Research

New biomaterial has some nerve

10/14/14 — Berkeley bioengineers have taken proteins from nerve cells and used them to create a “smart” material that is extremely sensitive to its environment. This marriage of materials science and biology could give birth to a flexible, sensitive coating that is easy and cheap to manufacture in large quantities.

Waller, others gain funding for interdisciplinary big-data research

10/02/14 — EECS assistant professor Laura Waller, who hopes to use new computational tricks to turn simple microscopes into cutting-edge imaging machines, is one of 14 researchers who will receive $1.5 million over the next five years as part of the the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation's Data-Driven Discovery Initiative.

Lydia Sohn’s cellular research gains White House notice

09/22/14 Office of Science and Technology Policy — A post to the White House blog last week recognized mechanical engineering professor Lydia Sohn for her prize-winning submission to a foundation-sponsored competition seeking the most compelling ideas for revolutionary life science platform technologies. Sohn's idea? A low-cost, label-free platform to screen, and subsequently sort, single-cells for multiple surface markers.

PEER issues preliminary report on Napa quake

09/22/14 Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center — PEER has published a preliminary report on the Aug. 24 South Napa earthquake, drawing on the extensive observations of faculty, staff and students who were deployed to the region in the days following the magnitude 6.0 quake.

EECS researcher creates controllable flying insects using TI technology

09/12/14 Texas Instruments — EECS associate professor Michel Maharbiz spends his days studying the "beautiful systems" of the insect world, and applying that knowledge to building the tiniest of flying objects.

William Tarpeh at the Berkeley Water Center

Defining development engineering

09/12/14 — Development engineers elude easy definition, but they are trained as multi-tooled tacticians creating holistic solutions to technical challenges that are interlaced with social and political complexities.

Bakar Fellow Michel Maharbiz of EECS explaining neural dust

Bakar research fellows make their case in Silicon Valley

09/09/14 — Sixteen Bakar Fellows, including several Berkeley Engineering faculty members, recently presented their research ideas to a a packed room of potential investors on Sand Hill Road.

UC Berkeley and Tsinghua University launch research and graduate education partnership

09/06/14 — UC Berkeley and Tsinghua University have signed an agreement to establish a joint institute in the city of Shenzhen in South China to promote research collaboration and graduate student education. First areas of focus for the institute will be nanotechnology and nanomedicine, low-carbon and new energy technologies, and data science and next-generation Internet.

Brainy, yes, but hardly handy

09/02/14 New York Times — Robots won't be able to take on many human roles until they acquire a delicate sense of touch, and that "takes time, and it's more complicated,” says Ken Goldberg, a roboticist and IEOR professor at Berkeley Engineering. “Humans are really good at this, and they have millions of years of evolution.”

Wafer used to build "organoid chips"---chips that mimic the behavior of the human body.

New ‘biochips’ that mimic our bodies could speed development of drugs

08/27/14 Wired — Researchers in the labs of Berkeley bioengineers Kevin Healy and Luke Lee are collaborating on a project to recreate parts of the human body on chips. The research aims to find ways to get tissue to live and mimic how real organs function in order to eliminate years of animal and human testing of medical treatments.

Professor Seung-Wuk Lee is interviewed on Danish TV

Bioengineering research on Danish TV

08/26/14 Jyske Bank — The Danish television program “Tech and City” filmed an episode at UC Berkeley showcasing bioengineering professor Seung-Wuk Lee's virus-electric energy work, and the CellScope project from professor Dan Fletcher's lab, explained by PhD alum and lecturer Frankie Myers.

Out of many, one

08/25/14 The New Yorker — EECS professor, Alexei Efros built the AverageExplorer to study visual information. The software creates an average image after compiling thousands of similar Internet photos.

Software for blending and averaging images

New tool makes a single picture worth a thousand – and more – images

08/14/14 — New software developed by UC Berkeley computer scientists seeks to tame the growing sea of visual data by generating an "average" photo that can represent many thousands of related images.

What cars did for today’s world, data may do for tomorrow’s

08/12/14 New York Times — Berkeley's AMP Lab, created two years ago for research into new kinds of large-scale computing, has become a key part of the world-changing ecosystem of digital hardware and software, spinning out companies like Databricks and Mesosphere that make megacomputing systems available and affordable.

Bottling up sound waves

08/07/14 Berkeley Lab — Berkeley Lab researchers, led by Berkeley Engineering materials science professor Xiang Zhang, have developed a technique for generating self-bending acoustic bottle beams that hold promise for ultrasonic imaging and therapy, and for acoustic cloaking, levitation and particle manipulation.

Photo editing tool enables object images to be manipulated in 3-D

08/06/14 R&D Magazine — A team including EECS professor Alexei Efros, formerly of Carnegie Mellon but now at Berkeley, created a photo editing tool that lets users manipulate images in 3-D so that objects can be turned or flipped and even originally hidden surfaces can be exposed.

New technology could help farsighted computer users see without glasses

07/31/14 CBS News — UC Berkley professor Brian Barsky's experiments could solve a common modern problem. He's developing software designed to help anyone who has to wear glasses every time they look at a computer or smartphone.

Video showing how vision correction technology works

Vision-correcting display makes reading glasses so yesterday

07/29/14 — Researchers at UC Berkeley are developing vision-correcting displays that can compensate for a viewer's visual impairments to create sharp images without the need for glasses or contact lenses.

Tiny laser sensor heightens bomb detection sensitivity

07/20/14 — UC Berkeley researchers, led by mechanical engineering professor Xiang Zhang, are developing ultra-sensitive bomb detectors using tiny laser sensors that could detect incredibly minute concentrations of explosives.

Nanolasers on silicon to provide faster data transmission

07/14/14 LiveScience — New technology in development at Berkeley Engineering promises to ensure that fiber optic networks will be able to keep pace with consumer demand for speed and seamless data flow. The work, led by EECS professor Connie Chang-Hasnain, involves growing lasers (called nanoneedles) on silicon , the base layer of choice for electronic devices.