2005 CS Distinguished Alumna Barbara Simons (Ph.D. '81) is the subject of a Berkeley Engineering profile celebrating the 150th anniversary of U.C. Berkeley.  Simons, who is a past president of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), has been drawing attention to the pitfalls of electronic voting since 2003.  She's a vocal critic of electronic ballots and is board chair of Verified Voting, a non-partisan organization that advocates for reliable and secure voting practices, as well as the author of a book titled “Broken Ballots: Will Your Vote Count?”   She is also a long-time champion for programs to increase diversity in computer science and engineering.

EECS alumnus Adnan Shihab-Eldin (B.S. '65) has won the 2017 Elise and Walter A. Haas International Award, which honors a Berkeley alumnus/a who is a native, citizen, and resident of another country and who has a distinguished record of service to that country in any field.  Shihab-Eldin is "a visionary leader in the field of energy globally, well respected by energy ministries and heads of state throughout the energy-producing world. He is also widely recognized as a pre-eminent world expert on energy technology, economics, and the environment."  His "contributions have not only helped to facilitate and advance Kuwait’s scientific and innovation ecosystem, but has also strengthened solid foundations for research and development in the wider Middle East region. He has used his expertise to further socioeconomic growth in Kuwait and the Arab Region through scientific and economic research, inspiring a culture of development and innovation."

EECS alumna Carol Shaw (EE B.S. '77/CS M.S. '78), one of the first female industrial video grame designers, is the subject of a University of Missouri, Kansas City News article celebrating women in STEM.   Shaw, who was always drawn to engineering and math, used punch cards and Fortran for her first programming class at Cal.  She became one of the first professional female video game developers when she joined Atari after graduating 1978.  in 1980, Shaw’s “Tic-Tac-Toe” became the first commercially released video game designed by a woman. She developed a scrolling format for her second game, "River Raid," while working at Activision.   It won several awards, including Inforworld’s Best Action Game and Best Atari 8-bit Game of the Year, when it was released in 1982.  Vintage Computing and Gaming magazine said that River Raid is "almost universally regarded as a masterpiece of game design."

EECS alumnus Allen Tsai (B.S. '00), the founder of startup Pani,  is profiled in the "Today's Entrepreneur" column for startup and investor network, Vator.   Pani is a smart-home company that builds products to help consumers and utilities measure, monitor, and recycle water.  It recently raised $1 million in seed  funding which it will use to "acquire talent and drive product development."   Prior to Pani, Tsai co-founded Azul Mobile and Ekata Systems.  One of the top lessons he learned as an entreprenur is "It is all about the people. Hire people who are smarter than you and empower them to do their best work. If you are the smartest person in the room, there's a problem."

2008 Distinguished CS Alumna Deborah Estrin (B.S. EECS  '80) has been awarded a 2018 'genius' grant from the the MacArthur Foundation.  Winners are chosen for "solving long-standing scientific and mathematical problems, pushing art forms into new and emerging territories, and addressing the urgent needs of under-resourced communities."  Estrin completed her graduate work at MIT before becoming a professor at USC, UCLA, and eventually Cornell Tech in New York, where she is currently Associate Dean.  She designs "open-source platforms that leverage mobile devices and data to address socio-technological challenges such as personal health management."  She was among the first to ascertain the potential of using the digital traces of people's daily lives for participatory mobile health.

A  low-cost community cellular networks project, run jointly by UC Berkeley (PI: CS Prof. Eric Brewer) and the University of Philippines-Diliman (UP-D), won the 2018 Information Society Innovation Fund (ISIF Asia) Community Networks Award.  “Village Base Station-Connecting Communities through Mobile Networks” (VBTS-CoCoMoNets) establishes community cellular networks (CCNs) in rural sites in the Philippines. CCNs are low-power, low-cost 2G base stations that enable users to make basic calls and text in areas that traditional commercial cellular networks cannot reach. The ISIF awards support creative internet solutions to development needs in the Asia Pacific in an effort to promote positive social and economic development.

In celebration of the 50th anniversary of computer science at UC Berkeley and the university’s sesquicentennial, the EECS Department is launching a special series of lectures by winners of the ACM A.M. Turing Award, considered the field’s equivalent of a Nobel Prize.  The Turing laureates all have ties to UC Berkeley either as current or past faculty members or as alumni. They include David Patterson, UC Berkeley professor emeritus of computer science, who, along with former Stanford president John Hennessy, earned a Turing this past March for influential work on computer architecture design. “The 1970s and 1980s represented a golden age of computer science research at Berkeley,” said Patterson. “A remarkable seven research projects that began here went on to earn Turing awards.”

John Ousterhout, professor of computer science at Stanford University, adds: “If you use Turing Awards as the metric, you could make the case that the greatest team of computer researchers ever assembled at one place and time was at UC Berkeley in the 1970s and 1980s.” The lecture series, which is open to the public, will kick off at 3 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 26, with a talk by Shafi Goldwasser, director of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at UC Berkeley. Every Wednesday through Nov. 14 will feature a Turing award laureate speaking in Banatao Auditorium in Sutardja Dai Hall.  In addition to their technical talk, the lecturers will reflect on their time at UC Berkeley and look toward the future of research and technological development in their fields. In anticipation of full attendance, these lectures will also stream live on YouTube via CITRIS.

Researchers including EE Prof. Sayeef Salahuddin and postdoc Dominic Labanowski (Ph.D. '17) have created a device that dramatically reduces the energy needed to power magnetic field detectors, which could revolutionize how we measure the magnetic fields that flow through our electronics, our bodies, and our planet.   The researchers found a new way to excite the tiny nitrogen-infused diamond nonocrystals in their magnetic sensor with microwaves, using 1,000 times less power than is required by traditional sensors.  “Our sensors could replace those more-difficult-to-use sensors in a lot of applications from navigation to medical imaging to natural resource exploration,” said Labanowski.

EE alumna Leslie Field (M.S./Ph.D. '1991), the first woman to earn a Ph.D. from the Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Center (BSAC), will be participating in a panel on "Restoring the Climate: Achievable Solutions" at the 2018 Global Climate Action Summit.  Field is the founder and CEO of Ice911, an organization devoted to mitigating climate change by using reflective sand as a natural heat shield to restore ice in the Arctic.  The panel will "explore the mission of climate restoration and some of the solutions that can get us there, creating jobs and economic benefit in the process."  The Global Climate Action Summit will run from September 12-14 in San Francisco.