Alumnus Yongdong Wang (CS Ph.D. '92),  currently Chief Technology Officer of Microsoft Asia-Pacific R&D Group, has been named Microsoft's Global Senior Vice President.  Wang joined Microsoft in 2009, founding the Microsoft Asia-Pacific R&D Group in Beijing, and took on the additional role of managing director of Applications & Services Group East Asia.

EECS alumna Leslie Field (M.S. ’88, Ph.D. ’91) is featured in a Berkeley Engineering news article titled “One big reflective band-aid”. After watching Al Gore’s film “An Inconvenient Truth” in 2006, Field was inspired to develop a technology to deal with climate change. The following year she began testing ideas to increase the reflective capacity of ice in a small lake in the Sierra Nevada and founded Ice911, a nonprofit organization dedicated to developing systems to be deployed on the planet’s receding ice sheets.

Alumnus Bob Jewett (EECS BS '75/M.S. '79) is profiled in a Berkeley Engineer article titled "Bob Jewett's double life" which describes the retired HP/Agilent/Keysight engineer's life-long fascination with the rules and science of billiards.  Bob has published hundreds of articles on subjects like table friction, shots that depend on spin, and calculating the best approach to a shot.

Alumnus Ankur Aggarwal (EECS M.Eng.'12) has been named in Forbes magazine's 30 Under 30 list,  a compilation of the brightest young entrepreneurs, innovators and game changers across 20  industries.  Ankur and his college roommates teamed up to found TowerView Health, which sells a smart pill box with custom trays of medication.

Alumnus Silvio Micali (CS PhD '82, CS Distinguished Alumni 2006) has published a paper called ALGORAND The Efficient and Democratic Ledger where he lays out a groundbreaking new vision of a decentralized and secure way to manage a shared ledger that provides a beautifully elegant solution to the Byzantine General’s problem.  Micali, the Ford Professor of Engineering at MIT, is the recipient of the Turing Award,  the Goedel Prize, and the RSA prize in cryptography.  His new research is profiled in an article titled "Move over Bitcoin - MIT Cryptographer Silvio Micali and his Public Ledger ALGORAND...The Future of Blockchain?" 

Alumnus Asad A. Abidi (EE MS '78/PhD '81, EE Distinguished Alumni 2015) will be the inaugural holder of the Abdus Salam Chair in the Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) in Pakistan.  The Chair is named in honor of theoretical physicist Abdus Salam, the first Pakistani and first Muslim to receive a Nobel Prize in science.  Abidi, who is a professor of electrical engineering at UCLA and the founding dean of LUMS, is known for his groundbreaking research in single-chip radios.   He  won the IEEE Pederson Award in Solid-State Circuits—which was named in honor of EECS Prof. Donald O. Pederson—in 2008.

Alumnus Kylan Nieh (CS BA/Business BS 2014) has made the 2017 Forbes 30 Under 30: Enterprise Technology list.  While still a student, Kylan started his own public speaking and leadership course at the Haas School of Business and became the youngest recipient of the Business Teacher of the Year Award in 2014.  After graduation, Kylan became the youngest Senior Product Manager at LinkedIn Students.

Alumnus Stephen W. Director (EE M.S. '67/Ph.D. '68) has been elected as a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors this year.  The title recognizes "academic inventors who have demonstrated a prolific spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on quality of life, economic development, and the welfare of society."  Director is a pioneer in the field of elec­tronic design automation and has patented methods for max­i­mizing the yield during the man­u­fac­turing of inte­grated cir­cuits.  Director is Provost Emeritus in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at Northeastern University.

Imperva has named alumnus Roger Sippl (CS BS '77 ) to its board of directors.  Sippl is a Silicon Valley software pioneer, entrepreneur and innovator.  He founded Informix Software (now part of IBM) in 1980, when he was just 24, to develop and commercialize SQL relational database software.  He subsequently took two more companies through IPO: The Vantive Corporation, which became part of PeopleSoft/Oracle, and Visigenic Software, which was acquired by Borland.  Sippl received the CS Distinguished Alumni award in 1995.

Alumnus Peter Norvig  (CS Ph.D. '86), now Director of Research at Google, is profiled in a Forbes magazine article titled "Artificial Intelligence Pioneers: Peter Norvig, Google."  The article describes Norvig's  history and accomplishments, and outlines his thoughts on human-machine partnerships and the disparate goals of  neuroscience and AI research.