News
April 8, 2026
Matei Zaharia awarded ACM Prize in Computing for contributions to data systems, enabling AI
Matei Zaharia, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences (EECS) at UC Berkeley, has been awarded the ACM Prize in Computing for his visionary development of distributed data systems and computing infrastructure. In the prize announcement, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) noted Zaharia’s development of open-source systems helped enable large-scale machine learning (ML), analytics and AI at a global scale. ACM is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, and their ACM Prize in Computing recognizes early-to-mid-career computer scientists whose work has had broad and lasting impact. Recipients receive a $250,000 prize, with financial support provided by an endowment from Infosys Ltd.
April 2, 2026
EECS researchers receive Laude “Slingshot” awards to advance next-generation AI systems
Three research projects featuring contributors from Sky Computing Lab have recently been selected for Laude’s Slingshot program.
March 4, 2026
OpenThoughts-Agent, Continual Learning Benchmark, and MAP announced as Slingshots // TWO projects with Laude Institute
These 14 projects from Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, CMU, UIUC, and Michigan are tackling production deployment, energy constraints, and continual learning. Several are building on infrastructure from Slingshots // ONE. Together, they show what happens when the right researchers get the right resources at the right time: research that ships, gets adopted, and moves the field forward.
November 18, 2025
vLLM is the top open source project on GitHub for 2025
2025’s top projects split between AI infrastructure (vllm, ollama, huggingface/transformers) and enduring ecosystems (vscode, godot, home-assistant).
October 21, 2025
EECS students drive AI innovation as Amazon PhD Fellows
Today, Amazon announced its new AI PhD Fellowship program, offering two years of funding to over 100 PhD students across nine universities. Ten of these inaugural fellowships have been awarded to graduate students from UC Berkeley EECS’ Sky Computing Lab, supporting cutting-edge research in core AI disciplines like machine learning, computer vision, and natural-language processing, ultimately driving innovations essential for the next evolution of practical AI.
Amazon launches $68 million AI PhD Fellowship program
"We are thrilled to partner with Amazon to advance open research in AI," said Joseph E. Gonzalez, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley and co-director of the university’s Sky Computing Lab. “Through this fellowship, Amazon and UC Berkeley are investing in the next generation of researchers, and I am excited to see how our PhD students will shape the future of artificial intelligence.”
October 20, 2025
Barbarians at The Gate: How AI is Upending Systems Research
AI is no longer just tuning systems as a “black box.” It’s now rewriting their core algorithms by treating the system as a “white box” and discovering solutions that can outperform human experts in a few hours. This new approach, which we term AI-Driven Research for Systems (ADRS), can automate some of the most tedious parts of research.
October 9, 2025
Lightspeed + Sky Lab: Supporting UC Berkeley’s Next Generation of Entrepreneurs
For decades, UC Berkeley has played a critical role in the technology and startup ecosystem. The trend has only accelerated in the AI era, with alumni having founded some of the most consequential startups of this generation, including OpenAI, Databricks, Perplexity, Skild AI, Reflection, and Physical Intelligence. In fact, according to the latest data from PitchBook, the university’s undergrad alumni have launched more VC-backed startups than any other campus globally. Against this backdrop, and amid National Science Foundation (NSF) changes, Lightspeed and Sky Lab are launching the first formal venture capital partnership in Sky Computing Lab’s history. Lightspeed has made $500k founding contribution to the partnership, whose goal is to sustain pivotal research and translate it into market-ready products and services that address enterprise needs.
August 13, 2025
Why This Billionaire Berkeley Professor Won’t Leave The Classroom
This computer science professor became a billionaire launching four startups out of his privately-funded research lab, including unicorns Databricks and Anyscale. But it’s never been just about business.
August 1, 2025
Berkeley computer science researchers propose evidence-based AI policy recommendations
Jennifer Chayes, Ion Stoica, Dawn Song, and Emma Pierson are co-authors on the article – “Advancing science- and evidence-based AI policy” by Rishi Bommasani et al – published by the journal Science on July 31.