Alumnus Ankur Aggarwal (EECS M.Eng.'12) has been named in Forbes magazine's 30 Under 30 list,  a compilation of the brightest young entrepreneurs, innovators and game changers across 20  industries.  Ankur and his college roommates teamed up to found TowerView Health, which sells a smart pill box with custom trays of medication.

Alumnus Silvio Micali (CS PhD '82, CS Distinguished Alumni 2006) has published a paper called ALGORAND The Efficient and Democratic Ledger where he lays out a groundbreaking new vision of a decentralized and secure way to manage a shared ledger that provides a beautifully elegant solution to the Byzantine General’s problem.  Micali, the Ford Professor of Engineering at MIT, is the recipient of the Turing Award,  the Goedel Prize, and the RSA prize in cryptography.  His new research is profiled in an article titled "Move over Bitcoin - MIT Cryptographer Silvio Micali and his Public Ledger ALGORAND...The Future of Blockchain?" 

Alumnus Asad A. Abidi (EE MS '78/PhD '81, EE Distinguished Alumni 2015) will be the inaugural holder of the Abdus Salam Chair in the Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) in Pakistan.  The Chair is named in honor of theoretical physicist Abdus Salam, the first Pakistani and first Muslim to receive a Nobel Prize in science.  Abidi, who is a professor of electrical engineering at UCLA and the founding dean of LUMS, is known for his groundbreaking research in single-chip radios.   He  won the IEEE Pederson Award in Solid-State Circuits—which was named in honor of EECS Prof. Donald O. Pederson—in 2008.

Alumnus Kylan Nieh (CS BA/Business BS 2014) has made the 2017 Forbes 30 Under 30: Enterprise Technology list.  While still a student, Kylan started his own public speaking and leadership course at the Haas School of Business and became the youngest recipient of the Business Teacher of the Year Award in 2014.  After graduation, Kylan became the youngest Senior Product Manager at LinkedIn Students.

Alumnus Stephen W. Director (EE M.S. '67/Ph.D. '68) has been elected as a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors this year.  The title recognizes "academic inventors who have demonstrated a prolific spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on quality of life, economic development, and the welfare of society."  Director is a pioneer in the field of elec­tronic design automation and has patented methods for max­i­mizing the yield during the man­u­fac­turing of inte­grated cir­cuits.  Director is Provost Emeritus in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at Northeastern University.

Imperva has named alumnus Roger Sippl (CS BS '77 ) to its board of directors.  Sippl is a Silicon Valley software pioneer, entrepreneur and innovator.  He founded Informix Software (now part of IBM) in 1980, when he was just 24, to develop and commercialize SQL relational database software.  He subsequently took two more companies through IPO: The Vantive Corporation, which became part of PeopleSoft/Oracle, and Visigenic Software, which was acquired by Borland.  Sippl received the CS Distinguished Alumni award in 1995.

Alumnus Peter Norvig  (CS Ph.D. '86), now Director of Research at Google, is profiled in a Forbes magazine article titled "Artificial Intelligence Pioneers: Peter Norvig, Google."  The article describes Norvig's  history and accomplishments, and outlines his thoughts on human-machine partnerships and the disparate goals of  neuroscience and AI research.

Alumnus Nicholas Weaver (CS B.A. '95/ Ph.D. '03), who now works at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) as a security expert, was interviewed by Leandra Bernstein of ABC 33/40 for an in-depth article titled Questions remain over Russian responsibility for passing stolen DNC emails to WikiLeaks.  "All the evidence, both public and still secret, points towards the Russians having stolen the emails, while there is effectively no evidence for any competing hypothesis," Nicholas said.

Alumna Valerie Taylor (EE M.S. '86/Ph.D. '91), now a computer science professor at Texas A&M University, has been named a 2016 Fellow by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).  Taylor is one of 53 ACM members honored for their contributions to computer science. She is being lauded for her “leadership in broadening participation in computing" and is the subject of an article in Black Enterprise.

Alumnus Paul Debevec (Ph.D. 1996) is the subject of a Cartoon Brew interview titled "Paul Debevec: A Name You Absolutely Need to Know in CG, VFX, Animation, and VR." Paul's insights into virtual cinematography, image-based lighting (IBL), and the crafting of photoreal virtual humans inspired several films, including The Matrix, Spider-Man 2, and Avatar, along with games and real-time rendered content.   Paul is now an adjunct research professor at the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies (USC ICT) and just began as a senior staff engineer in the GoogleVR Daydream team, working at the intersection of virtual reality and real-time rendering.  The interview explores why his research has had such a major influence on computer graphics, animation, vfx, and vr.