Kay Ousterhout recently won the Google Ph.d. Fellowship. This is one of the highest honors a CS grad student can win. It is extremely selective, with only a small number universities invited to submit two nominees each. Kay is a 5th year student of Prof. Sylvia Ratnasamy. The Google Phd Fellowship was created in 2009 to recognize and support outstanding graduate students doing exceptional work in Computer Science (CS) and related disciplines.

Prof. Ruzena Bajcsy and her team have been selected for a 2016-17 award from the Signatures Innovation Fellow Program. This program supports innovative research by UC Berkeley faculty on projects that hold commercial promise and supports visionary faculty entrepreneurs and leadership teams on their journey to building great companies. Prof. Bajcsy’s project is Individualized Human Modeling for Medical Diagnosis and Prescription of Assistive Devices.

EECS alumni Rick Garcia and Prof. Avideh Zakhor won the best paper award at the SPIE Electronic Imaging Conference on 3D Image Processing measurement. Their paper titled “Markerless Motion Capture With Multi-view Structured Light” is also the title of Rick’s Ph.D. thesis.

A special issue of the Proceedings of the IEEE, the most highly cited general-interest journal in electrical engineering and computer science, on the evolution of Electronic Design Automation (EDA) and its future developments, features papers from a number of research groups in EECS. The issue, including Prof. Robert Brayton and Prof. Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli as guest editors, has brought together for the first time multiple perspectives on the future of EDA and the challenges ahead. The significant contributions from EECS professors, students, and alumni witness the groundbreaking, continuous role of Berkeley EECS faculty and students in shaping the field.

EECS alumni Gene Luen Yang (CS B.A. '95) has been selected as the new national ambassador for Young People’s Literature. This literary ambassador program was created in 2008 “to raise national awareness of the importance of young people’s literature as it relates to literacy, education and the betterment of the lives of young people”. After graduating UC Berkeley in 1995, Yang went to work as a computer engineer for two years but came to the realization he was meant to teach. He left his job as an engineer to teach computer science at a high school. During this time he also wrote stories and began self-publishing comic books and in 2006 began winning awards and gaining notoriety for his graphic novels.

The Level Playing Field Institute (LPFI) honored Teaching Prof. Dan Garcia as a Tech Diversity Champion at their Annual Fairness Matters Forum 2015 held at Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco. LPFI is committed to eliminating the barriers faced by underrepresented people of color in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) and fostering their untapped talent for the advancement of our nation. This event focused on the progress toward diversifying tech and celebrated those who are working to create a more inclusive tech ecosystem.

EECS alumni Michael George Luby (CS Ph.D. ’83), VP of Technology at Qualcomm is among the class of 2015 ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) Fellows. In 1996-1997, while at ICSI (International Computer Science Institute) he led the team that invented Tornado codes. He is recognized for his contributions to coding theory, cryptography, parallel algorithms and derandomization.

In 2011 EECS partnered with the campus Division of Equity & Inclusion on a new strategic planning initiative to improve the numbers and create a more welcoming environment for women and underrepresented groups in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Today, thanks to the founding work of EECS Diversity Director Emerita Sheila Humphreys, the work of EECS Associate Director of Diversity & Achievement Tiffany Reardon's tireless efforts championing diversity and inclusion efforts, and the support and leadership of Prof. Tsu-Jae King Liu, the first woman Chair of EECS, over the past 4 years the percentage of undergraduate women in EECS has grown more than twice as fast as the growth of the overall student population, and the percentage of underrepresented minorities has been 3 to 5 times the overall rate.

EECS alumni Jeffrey Forbes (Ph.D. ’00, advisor Prof. Stuart Russell) has been named Chair of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Education Policy Committee. Created in 2007, the ACM Education Policy Committee is a high-level committee of acclaimed computer scientists and educators dedicated to improving opportunities for quality education in computer science and computing education around the world. Prof. Forbes is an Associate Dean of the Trinity College of Arts and Sciences at Duke University and has served as Program Director for the Education and Workforce program in the National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering.

EECS Prof. Emeritus and alumni (Ph.D. ’69) Charles Shank is one of two scientists to receive the Enrico Fermi Award, one of the federal government’s oldest and most prestigious awards for scientific achievement. He was also director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory from 1989-2004. Prof. Shank is recognized for “the seminal development of ultrafast lasers and their application in many areas of scientific research, for visionary leadership of national scientific and engineering research communities, and for exemplary service supporting the National Laboratory complex.”