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Fisker EMotion car

Radical new battery technology for a $130,000 electric sedan

01/12/18 LA Times — Solid-state automotive batteries, like those being designed for Fisker Inc.'s all-electric EMotion supercar, will eventually exist, says materials science and engineering professor Gerbrand Ceder, but “it's not going to happen as fast as people think.”
High-speed rail tunnel construction site

Trump infrastructure plan’s tunneling claims raise questions

01/05/18 Newsweek — The Trump administration contends that underground tunnels to carry high-speed rail lines can be built without a dime of federal funding. But critics, including civil and environmental engineering professor C. William Ibbs, head of Berkeley's Construction Management program, suggest there's nothing easy about that kind of tunneling, and it will surely require government oversight.
Presentating equations on a whiteboard at NIPS conference

All the buzz at AI’s big shindig

12/20/17 Economist — At the annual Neural Information Processing Systems conference this month, thousands of researchers flocked to Long Beach to devour algorithms, keynotes by famous speakers and all things artificial intelligence, prompting EECS associate professor Ben Recht to lament the event's growing corporatism.
Diagram of an adeno-associated virus, and cross-section photo of mouse spinal cord tissue showing cells in which the CRISPR-Cas9 gene has been expressed

First step toward CRISPR cure of Lou Gehrig’s disease

12/20/17 — Berkeley scientists led by Davis Shaffer, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and bioengineering, have for the first time used CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing to disable a defective gene that causes amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in mice, extending their lifespan by 25 percent.
Robert Full showing students the adhesive pads of a gecko

New course to tap Berkeley’s diversity and maker spirit

12/20/17 — Thanks to a $1 million grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Robert Full, professor of integrative biology and EECS, can realize a dream to show students how hacking the secrets of biology can help them design their future and give back to their communities.
Warren Hoburg with the Jungle Hawk Owl drone

Drone pioneer Warren Hoburg named Innovator of the Year

12/20/17 R&D — Aerospace engineer and astronaut candidate Warren "Woody" Hoburg (M.S.'11, Ph.D.'13 EECS) has been named Innovator of the Year by R&D Magazine for his pioneering work creating the Jungle Hawk Owl extended-flight drone.
Illustration of autonomous vehicle situation on city street

Are we going too fast on driverless cars?

12/15/17 Science — Automakers, high-tech companies and politicians are solidly behind self-driving cars and trucks as a sure path to a better, more mobile society. But research on the social, economic and environmental effects of autonomous vehicles is sparse - something Berkeley transportation engineers are seeking to remedy.
Harvey Weinstein

Fight sexual harassment in tech — with technology

12/14/17 Mercury News — In a commentary piece, CITRIS post-doc Brandie Nonnecke reports on two novel ways that women-led Bay Area startups are using technology to address gender-based discrimination and harassment in the tech sector.

A new metacanvas for metamaterials

12/13/17 — Junqiao Wu and Jie Yao, professors of materials science and members of Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division, asked themselves how it might be possible to create metamaterial devices that could be erased and written over again - like an Etch A Sketch drawing toy - to quickly yield a quite different device.
Tsu-Jae King Liu, Eli Yablonovitch

Liu, Yablonovitch honored as inventors

12/12/17 — EECS professors Tsu-Jae King Liu and Eli Yablonovitch are among three newly named Berkeley fellows of the National Academy of Inventors, an organization that champions the societal benefits of university research.
FLIPalliance: Dragan, Forbes, Fox, Joseph, Stephens-Martinez, Garcia, and Taylor

Berkeley’s FLIPalliance for diversity

12/09/17 — As part of its effort to attract talented women and minority graduate computer science applicants, Berkeley Engineering has joined the NSF-funded FLIP Alliance (Diversifying Future Leadership In the Professoriate).
Steven Conolly in his lab with two magnetic particle imaging prototypes. 

Closing in on cancer

12/06/17 — Bioengineering and EECS professor Steven Conolly is building a new kind of medical diagnostic technology called magnetic particle imaging (MPI).
The robot Vestri plays with objects to learn how to complete a task.

New robots can see into the future

12/06/17 — Berkeley researchers, led by EECS assistant professor Sergey Levine, have developed a learning technology that enables robots to imagine the future of their actions so they can figure out how to manipulate objects they have never encountered before.
Winning students Eric Munsing, Allen Tang, Soeren Kuenzel and Jake Soloff with their prize check

Grad students win $100,000 in data science contest

12/04/17 — A team of UC Berkeley graduate students with serious data science and analysis skills, including EECS MS student Allen Tang and CEE Ph.D. candidate Eric Munsing beat teams from the likes of Harvard, MIT and Oxford to win the $100,000 top prize in an international data science competition staged by the hedge fund Citadel.