New chameleon-like material
03/12/15 — Berkeley engineers led by EECS professor Connie Chang-Hasnain have created an ultra-thin film that can shift colors as easily as a chameleon's skin when pulled or twisted.
Electrical engineering
Wozniak, Matsuoka honored with Cal Alumni awards
03/03/15 Cal Alumni Association — Silicon Valley icon and philanthropist Steve Wozniak (B.S.'86 EECS), co-founder of Apple Computer, has been named the 2015 Alumnus of the Year by the Cal Alumni Association . Robotics pioneer and fellow EECS alum Yoky Matsuoka (B.S.'93), an executive at Google, Nest and Twitter, received an Excellence in Achievement Award.
Bringing the invisible to light
02/27/15 Berkeley Research — EECS professor Laura Waller is working on computational imaging methods for quantitative phase microscopy, which can be applied in a variety of scientific and industrial settings. Her work is supported by the Bakar Fellows Program for young faculty whose work holds commercial promise.
Forget the Singularity, let’s talk Multiplicity
02/26/15 Robohub — EECS and new media professor Ken Goldberg recaps his trip to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he talked about artificial intelligence and took part in a debate on "Will Machines Make Better Decisions Than Humans?"
Wearable circuits could extend MRI’s reach
02/13/15 Berkeley Research — EECS associate professor Ana Claudia Arias is creating new wearable electronics based on printed circuits, to allow easier and better MRI imaging of sick infants, among others.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.