Jack Moehle receives top earthquake engineering award
03/05/20 — The Earthquake Engineering Research Institute bestowed Moehle, a professor of civil and environmental engineering, with the George W. Housner Medal
Transportation
Autonomous vehicles: The answer to our traffic woes
08/28/19 Wired — Berkeley Engineering's Alexandre Bayen and Liao-Cho are studying the impact that autonomous vehicles can have on traffic flow. And, their findings suggest that self-driving cars can help alleviate traffic.
Shifting gears
05/01/19 — The integration of self-driving vehicles requires policy decisions that consider how travel behavior will shift with the introduction of new mobility choices.
Going with the Flow
05/01/19 — Researchers have developed a machine-learning tool to manage traffic where autonomous, partially-automated and manual vehicles share the road.
Ion drive flight test points to radically different future for aviation
12/05/18 Forbes — Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have conducted a successful 8-second flight test of an aircraft with an ion drive propulsion system, a larger version of the same cutting-edge technology that Berkeley engineers are using to fly centimeter-scale microrobots.
Watch just a few self-driving cars stop traffic jams
11/19/18 Science — Anyone can start a traffic jam - just by tapping the brakes. Now, scientists at Berkeley have shown that a few self-driving cars can prevent such jams - and in some cases double the average speed of surrounding vehicles.
Turning cars into robot traffic managers
10/29/18 — Berkeley transportation researchers are addressing the emerging era of smart vehicles with a project that uses machine learning to manage traffic where autonomous, semi-autonomous and manned vehicles share the road. They presented their project, called Flow, at the Conference on Robotic Learning.
Download the world’s largest self-driving dataset
06/07/18 Interesting Engineering — The Berkeley DeepDrive Industry Consortium has released an open-source dataset of 100,000 self-driving video sequences - largest of its kind - to the public in hopes of helping engineers develop autonomous vehicles.
Solar cruiser
06/01/18 — Berkeley's CalSol team designed a new solar-powered vehicle that can hold four passengers.
Why some cities have had enough of Waze
05/07/18 US News & World Report — Start-up-turned-tech-giant Waze solves traffic problems for some users, but creates challenges for others by overwhelming local streets. "There's nothing inherently wrong with routing apps, but the problem is overuse," says Alexandre Bayen, director of Berkeley's Institute of Transportation Studies.
Where are all the driverless cars?
04/04/18 Car Connection — Firms testing self-driving cars have slowed their programs, and did not beat a path to the door of the California DMV, which on April 2 was to begin issuing permits for testing on the state's roads. Berkeley transportation engineer Steve Shladover says that's because those companies are still trying to work out some challenging wrinkles.
How car sharing is evolving the transportation landscape
03/28/18 — Peer-to-peer car-sharing services have encouraged a small number of their members to ditch car ownership, according to a first-of-its-kind study of from the UC Berkeley Transportation Sustainability Research Center.
The perfect selfishness of mapping apps
03/15/18 The Atlantic — Popular mapping and routing apps may make overall traffic conditions worse in some areas, new research by Alexandre Bayen and the Institute of Transportation Studies suggests.
Why traffic apps make congestion worse
01/30/18 — Has your smartphone traffic app ever led you into a traffic jam? Professor and traffic engineer Alexandre Bayen, director of UC Berkeley's Institute of Transportation Studies, is working on smarter apps that will actually talk to one another to prevent clogged freeways and city streets.
Radical new battery technology for a $130,000 electric sedan
01/12/18 LA Times — Solid-state automotive batteries, like those being designed for Fisker Inc.'s all-electric EMotion supercar, will eventually exist, says materials science and engineering professor Gerbrand Ceder, but “it's not going to happen as fast as people think.”
Are we going too fast on driverless cars?
12/15/17 Science — Automakers, high-tech companies and politicians are solidly behind self-driving cars and trucks as a sure path to a better, more mobile society. But research on the social, economic and environmental effects of autonomous vehicles is sparse - something Berkeley transportation engineers are seeking to remedy.
California clears the way for testing driverless cars, but concerns remain
11/14/17 LA Times — Steve Shladover, a research engineer with Berkeley's Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology, is worried that attempts to expand federal authority over autonomous vehicle operations may usurp state efforts to bolster safety standards.
Case studies in forward thinking
11/01/17 — Nine Berkeley Engineering faculty members share some of their forward-looking work and how it might impact what's to come.
13.5-mile tunnel will make or break California’s bullet train
10/23/17 LA Times — A critical part of California's high-speed rail project is a 13.5-mile tunnel through the Diablo Range - a landmark project whose costs may greatly exceed initial expectations. "This is not good news for taxpayers of California," says civil engineering professor William Ibbs, who has consulted on similar rail projects around the world.
École Polytechnique and Berkeley partner for new transportation program
10/11/17 — École Polytechnique and the Institute of Transportation Studies have signed a new partnership agreement for the new École Polytechnique's Executive Master degree program. The new program will train transportation leaders to design, deploy and manage strategies and projects for companies and organizations that have an international focus.