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.

After six years of delivering major technological advances like Apache Spark, Apache Mesos and Alluxio, the AMPLab (Algorithms, Machines and People Lab) directed by Adjunct Prof. Michael Franklin and Profs. Michael Jordan and Ion Stoica will be closing and the RISELab (Real-time Intelligent Secure Execution Lab) will take it’s place. The RISELab will continue the work of the AMPLab, tackleing the next phase in distributed computing. Prof. Ion Stoica will continue his role as director and will be joined by Prof. Joe Hellerstein and Assistant Profs. Joseph Gonzalez and Raluca Ada Popa. AMPLab End of Projects events will be held on Nov. 17 & 18, 2016 at the International House, UC Berkeley.

Computer Science Assistant Prof. Sergey Levine is the subject of an article in BGR about machine learning titled Meet the professor who will help robots learn common sense.  “One of the things I think we’ve seen with computer vision is the bottom-up approach tends to be very effective,” Levine says. “In other words, once you figure out a good way to acquire the low-level representations — in the case of vision, things like the fact that images consist of edges — then whatever technique you use that’s general that can acquire those low-level representations will also be able to deal with the higher level stuff”

“So for me, part of the hope is if we can find the right way to acquire the low-level behaviors, the higher behaviors will begin to emerge naturally. Using the same technique just applied at a larger scale.”

Prof. Chenming Hu has been elected to be inducted into the 2017 Silicon Valley Engineering Hall of Fame by the Silicon Valley Engineering Council (SVEC). Hall of Fame members are selected based on demonstration of significant engineering or technical achievements, provided significant guidance in new and developing fields of engineering-based technology, and/or has managed or directed an organization making noteworthy contributions in design, manufacturing, production or service through the uses of engineering principles and applications. Hall of fame members represent the cream of the crop of the Valley and, and counts among its membership people like Gordon Moore, William Hewlett and David Packard in addition to our esteemed colleagues Paul Gray, Dave Hodges, Lotfi Zadeh, David Paterson, and Ernie Kuh.

A device and startup created by former CS students Kunal Chaudhary, Grant Empey, and Rishabh Parikh (along with ME alumus Anuj Chaudhary), are the focus of a California Magazine article titled "A Little Dotty: Berkeley Startup Has a New Way to Make Your House Smart."  Their creation, the Dot, is a $20 sandwich of circuit boards and chips housed in a black plastic case about the size and shape of a hockey puck. Functionally, it’s an electronic beacon that pairs with a smartphone via Bluetooth and can be programmed to perform a variety of functions based on where you are and who you are.  It has attracted interest from more than 1,700 donors, and is backed by two of Berkeley’s startup incubator programs, CITRIS Foundry and The House.  The Dot is also featured in an Inc.com article titled "How This University Sets Students Up for Entrepreneurial Success."