Welcome to the Home Page of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of California, Berkeley. I hope you will find the information here to be helpful as you learn more about our outstanding instructional and research programs, and our exceptional faculty, students, and staff.
Please refer to the Department's Vision and Mission
Statement to get a sense of our core values and what we are about as
a community.
It remains our goal to become the #1 ranked department of EECS in the
nation, leveraging our ability to work together across the dual disciplines
of electrical engineering and computer science and building on our strengths
within the College of Engineering, the Berkeley Campus, and the intellectual
foment of the San Francisco Bay Area. In our case, the whole truly is greater
than the sum of the parts.
We are well on our way to reaching our goal. In the
recent National Research Council report
entitled "Research-Doctorate
Programs in the United States: Continuity and Change," the Department
was ranked third in the nation in computer science and fourth in electrical
engineering. The Berkeley College of Engineering was ranked second in the
nation overall. The Berkeley campus was ranked as number one for graduate
study overall (in terms of the percentage of programs in the top ten, in
an astonishing 34 out of the 35 programs rated).
The 1995 US News and World Report rankings for graduate schools rated us (tied for) first in computer science, first in computer engineering, and third in electrical engineering. The 1996 rankings kept computer science in a tie for first place, with EE ranked #4 in the nation (with little difference among the top four schools). The 1996 US News and World Report's America's Best Graduate Schools ranked the following subspecialties of Berkeley computer science among the top five departments in the nation: Artificial Intelligence (#4), Databases (#1), Hardware (tied for #3), Software (#2), and Theory (#2). The 1996 US News and World Report's Guide to Undergraduate Programs ranked Berkeley Engineering as tied for #2 in the country and our computer science undergraduate program was ranked #3. In 1997, the U S News and World Report's rankings of graduate engineering programs placed Berkeley's computer engineering program at #2 in the country and our electrical engineering program at #4. There is no question that our programs are in the top handful in the nation and in the world.
In the June 23, 1997 Information Technology Annual Report issue of Business Week, Berkeley Computer Science was ranked as the #2 best Computer Science Research Laboratory in the world, in a tie with Microsoft Research and beating out such leading industrial information technology labs as IBM, Lucent, AT&T, and Xerox PARC.
Our proximity to Silicon Valley and the thriving software industry in San Francisco and the East Bay significantly enhances the impact and visibility of our work, and provides incredible opportunities for our graduates. We are located at the largest and most vibrant crossroads in the world of computing and electronics technologies.
The Department, through the Electronics Research Laboratory, enjoys a high level of research funding, receiving support from Federal, State (California state-funded projects and the MICRO Program), Industry, and University sources. In 1996-1997, our level of research funding was $44 million. The breakdown is as shown below. This is up from $28 million in the preceeding year!
When I was growing up, the late twentieth century and early twenty first
century were predicted to be the "Space Age," a term synonymous
with a positive, futuristic world view. Yet as we stand at the dawn of the
next millennium, it is the Information Age that is upon us. Information
technology research, broadly understood to incorporate both computer science
as well as electrical engineering technologies such as semiconductor devices,
manufacturing, computer-aided design, circuits, and systems, is largely
responsible for the developments that have swept the first digital computer
invented only 50 years ago into an industry expected to be valued at $3.5
trillion worldwide by the turn of the century. With an increasing shift
towards knowledge-intensive service industries, coupled with an ever smarter
and more specialized manufacturing sector, it is not surprising that information
technology is one of the fastest growing sectors of the U.S. and the industrial
world 's economies.
The fields of electrical engineering and computer science have mutually
supported each other to generate unprecedented acceleration in the development
of this technology. In the late 1970s, integrated circuit, semiconductor
manufacturing, and computer-aided design technologies made possible ever
more sophisticated single chip systems. This immediately led to the revolution
in desktop computing in the form of engineering workstations and personal
computers. These in turn provided the computational foundation for the design
of ever more complex integrated circuits, high performance processor chips,
and sophisticated CAD and manufacturing systems. And the feedback loop of
innovation continues unabated to this day.
Berkeley is respected for its development of breakthrough technologies
that have had significant impact, sometimes creating multibillion dollar
industries. In addition, the faculty is well known for its significant theoretical
contributions that deepen our understanding of fundamental questions of
computing and electronics technologies.
Just consider the following wide-spread technical developments that got
their starts in Berkeley research laboratories (the list is hopelessly incomplete):
In addition, Berkeley is renowned for his contribution to theory as well as practice:
Space does not permit me to list all of the significant and exciting
research projects we have underway. I invite you browse the faculty and
research project home pages to get a more in-depth perspective. See our About
EECS Page for a wealth of more detailed information about the Department
and the research programs of individual faculty members.
Berkeley's achievements may start with our faculty, but they certainly do
not end there! We number many industry leaders among the alumni of EECS
and the Berkeley campus. As Gordon Moore recently stated, there are more
Berkeley graduates in Silicon Valley than there are Stanford grads! Furthermore,
Berkeley's leadership in UNIX system software and relational databases has
sparked quite a few technology startups by in the East Bay by Berkeley faculty
and graduate students. Here is just a small sampling:
California has emerged from the recession with renewed vigor, with an
economy that exceeds that of all but a handful of the world's countries.
Multimedia/entertainment and information technology are the twin pistons
that now drive California's economy. The University
of California is well positioned to maintain its position as the premier
publically-assisted university in the nation. The university continues to
strongly support the department's programs. Over the past seven years we
have been authorized to hire twenty eight enthusiastic and outstandingly
qualified faculty, carrying us in exciting new directions in both curricula
and research. Four new faculty joined us in the 1997-1998 Academic Year:
Michael Jordan (joint with Statistics), Machine Learning; Anthony Joseph,
Distributed and Mobile Systems; Kurt Keutzer, Computer-Aided Design; John
Kubiatowicz, Parallel Architectures and Systems. Three additional faculty
will be joining us in 1998-1999: George Necula, programm verification and
software engineering; Jonathan Shewchuk, scientific computing and computation
geometry; and Doug Tygar, computer security and electronic commerce (joint
with SIMS). Two additional candidates, one in theoretical computer science
and one in digital signal processing, are currently considering our offer.
We have been authorized to hire several additional faculty members in the
coming academic year.
Financial support for our graduate students continues
to be easily available. The EECS Department has access to a variety of university,
federal, and industrial fellowships. Most fellowships are for one year and
awarded to entering students. We also have a number of Graduate Student
Instructorships, and most of our students beyond the first year are supported
as Graduate Student Researchers on faculty research projects. The EECS Department
does its best to provide sufficient financial aid to enable all qualified
graduate students who need help to attend Berkeley. Given our extremely
high level of research support (in the range of $500,000 per faculty member!),
virtually all students needing support find some form of financial assistance
throughout their graduate careers.
We are proud of our undergraduate
program, and the continuing strong commitment of our faculty to undergraduate
students and undergraduate teaching and curriculum development. Many of
our faculty members have been honored with the campus' Distinguished Teaching
Award. Two years ago, Professor Chenming Hu became the tenth member of our
faculty to be so honored. The result is a truly outstanding and well trained
group of undergraduates. In 1996, a team from Berkeley, under the coaching
of CS Professor Paul Hilfinger, won the International Collegiate Programming
Contest sponsored by the ACM.
Just in the past few years we have done a major revamping of the CS lower-division
curriculum, merged and revamped the EE and CS courses in networking, and
moved digital signal processing and digital design into the lower-division.
We are now undertaking a major effort to better integrate our lower division
EE and CS courses so as to achieve a truly unified curriculum for electrical
engineering and computer science students. We have also been actively increasing
the opportunities for undergraduate research projects by providing increased
financial support.
At both the undergraduate and graduate level, student
demand for our programs (as well as industrial demand for our graduates)
remains extremely strong. 1996 marked the first time that EECS graduates
exceeded ChemE's as the garnering the highest starting salaries of any engineering
field. For Spring 1997 graduates, the average starting salaries were $47,000
for Bachelors, $62,000 for Masters, and $80,000 for Doctoral degree holders.
We would expect these numbers to be 10-15% higher for Spring 1998 degree
holders.
We have the only large undergraduate program among top-ten EECS departments
west of the Mississippi, and not surprisingly our undergraduate applicants
as a group are academically the most highly qualified in the entire University
of California system.
Berkeley is rightly proud of its strong commitment
to diversity, as well as our great success in attracting a diverse student
population (undoubtedly the most diverse in the country). Our Department
remains deeply committed to the happy combination of diversity and excellence.
We don't anticipate that the recent widely publicized (and also widely misrepresented
in the press) change in the criteria for affirmative action on the part
of the Regents of the University will have any substantial impact on our
ability to deliver on this commitment.
There is the famous (true?) story of a letter written by the Director
of the Patent Office to President William McKinley in 1899: "Everything
that can be invented has been invented." This is certainly not the
case for electronics and computing!
I believe that we have never lived in a more exciting time for electronics
and computing than we live in right now. Transistors get smaller and faster,
processor speeds continue to accelerate, networked access to information
has become even more important, and the marriage of digital processing with
analog sensing and control represents a tremendous opportunity. All told,
the demand for increased computing, signal processing, information access,
and information display continues unabated.
EECS is clearly the right field for the 21st century, and Berkeley (and
the San Francisco Bay Area)
is the place to be a part of it!