number of college graduates who got degrees in computer science in 2011 was 2,000% higher than it was in 1970 according to the U.S. Dept. of Education. This course is taught by Asst. Teaching Prof. John De Nero. A notable alumni of this program is Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, ’86.