Two alumni were honored with the Distinguished Alumni Award at this spring’s CSE Research Open House: Darrell Long (Ph.D. ’88), currently a Distinguished Professor of Engineering at the University of California Santa Cruz, and Jeff Carter (B.A. ’86), the vice president overseeing relational database services at Amazon. They were honored for their contributions to academia and industry, and continue to be active in the CSE alumni network.
A worldwide leader in the field of artificial intelligence, DeepMind has established three fellowships for master’s students coming from underrepresented communities in graduate machine learning programs. DeepMind fellows receive two-year fellowships that provide tuition, a stipend, a travel grant, and a DeepMind mentor. Beyond supporting further research in machine learning and artificial intelligence, these fellowships were also developed with the goal of increasing diversity in the field of computing. UC San Diego was one of just three universities in the United States selected to participate in the program, in part due to alumnus Oriol Vinyals (M.A. ’09). Three CSE students are currently DeepMind fellows: Anshuman Dewangan, Ulyana Tkachenko, and Garrett Wolfe.
The CSE Alumni Advisory Board recently launched a $1,000 Leadership Excellence scholarship to help students impacted by COVID 19, as well as created the CSE Alumni Advisory Student Org Fund that provides $350 grants for student organizations hard-hit by the pandemic.
Congratulation to this year’s winners!
The new AAB Speaker series is designed to give current CSE students a look at the lives of successful alumni.
Kylie Taitano (B.S. ’14) was the first speaker and shared her experience working as a senior software engineer at Intuit and outlined the general responsibilities and expectations of a software engineer role.
Alvin Chen (B.S. ’13), now a senior software engineer at Microsoft Research, shared how to practice a growth mindset to shape your career growth.
Hesler Rodriguez (B.S. ’13) gave a high-level overview of how to build a service using Amazon Web Services (AWS), drawing from his experience working as a Senior Software Engineer at Amazon.
Spearheaded by CSE Chair Sorin Lerner, CSE’s inaugural Pixel Art Competition was held this spring. Anyone affiliated with CSE, past and present, was encouraged to participate. Patrick Traynor (B.S. ’18) received Best CSE Spirit for his submission. Christopher Jordan won Best Animation.
copyright 2020 – Computer Science & Engineering – University of California San Diego
