Prof. Seth Sanders is featured in a Yahoo Finance article about his participation in a panel discussion on Advancements in Storage Technology at the STUDIO Conference in San Francisco on August 3. Prof. Sanders is the chief scientist and co-founder of Amber Kinetics, Inc., developer of the world’s first commercially ready four-hour flywheel energy storage system.

Prof. Tsu-Jae King Liu has been selected to receive the 2016 Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) Aristotle Award. The Aristotle Award was created by the SRC Board of Directors in March 1995 to recognize supported faculty whose deep commitment to the educational experience of SRC students has had a profound and continuing impact on their professional performance and consequently a significant impact for members over a long period of time. It is a tribute to the unwavering commitment of Prof. King Liu to all aspects of education. Past winners of this award include Profs. Andrew Neureuther, Chenming Hu, David Allstot and Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli.

Prof. Dave Patterson has won the 2016 Richard A. Tapia Achievement Award for Scientific Scholarship, Civic Science and Diversifying Computing. This award is awarded yearly to an individual who demonstrates significant leadership, commitment and contributions to diversifying computing. This award will be presented at the 2016 Tapia Conference.

Prof. Sanjam Garg and Nir Yosef have been awarded Okawa Foundation Research Grants for 2016. This award recognizes promising young faculty members in the fields of information and telecommunications. Prof. Garg, whose research interests are in cryptography, security and more broadly theoretical computer science is awarded for his work on software obfuscation. Prof. Yosef, whose research interests are in utilizing high-throughput genomic data sets, and immune cells, covering various aspects of their biology, is awarded for his work on annotating the regulatory genome of mammalian cells.

Prof. David Tse has been named recipient of the 2017 IEEE Claude E. Shannon Award. This award is the highest honor in the field of information theory and was instituted to honor consistent and profound contributions to the field. Each Shannon Award winner is expected to present a Shannon Lecture at the following IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory.

EECS Prof. Tsu-Jae King Liu and Belle Wei (Chair of Engineering Education and Innovative Learning at San Jose State) penned an article for the Mercury News titled "Closing tech workforce gap calls for interdisciplinary model."   In it, they argue that there is a desperate need to increase the future number of computer scientists in the US workforce and this need can be met by women if Silicon Valley companies increase their efforts to collaborate with university educators. "Our educators are up to the task. What they need is incentive and support, along with resources to help them transcend outdated disciplinary divides...We need leaders across a broad spectrum of industry to identify the knowledge and skill sets that new employees will need to succeed."

The L&S Computer Science Division is featured in a Tech Crunch article titled "How generation Z females could be the answer to tech’s gender diversity problem."  The article discusses challenges in closing the gender gap and new initiatives designed to attract and retain girls to science and technology fields.  The CS Division was singled out for having almost doubled it's percentage of female CS majors  between 2009 and 2013.  By 2014, 21% of CS majors were women.  "Berkeley emphasized the impact computing has in the world, and worked to tone down elements that may put females off."

Alumni Sumit Gulwani (CS Ph.D. 2005) is at the centre of an effort to bring the power of computer code to those who are unable to write it themselves.   Sumit's research is featured in a Financial Times article which describes how his team at Microsoft developed Flash Fill for Excel which uses "programming by example" to automatically fill in outputs without entering a formula.

EECS Ph.D. student Nick Carlini (advisor Prof. David Wagner) in collaboration with a team of researchers from Georgetown University are featured in a number of news articles. They have revealed how secret commands could use voice-control tools like Siri and Google Now to take over your smartphone without your knowledge. They ran a series of tests to see just how easily these assistants could be tricked.

Intel has announced Prof. Tsu-Jae King Liu to be added to their board of directors, marking the second woman to be on their governing body. Prof. King Liu will join lawyer and former ambassador Charlene Barshefsky as the only two women on Intel’s board. “She brings a wealth of expertise in silicon technology and innovation that will be valuable for Intel in many areas as we navigate a significant business transition while continuing to lead in advancing Moore’s Law and harnessing its economic value,” Intel board chairman Andy Bryant said in a statement.