Engineering innovators join Bakar ranks
07/27/18 — Berkeley Engineering faculty members Steven Conolly, Ming Wu, Ting Xu and David Schaffer are among the new members of the Bakar Fellows Program.
Electrical engineering
Remembering Bill Baker, Berkeley Lab’s first electrical engineer
07/24/18 Berkeley Lab — Berkeley Engineering alumnus William R. “Bill” Baker, who died May 4 at age 103, was a lifelong engineer with an unrelenting mind, boundless ingenuity and dozens of patents to his credit. He was the first electrical engineer hired by Ernest O. Lawrence for what would eventually become Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Three Berkeley engineers named as top young innovators
06/29/18 — An EECS professor, graduate student and recent alumnus have been named to MIT Technology Review's 2018 list of “35 Innovators Under 35.”
Space mapping
06/02/18 — LeoLabs' radar technology tracks space debris and determines if it is hazardous to satellites or other spacecraft.
Then & now
06/02/18 — Over the past 150 years, Berkeley Engineering has created a legacy of innovation and public service.
‘Invisible’ displays
06/02/18 — A new development in LED technology may lead to “invisible” or vanishing displays.
Robot’s play
06/02/18 — Robots can manipulate objects they have never encountered before by building on previous play and observations.
Those four-wheeled robots on campus, explained
05/31/18 — The presence of talented EECS student engineers, along with plenty of hungry students and a gourmet local food scene, goes a long way to explain the decision by Felipe Chavez to launch his robot-powered meal delivery startup Kiwi in Berkeley.
A.M. Turing Award lecture to be livestreamed
05/29/18 HPC Wire — EECS professor emeritus David A. Patterson and former Stanford president John L. Hennessy, who received the 2017 ACM A.M. Turing Award for pioneering a systematic, quantitative approach to the design and evaluation of computer architectures, will jointly present the Turing Award Lecture on June 4 at the International Symposium of Computer Architecture in Los Angeles. The Turing Award lecture is open to the public and will be livestreamed.
Microsoft acquires Berkeley AI company to humanize its bots
05/21/18 The Verge — AI start-up Semantic Machines, co-founded and co-led by EECS professor Dan Klein, is being acquired by Microsoft, which hopes to make its Cortana digital assistant and other bots sound more naturally human by establishing "a conversational AI center of excellence in Berkeley."
Alexa and Siri can hear this hidden command. You can’t
05/10/18 New York Times — EECS Ph.D. candidate Nicholas Carlini and other Berkeley cybersecurity researchers have been embedding commands into music and spoken text that human listeners can't hear but smart devices can. Carlini hopes to secure AI systems against attacks that he assumes "malicious people" are already working on.
How to interact with robots
05/04/18 Wired — EECS professor Anca Dragan discusses one of the big challenges in her field of human-robot interaction: getting robots to anticipate human behavior. “It's not enough to know what people are currently doing. They need to know what's going to happen in the future.”
Vazirani elected to National Academy of Sciences
05/01/18 — Umesh Vazirani, the Roger A. Strauch Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, is one of five Berkeley faculty members newly named to the National Academy of Sciences.
Berkeley engineers among new faculty elected to AAAS
04/18/18 — Berkeley Engineering faculty members Eric Brewer and James Demmel are among nine UC Berkeley researchers elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a society founded in 1780 to honor exceptional scholars, scientists, artists and innovators from around the world.
Tiny nerve stimulator gains sophistication
04/10/18 — Berkeley engineers, led by EECS professors Rikky Muller and Michel Maharbiz, have taken implanted neural dust sensors forward by building the smallest, most efficient wireless nerve stimulator ever.
Atomically thin LED opens possibility for ‘invisible’ displays
03/26/18 — Berkeley engineers have built a bright-light emitting device that is just three atoms thick and fully transparent when turned off. The device opens the door to wall or window displays that could disappear when not in use, or to futuristic applications such as light-emitting tattoos.
Chirp Microsystems acquired
03/23/18 — Chirp Microsystems, a startup enabled with technology developed at UC Davis and UC Berkeley, has been acquired by Japanese electronics giant TDK Corporation. Based in Berkeley, Chirp Microsystems makes tiny, ultra-low power sensors that function like sonar or echolocation. The micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) technology enables extremely precise sensing and has applications in drones, robots, vehicles, smart home products, augmented reality and virtual reality systems.
Patterson wins Turing Award
03/21/18 — Berkeley computing pioneer David Patterson has won the A.M. Turing Award, considered the Nobel prize of computing, for his work on reduced instruction set computer microprocessors. The award, announced Wednesday by the Association for Computing Machinery, comes with a $1 million prize, which Patterson will share with co-winner John Hennessy.
Grad program rankings edge still higher
03/19/18 — In the latest U.S. News & World Report rankings of graduate programs, Berkeley Engineering and its departments held steady or moved higher in all categories, including electrical engineering joining CEE as the top-ranked program in the nation.
Q&A with Barbara Simons
03/16/18 — Barbara Simons, a founding member of Women in Computer Science and Engineering (which is celebrating its 40th anniversary), has been sounding the alarm about the potential pitfalls of internet and electronic voting for more than a decade.