Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences
UC Berkeley’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) houses top-ranked programs that attract stellar students and professors from around the world, pioneering the frontiers of information science and technology with broad impacts on society. As the largest and one of the most distinguished departments on the Berkeley campus, EECS has been at the forefront of research that has led to important advancements in semiconductor and MEMS devices, design technology, computer architecture, operating systems and databases, and wired and wireless networking. Our graduates now make up the core of today’s technology industry.
Did you know?
- Last year marked the 50th anniversary of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. Berkeley EECS, as it is known today, was formally ratified on July 1, 1973, after merging with the Department of Computer Science in the College of Letters & Sciences.
- EE Prof. Joseph Thomas Gier became the first Black professor to achieve tenure in the UC system when he was promoted to associate professor in 1952. An early pioneer in solar energy, he was an expert in the field of thermal and luminous radiation, whose inventions were used in the earliest days of space exploration.
- EECS professor David Patterson directed the “reduced instruction set computer” (RISC) project at Berkeley, making CPUs faster and more efficient. Today, 99% of the 16 billion microprocessors produced annually are RISC processors. In 2018, Patterson and Stanford’s John Hennessy won a Turing Award, the Nobel Prize of computing, for this work.
Bridget Agyare
B.A.’24, EECS
What if robots learned like humans?
Berkeley engineers were the first to demonstrate the use of deep-learning algorithms that allowed robots to learn by trial and error, a radical departure from previous approaches that relied on pre-programmed instructions. Researchers are now finding that simply showing a robot how to perform a task can increase its speed of mastery. Berkeley’s world-renowned program in AI brings together more than 30 faculty members and 200 graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, including experts in cognitive psychology, neuroscience and linguistics.
What if ultra-thin materials
detected structural fatigue?
Taking inspiration from nature, Berkeley engineers have created an ultra-thin film that can shift colors as easily as a chameleon’s skin when pulled or twisted. Researchers etched rows of tiny ridges onto a film of silicon about a thousand times thinner than a human hair. The ridges reflect light at different wavelengths, depending upon how far they are spaced. The thin-skinned material could be developed into a new class of display technologies or an early warning system for structural fatigue by changing color when critical components on bridges, buildings or airplanes are stressed.
