CS alumnus and Teaching Prof. Dan  Garcia (M.S. ' 95, Ph.D. '00, advisor: Brian Barsky) is the subject of a profile celebrating Latinx Heritage Month in the EECS department.  As a Nuyorican whose father was from Puerto Rico, Garcia "always coveted" his Hispanic heritage and actively explored as much of the Latinx culture as he could.  Known to "bring the flavor" to his students before finals, Garcia is particularly passionate about broadening the participation of underrepresented students in computing.

CS Prof. and alumnus Armando Fox (Ph.D. '98, advisor: Eric Brewer) is the subject of a profile celebrating Latinx Heritage Month in the EECS community.  Fox is the child of Cuban refugees who taught him to "pave the road" for those who follow.  He was born in New York City and raised in a bilingual and bicultural household where he was cared for by grandparents who did not speak English.  Fox  is known for his engagement with both campus student groups and national professional organizations to promote and support Latinxs in computing.

5th Year CS Master's students Alvin Kao (B.S. '19)  and Titan Yuan (B.S. '19) have been named to the Siebel Scholars Foundation’s 2020 class.  Kao is working on problems in the autonomous vehicle setting, like predicting the behavior of other agents and trajectory planning.  Yuan is working with the Swarm Lab on embedded software for some of the world’s tiniest wireless devices, so that they can be used as miniature temperature sensors and Bluetooth beacons.

EECS Prof. Emeritus and alumnus Edward Lee (Ph.D. '86, advisor: David Messerschmitt) is the subject of a profile created as part of the EECS Latinx Heritage Month celebration.  Lee discusses some of his Puerto Rican ancestors, including poet/playwright Alejandro Tapia y Rivera, considered one of the fathers of Puerto Rican literature, and physician Bailey K. Ashford, a pioneer in the study of tropical diseases.  Lee shares some of his personal experiences as a member of the Latinx community and even quotes one of his grandfather's Spanglish limericks.

CS alumnus Feng Zhou (Ph.D. '07, advisor: Eric Brewer) is the subject of a Bloomberg article titled "The U.S.-trained coder is helping NetEase find new life beyond games."  To help the company remain competitive, NetEase Youdao CEO Zhou is creating an all-in-one learning platform to tap the lucrative overlap between education and technology.  Addressing the pressure many Chinese families feel to prepare children for college entrance exams starting as early as Kindergarten, Zhou says courses can be taught through high-speed live-streaming, enabling smooth communication between teacher and student. Artificial intelligence-powered tutors can grade homework and use data to evaluate student test results.  “That’s what we have always been good at,” said Zhou. “Almost every industry in China has been transformed by the internet, but that’s not yet the case for education.”

EECS alumnus Feisal Jaffer (B.S. '97) is the new global head for Hilton’s luxury LXR Hotels and Resorts brand. He previous held positions as senior vice president of business development for Capella Hotel Group, part of Pontiac Land Group, and Pontiac’s senior vice president for acquisitions and development.  Hilton launched the LXR brand in 2018, which comprises independent hotels in resort locations.

Yamilée Toussaint Beach, founder and CEO of STEM From Dance (SFD), is the third recipient of the Educational Innovation Abie Award in Honor of A. Richard Newton, an award which honors the life and career of a beloved EECS professor and alumnus.  A. Richard Newton (Ph.D. '78, advisor: Donald O. Pederson) led the founding of CITRIS in 1999, and served as EECS chair and Engineering dean before his early death from pancreatic cancer in 2007.  Beach won for her efforts to harness the power of dance to inspire and support young women of color from low-income backgrounds to develop the confidence, skills, and awareness necessary to obtain STEM degrees. She launched SFD in 2012, using seed funding won from Teach For America’s Social Innovation Award. Since then, SFD has partnered with over 25 schools and community centers, serving over 400 girls.

EE alumna Leslie Field (M.S. '88/Ph.D. '91, advisor: Richard White) gave an insightful and inspirational presentation on Ice911 Research at the inaugural Global Climate Restoration Forum held at the United Nations Headquarters in New York yesterday.  Field is the Founder and CEO of Ice911 Research, a non-profit focused on developing a technique to preserve and rebuild polar and glacial ice and polar habitat using a localized and ecologically respectful material, like floating sand, to reflect sunlight and stave off one of the effects of global warming.

A paper by alumnus Vasily Volkov (Ph.D. '16), now at Nvidia, and his advisor Prof. James Demmel has won the 2019 ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference (SC19) Test of Time Award.   The paper, "Benchmarking GPUs to Tune Dense Linear Algebra," which won the SC08 Best Student Paper Award when it was published, describes a first-of-its-kind vision of GPU architectures as a vector machine. The authors defined techniques to achieve greater efficiency and performance, detailing an optimization pattern that is found today in many high-performance GPU codes.  The paper has been cited almost a thousand times and has had a tremendous impact on the field.  The award, which recognizes an outstanding paper that has deeply influenced the HPC discipline, is one of the most prestigious in the SC conference series and will be presented at the 2019 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis in Colorado in November.

Two EECS faculty and one alumnus are the authors with the most number of papers accepted to the upcoming 2019 Thirty-third Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), one of the most popular and influential AI conferences in the world.  CS Prof. Sergey Levine took the top spot with 12 papers, alumnus Francis Bach (Ph.D. '05, advisor: Michael Jordan) was the second most prolific contributor with 10 papers, and Prof. Pieter Abbeel placed third with nine.  Only one in five of the 6,743 papers submitted to the conference this year were accepted.  Registration to be one of the 8,000 attendees at  last year's NeurIPS (formerly NIPS) conference sold out in 12 minutes.  A lottery has been implemented for this year's conference, which will take place in December.