Prof. Costas Spanos has been selected to receive the 2016 Distinguished Faculty Mentor Award and Assistant Prof. Laura Waller has been selected to receive the 2016 Graduate Student Mentoring Award Junior Faculty. Nominated by faculty colleagues and current and former graduate students, the award recipients have demonstrated an outstanding commitment to helping UC Berkeley graduates to succeed academically, professionally, and personally. The award ceremony will be held April 13, 2016 in the Anna Head Alumnae Hall.

Prof. Ken Goldberg’s “People and Robots” CITRIS (Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society) initiative is in Part 2 of Rolling Stone’s “Inside the Artificial Intelligence Revolution: A Special Report”. One of the projects Prof. Goldberg is working on is the development of surgical robots to do the tedious work, allowing surgeons to focus on the important tasks.

Courses related to ham radio taught by EE Associate Prof. Michael Lustig are featured in a National Association for Amateur Radioarticle titled “UC Berkeley Trains, Tests Hundreds of New Hams”. The entry-level course exposes newcomers to ham radio and the advanced course goes into the theoretical applications of digital signal processing, filter design, modulation/demodulation, decoding subcarriers, APRS audio interface techniques, and antenna design.

Prof. Pieter Abbeel is featured in a Rolling Stone article titled “Inside the Artificial Intelligence Revolution: A Special Report, Pt. 1.”  Algorithms are the basis for modern day computing – data goes in, the computer does its thing, and the algorithm spits out a result. What’s new is that scientists have developed algorithms that reverse this process, allowing computers to write their own algorithms. This is called machine learning and is the idea behind the science of artificial Intelligence.

EECS alumna Diane Greene (Computer Science M.S. ’88) was ranked #1 of 26 most powerful female engineers in 2016 by Business Insider. Greene was a co-founder of VMware that sold to EMC for $635M. She then went on to become a big angel investor while working on her new startup BeBop, which Google bought for $380M while she was on the board at Google. Greene is currently running Google’s cloud computing business and on the boards of Intuit and MIT. She is also recipient of the 2016 EECS Distinguished Alumni Award in Computer Science and will be this year's CS commencement speaker.

The latest rankings from U.S. News & World Report, “America’s Best Graduate Schools 2017” has placed our Electrical Engineering program at #1, tied with Stanford and MIT, and our “Computer Engineering” program ranked #2, tied with Stanford. For the U.S. News rankings of graduate engineering programs, 215 engineering schools that grant doctoral degrees were surveyed.

Prof. Bernhard Boser has been selected to receive the 2016 NSF I/UCRC (National Science Foundation Industry & University Cooperative Research Program) Alex Schwarzkopf prize. This prize recognizes an individual or team whose research is judged to have made the greatest contribution to technological innovation.

EECS alumnus Srinivas Devadas has been named a 2016 MacVicar Faculty Fellow. The MacVicar Faculty Fellows Program honors MIT’s best teachers and mentors, who have made outstanding contributions to undergraduate education. Prof. Devadas is currently the Webster Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and has been on the MIT EECS faculty since 1988.

It is with sadness to announce that Prof. Chitoor V. Ramamoorthy (“Ram”) passed away on Thursday, March 10 at UCSD’s Thornton Hospital. All extended family members and friends are being directed to a workshop which will be held on May 5th in La Jolla for a memorial: www.TransKS.org. Sympathy cards may be sent to Mrs. Ramamoorthy at 558 Blackhawk Club Drive, Danville, CA 94506. Donations may be directed to the C.V. Ramamoorthy Distinguished Research Award.

Prof. Dan Garcia has been selected to receive a National Center for Women in Information Technology (NCWIT) 2016 Undergraduate Research Mentoring (URM) Award. This award recognizes Academic Alliance representatives at non-profit U.S. Institutions for their outstanding mentorship, high-quality research opportunities, recruitment of women and minority students, and efforts to encourage and advance undergraduates in computing-related fields.