Alumnus Jason Wu (EECS B.S. 2008) is featured in a Webby Awards article titled "How a Small Troop of Techies Led the U.S. Syrian Refugee Surge," the story of the  humanitarian efforts of the United States Digital Service (the White House's tech "start-up") to successfully vet and bring in some 85,000 Syrian refugees in the midst of the crisis.   Jason joined the USDS in an effort to do something more meaningful after working as a product manager at Facebook's Silicon Valley headquarters.  He asked himself "If I were one more person at Uber, how much of an impact would I make?"

EECS alumnus Bryan Catanzaro, Ph.D. ’11 (advisor Prof. Kurt Keutzer) has joined NVIDIA as the Vice President of applied deep learning research. He started off as an intern at NVIDIA while studying at UC Berkeley and was eventually hired as a research scientist working on programming models for parallel processors as well as libraries for deep learning. He then moved on to Baidu as a senior researcher creating next generation systems for training and deploying deep learning. He held that position until this recent appointment at NVIDIA.

A device and startup created by former CS students Kunal Chaudhary, Grant Empey, and Rishabh Parikh (along with ME alumus Anuj Chaudhary), are the focus of a California Magazine article titled "A Little Dotty: Berkeley Startup Has a New Way to Make Your House Smart."  Their creation, the Dot, is a $20 sandwich of circuit boards and chips housed in a black plastic case about the size and shape of a hockey puck. Functionally, it’s an electronic beacon that pairs with a smartphone via Bluetooth and can be programmed to perform a variety of functions based on where you are and who you are.  It has attracted interest from more than 1,700 donors, and is backed by two of Berkeley’s startup incubator programs, CITRIS Foundry and The House.  The Dot is also featured in an Inc.com article titled "How This University Sets Students Up for Entrepreneurial Success."

Alumna Prof. Colleen Lewis (EECS B.S. '05/CS M.S. '09), now teaching at Harvey Mudd College, is profiled in an article about the award-winning women attending the 2016 Grace Hopper Conference.  Colleen won the 2016 Denise Denton Emerging Leader ABIE Award for young tenure-track faculty doing research involving engineering or physical sciences, who positively influence and promote diversity.  Colleen created CSTeachingTips.org, a National Science Foundation funded website that offers tips for teaching computer science.

Software engineer Adrienne Porter Felt (CS Ph.D. 2012), now the tech lead manager for Google Chrome's usable security team, is the subject of a woprogrammer article at Medium.  Adrienne wrote her dissertation on permissions systems as part of the Security Research Group (under Prof. David Wagner),  and taught introductory computer classes at the Self-Paced Center.  In the article, she describes how she got into computer science, her research into using permissions to restrict the damage that rogue apps can do, and her latest efforts on HTTPS adoption. 

Grad student Virginia Smith has experienced periods where she felt somewhat isolated during her study of CS, a field that still has relatively few women. She recently joined forces with Ph.D. alumna Gitanjali Swamy and former Chair Tsu-Jae King Liu to form a round table of influential women in tech to think about how to increase diversity at the top levels. She has also written an article about this work.  Read about Virginia's experiences and endeavors.

Assistant Prof. Sergey Levine (former postdoc of Associate Prof. Pieter Abbeel), Wei Gao (postdoc with Prof. Ali Javey), and alumni Alex Hegyi (EECS M.S. ' 12/Ph.D.  '13) and Oriol Vinayls (Ph.D. EECS '13) made the MIT Technology Review's 2016 list of 35 Top Innovators Under 35. One of Prof. Levine’s projects is to improve motor control of robotic hands, allowing the robot to observe its own tasks and engineer its behavior to perform the tasks correctly. He is also interested in using deep learning to train autonomous drones and vehicles. Wei Gao published a major paper with Javey on the wearable sweat sensor in January that received global attention. Alex Hegyi, now at Xerox PARC in Palo Alto has developed a camera that records parts of the spectrum of light that you can’t see. Oriol Vinyals, now at Google DeepMind in London is working to create computers that can teach themselves how to play and win complex games—not by hard-coding the rules but by enabling them to learn from experience.

EECS alumnus Gene Luen Yang (CS B.A. '95) has been selected for a MacArthur fellowship, one of the most prestigious prizes in the United States.   Awarded for exceptional “originality, insight and potential,” a MacArthur prize comes with a no-strings-attached grant of $625,000 distributed over five years.  In January, Gene became the first graphic novelist named national ambassador for children’s literature by the Library of Congress.

Last week 18 undergraduates, three graduate students, two faculty, and four staff from UC Berkeley’s EECS Department attended the 2016 ACM Richard Tapia Diversity in Computing Conference in Austin, Texas.  In addition to making new connections with diversity leaders in academia and industry, Berkeley EECS participants reconnected with several EECS alumni: Jeffrey Forbes (Associate Dean at Duke University), Beth Trushkowsky (Assistant Professor at Harvey Mudd College), Valerie Taylor (Associate Dean at Texas A & M), and Hakim Weatherspoon (Associate Professor at Cornell). Teaching Professor Dan Garcia co-led a birds-of-a-feather session for Hispanics in Computing, and was a panelist on a session titled “Engaging Students of Color in Computer Science", which reflected on the department's recent efforts to broaden participation in computing.  *Dr. Raquel Romano of Google, and former LBL Postdoc, delivered a Keynote on "Redefining Inclusion: Technology as an Act of Service." *  EECS Director of Diversity Tiffany Reardon presented a poster highlighting the department’s support of women in undergraduate computing.  A highlight of the conference for many of us was seeing David Patterson receive the Richard Tapia Achievement Award for Scientific Scholarship, Civic Science and Diversifying Computing.  For years Professor Patterson has been an ardent supporter of the Tapia Conference as past Conference Chair, serving on the steering committee and funding large UC Berkeley contingents to attend the event. Well deserved, Dave! Berkeley students and faculty have attended every Tapia conference since the first one, in 2001. 

EECS alumni Matt Au (B.A. CS 2002) has been announced as the Chief Technology Officer of the cooking app start-up SideChef. SideChef is an interactive step-by-step cooking app that assists in the kitchen just like a virtual sous chef. With real time recipe navigation that includes hands-free voice commands, detailed photos, how-to videos, and built-in automatic timers, beginners have the tools to learn essential skills to cook with confidence, while intermediate and advanced cooks hone their abilities and contribute to the community with their own recipes.