The city of Berkeley took the #6 spot on Livability's ranking of "2019 10 Best Cities for Techies."  Cities were judged on factors that included: the proximity to top engineering, technology, and computer science degree programs; state internet coverage; top startup accelerators, incubators, and growth; and top environments for entrepreneurs.  "Prestigious University of California, Berkeley, ranks third among the best computer science programs worldwide, focusing on research to build the future of the tech industry. Almost 70 percent of the city’s population has a college degree, and its robust startup scene provides a myriad of opportunities for industry up-and-comers."

EE Prof. Eli Yablonovitch has won the prestigious Frederic Ives Medal / Jarus W. Quinn Prize from the Optical Society of America (OSA).  It is the highest award presented by the OSA and recognizes overall distinction.  Yablonitch, along with Sanjeev John, founded the field of photonic crystals in 1987.  He and his team were the first to create a 3-dimensional structure that exhibited a full photonic bandgap, which has been named Yablonovite.  His seminal paper reporting inhibited spontaneous emission in photonic crystals is said to be among the most highly cited papers in physics and engineering.

The EECS Distinguished Alumni Awards recognize the valuable contributions of its most distinguished alumni. The 2019 EE distinguished alumni are Sharad Malik (M.S. '87/EE Ph.D '90, advisor: Robert k. Brayton), Chair of Electrical Engineering at Princeton; and Dr. Ahmad Bahai (EE Ph.D '94, advisor: Pravin Varaiya), CTO of Texas Instruments. The 2019 CS distinguished alumni are Andrew Ng (CS Ph.D. '03, adviser: Michael Jordan), Stanford Professor; and Dr. Amin Vahdat (B.S. '92/ CS Ph.D.'98, advisor: Thomas Anderson), Technical Lead for networking at Google, and Google Fellow. The award presentation will be at BEARS on February 14, 2019.

EE alumna and Prof. Claire Tomlin (Ph.D. '98, adviser: Shankar Sastry) has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE).  NAE is among the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer.  Academy membership honors those who have made outstanding contributions to "engineering research, practice, or education, including, where appropriate, significant contributions to the engineering literature" and to "the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering, or developing/implementing innovative approaches to engineering education."  Tomlin was cited “For contributions to design tools for safety-focused control of cyberphysical systems.”

ACM A.M. Turing Award Laureate and database technology pioneer Prof. Emeritus Michael Stonebraker will deliver the opening keynote at Data Summit 2019, titled “Big Data, Technological Disruption, and the 800-Pound Gorilla in the Corner.”  Stonebraker was the main architect of the INGRES relational DBMS, and the object-relational DBMS, POSTGRES, developed at U.C. Berkeley. The Data Summit brings together corporations, government agencies, and public institutions to learn about the leading technologies and strategies for succeeding in this increasingly data-driven world.

2014 CS Distinguished Alumna, Yoky Matsuoka (B.S. '93), has been appointed to the Board of Directors of HP Inc.  Matsuoka was the founder of Google[x], the company's innovative research and development lab, before serving as CTO of Google Alphabet's Nest business.  She was also a senior executive at Apple and an endowed professor at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Washington.  The HP Board of Directors is said to be one of the most diverse of any technology company in the U.S.

CS grad student Lydia Liu (advisers: Michael Jordan and Moritz Hardt) has won the inaugural Microsoft Research Ada Lovelace Fellowship.  The new three-year fellowship is for PhD students at North American universities who are members of groups underrepresented in computing and pursuing research aligned to the topics carried out by Microsoft Research.  Liu's research aims to establish theoretical foundations for machine learning algorithms to achieve reliable and robust performance. The fellowship comes with a $42K stipend, tuition for three years, and an invitation to the PhD Summit, a two-day workshop where fellows will meet with Microsoft researchers and other top students to share their research.

EE Assistant Prof. Rikky Muller has been named an IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society (SSCS) Distinguished Lecturer (DL) for the two year term of 2019-2020.  SSCS DLs are experts in current integrated circuit technologies who are chosen to speak at chapter meetings and regional seminars because of their skills as deeply knowledgeable and excellent communicators.  Muller co-directs the Berkeley Wireless Research Center (BWRC) with Prof. Elad Alon, who is currently serving the second year of his term as a 2018-2019 SSCS DL.  Muller will be a featured speaker at the Berkeley EECS Annual Research Symposium (BEARS) on February 14, 2019

Research collaboration between Singapore–Berkeley Building Efficiency and Sustainability in the Tropics (SinBerBEST 2 -- part of the Berkeley Education Alliance for Research in Singapore center) led by EE Prof. Costas Spanos, and UC Berkeley’s Center for the Built Environment (CBE) resulted in three 2018 Building and Environment Best Paper Awards.  The awards, which are presented annually by the Building and Environment journal, recognize originality, contributions to the field, quality of presentation, and soundness of science.   The honored papers were titled "Automated Mobile Sensing: Towards High-Granularity Agile Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) Monitoring," "Development of the ASHRAE Global Thermal Comfort Database II," and "Personal Comfort Models: Predicting Individuals’ Thermal Preference Using Occupant Heating and Cooling Behavior and Machine Learning."

Recent EE alumna Cathy Wu (Ph.D. '18, adviser: Alexandre Bayen) has won the Council of University Transportation Centers (CUTC)’s Milton Pikarsky Memorial Award.  This honor, which recognizes the best Doctoral dissertation in the field of science and technology in transportation studies each year, was awarded for Wu's dissertation titled “Learning and Optimization for Mixed Anatomy Systems – A Mobility Context.”  “This is a great honor,” says Wu. “I feel very fortunate to have been able to study optimization challenges at very different layers of our complex transportation systems in the context of self-driving vehicles, from congestion to routing to questions touching on planning and policy.”