The Management, Engineering, & Technology (M.E.T.) program welcomed it's inaugural class of 40 students this week--drawn from about 2,500 applicants.  Undergrads who are admitted to M.E.T. combine courses at the Haas School of Business with one of three engineering tracks, including EECS.  While they take classes in both subjects throughout their 4 years at Berkeley, they will study together in a tight-knit cohort. The collaboration aims to build deep leadership and technology skills, and lay the groundwork for the next generation of entrepreneurs, CEOs, and Silicon Valley leaders.  The class of 2021 is made up of 30% women. 

EE alumnus Nima Jafarian (B.S. '04) has been appointed Vice President of Product Management and Marketing at PowerSphyr, one of the world’s most innovative providers of wireless power technology.   He is responsible for leading product management and marketing for SkyCurrent™, a ground-breaking wireless power system which combines near-field and far-field technology in a single system to deliver wireless power to electronic devices without cords or cable.  Jafarian began his career at National Semiconductor developing BiCMOS processes for power management ICs and subsequently held marketing and R&D roles with Analog Devices and Peregrine Semiconductor.  Prior to joining PowerSphyr, he spent five years at Lumileds in global product management and channel marketing.

CS alumnus Andrew Ng (Ph.D. '02, adviser: Michael Jordan) has been singled out by NewsCenter.io as one of 7 leaders shaping the AI revolution.  Ng founded the “Google Brain” project, which developed massive-scale deep learning algorithms.  He led the AI group at Baidu, China’s largest search engine company, which directed research into advertising, maps, take-out delivery, voice and internet searching, security, consumer finance, among others. Ng also co-founded Coursera, an online education company that has raised more than $200 million venture capital funding.  He is also currently an adjuct professor at Stanford.

U.C. Berkeley made StudySoup's list of the top 20 female-friendly computer science programs in the country.  The graduate student group WICSE (Women in Computer Science and Engineering) is credited for the ranking because they are working to "build a more inclusive environment in the industry. In addition to outreach programs for younger students, the organization partners with research institutions and corporate partners to host workshops and network events."

CS graduate student Rebecca Portnoff (adviser: David Wagner) has developed the first algorithm to identify adult ads tied to human trafficking rings by linking the ads to public information from Bitcoin — the primary payment method for online sex ads.  “The technology we’ve built finds connections between ads,” says Portnoff.  “Is the pimp behind that post for Backpage also behind this post in Craigslist? Is he the same man who keeps receiving Bitcoin for trafficked girls? Questions like these are answerable only through more sophisticated technological tools – exactly what we’ve built in this work – that link ads together using payment mechanisms and the language in the ads themselves.”  Her team will present their findings this month at the Association for Computing Machinery’s SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining.

CS Prof. Katherine Yelick will give the HPC keynote on Exascale computing at the upcoming ACM Europe Conference. Yelick also serves as Associate Laboratory Director for Computing Sciences at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.  The event, which will take place on Sept. 7-8 in Barcelona, Spain, will focus on the themes of Cybersecurity and High Performance Computing.

CS graduate student Grant Ho, Aashish Sharma (LBNL),  CS alumna Mobin Javed (Ph.D. 2016), and CS Profs. Vern Paxson and David Wagner have won the 2017 Internet Defense Prize, worth $100,000, for their paper "Detecting Credential Spearphishing in Enterprise Settings."  CS graduate student Thurston Dang,  Petros Maniatis (Google Brain), and Prof. David Wagner, were finalists for their paper "Oscar: A Practical Page-Permissions-Based Scheme for Thwarting Dangling Pointers."  The award, which is funded by Facebook and offered in partnership with USENIX, recognizes research that meaningfully makes the internet more secure.

CS Assistant Prof. Anca Dragan has been named one of 2017's 35 Innovators Under 35  by MIT Technology Review.   Each year, exceptionally talented young innovators are singled out for the honor because their work is thought to offer the greatest potential to transform the world.   Dragan was nominated in the Visionary category for "Ensuring that robots and humans work and play well together" and is profiled in an MIT Technology Review article.  She will also be recognized at a special ceremony at EmTech MIT.

U.C. Berkeley has been ranked best in the world in Electrical and Electronic Engineering, and second best in Computer Science and Engineering, in the Academic Rankings of World Universities (ARWU), an assessment of 500 top institutions around the globe by ShanghaiRanking.   EE's score was 333.5, beating out  Stanford  (315.5) and MIT (310.9).   CS had a total score of 251.9, beating Stanford (243.8) but coming in under MIT (357.4).   Berkeley was ranked the No. 1 public university overall, and placed in the top 10 in 20 of the 52 subjects ranked.

Assistant Prof. Sergey Levine, Prof. Pieter Abbeel, and graduate student Chelsea Finn are featured in a CSO article highlighting research they presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML).  The research was done in partnership with the NVIDIA AI Labs (NVAIL) programme.  Levine’s team wants to help intelligent agents learn faster and require less training by teaching deep neural networks to learn more like humans.  “Look at how people do it,” said Levine. “We never learn things entirely from scratch. We draw on our past experience to help us learn new skills quickly. So we’re trying to get our learning algorithms to do the same.”  Levine and his team have been using an NVIDIA DGX-1 system to train their algorithms how to coordinate movement and visual perception.

NVAIL helps keep AI pioneers ahead of the curve with support for students, assistance from researchers and engineers, and gives them access to the industry’s most advanced GPU computing power.