11/01/12 — Two Berkeley alumni started a microgrid project to bring electricity to places too remote to have cost-effective connections to traditional utility-scale power grids.
11/01/12 — EECS grad Chun Ming Chin and his team at Translate Abroad have created a mobile app that makes translating Chinese characters as simple as taking a photo.
10/22/12 San Jose Mercury News — In a Mercury News op-ed, Marvell executive and computer science alumna Weili Dai calls for a resurgence of U.S. manufacturing. “Silicon Valley has the know-how, track record and brain trust to lead the way,” says Dai. “For example, UC Berkeley and other fine universities already graduate some of the world's top semiconductor manufacturing experts.”
10/10/12 Charlie Rose — In an interview with TV journalist Charlie Rose, computer science alumna Barbara Simons (Ph.D., 1981) discusses her new book on electronic voting, Broken Ballots: Will Your Vote Count? In 2005, Simons became the first woman to receive the college's Distinguished Engineering Alumni Award.
09/10/12 Siebel Foundation — Nine Berkeley Engineering graduate students have been named 2013 Siebel Scholars. This year's cohort of 85 graduate students in the nation's leading business, bioengineering and computer science programs join a group of almost 800 in the program, which fosters leadership and academic achievement. Honorees receive $35,000 to complete their final year of study. Congratulations to this year's winners: In Bioengineering: Lukasz Jan Bugaj, Laura Rose Croft, Timothy Lamont Downing, Alex James Hughes and Debkishore Mitra; and in EECS: Yunlong Li, Antonio Lupher, Brandon Wang and Wei Wu.
06/26/12 — Never mind the labyrinthine streets, chaotic traffic and unfamiliar food: If you talk to many foreign travelers to China, they'll tell you the most challenging part of a journey there is the language barrier. And it's not just the spoken language; the written characters of Chinese are equally confounding. With thousands of symbols making up the Chinese script, deciphering a street sign, menu or train ticket can be an onerous task for tourists.
06/10/12 Inside Bay Area — Kylan Nieh, a UC Berkeley student from Fremont, is among 22 "inspiring Americans" chosen by Coca-Cola to carry the Olympic torch next month in Oxford, England. Nieh, an accomplished gymnast who once competed in the Junior Olympics, is now working toward degrees in computer science and business administration. He teaches a leadership and public speaking course at the Haas School of Business and is president of Nestle-sponsored Very Best in Youth Foundation, a program that spotlights teens who have affected other people's lives profoundly.
05/17/12 — Parents like Tony DeRose (Ph.D'85 CS), senior scientist and research group lead at Pixar Animation Studios, are all too familiar with the difficulty of finding something engaging for their children to do with their hands. “When my son grew out of Legos at about eight years old, we realized there wasn't much for him to graduate into,” DeRose says. That's when DeRose and his son began working on projects in their garage. Most of the projects went unfinished until they discovered the Maker Faire. From there, DeRose and his son were hooked. DeRose wanted to bring the Maker Faire to more students and co-founded the Young Makers program in 2010.
05/17/12 — Nationwide, our network of more than 2.5 million miles of pipeline is aging. More than a third of the pipeline infrastructure is over 50 years old, and a reliable method to monitor corrosion hasn't really existed. Until now. Jerome Singer, professor emeritus of EECS and engineering science, and two Berkeley Engineering alums have developed a way to keep tabs on pipeline health by using an MRI machine similar to the ones used in hospitals. Their technology is called the Magnetic Response Imaging System (MRIS), and it will be able to look at the state of underground pipelines.
05/14/12 ABC News — Viruses might eventually be able to power the very phone, computer or tablet you're reading this article on. Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Berkeley Lab have been able to generate power using a harmless human virus that can covert mechanical force into electricity. "In near future, we believe that we can develop personal electric generators," said Seung-Wuk Lee, a faculty scientist at Berkeley Lab and professor of bioengineering at UC Berkeley.
05/10/12 Texas Instruments — Texas Instruments Incorporated has announced a $2.2 million gift to support engineering education at UC Berkeley. The university will use the gift to transform its traditional introductory Electronic Design Laboratory into a dynamic learning environment for undergraduate students. "This is a unique opportunity to introduce a new generation of engineering students to the fun of building things that matter," said Professor Costas Spanos. "We will do this by infusing the 'maker' ethic early into the learning cycle, and by creating a place that brings together state-of-the-art instructional labs, a student meeting place and student-run space for hardware hacking."
05/01/12 — Computers have gotten faster, but the transistor hasn't kept pace with the push for greater efficiency; EECS professor Sayeef Alahuddin and graduate student Asif Khan have demonstrated that transistors can indeed be green.
05/01/12 — In spring 2012, the Floating Sensor Network project, led by associate professor of EECS Alexandre Bayen, launched a flotilla of 100 robots down the Sacramento River to provide data on water movement and pollutant spread.
05/01/12 — Small and inexpensive wireless sensors placed throughout our physical world are capturing and transmitting streams of information about conditions in places, things and even our behavior.
05/01/12 — Kushal Chakrabarti (B.S'04 EECS) founded Vittana, a start-up that helps students from low-income or poverty-stricken homes around the world get an education.
04/30/12 Berkeleyside — UC Berkeley student Derek Low is nothing if not inventive. A few months ago Low set out to make his Berkeley dorm room as fully automated as possible. The result, as you can see in the video he uploaded to YouTube, is BRAD: the Berkeley Ridiculously Automated Dorm. Through remote controlled lighting and curtains, Low's room manages to wake him up, put him to sleep and provide the right ambiance for homework and even romance. Its "party mode" is particularly impressive.
04/21/12 San Francisco Chronicle — Charles Kennedy ("Ned") Birdsall, Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and a pioneering inventor and educator in microwave tubes and plasma physics, died March 6, 2012, at his home in Lafayette. He was 86. Ned joined the Electrical Engineering Department in 1959, launching a four-decade academic career. Ned became known as a pioneering inventor and educator whose contributions to plasma science have made lasting impacts on communications and other
03/06/12 The Daily Beast — Weili Dai, Berkeley Engineering alumna (B.S. '84 CS) and co-founder of Marvell Technology Group, has been honored by Newsweek as one of "150 Women Who Shake the World." With her background in computer science and software development, Dai founded Marvell with her husband and his brother in 1995. Today the microchip maker's revenue tops $3 billion annually. Dai is one of the only women to head a top-500 tech company and is a prime example of a leader with an environmental conscience.
02/24/12 Wall Street Journal Market Watch — Marvell co-founder, chairman, president and CEO, Dr. Sehat Sutardja, has been named the recipient of UC Berkeley's Outstanding Alumnus Award in Electrical Engineering. The award presentation took place during the Berkeley Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Annual Research Symposium 2012. "Through his engineering achievements, activism and support, Dr. Sehat Sutardja has made invaluable contributions to UC Berkeley and to the field of electrical engineering," said Professor S. Shankar Sastry, Dean of the College of Engineering. Dr. Sutardja received M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from UC Berkeley.