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Engineering alum’s startup creates ultrathin batteries

01/10/13 San Francisco Chronicle — Imprint Energy, an Alameda startup co-founded by Engineering alumna Christine Ho, B.S. '05, M.S. '07, Ph.D. '10 MSE, is developing zinc-based batteries that are slim, flexible, powerful, and just might free gadget makers from the constraints of standard rechargeable batteries.

Personal robots moving closer to reality

11/28/12 CBS This Morning — Personal robots that can bake cookies, shoot pool and -- in the hands of EECS professor Pieter Abbeel -- fold laundry are evidence of a new generation in artificial intelligence, jump-started by a Silicon Valley tech company's PR2 robots.

ShanghaiTech, Berkeley launch 5-year collaboration

11/13/12 ShanghaiTech — ShanghaiTech University and UC Berkeley have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to launch a collaboration in education, culture, and scientific research over the next five years. The first stage of the project will involve Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences faculty from Berkeley sharing core instructional resources and research methodology with their Chinese counterparts.

Engineering innovation by design

11/05/12 — "Technology with soul." That's how Bernard Amadei, founder of Engineers Without Borders, describes engineering solutions that are designed and built with human needs in mind. Amadei, one of our own Ph.D.s (CE '82) and the Mortenson Professor at the University of Colorado, will be one of our featured speakers at our November 13th conference, "Engineering Innovation by Design," held here in the College of Engineering and open to all.

Decisions, decisions

11/05/12 — It has been a busy year for the developers of the new web app, Politify. It was only October of 2011 when Nikita Bier, then a political economy and business major, approached Jeremy Blalock, a second-year EECS student, to collaborate on an easy-to-use app to analyze public policy. They developed a non-partisan tool that enables voters to evaluate the costs and benefits of each presidential candidate's promised policies.

Decisions, decisions

11/01/12 — Two Berkeley students - an EECS and a political economy and business major- developed Politify, a non-partisan mobile app that enables voters to evaluate the costs and benefits of a candidate's policy platforms.
Byung Yang Lee, Seung-Wuk Lee and Ramamoorthy Ramesh

Electricity goes viral

11/01/12 — Scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have discovered a novel way to create electrical energy with the tap of a finger.

Image makers

11/01/12 — To reduce or even eliminate the use of anesthesia for pediatric patients during MRIs, EECS professors have developed a way to drastically reduce the time needed to conduct MRI exams.
Jose Carmena

Within reach

11/01/12 — Director of the Brain-Machine Interface Systems Lab Jose Carmena discusses the future of meshing mind and machine.
Inside a Gram Power-connected home in rural India

Prepaid power

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.

Picture-perfect translation

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.

Can Silicon Valley bring back U.S. manufacturing?

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.”

Barbara Simons discusses electronic voting on Charlie Rose

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.

2013 Siebel Scholars announced

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.

Decoding pictographs: There’s an app for that

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.

Berkeley Engineering student chosen to carry Olympic torch through England

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.

The education of a maker

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.

Preventive medicine for pipelines

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.