EECS major Daniel Pok and CS major Isabel Zhang are featured in a Berkeley News article titled “Seeing is believing”. They are the co-founders of a student organization called VR@Berkeley. The club provides students access to virtual reality equipment and training and charters project teams to explore the applications and implications of virtual reality in diverse fields through research and development. The VR (virtual reality) club started with a handful of members in early 2015 and has grown to 200 members across campus who are working on a range of projects including an augmented 3-D virus model that pops off the page of a biology textbook and the use of virtual reality to play the Campanile’s carillon.

Effective January 1, 2017, Prof. Ken Goldberg will serve as Chair of the Department of Industrial Engineering & Operations Research (IEOR).  Ken is a professor of IEOR, with secondary appointments in EECS, Art Practice, the School of Information and Radiation Oncology at UCSF’s Medical School. Ken is Director of CITRIS’s People and Robots Initiative and UC Berkeley’s AUTOLAB, where he and his students pursue research in geometric algorithms and machine learning for robotics and automation in surgery, manufacturing and service applications.

A companion to Tech Review’s annual 35 Innovators Under 35 list features a list of seven innovators over 70. The new list includes EECS Professor Ruzena Bajcsy and professor emeritus Michael Stonebraker.  The 7 Over 70 list acknowledges innovators who are continuing to have sustained impacts in their field well after most of their colleagues have decided to retire.

On Saturday, November 5, Berkeley hosted the 2016 Pacific Northwest Regional Programming Contest, part of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest.  In Division I, the Berkeley Blue team, comprising Keyhan Vakil, Evan Limanto, and Ruichao Chen, took second place, behind a team from the University of British Columbia (and ahead of the top Stanford team). In Division II, the Berkeley Ursi team, comprising Michael Luo, Larry Yang, and Eric Sheng, took first place.

The Berkeley Blue team now advances to the World Finals to be held in Rapid City, South Dakota in May 2017.

Alumnus Jason Wu (EECS B.S. 2008) is featured in a Webby Awards article titled "How a Small Troop of Techies Led the U.S. Syrian Refugee Surge," the story of the  humanitarian efforts of the United States Digital Service (the White House's tech "start-up") to successfully vet and bring in some 85,000 Syrian refugees in the midst of the crisis.   Jason joined the USDS in an effort to do something more meaningful after working as a product manager at Facebook's Silicon Valley headquarters.  He asked himself "If I were one more person at Uber, how much of an impact would I make?"

EE professor and Director of the Institute of Transportation Studies, Alex Bayen, is interviewed by KRON4 News for an piece titled "Are the I-80 SMART corridors easing traffic congestion?"  Bayen says “It’s not going to be possible in the future to build more infrastructure to accommodate more traffic. So, in order to relieve that congestion, we need other solutions and the solutions have to do with operations and planning, and this is really where SMART corridor concept can make a huge difference.”

The Coleman Fung Institute for Engineering celebrated its fifth year anniversary with reflections on how far the institute has grown. Launched in January of 2010, the institute is the hub connecting engineering disciplines with management, data, and social sciences, transforming engineers and scientists into leaders who can take risks and develop technical, social, and economic innovations.  The Fung Institute administers the Master of Engineering program.

Prof. David Wagner has won the ACM Special Interest Group on Security, Audit and Control (SIGSAC) 2016 Outstanding Innovation Award. This award is given for outstanding and innovative technical contributions to the field of computer and communication security that have had lasting impact in furthering or understanding the theory or development of secure systems. Prof. Wagner is recognized "For innovative research in systems security, software security, and cryptography that has inspired research in sandboxing, static analysis for security, and cryptanalysis."

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.

The BAIR Lab (Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Lab) will be forming a research partnership with China’s Huawei Noah’s Ark Laboratory to the initial tune of $1M covering areas like deep learning, reinforcement learning, machine learning, natural language processing and computer vision. Machine learning has become a central part of a lot of basic large-scale computing projects, from bots to search engines and more. Computer vision is being applied in areas like facial recognition tech, AR, VR and self-driving applications. NLP is what makes services like Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and Microsoft’s Cortana work.