Research

Engineers demo first processor that uses light for ultrafast communications

12/23/15 — Engineers at Berkeley, MIT and Colorado have successfully married electrons and photons within a single-chip microprocessor, a landmark development that opens the door to ultrafast, low-power data crunching.

Building an organ in the marsh

12/16/15 — A Louisiana native and environmental engineering Ph.D. student, Madeline Foster-Martinez is studying the fluid dynamics of a local marsh to better understand tidal wetland restoration.

Microscopic images of conventional and bidirectional freeze-casting

The artificial materials that came in from the cold

12/15/15 Berkeley Lab — Researchers led by Robert Ritchie, professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and engineering, have developed a freeze-casting technique that enables them to design and create strong, tough and lightweight materials comparable to bones, teeth, shells and wood.

"Average" photos from hogh school yearbooks through the decades

Evolution of the (forced) smile

12/04/15 MIT Technology Review — Mining a vast database of high-school yearbook photos, EECS Ph.D. candidate Shiry Ginosar and her team used a machine-vision algorithm to reveal the change in hairstyles, clothing and even smiles over the past century.

Berkeley, lab and Tsinghua partner on energy and climate

12/02/15 — The Berkeley Energy & Climate Institute, led by mechanical engineering professor Paul Wright, is partnering with Berkeley Lab and Tsinghua University to form the Berkeley Tsinghua Joint Research Center on Energy and Climate Change, which aims to develop scientifically based clean energy solutions.

AMP Lab: Solving big data’s biggest problems

12/02/15 Berkeley Research — The AMP Lab, launched in 2011 by Michael Franklin and colleagues in computer science, has already had an outsized impact on industry, from battling cancer to getting an answer from Siri.

Schematic of a laser beam energizing a monolayer semiconductor

Coming to a monitor near you: a defect-free, molecule-thick film

11/30/15 — A team of research engineers at UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab, led by EECS professor Ali Javey, has discovered a simple way to fix defects in atomically thin monolayer semiconductors using an organic superacid, opening the door to transparent LED displays, nanoscale transistors and more.

Seeking data wisdom

11/23/15 Berkeley Research — Science and engineering have a way of turning what seems like fantasy into reality - like "mind reading," or genetic organ formation, two promising research areas that rely on a powerful interlocking of science, computation and statistics that EECS and statistics professor Bin Yu calls "data wisdom."

Berkeley drone researchers win Microsoft Hololens research grant

11/13/15 CITRIS — Three faculty members from the UC Berkeley Robotics and Intelligent Machines Lab have won one of five academic research grants from Microsoft Research. The research by Allen Y. Yang, Claire Tomlin and Dean Shankar Sastry will be supported by a team of EECS undergraduates from the Virtual Reality @ Berkeley Club.

Darwin performs actions after virtual and real-world learning.

Robot toddler learns to stand by ‘imagining’ how to do it

11/10/15 MIT Technology Review — Instead of being programmed, Darwin, a robot in the lab of EECS associate professor Pieter Abbeel, uses brain-inspired algorithms to “imagine” doing tasks before trying them in the real world.

3-D mapping your world with a backpack

11/02/15 KQED Quest — EECS professor Avideh Zakhor has extended 3-D mapping and rendering - what she calls ‘reality capture' - to interior spaces through a laser-equipped backpack that collects thousands of data points, then stitches them together into a 3-D model.

UC Berkeley to co-lead regional big data ‘brain trust’

11/02/15 — UC Berkeley is teaming up with UC San Diego and the University of Washington to lead one of four regional innovation hubs established by the National Science Foundation to facilitate multi-sector collaborations that can accelerate advances in data science.

Dean’s word: Disrupting health care by design

11/01/15 — An expanding network, including a new partnership with UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital Oakland, allows the joint efforts of alumni, faculty and students to engineer solutions and change the scope of improving health care.

BRETT with EECS professor Pieter Abbeel.

Q+A with BRETT

11/01/15 — “How can we get a robot to think about situations it's never seen before?” asks EECS professor Pieter Abbeel. In this Q&A, BRETT, resident robot in Abbeel's lab, describes its experiences with deep learning.

Aeriel view of glaciers in Southwest British Columbia.

Origin science

11/01/15 — Where did the first Americans come from? Recent findings suggest evidence that both supports and dispels some earlier ideas about the origin of the Americas.

GMOs on lockdown

11/01/15 — Using a strain of E. coli, Berkeley engineers may have found a way to lock and unlock a single gene with a single chemical molecule.

Light-speed genetics

11/01/15 — Traditional polymerase chain reaction genetics tests take hours and lots of energy to perform. Researchers have now cut the waiting time and cost of the photonic PCR system without losing resolution.

Graduate student researcher Zack Phillips demonstrating the modified Cellscope

Undergrad research on the rise at Cal

10/27/15 Blum Center — A team of six young EECS students working in the Computational Imaging Lab, whose LED array dome extended the reach of the CellScope microscope, exemplifies the mutual benefits of research by undergraduates at UC Berkeley.

Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute inaugurated in China

10/26/15 — Some 200 guests turned out Oct. 20 for a ceremony to inaugurate the new Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute (TBSI) in Shenzhen, China. The joint research institute provides a platform for innovative research and graduate student education to fuel economic growth, solve global problems and train industry leaders.

Electric field at the edges of a 2D excitonic laser resonator

Exciting breakthrough in 2D lasers

10/20/15 Berkeley Lab — Berkeley Lab researchers, led by mechanical engineering professor Xiang Zhang, have developed an atomically thin excitonic laser, achieving bright light emissions at visible light wavelengths in what could be a major step forward for high-performance optical communication and computing applications.