News

Can cellphones help cities be more energy efficient?

09/23/19 — Berkeley Engineering, Berkeley Lab and MIT researchers have created a new tool that uses cellphone data to estimate building occupancy rates in urban areas, with the aim of optimizing energy use at a citywide scale - and helping to mitigate climate change.

Warning! AI is heading for a cliff

09/19/19 California Magazine — Electrical engineering and computer sciences professor Stuart Russell proposes a solution to AI's fundamental "design error."

U.S. Military researchers work to fix easily fooled AI

09/19/19 NPR — NPR's All Things Considered talked to EECS professor Dawn Song about her AI work with traffic signs to explain how U.S. Military researchers are working to combat what they call "adversarial artificial intelligence." That's when someone hacks into an AI system to transmit the wrong information.

A single dose for good measure

09/13/19 Berkeley Lab — Nuclear engineering professor Rebecca Abergel and her colleagues at Berkeley Lab have developed a new pill to treat radiation poisoning. The pill could also double as an anti-gadolinium-toxicity pill for MRI patients injected with a commonly-used contrast dye.

Students make neutrons dance beneath campus

09/11/19 — In an underground vault enclosed by six-foot-thick concrete walls, nuclear engineering students are making neutrons dance to a new tune: one better suited to producing isotopes for geological dating, forensics, diagnostics and medical treatment.

Berkeley Engineering is #3 in U.S. News rankings

09/09/19 U.S. News & World Report — Berkeley Engineering's undergraduate program was again ranked third overall and the top public engineering school by U.S. News & World Report. Eight individual engineering programs were ranked among the top 5 in their respective fields, and all were in the top 10.

Sally Floyd, who helped things run smoothly online, dies at 69

09/05/19 New York Times — Sally Floyd (Ph.D '89, EECS) was one of the inventors of Random Early Detection, which continues to play a vital role in the stability of the internet. She passed away on August 25.

New Bakar Fellows are already having an impact

09/05/19 — Three Berkeley Engineering professors have been named 2019–20 Bakar Fellows: Niren Murthy (BioE), Raluca Ada Popa (EECS) and Kenichi Soga (CEE).

Autonomous vehicles: The answer to our traffic woes

08/28/19 Wired — Berkeley Engineering's Alexandre Bayen and Liao-Cho are studying the impact that autonomous vehicles can have on traffic flow. And, their findings suggest that self-driving cars can help alleviate traffic.

Fletcher Lab’s mobile phone-based microscope receives Gates Foundation support

08/27/19 — The Gates Foundation awarded a grant to Berkeley in July 2019 to support the scaled-up production of the LoaScope, a mobile phone-based microscope developed by bioengineering professor Daniel Fletcher and researchers in his bioengineering laboratory.

Waze hijacked L.A. in the name of convenience. Can anyone put the genie back in the bottle?

08/21/19 Los Angeles Magazine — Traffic apps, like Waze, turned L.A. neighborhoods into "shortcuts." Los Angeles Magazine recently spoke to UC Berkeley's Alex Bayen and Susan Shaeen about how we got here and whether this trend can be reversed.

Wearable sensors detect what’s in your sweat

08/16/19 — A team of Berkeley engineers is developing wearable skin sensors that can detect what's in sweat, potentially supplanting invasive procedures like blood draws and providing real-time updates on health conditions.

Meet Berkeley’s new data science leader

08/14/19 — Microsoft's Jennifer Tour Chayes will become the university's new associate provost for the Division of Data Science and Information and dean of the School of Information.

Engineering research entices community college students to pursue STEM careers

08/12/19 — A program called Transfer-to-Excellence Research Experiences for Undergraduates offers students from California community colleges the opportunity to work alongside Berkeley researchers.

NSF awards $5M to increase public cloud access to research

08/09/19 — The National Science Foundation has awarded $5 million to researchers from UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, and the University of Washington to develop CloudBank, a suite of managed services to remove barriers to public cloud access for data science and computer science research and education.

Jerome R. Singer, MRI pioneer, dies at 97

08/06/19 — Jerome R. Singer, professor emeritus and a pioneer in the field of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), passed away in July. Singer taught and conducted research in the electrical engineering and computer sciences and the biophysics departments at Berkeley for 25 years.