Electrical engineering

Optical antenna enables LEDs to rival lasers

02/04/15 Berkeley Lab — A Berkeley Lab team, led by EECS professor Eli Yablonovitch, has used an external optical antenna to greatly enhance the spontaneous emission of light from a semiconductor nanorod. This advance opens the door to LEDs that can replace lasers for short-range optical communications.

Gordon and Betty Moore endow chair to honor UC Berkeley engineering professor Paul Gray

02/03/15 — Paul R. Gray, former executive vice chancellor and provost at UC Berkeley and former dean and professor emeritus in Berkeley's College of Engineering, has been honored with the naming of a distinguished faculty chair at Berkeley, endowed by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore and his wife, Betty.

Mainstreaming science in the movies

01/13/15 berkeleyByte — Energy engineering undergrad Alison Ong discusses how Hollywood has been giving STEM fields a boost lately - The Imitation Game, Interstellar, The Theory of Everything - and notes the tension between good science and good storytelling.

Sangiovanni-Vincentelli named ACM fellow

01/09/15 Association for Computing Machinery — EECS professor Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli has been named a 2014 fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery for his contributions to electronic design automation.

A hands-on demonstration of the newest Oculus Rift.

Maker hero: Alumnus Jack McCauley on Guitar Hero, Oculus and the future of making

12/19/14 Berkeley Innovators — Jack McCauley (EECS ’86), the inaugural speaker in the Berkeley Innovators Lecture Series, told a packed auditorium how his lifelong passion for tinkering brought him a path-breaking career in hardware engineering and design.

atomic structure of a ferroelectric material

Discovery advances ferroelectrics in quest for lower power transistors

12/17/14 CITRIS — Berkeley engineers describe the first direct observation of a long-hypothesized but elusive phenomenon called “negative capacitance” in ferroelectric material, which could open the door to a radical reduction in the power consumed by transistors and the devices containing them.

Paul Allen gives $5.7M to ‘cutting-edge’ artificial intelligence researchers

12/12/14 GeekWire — EECS professor Maneesh Agrawala, who is researching ways for machines to better "read" diagrams and other visualizations, is one of seven scientists who will share $5.7 million awarded this month by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation as part of the Allen Distinguished Investigator Program.

pulse oximeter sensor composed of all-organic optoelectronics

Organic electronics could lead to cheap, wearable medical sensors

12/10/14 — EECS associate professor Ana Arias is leading a team of researchers creating a pulse oximeter using all organic materials instead of silicon. The advance could lead to cheap, flexible sensors that could be used like a Band-Aid.

Palo Alto schoolchildren practice computer coding

Gearing up for the Hour of Code

12/09/14 NBC Bay Area — To mark CS Education Week, Jessica Aguirre interviews EECS professor Dan Garcia about the Hour of Code. At Berkeley, CS Education Day on December 9 brings 500 local high school students to campus for a full day of activities related to computer science.

Design Note: Björn Hartmann on design, teamwork and expertise

12/08/14 berkeleyByte — In an interview with the student-run berkeleyByte design blog, Björn Hartmann of EECS and the Jacobs Institute discusses what led him to human-computer interaction, where he thinks design education is heading, and the importance of interdisciplinarity.

Smithsonian creates first-ever 3-D presidential portrait

12/04/14 Smithsonian Institution — EECS alumnus Paul Debevec and a team of 3-D imaging specialists led by the Smithsonian Institution created the first 3-D presidential portrait for Barack Obama, assembling a high-speed system with eight cameras and 50 LED lights at the White House to capture the president's facial features in detail.

Students at Emerson Elementary School with tutors from the LEARNS Program

Cal students make crowd-funding site for Berkeley schools

12/02/14 Berkeleyside — A crowdfunding website, build by Berkeley Engineering computer science students from the Blueprint club, is helping teachers in the Berkeley public schools raise money for everything from books to robotics kits.

Emmunify team member Jessica Watterson in New Delhi with an outreach worker to conduct a usability test.

Project uses tech to help boost vaccination rates in India

12/02/14 — UC Berkeley students from public health and EECS are creating a new tool to store patient vaccination records on a portable chip, which could soon make it far easier for children in developing nations to get life-saving vaccines.

A screen fix for vision-impaired among top 10 world-changing ideas of 2014

11/25/14 Scientific American — Technology to pre-correct displays on computer screens for vision-impaired users, developed by professor Brian Barsky in collaboration with MIT colleagues, has been named one of the top 10 “world-changing ideas” of 2014 by Scientific American magazine.

Professors honored for excellence in semiconductor technology and design research

11/13/14 Semiconductor Industry Association — Tsu-Jae King Liu, EECS chair and TSMC Distinguished Professor in Microelectronics, and engineering professor Kenneth O of UT Dallas have received University Research Awards from the Semiconductor Industry Association in recognition of their outstanding contributions to semiconductor research.