Electrical engineering

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.

Student hacker wins award for wearing a ‘white hat’

06/19/13 Los Angeles Times — Berkeley computer science junior Skyler Rojas has been awarded $2000 by the Information Systems Security Association at the Cornerstones of Trust conference for choosing a career in cybersecurity. Rojas, who is interning this summer at Symantec, says his dream job would be "penetration tester" - someone who works from the inside to find network vulnerabilities.

Yablonovitch elected to membership in Royal Society

06/19/13 Royal Society — Eli Yablonovitch, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, is one of two Berkeley scientists elected as 2013 foreign members of the United Kingdom's distinguished Royal Society, a fellowship of eminent scientists, engineers and technologists.

Cal EECS professor receives prestigious international award

06/13/13 Contra Costa Times — Electrical engineering and computer science professor Eli Yablonovitch is one of two recipients of the 2012 Harvey Prize, a prestigious international award for his "pioneering discoveries in photonics, optoelectronics, and semiconductors."

Academic-industrial team to uncover innovations in systems engineering

05/30/13 iCyPhy — UC Berkeley has partnered with Caltech, IBM and United Technologies Corp. to launch Industrial Cyber Physical Systems (iCyPhy), a Berkeley-based research consortium that will identify and develop new engineering techniques to make it easier to successfully build products and services that combine complex software, hardware and mechanical components.

How password strength meters can improve security

05/20/13 Information Week — Password strength meters aren't just window dressing, but can result in stronger passwords when users are forced to change "important" accounts, according to a new study by UC Berkeley researcher Serge Egelman and colleagues at the University of British Columbia and Microsoft Research.

Molding the next generation of computer scientists

05/14/13 CNN Tech — Kevin Wang always had the teaching bug in him. Now the 2002 EECS alumnus and Microsoft developer is combining his passion and his profession through Technology Education and Literacy in Schools (TEALS), an initiative founded by Wang and supported by Microsoft that places high-tech professionals as part-time teachers in high schools.

Oxford-bound

05/13/13 — Graduating senior Daniel A. Price, a double major in bioengineering and electrical engineering and computer sciences with a minor in physics, was selected as one of this year's Rhodes Scholars. Next fall at Oxford University, Price will pursue research in medical diagnostic equipment. Here he tells us more about his studies, his research and future plans.

EECS offers online master’s program

05/01/13 — The college launches an EECS online master's program in integrated circuits.

Q+A: Oxford-bound

05/01/13 — Alum Daniel A. Price, selected as a 2013 Rhodes Scholar, shares his future plans for Oxford and beyond.

Mind readers

05/01/13 — Researchers were able to infer sensitive information—such as credit card PINs, birth months and home locations—from participants wearing brainwave-reading headsets that are typically used for hands-free gaming.

Critical making comes to campus

05/01/13 — “Students are going to understand how to collaborate across disciplines while respecting and appreciating the viewpoints, values and concerns of others about a design,” Eric Paulos says. “I fundamentally believe that this is the future of the practitioner. They will have to know how to co-create things.”

Experiential ed.

05/01/13 — Many hands-on labs, shops and workspaces around campus allow students to learn by doing.

College, TI cut ribbon on $2.2 million electronics design lab

04/11/13 Berkeley Patch — Texas Instruments and the College of Engineering today opened the doors to a state-of-the-art electronics teaching lab in Cory Hall, made possible by major gifts from TI and Agilent, that will encourage ingenuity among undergraduate engineering students.

BOINC enlists Android phones in search for black holes

03/27/13 Wired — Computer science professor David Anderson, creator of the BOINC platform that runs SETI@home and other crowd-sourced projects, is now trying to capture the computing power of smart phones with software for Android phones that would help Einstein@home search for black holes.

EECS alumni Micali and Goldwasser win Turing Award

03/18/13 Association for Computing Machinery — Ph.D. EECS alumni Silvio Micali and Shafi Goldwasser have been named winners of the ACM Turing Award, considered the Nobel Prize of computer science. The two, both now computer science professors at MIT, pioneered the field of provable security, which laid the mathematical foundations that made modern cryptography possible.