Rising seas: A new look at resilient infrastructure
05/01/16 — A cross-disciplinary team of researchers is studying how sea-level rise will impact and disrupt the Bay Area using a variety of data modeling and analysis methods.
Transportation
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ride-sharing forces automakers to rethink how they sell cars
06/30/15 Los Angeles Times — Every vehicle that goes into a full-time car-sharing service, such as short-time rental company Zipcar, supplants four to six new car sales and postpones the purchase of up to seven more, says Susan Shaheen, a transportation sustainability researcher and adjunct professor of civil and environmental engineering.
Why do buses always come in bunches?
06/17/15 CityMetric — Lewis Lehe, a transport engineering Ph.D. candidate, has built a game of sorts to demonstrate the math behind the unfortunate truth that city buses serving the same route tend to arrive in clumps, one right behind the other.
Smart scooter
05/01/15 — Modified Razor scooters are used in a cyber-physical system design course to how electric vehicles interface with the energy grid.
UC grad students deliver solutions, startups
04/24/15 University of California — Grad students from across the UC system will descend on Sacramento April 28 for Graduate Research Advocacy Day. Among them will be Berkeley civil engineering grad student André Carrel, who is studying how bus service reliability affects ridership.
Students race car with just a few drops of gas
04/08/15 ABC-7 News — A team of mechanical engineering students race through the streets of Detroit in a car that employs cutting-edge materials and tools - but very little gas.
Aging wooden bridge needs all the support it can get
03/23/15 New York Times — Structural engineering professor Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl has been hired as a consultant on a fight by local residents to save the Albion River Bridge - California's last wooden bridge on a coastal highway.
In memoriam: William L. Garrison, civil engineer and transportation expert
03/02/15 — William L. Garrison, a professor emeritus of civil engineering and an expert in the ways innovation and technological change occur in the field of transportation, has died at age 90.
The impact of falling oil prices on your wallet
01/05/15 WalletHub — In a recent Ask the Experts column, Robert Bea, professor emeritus of civil and environmental engineering, discusses the precipitous drop in oil prices and its likely effect on the economy.
Air pollution down thanks to California’s regulation of diesel trucks
12/12/14 Berkeley Lab — Detailed measurement of emissions from thousands of heavy trucks in the Bay Area by Berkeley Lab air quality scientists, led by adjunct professor Thomas Kirchstetter and professor Rob Harley, both of civil and environmental engineering, showed a dramatic reduction in pollutants in the wake of aggressive new regulations implemented by the California Air Resources Board.
Self-driven to solve transportation problems
11/21/14 San Jose Mercury News — Mechanical engineering professor Karl Hedrick, director of Berkeley's Vehicle Dynamics Laboratory, has spent decades researching the nonlinear control systems that set the foundation for today's smart cars.
The unknown start-up that built Google’s first self-driving car
11/20/14 IEEE Spectrum — The story behind Google's innovative self-driving car and the revolutionary Street View camera technology that preceded begins with 510 Systems, a tiny Berkeley start-up launched by IEOR grad (and later Google engineer) Anthony Levandowski and fellow Berkeley Engineering student Bryon Majusiak.
Supercharging more electric cars risks crashing the grid
11/05/14 California magazine — U.S. electrical grids might not be ready for the new wave of electric vehicles expected within the decade. But the Smart Cities Research Center in civil and environmental engineering is working on data-driven ways to prevent a grid meltdown.
Bullet train just a blur in California governor’s race
10/28/14 Los Angeles Times — Civil engineering professor Robert Bea, a pioneering expert in the field of risk analysis, comments on the relatively small role California's bullet train is playing in the state's gubernatorial election, and how that could become a problem down the line.
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.