The US News and World Report has ranked both the EE and CS engineering programs among the top 3 undergraduate programs in the country for 2020.  Berkeley once again took the #2 spot in the Electrical/Electronic/Communications (EEC) category, while moving up one spot to #3 from its 2019 ranking in the Computer engineering category.   Berkeley EECS ranks just behind MIT in the EEC category and behind MIT and CMU in the Computer category.   Berkeley Engineering programs were ranked #3 overall in the country.

EECS graduate student Carlos Biaou (M.S. '18, advisor: Vivek Subramanian) has won a UC Berkeley Sather Gate Young Volunteer Award.  Berkeley volunteer awards are given to "people who give generously of their time and expertise to serve the Berkeley community."   Biaou was the president of the Black Graduate Engineering and Science Students association (BGESS) from 2017 to 2019.  He won the Pillar of the Community Award from the Latino/a Association for Graduate Students in Engineering and Science at Berkeley (LAGSES) earlier this year "For his commitment to building community across organizations on campus."  Biaou is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow studying various degradation processes in perovskite solar cells. 

EECS alumnus Bruce Hajek (Ph.D. '79, advisor: Eugene Wong), who has been on the faculty of the Grainger College of Engineering, and a researcher in the Coordinated Science Laboratory, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for 40 years, has been named head of UIUC's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE).  Hajek is an internationally renowned expert in the field of communications networks and served as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, and as President of the IEEE Information Theory Society.

EECS sophomore Arth Vidyarthi has been selected to participate in the 2019 Forbes Under 30 Summit scholarship program.  The summit, which brings together "the best minds across industries, venture capitalism, public policy and more to learn, network, collaborate, recruit and exchange ideas," will be held in Detroit at the end of October. The scholarship program grants students the chance to participate in networking opportunities and provides free access to the summit.  “Philanthropy is one of the areas being focused on at this year’s summit," said Vidyarthi, "and I’d love to find out more about the way technology is being used to revolutionize the way it’s being carried out.”

EECS students, postdocs, alumni, and faculty were front and center at the 28th USENIX Security Symposium in Santa Clara last week.  In addition to the Test of Time and Distinguished Paper Awards (see below), Keynote Speaker Alex Stamos (B.S. '01), previously the Chief Security Officer of Facebook, highlighted the threat model work of current ICSI postdoc Alisa Frik (advisor: Serge Egelman).  Alumnus Nicholas Carlini (Ph.D. '18, advisor: David Wagner) gave a talk on his neural networks research which was co-authored by CS Prof. Dawn Song and postdoc Chang Liu.  ICSI researchers Primal Wijesekera and Serge Egelman, and former ICSI postdoc Joel Reardon, were awarded a Distinguished Paper Award for "50 Ways to Leak Your Data: An Exploration of Apps' Circumvention of the Android Permissions System." Grad students Frank Li (advisor: Vern Paxson) and Nathan Malkin (advisors: Serge Egelman and David Wagner), received a Distinguished Paper award at the SOUPS '19 technical session for "Keepers of the Machines: Examining How System Administrators Manage Software Updates For Multiple Machines." The Zip Bomb research of alumnus David Fifield (Ph.D. '17, advisor: Doug Tygar) was also awarded a Best Paper award at the WOOT '19 technical session.

Two CS grad students, co-advised by David Culler and Raluca Popa, also made presentations.  Sam Kumar presented "JEDI: Many-to-Many End-to-End Encryption and Key Delegation for IoT" and Michael P. Andersen presented "WAVE: A Decentralized Authorization Framework with Transitive Delegation."

Graduate student Grant Ho and his co-advisors Profs. Vern Paxson and David Wagner, were honored with a Distinguished Paper Award at the 2019 USENIX Security Symposium for "Detecting and Characterizing Lateral Phishing at Scale".  In the paper, they presented "the first large-scale characterization of lateral phishing attacks, based on a dataset of 113 million employee-sent emails from 92 enterprise organizations."  Ho, Paxson, and Wagner previously won the same award at the 2017 USENIX Security Symposium for their paper "Detecting Credential Spearphishing Attacks in Enterprise Settings."

CS Profs. and alumni David Wagner (Ph.D. '00) and Eric Brewer (B.S. '89), and alumni Ian Goldberg (Ph.D. '00) and Randi Thomas (M.S.) have won the 2019 USENIX Test of Time Award for their 1996 paper titled "A Secure Environment for Untrusted Helper Applications."  The paper, which introduced a fundamental and crucial technique for confining untrusted applications in computer systems, and which made a significant contribution to the computer security field, was written by Wagner, Goldberg and Thomas when they were Brewer's graduate students.  “Beyond its strong academic impact — cited by 890 papers," said award committe member Dan Boneh, "the technique is now used to confine web pages in the Chrome browser, and to confine applications running on Android."

EE Prof. and Dean of Engineering Tsu-Jae King Liu has won a 2019 Asian American Distinguished Science and Technology Award  for "contributions to nanometer-scale field-effect transistor and micro-electro-mechanical relay technology for digital computation and memory applications.”   The award is part of the annual DiscoverE National Engineers Week program hosted by CIE/USA, and was presented at the 2019 Asian American Engineer of the Year  Award and Conference (AAEOY) on August 16th.

EECS Prof. Raluca Ada Popa has been selected for the Bakar Fellows Program, which supports faculty working to apply scientific discoveries to real-world issues in the fields of engineering, computer science, chemistry, and biological and physical sciences. With her Bakar Fellows Spark Award, Prof. Popa will design and build a data encryption platform that will enable collaborative machine learning studies by performing these multi-party computations under encryption.