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.
EECS sophomore Alexandria Finley has been selected to compete in the 2016 Genée International Ballet Competition as one of the 10 participants sponsored by the Royal Academy of Dance. One hundred dancers will compete over 10 days this December in Sydney, Australia, at the Genée, one of the most prestigious ballet competitions in the world. Alexandria describes how she balances her passions for dance, computer science, and physics in an interview with Heather Levien.
Grad student Virginia Smith has experienced periods where she felt somewhat isolated during her study of CS, a field that still has relatively few women. She recently joined forces with Ph.D. alumna Gitanjali Swamy and former Chair Tsu-Jae King Liu to form a round table of influential women in tech to think about how to increase diversity at the top levels. She has also written an article about this work. Read about Virginia's experiences and endeavors.
Last week 18 undergraduates, three graduate students, two faculty, and four stafffrom UC Berkeley’s EECS Department attended the 2016 ACM Richard Tapia Diversity in Computing Conference in Austin, Texas. In addition to making new connections with diversity leaders in academia and industry, Berkeley EECS participants reconnected with several EECS alumni: Jeffrey Forbes (Associate Dean at Duke University), Beth Trushkowsky (Assistant Professor at Harvey Mudd College), Valerie Taylor (Associate Dean at Texas A & M), and Hakim Weatherspoon (Associate Professor at Cornell). Teaching Professor Dan Garcia co-led a birds-of-a-feather session for Hispanics in Computing, and was a panelist on a session titled “Engaging Students of Color in Computer Science", which reflected on the department's recent efforts to broaden participation in computing. *Dr. Raquel Romano of Google, and former LBL Postdoc, delivered a Keynote on "Redefining Inclusion: Technology as an Act of Service." * EECS Director of Diversity Tiffany Reardon presented a poster highlighting the department’s support of women in undergraduate computing. A highlight of the conference for many of us was seeingDavid Pattersonreceive the Richard Tapia Achievement Award for Scientific Scholarship, Civic Science and Diversifying Computing. For years Professor Patterson has been an ardent supporter of the Tapia Conference as past Conference Chair, serving on the steering committee and funding large UC Berkeley contingents to attend the event. Well deserved, Dave! Berkeley students and faculty have attended every Tapia conference since the first one, in 2001.
CS Scholar Haile Shavers is the subject of an interview by Youth Radio/The Huffington Post in which she discusses her experiences as a black woman undergraduate studying computer science. Haile graces a billboard on Broadway and 22nd Street in Oakland, sponsored by the Kapor Center for Social Impact, which reads "As Oakland becomes more tech, let’s ensure tech becomes more Oakland."
EECS honor society Eta Kappa Nu (HKN) hosted a town hall on Wednesday, Sept. 14, 2016, to discuss concerns created by long waitlists for some EECS classes. The town hall was attended by EECS Chair Jitendra Malik, CS Chair James Demmel, and EE Chair Jan Rabaey, as well as a variety of faculty, staff, and students in the department. The meeting was prompted by a dramatic increase in the number of undergraduates taking computer science classes over the past three years which resulted in waitlists of around 2,600 students at the beginning of this semester. Although generous private donations, which were applied to short term funding for additional GSIs, helped alleviate the worst of the problem by the third week of classes, a longer-term strategy needs to be devised.
EECS graduate students Paul Bramsen and Wesley Hsieh have been selected as Siebel Scholars for 2017. The Siebel Scholars program promotes leadership, academic achievement and “the collaborative search for solutions to the world’s most critical issues." Paul builds data structures and Wesley leverages human intuition and demonstrations to improve robot learning. Siebel Scholars are recognized as exceptional graduate students in business, computer science, bioengineering and energy science and comes with an award of $35,000.
The research of postdoctoral scholar Oscar Beijbom (supervised by Prof. Trevor Darrell at the Berkeley Vision and Learning Center) is being used to help coral researchers speed up the under-sea mapping of reefs around the world. Beijbom's neural-networking algorithm is part of a software project, featured in a Nature article, that can zip through and classify over a million photographs in a matter of months.
As a way to provide more facetime between busy faculty and students in EECS, a new café called Tea 1 has opened in Cory Hall. After town hall discussions with EECS students, faculty and staff it was determined that a café would provide a more relaxed atmosphere for students to see faculty in a different context than lectures or office hours. Retrofitting the room to accommodate the café was paid for by private funds raised by former EECS department chair Tsu-Jae King Liu.
