Berkeley BCS 2026 AI + Recruiting Summit

Win up to $5M in Seed Funding* | September 27th, 10:00 AM–6:00 PM PT In partnership with "Girls into VC" @ UC Berkeley Join us for an elite hackathon where you'll build cutting-edge projects with Google Gemini and earn 30-minute pitch meetings with top-tier VCs. 🏆 The Prize Top teams will be judged by representatives from Google, Berkeley, Stanford, and multiple venture capital funds. Grand Prize — VC Pitch Access: A 30-minute private pitch meeting with selected funds from our judging panel — VCs writing $500K–$5M seed checks. Pitch your hackathon project or your existing startup. Google AI Studio Track (sponsored by DeepMind): In-Person: share of $15K in GCP credits Online: share of $5K in GCP credits *Investment not guaranteed. The prize is pitch access only — winning teams gain meeting access but must earn investment through their pitch and business fundamentals. 📅 Event Schedule 10:00 AM — Registration & Breakfast: light refreshments and networking with fellow builders 10:30 AM — Opening Ceremony & Rules Briefing: official rules and competition format 11:30 AM — Hacking Begins: 3-hour build sprint 2:30 PM — Submission Deadline (hard stop): all submissions must be in 2:30 PM — Late Lunch: sandwiches, beverages, and networking 3:30 PM — Semi-Finalists Announced: top teams selected for live pitches 4:00 PM — Live Finals: top teams pitch on stage (5-min pitch + 5-min Q&A) 5:30 PM — Winners Announced 6:00 PM — Event Wrap-Up ⚖️ Meet the Judges Google & Google DeepMind Naman Goyal — Researcher, Google DeepMind Jaidev Shah — Researcher, Google DeepMind Amit Patel — Director, Google Joana Carrasqueira — Senior Manager, Google DeepMind Zviad Kardava — Staff AI Developer Relations Engineer, Google Venture Capital & Industry Utkarsh Bajpai - Investor, General Catalyst Vinod Joseph - Investor, Samsung NEXT Ventures Felix To — Investor, NFX Lan Wu — Investor, Fusion Fund Rob Smith — Investor, M13 Jyotika Gupta — Investor, z21 Ventures Sarah Loveland —Investor, Civilization V

Join us Tuesday, October 13th at 5:30 PM for a talk with Shoshana Berger, writer, strategist, and cofounder of the Aged Intelligence Society. With a career spanning journalism, design, and storytelling, Shoshana has shaped how organizations communicate ideas that matter, from her leadership in marketing at IDEO to her role guiding content and communications at Notion. Her work sits at the intersection of design, culture, and meaning, exploring how we make sense of complex systems and, ultimately, our own lives. In her talk, Good Life Design is as Little Life Design as Possible, Shoshana will challenge the idea that every aspect of life needs to be optimized, engineered, or intentionally crafted. Drawing on her experiences across design, media, and writing, she will explore what it means to step back from constant self-improvement and instead create the conditions for a life that unfolds more naturally. Moving between themes of storytelling, technology, and mortality, she offers a perspective on how to navigate ambition, creativity, and constraint without overdesigning the human experience. Come ready to question the pressure to design everything, and consider what it might mean to leave more space for life to happen on its own terms. This event is free and open to the public. .................... Design Field Notes is a lecture series where we invite the public to the UC Berkeley campus for conversations with designers, makers and artists who are contributing to shaping the future through design. If you require accommodation for a disability for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) or information about campus mobility access features in order to fully participate in this event, please contact Jacobs Institute staff at jacobsinstitute@berkeley.edu with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days in advance of the event.

Join us Tuesday, November 17 at 5:30 PM for a talk with Dawn Danby and David McConville, co-founders of Spherical, an integrative research and design studio working to regenerate the health and integrity of Earth’s living systems. Through design, research, and technology, Spherical explores how human systems are embedded within larger ecological, cultural, and planetary webs of relation, and how new forms of infrastructure might support reciprocal relationships with the living Earth. In this talk, Dawn and David will examine how climate action is often made politically viable through the language of infrastructure, and why that framing is both necessary and incomplete. Rather than treating infrastructure as a purely technical system, they will argue for a broader understanding that includes the nested scales, living relations, and more-than-human worlds that sustain life. Drawing on their work across ecological design, planetary systems, and media arts, they will explore how climate solutions demand new ways of seeing, mapping, and designing in relation to the Earth. Attendees will be invited to rethink infrastructure not simply as built form, but as a living scaffold for reciprocal care, repair, and transformation. This talk is open to the public and is for designers, researchers, students, and anyone interested in climate, systems thinking, and the role of design in shaping more livable futures. .................... Design Field Notes is a lecture series where we invite the public to the UC Berkeley campus for conversations with designers, makers and artists who are contributing to shaping the future through design. If you require accommodation for a disability for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) or information about campus mobility access features in order to fully participate in this event, please contact Jacobs Institute staff at jacobsinstitute@berkeley.edu with as much advance notice as possible an