Graduate students Radhika Mittal (advisors: Sylvia Ratnasamy and Scott Shenker) and Sam Chiu-Wai Wong (advisor: Christos Papadimitriou) have won 2017 Google PhD Fellowships. This is one of the highest honors available for Computer Science graduate students.  Each selected university is permitted to nominate two students and Google awards approximately 15 named fellowships per year.  Radhika, whose area is Computer Networking, was awarded a Microsoft Research Graduate Women’s Scholarship in 2013.  Sam, who is interested in the area of Algorithms and Complexity, won Best Paper at the IEEE FOCS Symposium in 2015 and has been awarded an IBM Scholarship.

Alumna Valerie Taylor (EE M.S. '86/Ph.D. '91) has been appointed the next director of the Mathematics and Computer Science (MCS) division at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory.  Taylor has received numerous awards for distinguished research and leadership and authored or co-authored more than 100 papers in the area of high performance computing, with a focus on performance analysis and modeling of parallel scientific applications.  Argonne’s MCS Division produces next-generation technologies and software to tackle the challenges of big data generated by high-performance computing and large, experimental facilities.

EE Prof. Tsu-Jae King Liu, who participated in a semiconductor "Moore's Law" panel discussion at the South by Southwest festival in Texas, is featured in an Electronic Design article  titled "Forget Scaling. Moore's Law Panel Talks Power Consumption."  Tsu-Jae, who helped pioneer the Finfet transistor in 1998, describes some of the ways that transistors and integrated circuits will be evolving and how they might be used in future innovations.

Postdoctoral researcher Matthias Vallentin is developing VAST,  a  forensic analysis tool  designed to help prioritize the investigation of computer security breaches.  It complements Bro, a security tool  devised by Prof. Vern Paxson when he was a graduate student 22 years ago and which is now used worldwide, to instantly collect huge volumes of log data that a hack might compromise.  “Maybe the external machine also appeared in a phishing email, which contained a PDF attachment. Not only that, but the PDF also includes a malicious payload, which upon opening, sends sensitive information from the employee’s computer to a cyber criminal.  VAST supports this iterative process to reconstruct the complete picture and presents it on a platter” explains Vallentin.  The function, development, and industrial potential of these tools are discussed in a Berkeley Research article.

CS graduate student Baiyu Chen (advisor: Alexei Efros) and Anthony Barrs were awarded top prize and $50,000 for their design at the Infrastructure Vision 2050 Challenge.  Their idea, profiled in an article for Fortune, was to construct a "Hyperlane," or a single platform the size of four interstate lanes that would run parallel to pre-existing highways in order for self-driving cars to travel at high speeds with no chance of getting into a jam.

Tomás Vega, a senior computer science and cognitive science major, was part of a team that participated in the first collegiate Tikkun Olam Makers (TOM) event and which was profiled in a Jewish News article titled "Cal students pull a marathon to engineer disability solutions."  His team, led by Berkeley alumnus Pierluigi Mantovani, designed a special pair of gloves to help a Berkeley filmmaker with very limited use of his hands navigate a computer screen.  The filmmaker, who had to use a joystick with his lower lip to navigate, can now perform the same task by just slightly moving his wrists.  The gloves use electromyography, which detects signals from his muscles.   “When someone tells you, ‘Thank you for changing my life, for improving the quality of my life,’ there’s nothing like that,” Vega said.

Prof. Eli Yablonovitch has been awarded the IEEE William R. Cherry Award, which is the highest IEEE Award for solar cells. This award recognizes an individual engineer or scientist who has devoted a part of their professional life to the advancement of the science and technology of photovoltaic energy conversion. The nominee must have made significant contributions to the science and/or technology of PV energy conversion, with dissemination by substantial publications and presentations. Prof. Yablonovitch is receiving this award for his contributions to research, engineering and entrepreneurship realizing photovoltaic technologies capturing the "ins and outs" of photons and application of these technologies in silicon and III-V solar cells.

Alumnus Raghav Chandra (EECS B.S. '11) and his second start-up, UrbanClap, are the subject of a Live Mint article describing the formation and rise of the most funded start-up in the still nascent hyperlocal segment of the on-demand services sector in India.  UrbanClap, which aggregates 107 local services and 65,000 providers, and enables customers to request services online through its website or mobile application, raised $36.6M in funding during the first 2 years after its inception.  Raghav, who was active in GamesCrafters as a student, became a software engineer at Yelp and Twitter, and founded the startup Buggi, before meeting his current partners to co-found UrbanClap.

Prof. Jan Rabaey will be receiving two honorary doctorates. The first one is for scientific merit from the University of Antwerp in Belgium on March 30, 2017.  The second one will follow on May 20 from the Tampere University of Technology. The title of Honorary Doctor is the highest recognition that a university can award. In the early 1990s, Prof. Rabaey developed the ‘infopad’, the forerunner of the iPad and tablet computers. He is currently conducting research into the human intranet, which involves connecting the human body to sensors and devices that communicate with the human brain.

Prof. Dan Garcia was interviewed in a PBS Newshour article titled “This Pi Day, use math to beat your friends at classic toy games”. To celebrate Pi Day, mathematicians and physicists explored three classic toys, hula hoops, yo-yo’s and Connect Four on ways to be the most successful with each toy. To count how many possible ways a real game of Connect Four could end, Prof. Garcia’s  research group called GamesCrafters created a program to simulate all the moves. GamesCrafters “strongly solved” the game and found 4,531,985,219,092, or 4.53 trillion combinations to Connect Four are possible.