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Karl Hedrick

ME professor Karl Hedrick dies at 72

02/28/17 — J. Karl Hedrick, the James Marshall Wells Academic Chair and Professor of Mechanical Engineering, passed away on February 22 after a long battle with lung cancer. He was an expert on nonlinear control theory and its applications to transportation. See also the Daily Cal's obituary for Prof. Hedrick.
Kenichi Soga

Hashtagging the way to safer infrastructure

11/29/16 — Civil and environmental engineering professor Kenichi Soga delivered a CITRIS talk about using social media and sensor-laden environments to build smart infrastructure.
Sign for Nobel laureate bike parking space

Nobel (bike) parking

11/01/16 — Reserved parking for Nobel laureates won't be limited to cars anymore. New, gold-colored bike racks were installed just outside of the Free Speech Café in recognition of Berkeley's contributions to the 2007 Nobel-prize winning International Panel on Climate Change.
Plants growing on high-rise building

Green cities

11/01/16 — The majority of the world's population is projected to live in cities by the year 2050. Although cities are considered strains the environment, nuclear engineering professor Daniel Kammen see the potential for cities to be models of sustainability.
Berkeley research team and their autonomous car

Berkeley team recognized for autonomous car research

10/05/16 — ME professors Francesco Borrelli and Karl Hedrick, Ph.D. student Ashwin Carvalho, and Associate Director for Self-Driving Vehicle Development Chan Kyu Lee were in attendance for the U.S. Department of Transportation's announcement of a new policy on Automated Vehicle Development.
Jitendra Malik of UC Berkeley and Fei-Fei Li of Stanford

A lesson of Tesla crashes? Computer vision can’t do it all yet

09/21/16 New York Times — EECS department chair Jitendra Malik, a researcher in computer vision for three decades, doesn't own a Tesla, but he has advice for people who do. “Knowing what I know about computer vision,” he said, “I wouldn't take my hands off the steering wheel.”
Bikes, streetcars, buses and more vehicles on a San Francisco street

SF, UC Berkeley to continue collaborating on ‘smart cities’

09/09/16 — This year's bid by San Francisco and UC Berkeley failed to win the U.S. Department of Transportation's Smart City Challenge, but the city and university have agreed to continue to jointly explore innovative urban transportation options, and ways that technology can improve city life in general.
Otto self-driving truck on highway test run

Uber Is betting we’ll see driverless 18-wheelers before taxis

09/08/16 MIT Technology Review — With its acquisition of self-driving truck startup Otto, Uber is hoping for a shortcut in the race to profit from driverless vehicles. But research engineer Steven Shladover of Berkeley's California Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology Program (PATH) sees challenges - real and perceived - in putting 40-ton trucks on the road with only software behind the wheel.
Sketch of bLoop

Whooshing into the future

06/21/16 California magazine — Aiming to make speed-of-sound commutes a reality, the bLoop team, made up of 40 UC Berkeley students and faculty, is heading into the final round of the hyperloop competition sponsored by Elon Musk's SpaceX company.
Artist

On the road to driverless cars

05/24/16 Berkeley Science Review — How Berkeley research, including foundational work by PATH plus recent advances in engineering and computer science, is fundamental to industry progress on automated transportation.
Susan Shaheen speaking at the Smart City Challenge kickoff

San Francisco, UC Berkeley team up to tackle transit challenges

05/05/16 — UC Berkeley transportation researchers joined San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee in inviting the region's tech companies to join the Smart City Challenge, a Department of Transportation competition that could bring $40 million to the city and UC Berkeley to create the nation's first smart transportation network.
Diagram of Berkeley Hyperloop prototype, showing air bearings, safety features, signals and controls.

Learning to levitate

05/01/16 — This August, the Berkeley Hyperloop (bLoop) team will shoot its transportation pod down a test track at high speeds for a design competition. But first, the team of 40 students must make their Hyperloop pod levitate.
Traffic jam

How the daily commute is going to change

04/25/16 Wall Street Journal — Susan Shaheen, a researcher at the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at UC Berkeley, says ride-sharing carpool services being developed by Uber and Lyft could help fix some of the "first-mile, last-mile" issues with U.S. transportation grids, providing shorter trips to and from public transportation systems.
Inside a self-driving car

Automakers go back to school for self-driving cars

03/16/16 Bloomberg Business — Automakers Ford, Toyota and Volkswagen, along with electronic companies Nvidia, Samsung, Qualcomm and Panasonic, are collaborating to fund artificial intelligence research at UC Berkeley, hoping this DeepDrive alliance can help them build the brains behind self-driving cars.
CNBC

The road to sustainability

01/28/16 CNBC — In a new video series on sustainable energy, civil and environmental engineering professor Arpad Horvath compares the environmental footprints of emerging transportation technologies, from biofuels and high-speed rail to maritime shipping and aviation.
Self-steering bus in Portland, Oregon.

Still no flying cars? The future of transit promises something even better

11/06/15 The Guardian — EECS professor Alexandre Bayen, director of the Institute for Transportation Studies, joins other transportation experts in discussing navigation and booking apps, driverless cars and automated buses, and other ways that technology promises to revolutionize the transportation industry.

Transit trends

11/01/15 — While not known for fast responses to the market, automakers are now making modifications to suit the sharing economy, which is growing by 35 percent a year. If only they could do something about poor driving practices, most notably, the jerk merge.