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Cal football to be played on Kabam Field

12/09/13 San Francisco Chronicle — Kabam, a San Francisco-based mobile-gaming company, has secured naming rights for the playing field at Memorial Stadium. Three of Kabam's founders, including Michael Li, B.S. '01 EECS, are Berkeley graduates, as are 10 percent of the company's 700 employees worldwide.

David Culler to receive the Okawa Prize, 2013

12/05/13 CITRIS — EECS Department Chair and Director of the CITRIS Energy Initiative David Culler has been selected as a recipient of the 2013 Okawa Prize, which is awarded annually by the Okawa Foundation for Information and Telecommunications.

Educating a maker: The Berkeley perspective

11/27/13 Forbes — Students are busy in the CITRIS Invention Lab, on the bottom floor of Sutardja Dai Hall. The lab, which is co-directed by Bjoern Hartmann and Eric Paulos, both EECS professors, houses new rapid prototyping equipment, such as 3D printers and laser cutters. Hartmann teaches an interactive device design class, while Paulos teaches a class called Critical Making. Both classes emphasize design thinking and hands-on learning.

Work out to charge up

11/22/13 — In early November, a retrofitted elliptical machine was installed in the university's Recreational Sports Facility. The specially outfitted machine charges users' cell phones while they work out. Watch a video of the Human-powered Gym in action.

George Leitmann receives French Legion of Honor

11/19/13 — George Leitmann, professor of the Graduate School and professor emeritus of Engineering Science, has been awarded Knight of the Legion of Honor, France's highest tribute recognizing military and civil service on behalf of the French nation.

Helping dissenters evade foreign eavesdropping

11/05/13 San Francisco Chronicle — Yahel Ben-David, a computer science doctoral student, has been working with other Berkeley Engineering researchers to create an Android application that will allow activists and citizens to communicate anonymously even when oppressive governments try to shut down communications channels.
Ali Javey

Q+A with Ali Javey

11/01/13 — EECS professor Ali Javey has been widely covered in the science press for breakthroughs ranging from a new, low-cost method for manufacturing high efficiency photovoltaics to improved ‘e-skin'

Cracked encryption? Back doors? Cellphone snooping may be easier than ever

10/31/13 NBC News — Computer science professor Vern Paxson weighs in on the National Security Agency's interception of wireless communications, noting that even modern encryption may have flaws if done incorrectly. He also worries about allegations that the NSA is vacuuming up information at a heretofore unimagined scale.

The talk that wasn’t

09/27/13 Scientific American — A story from the Heidelberg Laureate Forum about EECS professor emeritus Manuel Blum -- a scientist, a teacher, a human, and "a person with a genuine curiosity about everything."

March of the ‘zombie vortices’

09/11/13 — A team led by Philip Marcus, a mechanical engineering professor and computational physicist, shows how variations in gas density lead to instability, which then generates the whirlpool-like vortices needed for stars to form. According to the researchers' models, the change in density is what triggers the violent birth of a new star, upending an otherwise stable dead zone of gas-or what Marcus calls ‘zombie vortices'

Berkeley’s computer science major places first in new ranking

09/06/13 Daily Californian — UC Berkeley won the top spot for computer science majors' return on investment in a new ranking compiled by Affordable Colleges Online, surpassing second-place Stanford in the comparison pitting lifetime earnings against educational costs.

8 Berkeley Engineers among 2014 Siebel Scholars

09/06/13 Siebel Foundation — The Siebel Scholars Foundation has named 85 talented graduate students to its Siebel Scholars class of 2014, including five bioengineering students and three computer science students from UC Berkeley.

New technique analyzes shadows to spot photo fakes

08/15/13 Inside Science — A new algorithm, developed by Berkeley computer science professor James O'Brien and colleagues at Dartmouth, can spot fake photos by looking for inconsistent shadows that are not always obvious to the naked eye.

Berkeley and Stanford launch nanofabrication partnership with TSI Semiconductors

08/15/13 — The College of Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley announced that its Marvell Nanofabrication Laboratory, along with Stanford University's Nanofabrication Facility, has initiated a virtual technology transfer exercise with TSI Semiconductors, LLC, a specialty foundry offering flexible technology development and advanced manufacturing solutions for projects ranging from the smallest to very large lot sizes.

Using citizen videos, Rashomon Project seeks to protect activists

07/23/13 New Hampshire Public Radio — As citizen-generated media grows increasingly integrated into protest coverage, software developed by UC Berkeley researchers could help protect activists against unjust persecution. Berkeley Engineering professor Ken Goldberg talks about the CITRIS Data and Democracy Initiative's Rashomon Project, which he leads.

Researchers propose ‘neural dust’ to monitor brain from inside

07/17/13 ExtremeTech — Berkeley Engineering researchers have proposed a network of tiny implantable sensors that could function like an MRI inside the brain, recording data on nearby neurons and transmitting it back out. This long-lasting "neural dust," envisioned by graduate student Dongjin Seo and colleagues in EECS, would solve the problems of size and invasiveness posed by current brain imaging technologies.

Douglas C. Engelbart, inventor of the computer mouse, dies at 88

07/03/13 New York Times — Douglas C. Engelbart, 88, a visionary scientist and Berkeley electrical engineering Ph.D. whose host of inventions - among them the computer mouse - became the basis for both the Internet and the modern personal computer, died July 2 at his home in Atherton, Calif.

The hidden cost of free apps: Mobile ads drain batteries

06/26/13 Information Week — The advertisements in a typical mobile app consume almost a quarter of the energy used by the app, according to research by Berkeley computer science graduate student Prashanth Mohan and his colleagues at Microsoft Research.