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.

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.

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.”

An article featured in Bloomberg Business titled “Five of the Best Computer Science Classes in the U.S” has named EECS CS 61A in the top 5. The number of college graduates who got degrees in computer science in 2011 was 2,000% higher than it was in 1970 according to the U.S. Dept. of Education. This course is taught by Asst. Teaching Prof. John De Nero. A notable alumni of this program is Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, ’86.

EECS alumni Matei Zaharia (advisor Profs. Scott Shenker & Ion Stoica) and John Duchi (advisor Prof. Michael Jordan) have won ACM (Assoc. for Computing Machinery) dissertation awards. Matei won the 2014 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for his thesis “An Architecture for Fast and General Data Processing on Large Clusters”, and fellow AMPLab alum John Duchi won Honorable Mention for his thesis “Multiple Optimality Guarantees in Statistical Learning”. Matei and John are now faculty members at MIT and Stanford, respectively.