Building an organ in the marsh
12/16/15 — A Louisiana native and environmental engineering Ph.D. student, Madeline Foster-Martinez is studying the fluid dynamics of a local marsh to better understand tidal wetland restoration.
News
QuakeCAFE: A mobile wake-up call for Californians
12/16/15 CITRIS — No one likes to be reminded that there's a 99.7% chance that California will experience a major earthquake in the next 30 years. But a little preparedness can go a long way, and a new mobile-friendly website called QuakeCAFE can help.
Making furniture from fungi
12/16/15 Scientific American — For three years, doctoral mechanical engineering student Sonia Travaglini has been studying inventor Phil Ross's mushroom composite as a sustainable alternative to wood, plastic and other materials.
Three scientists elected to National Academy of Inventors
12/15/15 — The National Academy of Inventors has elected three UC Berkeley faculty members to its ranks in honor of their innovation and creativity leading to patented inventions that have made a tangible impact on society. The new members include Chenming Hu, an EECS professor in the graduate school, and Paul Wright, the A. Martin Berlin Chair in Mechanical Engineering.
The artificial materials that came in from the cold
12/15/15 Berkeley Lab — Researchers led by Robert Ritchie, professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and engineering, have developed a freeze-casting technique that enables them to design and create strong, tough and lightweight materials comparable to bones, teeth, shells and wood.
Tech titans create nonprofit to develop artificial intelligence
12/15/15 Bloomberg Business — A group of prominent Silicon Valley entrepreneurs has established a nonprofit organization to develop "digital intelligence" that will benefit humanity. “This collection of people is stunning,” said EECS professor and company adviser Pieter Abbeel, who said he expects the company's research and ideas to be “impressive and surprising.”
Polaroids for the smartphone set, with a video twist
12/09/15 — Prynt, a San Francisco-based startup founded by two graduates of a Berkeley Engineering entrepreneurship program, is bringing instant print photography to smartphones.
Roundtable tackles issues facing women in tech
12/07/15 — The lack of women in technology-related positions might seem like an overwhelming challenge. But that didn't stop a group of motivated women engineers, data scientists and senior tech managers from taking steps to tackle the problem in a summit held at Berkeley earlier this fall.
Evolution of the (forced) smile
12/04/15 MIT Technology Review — Mining a vast database of high-school yearbook photos, EECS Ph.D. candidate Shiry Ginosar and her team used a machine-vision algorithm to reveal the change in hairstyles, clothing and even smiles over the past century.
Cambridge launches new center to study AI and the future of intelligence
12/04/15 Phys.org — The University of Cambridge is establishing a new interdisciplinary research center to address technical, practical and philosophical questions related to artificial intelligence, thanks to a landmark grant of £10 million from the Leverhulme Trust. EECS professor Stuart Russell, a leading AI researcher at Berkeley Engineering, will collaborate on the project.
Dan Fletcher named to Foreign Policy’s 2015 Global Thinkers list
12/03/15 Foreign Policy — Bioengineering professor Daniel Fletcher has been named a top innovator of 2015 by Foreign Policy magazine for his development of the CellScope Loa, a 3D-printed plastic base that turns a cell phone into a disease-finding video microscope.
Berkeley, lab and Tsinghua partner on energy and climate
12/02/15 — The Berkeley Energy & Climate Institute, led by mechanical engineering professor Paul Wright, is partnering with Berkeley Lab and Tsinghua University to form the Berkeley Tsinghua Joint Research Center on Energy and Climate Change, which aims to develop scientifically based clean energy solutions.
AMP Lab: Solving big data’s biggest problems
12/02/15 Berkeley Research — The AMP Lab, launched in 2011 by Michael Franklin and colleagues in computer science, has already had an outsized impact on industry, from battling cancer to getting an answer from Siri.
3D printed assistive technology gets boost from UC Berkeley designathon
12/01/15 3Dprint.com — Several Berkeley engineering and design organizations held a 3D Printing Designathon for assistive technology at Sutardja Dai Hall on Nov. 14-15 commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
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.