Professor in Residence Trevor Darrell has been hired as Chief Scientist at Nexar, the world's first over-the-top vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) network that turns smartphones into Artificial Intelligence Dashcams.  In parallel to his work in EECS, Darrell will lead research in the area of machine vision deep learning and vehicle path prediction, including leveraging the company's pool of rare large-scale driving data sets that contain video and telemetry of a variety of real-world driving environments to develop automotive applications.

The CS Division has launched RISELab (Real-time Intelligence with Secure Execution Laboratory), the latest in its series of five-year intensive research labs in computer science. RISELab’s mission is to improve how machines make intelligent decisions based on real-time input.  It is the successor of AMPLab,  a pioneering Big Data effort, which launched widely used open source projects including Apache Spark, Apache Mesos and Alluxio.  RISELab is supported by sponsors that include Amazon Web Services, Ant Financial, Capital One, Ericsson, GE Digital, Google, Huawei, Intel, IBM, Microsoft and VMWare.

Alumnus Ankur Aggarwal (EECS M.Eng.'12) has been named in Forbes magazine's 30 Under 30 list,  a compilation of the brightest young entrepreneurs, innovators and game changers across 20  industries.  Ankur and his college roommates teamed up to found TowerView Health, which sells a smart pill box with custom trays of medication.

Alumnus Kylan Nieh (CS BA/Business BS 2014) has made the 2017 Forbes 30 Under 30: Enterprise Technology list.  While still a student, Kylan started his own public speaking and leadership course at the Haas School of Business and became the youngest recipient of the Business Teacher of the Year Award in 2014.  After graduation, Kylan became the youngest Senior Product Manager at LinkedIn Students.

Imperva has named alumnus Roger Sippl (CS BS '77 ) to its board of directors.  Sippl is a Silicon Valley software pioneer, entrepreneur and innovator.  He founded Informix Software (now part of IBM) in 1980, when he was just 24, to develop and commercialize SQL relational database software.  He subsequently took two more companies through IPO: The Vantive Corporation, which became part of PeopleSoft/Oracle, and Visigenic Software, which was acquired by Borland.  Sippl received the CS Distinguished Alumni award in 1995.

Alumnus Peter Norvig  (CS Ph.D. '86), now Director of Research at Google, is profiled in a Forbes magazine article titled "Artificial Intelligence Pioneers: Peter Norvig, Google."  The article describes Norvig's  history and accomplishments, and outlines his thoughts on human-machine partnerships and the disparate goals of  neuroscience and AI research.

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 alumna Prof. Andrea Goldsmith (B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. ’94) co-founded Quantenna in 2005 to build a product and company around her research in adaptive multiple-antenna (MIMO) wireless communications. After seed funding for Quantenna was secured from Sequoia Capital in March of 2006, Goldsmith took a leave of absence from Stanford to lead the company’s technical strategy and development in the role of CTO. She continued in this role through June 2009. She is currently chairing the company’s technical advisory board. Quantenna has continued innovating to remain at the cutting edge of WiFi technology. Quantenna chipsets are now deployed with 15 major carriers throughout the world, including AT&T, DirectTV, Comcast, Orange, Swisscom, and Telefonica.  The company employs 275 people worldwide, with revenues this year expected to exceed $110M. The company went public on Oct. 28, 2016 as QTNA, with the founders, company executives, and early employees ringing the closing Nasdaq bell. Quantenna’s stock has risen 15% since its IPO. Andrea Goldsmith is also the Stephen Harris Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford. 

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.