Alumnus Sanjay Mehrotra (EECS B.S. '78/M.S. '80) has been elected Chair of the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA).  The SIA is a trade association and lobbying group that represents "U.S. leadership in semiconductor manufacturing, design, and research."  Mehrotra, who is currently President and 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.

2010 EECS distinguished alumna Theresa Huai-Ying Meng (M.S. '85/Ph.D. '88) has won the 2019 IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal.  The award is presented to an individual or team for "exceptional contributions to communications and networking sciences and engineering."  Meng, who is a Professor Emerita at Stanford University and founder of Atheros Communications Inc., won "for technical contributions to and leadership in the development of wireless semiconductor technology."  Meng is following in the footsteps of graduate advisor, David Messerschmitt, who won the award in 1999.

The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) has established "The Soumitra Dutta Chair in Artificial Intelligence," named for CS alumnus Soumitra Dutta (M.S. '87/Ph.D. '90 adviser: Lotfi Zadeh), "to promote excellence and leadership in teaching, research, and development in the field of artificial intelligence and to facilitate wider and deeper interaction between the industry and IIT Delhi faculty and students."  Dutta, the founding Dean of the SC Johnson College of Business at Cornell University, is  best known for being the architect of the Global Innovation Index.

EECS alumnus Bryan Catanzaro (Ph.D. '11 advisor: Kurt Keutzer), the Vice President of Applied Deep Learning Research at NVIDIA, is one of the subjects of a Forbes series on the AI innovators "who have dedicated their life’s work to improving the human condition through technology advancements."  Catanzaro has worked alongside deep learning pioneers Adam Coates and Andrew Ng at Baidu, creating the next generation of systems for deep learning training and developing end-to-end deep learning-based speech recognition models. In the interview, he talks about one of the most important conferences in the researching world (NeurIPS 2018) and why research is important to help build out the future of AI.

CS alumnus Diane Greene (M.S. '88), the CEO of Google Cloud, has been named to Data Economy's list of Americas 50: The world’s first top 50 North, Central and South American influencers.  The list highlights "personalities who are leading data centres, cloud, edge computing and data through charting new innovations or technological breakthroughs, sheer investment or business acumen, or exceptional entrepreneurial skillsets."

CS alumnus Mike Nelson (Ph.D. '88, advisor: John Ousterhout), has become Chief Scientist at Xcalar, a fast-growing big data processing and virtual data warehouse platform.  While at Berkeley, Neslon was a key member of the team that developed the Sprite Distributed Operating System.  He was a fellow and one of the first engineers at VMware, where he was the lead architect of VMkernel, an operating system designed to run virtual machines that is the foundation for all VMware server products. At Xcalar, he will be responsible for spearheading the company's Cloud and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) efforts.

2005 CS Distinguished Alumna Barbara Simons (Ph.D. '81) will be receiving the Athena Lifetime Achievement Award at the CITRIS Women in Tech Symposium on Friday, 11/16.  Simons, who is a past president of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), is board chair of Verified Voting, a non-partisan organization that advocates for reliable and secure voting practices.  She is the author of “Broken Ballots: Will Your Vote Count?” and is a long-time champion for programs to increase diversity in computer science and engineering.  She will not be able to attend the conference but will make an appearance in a short video.

A paper written by CS Prof. David Culler and alumnus Jonathan Hui (M.S. '05/Ph.D. '08) in 2008 titled "IP is Dead, Long Live IP for Wireless Sensor Networks" has won the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys) 2018 Test of Time Award.  The paper dispelled the notion that IP cannot run on wireless embedded sensors and made a long term impact  on standards like 6LoWPAN and platforms like Thread.  The award recognizes papers that are at least 10 years old and have had long lasting impact on networked embedded sensing system science and engineering.  Culler previously won this award in both 2014 and 2015.

EECS alumna Theresa H. Meng (M.S. '85/Ph.D. '88 advisor: David Messerschmitt) has won the 2018 Association of Computing Machinery (ACM ) SIGMOBILE Outstanding Contribution Award.  This award is given for significant and lasting contributions to the research on mobile computing and communications and wireless networking.  Meng, who is a Professor Emerita at Stanford University and founder of Atheros Communications Inc., was cited "for groundbreaking research, engineering and entrepreneurial leadership to make Wi-Fi faster, lower power, and lower cost."

CS graduate students Sarah Chasins (advisor: Ras Bodik), Orianna DeMasi (BIDS), Sandy Huang (advisors: Anca Dragan/Pieter Abbeel), and postdoc Angjoo Kanazawa (advisors: Jitendra Malik/Alyosha Efros/Trevor Darrell) will be participating in the Rising Stars career-building workshop for women in EECS, which will be held from Oct. 28-30, 2018 at MIT in Cambridge, Massachussetts.    Chasin's topic is “Helena: A Web Automation Language for End Users,” DeMasi's is " Developing a Dialog System to Augment SMS Helpline Counselor Training,” Huang's is “Enabling Robot Transparency with Informative Actions,” and Kanazawa's is “Perceiving Deformable Shapes: Humans, Animals, and Birds.”  Speakers include EECS Profs. Laura Waller and Katherine Yelick, as well as postdoc Farnaz Niroui and alumnus Anantha Chandrakasan (B.S. '89/M.S. '90/Ph.D. '94).