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$20 million gift launches design institute

06/18/13 — I just returned from Chicago, where I had the great honor of taking the stage with President Bill Clinton and Dr. Paul Jacobs, chairman and CEO of Qualcomm and chair of our advisory board, as Paul announced a $20 million commitment that he and his wife, Stacy, are making to launch an Institute of Design Innovation here in the college.

From problem to prototype

06/18/13 — For bioengineering undergraduate students Nasim Barzanian, Sakthivel Nagaraj, Neil Ray and Jeffrey Yang, inspiration took the form of a ballpoint pen, which sparked their development of an innovative technology for laparoscopic surgery. The student team formed during a bioengineering course, which partnered undergraduates with a physician to address a real clinical challenge, providing in-depth experience with the formal engineering design process.

Now and forever Berkeley Engineers

06/18/13 — Berkeley Engineering held its 144th Commencement on Sunday, May 19, at the Hearst Greek Theatre. Berkeley Engineer Dan Mote, president-elect of the National Academy of Engineering, urged undergrads to seek greatness "at the edges." DARPA director Arati Prabhakar delivered the commencement address to Ph.D. and master's candidates. Another Berkeley Engineer, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, gave the university-wide commencement address. Of all his accomplishments, Wozniak said his proudest moment, still, was the day he graduated from Berkeley.

Manufacturing energy

06/18/13 — Lindsay Miller (Ph.D'12 ME) opted to pursue graduate studies at Berkeley because of the university's reputation for groundbreaking alternative energy research and its multidisciplinary approach. As a post-doc in Paul Wright's lab, she became intrigued by the process of turning a prototype into a device ready for real-world application. “My research was trying to make wireless sensor nodes that never die - batteries that can be recharged infinitely by the energy available in the environment,” says Miller.

Cal EECS professor receives prestigious international award

06/13/13 Contra Costa Times — Electrical engineering and computer science professor Eli Yablonovitch is one of two recipients of the 2012 Harvey Prize, a prestigious international award for his "pioneering discoveries in photonics, optoelectronics, and semiconductors."

Small gadgets that make you healthier

06/12/13 Scientific American — A new movement that combines traditional medical record keeping and public health surveillance with data mining and mobile phone technologies holds great promise for patients and researchers alike. Steven DeMello, director of health care at CITRIS, says mobile diagnosis and surveillance could help blunt the impact of changing demographic trends.

Hyundai Center of Excellence dedicated at UC Berkeley

06/12/13 — The Hyundai Center of Excellence in Integrated Vehicle Safety Systems and Control was dedicated on Wednesday at Berkeley's Hesse Hall. Engineers from Hyundai and Berkeley will collaborate “to design the car of the future,” said Dean Shankar Sastry.

Computer memory can be read with a flash of light

06/11/13 Nature — Modern computer memory technologies come with a trade-off between speed and retention time. But a prototype memory device, co-developed by Berkeley Engineering materials scientist Ramamoorthy Ramesh, combines speed, endurance and low power consumption by uniting electronic storage with a readout based on the physics that powers solar panels.

Berkeley’s little legged robots grow wings and tails

06/05/13 IEEE Spectrum — Berkeley Engineering students have been exploring what you can do when you give ground robots bio-inspired accessories, and they've got some little legged robots doing cool new stuff thanks to the addition of wings and tails.

Academic-industrial team to uncover innovations in systems engineering

05/30/13 iCyPhy — UC Berkeley has partnered with Caltech, IBM and United Technologies Corp. to launch Industrial Cyber Physical Systems (iCyPhy), a Berkeley-based research consortium that will identify and develop new engineering techniques to make it easier to successfully build products and services that combine complex software, hardware and mechanical components.

Bolts along Bay Bridge bike path fail

05/29/13 San Francisco Chronicle — Civil engineering professor Bob Bea comments on yet another problem with bolts on the new span of the San Francisco Bay Bridge, currently under construction: "This is not pretty. … If we are being challenged by straightforward, simple things, it raises serious questions about what we've done on complex situations."

Engineers see a path out of green card limbo

05/23/13 New York Times — In a video and story, foreign engineering graduate students at U.C. Berkeley reflect on how immigration reform could make it easier for highly skilled workers like them to stay in the United States.

How password strength meters can improve security

05/20/13 Information Week — Password strength meters aren't just window dressing, but can result in stronger passwords when users are forced to change "important" accounts, according to a new study by UC Berkeley researcher Serge Egelman and colleagues at the University of British Columbia and Microsoft Research.

Corrosion plagues new Bay Bridge span

05/20/13 Sacramento Bee — A comprehensive investigation by the Sacramento Bee of constructions problems on the new Bay Bridge quotes Berkeley materials science & engineering professor Thomas Devine as saying Caltrans used the wrong tests for corrosion, resulting in "essentially useless" findings. He called the agency's research "woefully inadequate" and "meaningless" for detecting "environmentally assisted cracking."

Molding the next generation of computer scientists

05/14/13 CNN Tech — Kevin Wang always had the teaching bug in him. Now the 2002 EECS alumnus and Microsoft developer is combining his passion and his profession through Technology Education and Literacy in Schools (TEALS), an initiative founded by Wang and supported by Microsoft that places high-tech professionals as part-time teachers in high schools.

Student entrepreneurship is humming at elite universities

05/14/13 Forbes — “I am young, have time and am willing to take the risk. We want to innovate and deliver awesome engineering products,” says mechanical engineering major Timothy Lee in a story examining the passion of student entrepreneurs and UC Berkeley's expanding efforts to nurture them.

Go Bears!

05/13/13 — As engineers we compete. New ideas, technologies and solutions come about only if we act as their champion. Sometimes the difference between an idea being realized or being left to wither in the planning phases can be a competitive spark that makes us want to improve things. As I take stock of the 2012–13 academic year, I am again impressed by the achievements of our students-and by their competitive nature.

Oxford-bound

05/13/13 — Graduating senior Daniel A. Price, a double major in bioengineering and electrical engineering and computer sciences with a minor in physics, was selected as one of this year's Rhodes Scholars. Next fall at Oxford University, Price will pursue research in medical diagnostic equipment. Here he tells us more about his studies, his research and future plans.

Plate piles keep levees intact

05/13/13 — In the basement of Davis Hall, Hamed Hamedifar (Ph.D'12 CEE) is rattling scale models of levees on a shake table, subjecting them to vibrations replicating the magnitude 6.9 El Centro earthquake of 1940. Hamedifar is designing a plate pile system, rectangular plates affixed to three-yard beams, to bolster the strength of levees in places like the California Delta.