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.

Alumnus Eric Cheng (EECS B.S. and B.S.  Business Administration, Haas, 2007) was promoted to partner in the Palo Alto and San Francisco offices of Kirkland & Ellis LLP.   Eric's practice focuses on intellectual property disputes in federal district courts around the country as well as before the U.S. International Trade Commission, with an emphasis on patent and  copyright infringement, and trade secret misappropriation, involving a wide range of technologies.

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.

Alumnus Billy Klüver (EE MS 1955/ Ph.D. 1957), who then became an assistant professor in EECS from 1957-58 is featured in a Little Atoms online article titled “How AT&T shaped modern art”. Born in Monaco in 1927, Klüver installed a television antenna on top of the Eiffel tower and developed underwater filming equipment for Jacques Cousteau before coming to Cal.   He eventually joined Bell Telephone Laboratories where he began collaborating with artists  on works incorporating new technology and was co-founder of Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.).   Klüver felt artists "helped make technology more human."

Prof. Seth Sanders is featured in a Yahoo Finance article about his participation in a panel discussion on Advancements in Storage Technology at the STUDIO Conference in San Francisco on August 3. Prof. Sanders is the chief scientist and co-founder of Amber Kinetics, Inc., developer of the world’s first commercially ready four-hour flywheel energy storage system.

Prof. Tsu-Jae King Liu has been selected to receive the 2016 Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) Aristotle Award. The Aristotle Award was created by the SRC Board of Directors in March 1995 to recognize supported faculty whose deep commitment to the educational experience of SRC students has had a profound and continuing impact on their professional performance and consequently a significant impact for members over a long period of time. It is a tribute to the unwavering commitment of Prof. King Liu to all aspects of education. Past winners of this award include Profs. Andrew Neureuther, Chenming Hu, David Allstot and Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli.

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.