Profs. Dawn Song, Ion Stoica, Kurt Keutzer, Michael Jordan, Pieter Abbeel, and Trevor Darrell have teamed up with EECS alumnus Cameron Baradar (B.S. '15) and startup institute The House to run a new "global center-of-gravity of AI activity" called AI@The House. The new program will offer technical guidance, mentorship, free graphic processing units and financial support, among other resources, to startups focused on AI.  Their first core initiative is an accelerator for startups who are leveraging AI to build industry-defining products.

EE Prof. Sayeef Salahuddin will serve as associate director of a new, $26 million research center called Applications and Systems-driven Center for Energy-Efficient integrated Nano Technologies (ASCENT), which will focus on conducting research that aims to increase the performance, efficiency and capabilities of future computing systems for both commercial and defense applications .  ASCENT, under the direction of Notre Dame Professor Suman Datta,  will involve 20 faculty members representing 13 of the nation's leading research universities, and is funded by the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC)’s Joint University Microelectronics Program (JUMP), which represents a consortium of industrial participants and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).  The multidisciplinary research center will develop and utilize advanced technologies to sustain the semiconductor industry's goals of increasing performance and reducing costs. 

EECS alumnus Bob Dahlberg (B.S., Tau Beta Pi, Eta Kappa Nu) has been appointed AutoGrid's new Vice President of Strategic Partnerships & Business Development.  AutoGrid is a leader in flexibility management software.  Dahlberg will spearhead efforts to build a multi-channel partner network and develop new business opportunities with partners in energy efficiency, hardware manufacturing and demand-response aggregation. After graduating, Dahlberg worked as a product manager at Intel before beginning his startup career at then pre-revenue Synopsys, now the world’s 15th largest software company.  He subsequently served as a partner at technology venture capital firm Horizon Ventures before joining Arrayent,  a leading consumer internet of things platform for brand manufacturers, where he signed the company’s first major customers.

EECS alumnus Wei-Tek Tsai (M.S.'82/Ph.D. '85) has been added to the Advisory Board of ThreeD Capital, a Canadian--based venture capital firm focused on investments in "promising, early stage companies with disruptive capabilities."  Tsai served as Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota and later joined Arizona State University as a professor of Computer Science and Engineering in the School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering.  In China, he initiated the first academic laboratory dedicated to blockchain research and education in China at Beihang University’s School of Computer Science and Engineering.  Sheldon Inwentash, Chairman and CEO of ThreeD Capital, stated, "Dr. Wei-Tek Tsai is a world-renowned Blockchain expert who, amongst his many great accomplishments, has developed high-speed super large ledger technology that could represent the most disruptive protocol of the already disruptive blockchain industry. His experience and knowledge will be invaluable to our Blockchain initiatives."

Daniel Grubb (EE140) and Ruocheng Wang (EE240A) have won an Analog Integrated Circuits I class design competition sponsored by Keysight technologies. The students designed low-power and high-speed LCD display drivers for a smartwatch display for the classes taught by Assistant Prof. Rikky Muller. Competition finalists gave presentations to a panel of judges that included three Berkeley alumni who are now Keysight engineers.  Grubb and Wang won hand-held digital multimeters generously donated by Keysight.

CS alumna Diane Greene (M.S. '88) is ranked 12 on Bloomberg Businessweek's list of the 50 people who defined global business in 2017.   Greene is the senior vice president and cloud chief at Google.  Although the Google Cloud Platform currently has only about 5% of the cloud market, it grew more than 80% in the past year under her management--outpacing industry leader Amazon.com Inc.  Greene thinks Google Cloud could surpass Amazon Web Services by 2022 as it sells more software tools and services and becomes Google’s chief vehicle for bringing advances in artificial intelligence and quantum computing to market.

EE alumnus Mark Heising (M.S. '83) has been appointed to the board of trustees for The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS).  The IAS is one of the world’s leading centers for curiosity-driven basic research and serves as a model for protecting and promoting independent inquiry, prompting the establishment of similar institutes around the world, and underscoring the importance of academic freedom worldwide. Heising is the founder and managing director of Medley Partners, an investment firm based in San Francisco.  He previously worked as a chip design engineer and founded VLSI Cores--which designed and licensed cryptographic integrated circuits. He holds six U.S. patents in cryptography, compression, and data communications.

Alumnus Sanjay Mehrotra (EECS B.S. '78/M.S. '80) has been named the 2018 Vice Chair of the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA).  The SIA is a trade association and lobbying group positioned as "the voice of the U.S. semiconductor industry."  Mehrotra, who is currently CEO of Micron, led the growth of SanDisk Corporation from start-up in 1988 to Fortune 500 company in 2016.  He holds 70 patents and has published articles on nonvolatile memory design and flash memory systems.

CS alumna Diane Greene (M.S. '88) sat down with Ginni Rometty and Marc Benioff at the Dreamforce conference last week to talk about women leaders in tech.  Greene, who is currently the CEO of Google Cloud, started out designing offshore oil structures and systems before becoming a software engineer.  She founded several successful companies, most notably VMware, which created the market for virtualization.  She and Rometty, who is the CEO of IBM, stand among the ranks of the tech giants of industry--almost all of whom are men.   They discussed their careers, leadership philosophies, and how they approach their responsibilites as women in power.

CS alumnus Wu-Fu Chen (Ph.D. '77) has been elected to the Board of Directors of Crown Bioscience Inc., a global drug discovery and development company.  Chen is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Acorn Campus Ventures and Partner Emeritus at Mobility Ventures LLC.  He started more than a dozen companies, including Cascade Communications (IPO in Nasdaq, $10B) and Xinwei Telecom (IPO in China, near $30B).  Forbes Magazine ranked Chen as one of the Top 100 Venture Investors in the U.S. and he was recognized by Red Herring magazine as one of the “Top Ten Entrepreneurs of 2000”.   He has been featured on the front page of the Wall Street Journal and was once called the “Most Influential Person” in optical networking by Light Reading magazine.