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.

Prof. Scott Shenker has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The strength of the Academy lies in the intellectual leadership of its members and the wide range of expertise they bring to its studies and publications. The Academy membership encompasses over 4,600 Fellows and 600 Foreign Honorary Members and reflects the full range of disciplines and professions: mathematics, the physical and biological sciences, medicine, the social sciences and humanities, business, government, public affairs, and the arts. Among the Academy's Fellows are more than 250 Nobel laureates and 60 Pulitzer Prize winners.

The paper by Prof. David Culler and former students Joseph Polastre and Jason Hill titled “Versatile low power media access for wireless sensor networks", in the Proceedings of the 2nd international Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems has been selected as a winner of the inaugural SIGMOBILE Test of Time award for 2016. The Berkeley MAC (B-MAC) was a pioneering contribution to media access control in TinyOS-based wireless sensor networks. B-MAC and its underlying low-power listening principle became a facto standard in sensor networks. It plays a lasting role in the development of new low power wireless technologies such as IoT.

According to Semantic Scholar, a search tool that uses AI to actually understand—to a limited extent—the content of published literature,  Prof. Michael Jordan is the most influential computer scientist on the web.  Semantic Scholar, developed at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, is a "smart" search service for journal articles which is designed to quickly highlight the most important papers and identify the connections between them.  The project and its rankings are profiled in a Science article titled "Who’s the Michael Jordan of computer science? New tool ranks researchers' influence."   Profs. Jitendra Malik and Scott Shenker also rank in the top 7.

The paper titled "Crowdie: Feedback-Directed Instrumentation for Deployed JavaScript Applications", authored by Magnus Madsen (U. of Waterloo), Frank Tip (Samsung), Esben Andreasen (Aarhus U.), Prof. Koushik Sen (EECS) and Anders Moller (Aarhus U.) has been chosen to receive an ACM SIGSOFT (Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Software Engineering) Distinguished Paper Award. Less than 10% of the accepted papers and less than 2% of the total submissions have been chosen to receive this highly prestigious award.

The Mu Chapter of UC Berkeley has received the 2014-15 IEEE-HKN Outstanding Chapter Award.  This award is presented to IEEE-HKN chapters in recognition of excellence in their chapter administration and programs. Recipients are selected on the basis of improving professional development; raising instructional and institutional standards; encouraging scholarship and creativity; providing a public service, and generally further the established goals of IEEE-HKN.

11 EECS graduate students have been awarded National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships (NSF GRFP). In EE they are Sidney Douglas Buchbinder, Regina Eckert, Laura Hallock, Sang Min Han, Michael Kellman, Efthymios Papageorgiou and Margaret Payne. In CS they are Abhishek Gupta, Grant Ho, Ethan Jackson and Gregory Kahn. The NSF GRFP program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees at accredited US institutions. Fellows benefit from a three-year annual stipend of $34,000 along with a $12,000 cost of education allowance for tuition and fees.

The EECS Department is pleased to announce a $1 million dollar gift from the Hopper-Dean Foundation in support of diversity initiatives in Computer Science. Over the next two years, we anticipate this effort will touch thousands of students at Cal and high schools nationwide. The Hopper-Dean Foundation funds will support a comprehensive outreach and retention model that combines best practices in high school teaching with an expansion of the recent - but already proven – Berkeley CS Scholars program.

Prof. Michael Jordan has been selected to receive the 2016 IJCAI (International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence) Research Excellence Award. The Research Excellence award is given to a scientist who has carried out a program of research of consistently high quality yielding several substantial results. Professor Jordan is recognized for his groundbreaking and impactful research in both the theory and application of statistical machine learning.

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.