Dr. Gary May has been selected to become the 7th Chancellor of UC Davis. Dr. May is an alumnus of EECS (M.S. ’88 and Ph.D. ’92) and was one of the founding members of the Black Graduate Engineering and Science Students (BGESS) group. In 2010, he was named Outstanding Electrical Engineering Alumnus of UC Berkeley. Dr. May is currently the dean of the College of Engineering at Georgia Tech where he serves as the college’s chief academic officer, leading more than 400 faculty members and more than 13,000 students. The UC Board of Regents will vote on the terms of the proposed appointment during a special meeting at UCLA on Feb. 23. If the board approves the appointment, May will assume the chancellorship on August 1, 2017.

Assistant Prof. Ren Ng has been selected to receive the 2017 Sloan Research Fellowship in the category of Computer Science. 126 early-career scholars are chosen to receive this prestigious award and represent the most promising scientific researchers working today. Since 1955, Sloan Research Fellows have gone on to win 43 Nobel Prizes, 16 Fields Medals, 69 National Medals of Science, 16 John Bates Clark Medals, and numerous other distinguished awards.

Prof. Marti Hearst has been elected into the Association of Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI) Academy. The SIGCHI Academy is an honorary group of individuals who have made substantial contributions to the field of human-computer interaction. These are the principal leaders of the field, whose efforts have shaped the disciplines and/or industry, and led the research and/or innovation in human-computer interaction. Prof Hearst's HCI research includes user interfaces for search, information visualization of text, web site usability, and innovation in education.  She wrote Search User Interfaces, the first academic book on this topic and her search projects include usability analysis of search results clustering, the TileBars query term visualization, BioText search over the bioscience literature, and the Flamenco project that investigated and the promoted the use of faceted metadata for navigation and search.  Faceted navigation became the standard search interface for e-commerce, digital libraries and image collections for at least a decade.

At the Spark Summit East 2017, CS Prof. Ion Stoica was interviewed  by theCUBE about The challenges of securing data on the move.   Prof. Stoica, who is the executive chairman at Databricks Inc, says that “Security is always a difficult topic. It means so many things to so many people."  He describes some interesting research and new technologies for detecting and identifying a variety of security problems to better guard data in the cloud.

Prof. Tsu-Jae King Liu and Prof. Katherine Yelick have been elected to the National Academy of Engineers (NAE).  Election to membership in the NAE is among the highest forms of recognition of notable accomplishments in engineering. Prof. King Liu was recognized for "contributions to the fin field effect transistor (FinFET) and its application to nanometer complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology," and Prof. Yelick was recognized for "software innovation and leadership in high-performance computing."

Prof. Michel Maharbiz, Prof. Yun Song, Associate Prof. Laura Waller, Assistant Prof. Rikky Muller, and Assistant Prof. Nir Yosef are among the  thirteen UC Berkeley faculty chosen to receive up to $1.5 million each over the next five years by the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub.   The investigator awards are the first individual grants by the CZ Biohub as it seeks to foster unconventional scientific exploration and encourage researchers to invent new tools to accelerate the pace of discovery.  “I am humbled and speechless,” said Prof. Maharbiz. “This is an ambitious endeavor and I can’t wait to get started and be part of it. I really do believe we, collectively, can make a big impact on diseases over the next decade, and I’m really excited to be a part of this.”

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.

On February 14th, Prof. Kameshwar Poollawill lead a Power Systems Engineering Research Center (PSERC) webinar titled "The Sharing Economy for the Smart Grid."  Funded by the DOE, this free, public webinar will explore sharing economy opportunities in the electricity sector.  The presentation will also discuss control technology platforms necessary for the physical exchange of power, and market platforms necessary to trade electricity storage.

Professor in Residence Trevor Darrell has been hired as Chief Scientist at Nexar, the world's first over-the-top vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) network that turns smartphones into Artificial Intelligence Dashcams.  In parallel to his work in EECS, Darrell will lead research in the area of machine vision deep learning and vehicle path prediction, including leveraging the company's pool of rare large-scale driving data sets that contain video and telemetry of a variety of real-world driving environments to develop automotive applications.

Associate Prof. Pieter Abbeel and the Robot Learning Lab are profiled in a comprehensive article for Datamation titled "Artificial Intelligence: When Will the Robots Rebel?"  The article covers the foundational tools of AI, like machine learning, and delves into subjects like the human desire to replicate itself, the singularity, and the possibility of robot rebellion.  It also looks at the ways AI currently impacts our lives and how it might change our future.