News

Award winners Mike Alvarez Cohen, Amy Herr and Scott Shenker

Herr, Shenker win Berkeley Visionary awards

09/11/17 SF Business Times — Bioengineering professor Amy Herr and EECS professor Scott Shenker are inaugural winners of the Berkeley Visionary Awards, an honor created by the Berkeley Chamber of Commerce to recognize innovative leaders in the city whose work is creating an economic impact.

Remembering Lotfi Zadeh

09/08/17 — Lotfi Zadeh - professor emeritus, world-renowned computer scientist and leader of the college community - died on September 6, 2017 at the age of 96.

Pieter Abbeel and Michael Jordan join IEOR

08/24/17 — Berkeley Engineering professors Pieter Abbeel and Michael Jordan, both experts in machine learning, have been appointed as joint faculty in IEOR in addition to their primary appointments in EECS (and Statistics for Jordan).

Boot camp participants at California Memorial Stadium.

Fresh ideas for nuclear power

08/24/17 — Two dozen students from all over the world gathered at Berkeley for two weeks over the summer to discuss, plan and help start building a new nuclear energy sector. The students, along with professional mentors and speakers, were part of the 2017 Nuclear Innovation Boot Camp.

Students in the first M.E.T. class on the steps of Sutardja Dai Hall

Inaugural M.E.T. class prepares to study business and engineering

08/23/17 Haas News — The founding class of 40 students in the Management, Engineering, & Technology program arrived at Berkeley this week ready to learn from each other and from top faculty at both Berkeley Engineering and the Haas School of Business.

Armen Chouldjian demonstrates the web app he and Anuj Shah developed for BART

For BART engineering interns, a focus on safety, reliability and innovation

08/23/17 Mass Transit — When EECS senior Armen Chouldjian returns to UC Berkeley in the fall, he'll ride BART knowing his summer internship helped increase safety and reliability for all the transit system's riders.

Glue inspired by mussels could save lives

08/23/17 Food & Wine — Mussels may do a lot more for us than just offering a delicious vehicle for butter and garlic. UC Berkeley scientists are now studying the way mussels stick to slippery rocks to make prenatal surgery a much safer option.

UC Berkeley students Joshua Nixon and Kimberlie Le serving their plant-based fish product to Christie Legally, senior scientist at the Good Food Institute

New alt.meat lab aims to win over meat lovers

08/23/17 — The Sutardja Center is launching a new Alternative Meats Lab to give students a leg up on a trillion-dollar market opportunity: transforming the meat industry. The lab at Berkeley will use the latest technology tools and techniques to engineer plant-based meat alternatives.

Defending the Internet from spear fishing

08/23/17 — At the USENIX Security Conference in Vancouver this month, a team of computer science researchers from Berkeley Engineering won the 2017 Internet Defense Prize - and a $100,000 award - for their new approach to detecting credential spear phishing attacks.

Christopher Ategeka: Health care access for all

08/22/17 PBS NewsHour — In a Brief but Spectacular video on PBS, Berkeley Engineer and entrepreneur Christopher Ategeka (B.S.'11, M.S.'12 ME) tells how he is using his influence to recruit health professionals to work in underserved parts of Africa.

Introducing the Hallac Scholars

08/21/17 — Berkeley Engineering sophomores Alex Montanez and Miriam Almaraz are part of the inaugural class of Hallac Scholars - a program sponsored by the global asset management firm BlackRock that's a combined scholarship, mentorship and internship all rolled into one. The goal of the new program is to teach engineers how to develop innovative tech for delivering financial services.

Members of the entrepreneurship and innovation partner groups that make up BEGIN

Announcing BEGIN: Berkeley’s Gateway to Innovation

08/18/17 — Berkeley is launching BEGIN, the Berkeley Gateway to Innovation, as a virtual hub for innovation on campus. The site will connect entrepreneurs with Berkeley's robust network of innovation courses, incubators, accelerators, funding and social networks.

Victorious CalSol team members surround their car, Zephyr, at the track in Austin, Texas.

CalSol finishes 1st at Formula Sun Grand Prix

08/17/17 Daily Californian — The CalSol student team has won the Formula Sun Grand Prix, an annual solar vehicle track race for college teams from around the nation. CalSol's four-year-old Zephyr took first place in the July race in Austin, TX, completing 228 laps with zero penalties.

Launching an autonomous glider guided by artificial intelligence in the Nevada desert

Can artificial intelligence fly a plane?

08/17/17 New York Times — IEOR professor and roboticist Ken Goldberg discusses the problems of robots and uncertainty: getting machines to mimic the way humans intuitively plan for their next action and deal with events they've never before experienced.

David Sedlak by the reflecting pool in front of Hearst Memorial Mining Building

Reduce and reuse: Surprising insights on making cities more water resilient

08/17/17 The Water Blog — In a Q&A, civil and environmental engineering professor David Sedlak, co-director of the Berkeley Water Center, discusses the World Bank's Water Scarce Cities Initiative, which aims to develop integrated and innovative water management solutions.

Ensuring that robots and humans work and play well together

08/17/17 MIT Tech Review — EECS assistant professor Anca Dragan is working to distill complicated or vague human behavior into simple mathematical models that robots can understand. Her visionary work has landed her a spot on MIT Tech Review's 35 Innovators Under 35 list.

Eko Devices founders Tyler Crouch, Jason Bellet and Connor Landgraf

Heart and asthma monitors? There’s an app for that

08/10/17 New York Times — Two startup companies spun out of bioengineering's senior capstone design program are taking the world of remote health monitoring by storm. Monitoring devices by Eko Devices and Knox Medical Diagnostics are changing the landscape of medicine, the New York Times reports.

Introducing the Henry and Joyce Miedema Chair in CEE

07/31/17 — Civil and environmental engineering professor Mark Stacey has been appointed to the newly created Henry and Joyce Miedema Chair in Civil and Environmental Engineering. Alumnus Henry Jay Miedema (CE BS '61, MS '63) and Joyce Miedema created the award to support faculty teaching about California water issues.

Down the Lawson adit

07/27/17 — Hidden on the north side of campus are 900 feet of UC Berkeley's mining history. Berkeley Engineering's own Scott Shackleton, assistant dean, shares the fascinating history of the Lawson mine shaft, which is currently used for earthquake monitoring.

Salto-1P, the amazing jumping robot

07/18/17 IEEE Spectrum — Thanks to some mechanical fine-tuning and the clever addition of a pair of thrusters, Salto-1P, the tiny jumping robot from EECS professor Ronald Fearing's Biomimetic Millisystems Lab, is leaping longer, faster and higher than ever. Prepare to be amazed.