According to Business Insider, most college computer science rankings only include factors like the number of research papers published, global reputation, etc., while ignoring practical coding skills. HackerRank, a free coding practice website that allows developers to hone their coding skills by solving challenges, launched a University Rankings Competition to figure out which schools produce the best coders.  Berkeley was ranked #1 in America and #4 internationally out of over 5,000 participants from 126 schools. 

Earlier this year NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang delivered a NVIDIA DGX-1 AI supercomputer in a box to the Berkeley AI Research Lab (BAIR). BAIR’s research is at the cutting edge of multi-modal deep learning, human-compatible AI and connecting AI with other scientific disciplines and the humanities. According to Prof. Pieter Abbeel, “More compute power directly translates into more ideas being investigated, tried out, tuned to actually get them to work.”

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.

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.

EECS Prof. Tsu-Jae King Liu and Belle Wei (Chair of Engineering Education and Innovative Learning at San Jose State) penned an article for the Mercury News titled "Closing tech workforce gap calls for interdisciplinary model."   In it, they argue that there is a desperate need to increase the future number of computer scientists in the US workforce and this need can be met by women if Silicon Valley companies increase their efforts to collaborate with university educators. "Our educators are up to the task. What they need is incentive and support, along with resources to help them transcend outdated disciplinary divides...We need leaders across a broad spectrum of industry to identify the knowledge and skill sets that new employees will need to succeed."

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."

Microsoft Research brought together top-notch computer science PhD student researchers who are about to embark on their careers with researchers and engineers who have proven research and technology impact for the 2-day Student Summit on Mobility, Systems, and Networking. During the summit, students presented their work to an ideal audience--their academic peers and a small group of Corporate Vice President-nominated engineers and researchers from Microsoft’s worldwide labs. Out of the 4 students recognized in the “Best Of” competition, two are from Berkeley EECS: Matthias Vallentin won Best Poster and Colin Scott received Honorable Mention.

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.