News

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.

PiE wins big

05/13/13 — Pioneers in Engineering (PiE) is a Berkeley student group that runs a mentorship program to engage teenagers in science and technology. April was a busy month for PiE. They won $25,000 in a national competition sponsored by Ford and Zipcar. Then, only days after an event held on campus to celebrate that big win, PiE held a competition of their own-they hosted a robotics challenge game for two dozen high school teams.

Breaking news: engineers will get jobs

05/02/13 Daily Californian — Reporting on the Wall Street Journal's annual “Highest-Paid College Majors” list, the Daily Clog notes that seven out of the 10 majors listed were off-shoots of engineering, which is good news for Cal students.

Mind the gap

05/01/13 — ITS graduate student Dan Howard re-envisioned the Berkeley campus in the style of the iconic London Underground map.

Cutting the ribbon at the re-dedication of the Bechtel Engineering Center

Dean’s word: Bechtel made better

05/01/13 — Celebrating the re-dedication of Bechtel Engineering Center.

Engineering benchmarks for cap-and-trade

05/01/13 — The Mechanical Engineering Laboratory for Manufacturing and Sustainability is helping the California Air Resources Board to develop methodologies for determining CO2 allocations for companies to help reduce the state's overall CO2 emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.

Comments

05/01/13 — Comments by readers on recent issues.