In an article for the Daily Cal, undergraduate Taylor Choe thanks CS Assistant Teaching Prof. Josh Hug for helping her overcome her negative first impression of Berkeley and discover what makes it so special.   "My mindset going into CS 61B was definitely not a positive one. I struggled with 61A and felt discouraged, making me really come to dislike computer science." she wrote.  But Dr. Hug made her fall in love with computer science and helped her find faith in the public school system.   "You could tell that he wanted to be at lecture and wasn’t thinking about being somewhere else. His projects, homeworks and labs were entertaining and engaging, displaying the time and thought that went into each of them. He constantly emphasized the importance of being an honest person in addition to being an honest programmer. He was somehow able to make a 1,400-person class feel a little smaller. And I don’t think there is anything more you can ask of a professor, especially at a school as large as UC Berkeley."

The Turing Award 50th Anniversary celebration was held at the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco on June 23-24, 2017.   CS Professors Stuart Russell and Michael Jordan participated on a panel discussion about advances in deep neural networks, Prof. Umesh Vazirani moderated a panel on quantum computing.  Prof. Emeritus and Turing winner Michael Stonebraker discussed the legal ramifications of collecting data from a growing number of devices with different encoding formats, and alumnus and Turing winner Butler Lampson (Ph.D. '67) participated on a panel about the end of Moore's Law.

The ACM A.M. Turing Award is considered the "Nobel prize of computing," and comes with a $1 million prize for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to the computing field.   EECS faculty have won four:  Richard Karp for theory and efficiency of algorithms (NP-completeness) in 1985, William Kahan for numerical analysis (floating-point) in 1989, Manuel Blum for computational complexity theory and cryptography in 1995, and Michael Stonebraker for modern database systems in 2014.  EECS alumni have won seven: Ken Thompson (B.S. '65/M.S. '66) for operating systems theory (UNIX) in 1983, Niklaus Wirth (Ph.D. '63) for computer languages (EULER/Pascal, etc.) in 1984, Butler Lampson (Ph.D. '67) for distributed, personal computing (workstations, networks, etc.) in 1992, Douglas Englebart (MS. '53/Ph.D. '55) for interactive computing in 1997, Leonard Adleman (Ph.D. '76) for public-key cryptography in 2002, and Shafi Goldwasser (M.S. '81/Ph.D. '84) with Silvio Micali (Ph.D. '82) for cryptography and complexity theory in 2012.

A paper co-authored by Prof. Sanjit A. Seshia and postdoctoral researcher Dr. Alexandre Donze, along with researchers from Toyota, has been selected for the 2017 IEEE Transactions on CAD Donald O. Pederson Best Paper Award. This award recognizes the best paper published in the Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems publication. Donald O. Pederson was a professor of electrical engineering in EECS and one of the designers of SPICE, the canonical integrated circuit simulator. The paper, entitled "Mining Requirements from Closed-Loop Control Models", received this recognition at the 54th Design Automation Conference.

EE graduate student Vasuki Narasimha Swamy (adviser: Anant Sahai) and CS graduate student César Torres (adviser: Eric Paulos) have won inaugural Microsoft Research Dissertation Grants.  These grants offer financial support to selected doctoral students from groups that are under-represented in the field of computing.  Of the 200 applicants, only 12 were chosen.  Vasuki's research topic is “Real-time Ultra-reliable Wireless Communication” and César's is “Hybrid Aesthetics – A New Media Framework for the Computational Design of Creative Materials, Tools, and Practices within Digital Fabrication.”

Alumnus Edgar Solomonik (CS Ph.D. '14,  adviser: James Demmel) has won the Alston S. Householder Prize XX (2017)  for the best dissertation in numerical linear algebra.  The Householder prize, which is presented once every three years at a Symposium held in cooperation with the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) and the SIAM Activity Group on Linear Algebra, has two winners this year.  Edgar's dissertation,  titled "Provably Efficient Algorithms for Numerical Tensor Algebra," also won the EECS Department's David J. Sakrison Memorial Prize for truly outstanding research. Edgar is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

EECS alumna Dawn Tilbury (M.S.'92, Ph.D.'94) will lead investments in fundamental engineering research and education as the newly appointed head of the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Directorate for Engineering (ENG).  ENG supports engineering research and education critical to the nation's future and fosters innovations that benefit society.   It provides about 32 percent of the federal funding for fundamental research in engineering at academic institutions.  Dawn has been a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan, focusing in the area of control systems, with a courtesy appointment in the EECS department.  She also formerly served as associate dean for research in UMich's College of Engineering.  "I welcome the opportunity to work with the engineering and scientific community to address the big challenges that face the nation and world today," she says.

Alumnus Anantha Chandrakasan (B.S. '89/M.S. '90/Ph.D. '94), the Vannevar Bush Professor and head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Techhnology (MIT), has been named dean of MIT's School of Engineering.  Anantha joined the MIT faculty in 1994 and has produced a significant body of research focused largely on making electronic circuits more energy efficient. His early work on low-power chips for portable computers helped make possible the development of today’s smartphones and other mobile devices.  While Chair, he initiated a number of student programs including Rising Stars, for graduate and postdoc women.

Ana Arias has been selected for the 2017 Research and Development Award from the Flexible and Printed Electronics Conference, organized by FlexTech, a consortium that supports the development of flexible electronics. The FLEXIs recognizes outstanding work and achievements of organizations and individuals active in flexible hybrid electronics (FHE). The four categories include Research & Development, Innovation & Commercialization, Industry Leadership, and Education Leadership. Associate Professor Arias is recognized for the development of flexible medical sensors and printed flexible devices. Her breakthrough research has led to the creation of flexible receiving coils for magnetic resonance imaging devices and devices for impedance sensing for the detection of early pressure ulcers in vivo.

Alistair Sinclair has been awarded the 2017 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Distinguished Service Award. This award is presented on the basis of value and degree of services to the computing community including activities on behalf of the ACM, other computer organizations, and/or other entities. Prof. Sinclair is recognized for his role in the spectacular success of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing in taking collaboration in the field to an entirely new level.

Jose Carmena is mentioned in IEEE’s publication The Institute in an article titled “Timeline: The Evolution of Assistive Technologies”  (see timeline at the bottom of the article, year 2017). In celebration of The Institute's 40th anniversary this article highlights topics and technologies  over the past four decades that have applied electronics to significantly help people overcome disabilities. Professor Carmena is recognized for contributions to the neural basis of motor-skill learning and neuroprosthetic systems. His research program in neural engineering and systems neuroscience is aimed at understanding the neural basis of sensorimotor learning and control, and at building the science and engineering base that will allow the creation of reliable neuroprosthetic systems for the severely disabled. He is also co-chair of the IEEE Brain Initiative and Co-Director of the Center for Neural Engineering and Prostheses at UC Berkeley and UCSF.