Jean Paul Jacob (M.S. '65 and Ph.D. '66) has been awarded a medal of the Rio Blanco Order, one of the highest honors of the Brazilian Government, in part for his work with the College of Engineering as faculty-in-residence in EECS and as special advisor to the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS).
EECS alumna Prof. Andrea Goldsmith (B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. ’94) co-founded Quantenna in 2005 to build a product and company around her research in adaptive multiple-antenna (MIMO) wireless communications. After seed funding for Quantenna was secured from Sequoia Capital in March of 2006, Goldsmith took a leave of absence from Stanford to lead the company’s technical strategy and development in the role of CTO. She continued in this role through June 2009. She is currently chairing the company’s technical advisory board. Quantenna has continued innovating to remain at the cutting edge of WiFi technology. Quantenna chipsets are now deployed with 15 major carriers throughout the world, including AT&T, DirectTV, Comcast, Orange, Swisscom, and Telefonica. The company employs 275 people worldwide, with revenues this year expected to exceed $110M. The company went public on Oct. 28, 2016 as QTNA, with the founders, company executives, and early employees ringing the closing Nasdaq bell. Quantenna’s stock has risen 15% since its IPO. Andrea Goldsmith is also the Stephen Harris Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford.
Alumnus Jason Wu (EECS B.S. 2008) is featured in a Webby Awards article titled "How a Small Troop of Techies Led the U.S. Syrian Refugee Surge," the story of the humanitarian efforts of the United States Digital Service (the White House's tech "start-up") to successfully vet and bring in some 85,000 Syrian refugees in the midst of the crisis. Jason joined the USDS in an effort to do something more meaningful after working as a product manager at Facebook's Silicon Valley headquarters. He asked himself "If I were one more person at Uber, how much of an impact would I make?"
EECS alumnus Bryan Catanzaro, Ph.D. ’11 (advisor Prof. Kurt Keutzer) has joined NVIDIA as the Vice President of applied deep learning research. He started off as an intern at NVIDIA while studying at UC Berkeley and was eventually hired as a research scientist working on programming models for parallel processors as well as libraries for deep learning. He then moved on to Baidu as a senior researcher creating next generation systems for training and deploying deep learning. He held that position until this recent appointment at NVIDIA.
A device and startup created by former CS students Kunal Chaudhary, Grant Empey, and Rishabh Parikh (along with ME alumus Anuj Chaudhary), are the focus of a California Magazine article titled "A Little Dotty: Berkeley Startup Has a New Way to Make Your House Smart." Their creation, the Dot, is a $20 sandwich of circuit boards and chips housed in a black plastic case about the size and shape of a hockey puck. Functionally, it’s an electronic beacon that pairs with a smartphone via Bluetooth and can be programmed to perform a variety of functions based on where you are and who you are. It has attracted interest from more than 1,700 donors, and is backed by two of Berkeley’s startup incubator programs, CITRIS Foundry and The House. The Dot is also featured in an Inc.com article titled "How This University Sets Students Up for Entrepreneurial Success."
Alumna Prof. Colleen Lewis (EECS B.S. '05/CS M.S. '09), now teaching at Harvey Mudd College, is profiled in an article about the award-winning women attending the 2016 Grace Hopper Conference. Colleen won the 2016 Denise Denton Emerging Leader ABIE Award for young tenure-track faculty doing research involving engineering or physical sciences, who positively influence and promote diversity. Colleen created CSTeachingTips.org, a National Science Foundation funded website that offers tips for teaching computer science.
EECS alumna Vidya Ganapati (M.S.'12, Ph.D.'15) has won the CITRIS Athena Early Career Award, recognizing the accomplishments of technology leaders and organizations fostering interest in computer science for the next generation of women and girls. Vidya has demonstrated a range of research accomplishments, including applications in solar cells for energy efficient electronics and advanced imaging for surgical robotics. She completed predoctoral research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and currently works for Verily Life Sciences. She has been active in teaching and mentoring girls and young women through programs such as Girls Who Code, Science Club for Girls, and the Girls in Engineering summer camp.
Software engineer Adrienne Porter Felt (CS Ph.D. 2012), now the tech lead manager for Google Chrome's usable security team, is the subject of a woprogrammer article at Medium. Adrienne wrote her dissertation on permissions systems as part of the Security Research Group (under Prof. David Wagner), and taught introductory computer classes at the Self-Paced Center. In the article, she describes how she got into computer science, her research into using permissions to restrict the damage that rogue apps can do, and her latest efforts on HTTPS adoption.
Alumnus Eric Cheng (EECS B.S. and B.S. Business Administration, Haas, 2007) was promoted to partner in the Palo Alto and San Francisco offices of Kirkland & Ellis LLP. Eric's practice focuses on intellectual property disputes in federal district courts around the country as well as before the U.S. International Trade Commission, with an emphasis on patent and copyright infringement, and trade secret misappropriation, involving a wide range of technologies.
Grad student Virginia Smith has experienced periods where she felt somewhat isolated during her study of CS, a field that still has relatively few women. She recently joined forces with Ph.D. alumna Gitanjali Swamy and former Chair Tsu-Jae King Liu to form a round table of influential women in tech to think about how to increase diversity at the top levels. She has also written an article about this work. Read about Virginia's experiences and endeavors.
