EECS alumna Ming C. Lin (B.S./M.S./Ph.D. '86-'93) has been named Chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland (UMD).  Lin,  a noted educator and expert in virtual reality, computer graphics and robotics, will assume the role of Elizabeth Stevinson Iribe Chair of Computer Science with a joint appointment in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS). The department includes more than 50 tenured or tenure-track faculty members and 11 full-time professional track instructional faculty members. “One of my primary goals is to ensure that our students will be successful in their careers when they graduate,” Lin said. “They are going to be the leaders in a society where practically every aspect of daily life is enabled and impacted by computing. Giving them the knowledge and skills to excel in a technology-empowered world is a mission I take very seriously.”

CS alumnus Harold Pimentel (Ph.D. '16, advisor: Lior Pachter), now a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford, has been chosen as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Hanna H. Gray Fellow.  The goal of the fellows program is to "recruit and retain individuals who are from gender, racial, ethnic, and other groups underrepresented in the life sciences, including those from disadvantaged backgrounds, early in their careers."  Pimentel is researching what happens when cells fail to prune RNA copies of genes. These copies contain interrupting sequences called introns that are usually spliced out before an RNA molecule serves as a template for protein production. Neglecting to trim away introns is sometimes associated with abnormal cellular behavior and disease. Pimentel plans to use computational methods he developed to analyze a vast set of RNAs in healthy and cancerous tissues to discover whether lingering introns play a part in cancer.   He says he will use the $1.4M award to start a new lab.

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.

CS alumna Diane Greene (M.S. '88) is ranked 12 on Bloomberg Businessweek's list of the 50 people who defined global business in 2017.   Greene is the senior vice president and cloud chief at Google.  Although the Google Cloud Platform currently has only about 5% of the cloud market, it grew more than 80% in the past year under her management--outpacing industry leader Amazon.com Inc.  Greene thinks Google Cloud could surpass Amazon Web Services by 2022 as it sells more software tools and services and becomes Google’s chief vehicle for bringing advances in artificial intelligence and quantum computing to market.

EECS alumnus and civil rights leader Harlan Yu (B.S. '04) is appealing to CS departments to show students how they can “pull on various levers of policy" to keep the public protected.  Yu, who is now the Executive Director of a non-profit tech-policy consulting group called Upturn, is the focus of a Princeton Alumni Weekly article describing how he, and Upturn co-founder David Robinson, are working to shape the future of technology.  They helped draft the influential “Civil Rights Principles for the Era of Big Data,” as well as a set of principles to specifically address the use of body cameras by police.  They also helped curb the proliferation of targeted online ads for payday loans and are involved in the fight for internet freedom abroad.  In the future, they plan to tackle social equity in the development of self-driving cars, like the potential for carmakers’ mapping technology to restrict where autonomous vehicles can and cannot drive.  “We need many more computer scientists and technologists focusing on the core social problems — in housing, in education policy, in health policy, in all sorts of core areas where new technologies are going to shift the landscape,” Yu says. “As technology continues to permeate all aspects of our society, there’s just going to be a greater need for this kind of work.”

EECS Master's student Allen Tang (also alumnus, B.A. CS/Statistics/ORMS) and his Berkeley teammates have won the Data Open Championship at the New York Stock Exchange.  The winners receive a $100,000 cash prize and possible job interviews with Citadel, a Chicago-based hedge fund firm. The competition was comprised of 20 one-day competitions from Stanford to MIT to Oxford, with the best performers competing in the week-long finale.  The Berkeley team of four applied data science to a meaningful problem in education--the impact of opening charter schools--to find where more funding would have the biggest effect. They worked 16-hour days during the week and produced a 20-page report and presentation on how charter schools have a negative impact in the short-term but outperform public schools in the long-term because of a survivorship bias. Only good charters stay in the system while bad ones close.

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.

CS alumna Diane Greene (M.S. '88) sat down with Ginni Rometty and Marc Benioff at the Dreamforce conference last week to talk about women leaders in tech.  Greene, who is currently the CEO of Google Cloud, started out designing offshore oil structures and systems before becoming a software engineer.  She founded several successful companies, most notably VMware, which created the market for virtualization.  She and Rometty, who is the CEO of IBM, stand among the ranks of the tech giants of industry--almost all of whom are men.   They discussed their careers, leadership philosophies, and how they approach their responsibilites as women in power.

CS alumnus Wu-Fu Chen (Ph.D. '77) has been elected to the Board of Directors of Crown Bioscience Inc., a global drug discovery and development company.  Chen is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Acorn Campus Ventures and Partner Emeritus at Mobility Ventures LLC.  He started more than a dozen companies, including Cascade Communications (IPO in Nasdaq, $10B) and Xinwei Telecom (IPO in China, near $30B).  Forbes Magazine ranked Chen as one of the Top 100 Venture Investors in the U.S. and he was recognized by Red Herring magazine as one of the “Top Ten Entrepreneurs of 2000”.   He has been featured on the front page of the Wall Street Journal and was once called the “Most Influential Person” in optical networking by Light Reading magazine.