News

Schematic of a laser beam energizing a monolayer semiconductor

Coming to a monitor near you: a defect-free, molecule-thick film

11/30/15 — A team of research engineers at UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab, led by EECS professor Ali Javey, has discovered a simple way to fix defects in atomically thin monolayer semiconductors using an organic superacid, opening the door to transparent LED displays, nanoscale transistors and more.

Russell wins technology policy award for AI work

11/30/15 World Technology Network — EECS professor Stuart Russell, a leading thinker in the field of artificial intelligence, has won the 2015 World Technology Award in the area of Policy. Other finalists for the award included Pope Francis and economist and author Thomas Piketty.

Google picks Diane Greene to expand its cloud business

11/23/15 NY Times — Google, playing catch-up in the booming cloud computing market, has named VMware co-founder Diane Greene (M.S.'88 EECS), a respected Silicon Valley entrepreneur and technologist, to head its cloud business that caters to companies.

James Demmel among 3 new AAAS fellows

11/23/15 — Three UC Berkeley faculty members are among 347 new fellows named to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, including James Demmel, professor of mathematics and of computer sciences, who was cited for his distinguished contributions to the theory and practice of numerical linear algebra.

Seeking data wisdom

11/23/15 Berkeley Research — Science and engineering have a way of turning what seems like fantasy into reality - like "mind reading," or genetic organ formation, two promising research areas that rely on a powerful interlocking of science, computation and statistics that EECS and statistics professor Bin Yu calls "data wisdom."

Berkeley Engineering team wins $10,000 for cloud-storage innovation

11/23/15 Daily Californian — The EECS graduate student duo of Tae Joon Seok and Sangyoon Han has come away with $10,000 after winning third place in a national competition among collegiate inventors for their cloud-technology innovation, called the Silicon Waveguide Array Photonic Switch.

The superior stethoscope

11/20/15 Time — The Eko Core smart stethoscope, developed by CEO Connor Landgraf (B.S'13, M.Eng'14 BioE) and his team at Eko Devices, has been named one of the 25 best inventions of 2015 by Time magazine.

Engineering student Akol Kuan high-fives sixth-graders at Beacon Day School

Of war, water and working to fix South Sudan

11/18/15 — Civil engineering undergrad Akol Kuan brought tales of his native South Sudan to Oakland's Beacon Day School, where sixth graders had just finished reading A Long Walk to Water, a novel that follows the hardships and heartbreaks of two Sudanese 11-year-olds.

Berkeley Lab dedicates new computing center to late EECS professor

11/17/15 — Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has opened a new building dedicated to energy supercomputing and networking, and named it after the late Shyh Wang, an EECS professor and a pioneer in semiconductor lasers.

InDinero CEO Jessica Mah delivers Newton lecture

11/17/15 — At the October 27 Newton lecture, alumnus and InDinero co-founder Jessica Mah (B.S'10 EECS) talked about the experience of launching a multi-million-dollar business.

Science and the public good

11/17/15 — To be equitable and sustainable, international development goals need to incorporate innovations in science and technology and harness the data revolution.

Instant eSports

11/17/15 — Instant eSports, recently founded by three former EECS students, is a new type of media company for a new type of sports fan.

Celebrating World Toilet Day, reinventing sanitation

11/17/15 — United Nations World Toilet Day on Nov. 19 is environmental engineering doctoral student William Tarpeh's main chance - a time to proselytize about all things sanitation. For mechanical engineering grad student Emily Woods, it's a boost for Sanivation, the company she co-founded to convert human feces into charcoal for a poor community in Kenya.

Discarded circuit boards ready for processing

Filtering the e-waste stream

11/16/15 — Alumnus Glen Langstaff (B.S'77 ME/NE) wants to use new technology to make disposing of old technology cheaper and more efficient. Here's how:

Berkeley drone researchers win Microsoft Hololens research grant

11/13/15 CITRIS — Three faculty members from the UC Berkeley Robotics and Intelligent Machines Lab have won one of five academic research grants from Microsoft Research. The research by Allen Y. Yang, Claire Tomlin and Dean Shankar Sastry will be supported by a team of EECS undergraduates from the Virtual Reality @ Berkeley Club.

The problem with ‘help’ in global development

11/10/15 SSIR — To move beyond good intentions, the development paradigm must shift toward collaboration, community involvement, and empowerment, writes mechanical engineering Ph.D. candidate Julia Kramer in a commentary for the Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Darwin performs actions after virtual and real-world learning.

Robot toddler learns to stand by ‘imagining’ how to do it

11/10/15 MIT Technology Review — Instead of being programmed, Darwin, a robot in the lab of EECS associate professor Pieter Abbeel, uses brain-inspired algorithms to “imagine” doing tasks before trying them in the real world.

Roberto Horowitz named mechanical engineering chair

11/09/15 — Roberto Horowitz, the James Fife Endowed Chair Professor of Mechanical Engineering, has been named chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the College of Engineering.

Still no flying cars? The future of transit promises something even better

11/06/15 The Guardian — EECS professor Alexandre Bayen, director of the Institute for Transportation Studies, joins other transportation experts in discussing navigation and booking apps, driverless cars and automated buses, and other ways that technology promises to revolutionize the transportation industry.

blueEnergy project in Bluefields, Nicaragua

blueEnergy’s water and sanitation technology for Nicaragua

11/06/15 Blum Center — NGOs like blueEnergy, founded by Berkeley graduate Mathias Craig (B.S'01 CEE), are helping to provide residents of resource-rich but infrastructure-poor Nicaragua with access to clean water and improved sanitation.