News

Identifying Seaborg’s lost plutonium

01/08/15 Physics Central — A tiny radioactive fleck - rediscovered in a bucket on its way to a disposal site - may well be the first sample of plutonium big enough to be seen by the naked eye, produced in 1942 by the element's discoverer, Glenn Seaborg.

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.

World class

01/01/15 — U.S. News & World Report ranks Berkeley Engineering as one of the top three engineering universities in the world.

A hands-on demonstration of the newest Oculus Rift.

Maker hero: Alumnus Jack McCauley on Guitar Hero, Oculus and the future of making

12/19/14 Berkeley Innovators — Jack McCauley (EECS ’86), the inaugural speaker in the Berkeley Innovators Lecture Series, told a packed auditorium how his lifelong passion for tinkering brought him a path-breaking career in hardware engineering and design.

atomic structure of a ferroelectric material

Discovery advances ferroelectrics in quest for lower power transistors

12/17/14 CITRIS — Berkeley engineers describe the first direct observation of a long-hypothesized but elusive phenomenon called “negative capacitance” in ferroelectric material, which could open the door to a radical reduction in the power consumed by transistors and the devices containing them.

graduate student Aislan Foina discusses drones with Expo attendees

Students show off ‘autonomous vehicles’ at L.A. Drone Expo

12/16/14 — Berkeley Engineering students joined civil engineering professor Raja Sengupta at the first-ever Drone Expo in Los Angeles on Saturday, demonstrating their “unmanned autonomous vehicles” to a crowd of hobbyists and enthusiasts.

Jay Keasling, Jennifer Doudna and Richard Mathies

Berkeley innovators named fellows of National Academy of Inventors

12/16/14 — Three UC Berkeley faculty members whose innovations have launched startups and whole new areas of research, including biochemical engineer Jay Keasling, have been named fellows of the National Academy of Inventors.

Study reveals resilience of Roman architectural concrete

12/15/14 — An international research team studying the mortar used to build ancient Roman architectural marvels, led by Marie Jackson of civil and environmental engineering, has found a secret to the material's resilience - formation during curing of a crystalline binding hydrate that prevents microcracks from propagating

Heavy truck entering the Caldecott Tunnel

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.

Paul Allen gives $5.7M to ‘cutting-edge’ artificial intelligence researchers

12/12/14 GeekWire — EECS professor Maneesh Agrawala, who is researching ways for machines to better "read" diagrams and other visualizations, is one of seven scientists who will share $5.7 million awarded this month by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation as part of the Allen Distinguished Investigator Program.

Retirement of Professor Ronald Gronsky

12/11/14 — Professor Ronald Gronsky will be stepping down from his position as Director of the Global Engagement Office (GEO) at the end of December.

Berkeley’s RISC-V wants to be free

12/10/14 EE Journal — EECS professor David Patterson and his graduate assistants are promoting their open-source RISC-V microprocessor instruction set as the go-to computer teaching tool, a CPU architecture for everything from SoC to IoT.

pulse oximeter sensor composed of all-organic optoelectronics

Organic electronics could lead to cheap, wearable medical sensors

12/10/14 — EECS associate professor Ana Arias is leading a team of researchers creating a pulse oximeter using all organic materials instead of silicon. The advance could lead to cheap, flexible sensors that could be used like a Band-Aid.

Palo Alto schoolchildren practice computer coding

Gearing up for the Hour of Code

12/09/14 NBC Bay Area — To mark CS Education Week, Jessica Aguirre interviews EECS professor Dan Garcia about the Hour of Code. At Berkeley, CS Education Day on December 9 brings 500 local high school students to campus for a full day of activities related to computer science.

Got an earache? S.F. startup says a smartphone’s the cure

12/09/14 SFGate — CellScope, a San Francisco startup born in Dan Fletcher's bioengineering lab, believes that telemedicine's next frontier is buried under earwax. On Tuesday, the company started selling a device that transforms an iPhone into an ear-viewing otoscope.

A forged steel wrench side by side with a 3D-printed plastic wrench

Teaching design innovation

12/08/14 — The Jacobs Institute is supporting five design courses in spring 2015, ranging from a course on sketching for designers, to an interactive seating design competition, to a new lower-division engineering course in which students will gain hands-on and simulated experience with a wide range of manufacturing processes.

Design Note: Björn Hartmann on design, teamwork and expertise

12/08/14 berkeleyByte — In an interview with the student-run berkeleyByte design blog, Björn Hartmann of EECS and the Jacobs Institute discusses what led him to human-computer interaction, where he thinks design education is heading, and the importance of interdisciplinarity.

Smithsonian creates first-ever 3-D presidential portrait

12/04/14 Smithsonian Institution — EECS alumnus Paul Debevec and a team of 3-D imaging specialists led by the Smithsonian Institution created the first 3-D presidential portrait for Barack Obama, assembling a high-speed system with eight cameras and 50 LED lights at the White House to capture the president's facial features in detail.

Students at Emerson Elementary School with tutors from the LEARNS Program

Cal students make crowd-funding site for Berkeley schools

12/02/14 Berkeleyside — A crowdfunding website, build by Berkeley Engineering computer science students from the Blueprint club, is helping teachers in the Berkeley public schools raise money for everything from books to robotics kits.

Emmunify team member Jessica Watterson in New Delhi with an outreach worker to conduct a usability test.

Project uses tech to help boost vaccination rates in India

12/02/14 — UC Berkeley students from public health and EECS are creating a new tool to store patient vaccination records on a portable chip, which could soon make it far easier for children in developing nations to get life-saving vaccines.