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David Patterson

Patterson wins Turing Award

03/21/18 — Berkeley computing pioneer David Patterson has won the A.M. Turing Award, considered the Nobel prize of computing, for his work on reduced instruction set computer microprocessors. The award, announced Wednesday by the Association for Computing Machinery, comes with a $1 million prize, which Patterson will share with co-winner John Hennessy.
Berkeley Engineering

Grad program rankings edge still higher

03/19/18 — In the latest U.S. News & World Report rankings of graduate programs, Berkeley Engineering and its departments held steady or moved higher in all categories, including electrical engineering joining CEE as the top-ranked program in the nation.
John DeNero

John DeNero honored for distinguished teaching

03/19/18 — EECS professor John DeNero has been named a winner of Berkeley's Distinguished Teaching Award, one of the university's highest honors. DeNero uses technology and teaching assistants to scale popular computer and data science courses without losing academic rigor. His work was recently featured in Berkeley Engineer magazine.
Barbara Simons

Q&A with Barbara Simons

03/16/18 — Barbara Simons, a founding member of Women in Computer Science and Engineering (which is celebrating its 40th anniversary), has been sounding the alarm about the potential pitfalls of internet and electronic voting for more than a decade.
Traffic jam on a Los Angeles freeway

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.
white fiber mat containing a stable enzyme that can break down a toxic chemical

Protein ‘mat’ can soak up pollution

03/15/18 — Berkeley researchers led by Ting Xu, professor of materials science and engineering and chemistry, have found a unique way to keep proteins active in synthetic environments, using this breakthrough technology to create fiber mats that can trap chemical pollution.
Postdoc Amal El-Ghazaly with EECS professor Jeffrey Bokor

California Alliance improving pipeline to the professoriate

03/13/18 — Women and underrepresented minorities in STEM fields, like EECS postdoc Amal El-Ghazaly, are moving into the pipeline for coveted faculty positions thanks to a creative coalition of four elite universities, led by UC Berkeley.
Marissa Louie with several of her plush friends

The hidden social mission behind a trending toy

03/13/18 — A herd of stuffed animals with mix-and-match parts paid a visit to a Sutardja Center classroom to help students learn how they can design products to have a social impact - a subject dear to the heart of Animoodles CEO (and industrial engineering alumna) Marissa Louie.
Roads dividing in a forest

New machine learning method sees the forests and the trees

03/06/18 Berkeley Lab — In an effort to teach computers to guide science, researchers at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley have come up with a novel machine learning method, which they call "iterative Random Forests," that enables scientists to derive insights from systems of previously intractable complexity in record time.
Brown fat tissue from a mouse

Brown fat flexes its muscle to burn energy — and calories

03/06/18 — Scientists at the UC Berkeley, including bioengineering professor Sanjay Kumar, have discovered that the same kind of fat cells that help newborn babies regulate their body temperature could be a target for weight-loss drugs in adults.
Robotic surgical arm picking up grains of rice from a moving platform

How flight simulation tech can help turn robots into surgeons

03/02/18 Wired — Robotics researchers from Berkeley's AUTOLab, led by IEOR and EECS professor Ken Goldberg, have built a heaving robotic platform - mimicking the motion of a breathing, heart-beating human patient - to help develop algorithms that robotic surgical assistants can use to guide their cutting.
Graphic illustrating how the brain

Retraining the brain’s vision center to take action

03/01/18 — Neuroscientists, including Berkeley EECS professor Jose Carmena, have demonstrated the astounding flexibility of the brain by training neurons that normally process input from the eyes to develop new skills, in this case, to control a computer-generated tone.
Grace O

Mechanical engineering to aid back surgery

02/28/18 Berkeley Research — Lower back pain is not as common as the common cold, but it's close, and treating it surgically comes with significant risk. Grace O'Connell, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, is heading a project aimed at predicting which patients are most vulnerable to secondary fractures or disc degeneration following spinal fusion surgery.
Ion Stoica with members of the RISELab team

$10 million award for RISELab’s AI research

02/27/18 — Berkeley's RISELab, led by EECS professor Ion Stoica, has received an Expeditions in Computing award from the National Science Foundation, providing $10 million in funding over five years to enable game-changing advances in real-time decision making technologies.
Teresa Meng

An engineer’s guide to sexism

02/23/18 EE Times — It's not often a female engineer steps before hundreds of male colleagues at a major conference and gives a tutorial on the institutional sexism in their profession. But that's what happened at this month's International Solid State Circuits Conference, where Berkeley alum Teresa Meng (M.S.'84, Ph.D.'88 EECS), Stanford professor and Atheros Communications co-founder, addressed “Winning the game in a male-dominated industry.”
Warning flag with skull and crossbones

Why AI researchers should be more paranoid

02/23/18 Wired — A new report highlights risks of artificial intelligence, such as malicious self-driving cars or assassin robots. EECS professor Ion Stoica, who recently surveyed technical challenges in AI, said Berkeley is already trying to expose students flocking to the field to concerns over AI safety and security.
Award winners Lane Martin and Arvind Dasgupta with EH&S Director Patrick Goff and Vice Chancellor for Research Randy Katz

Prometheus Group honored for lab safety

02/23/18 — The Prometheus Group, headed by materials science and engineering professor Lane Martin, has won UC Berkeley's grand prize for lab safety for the team's commitment to safe practices in their work on functional complex-oxide thin-film materials.
Pandemic Resiliency team members Suyasha Gupta, Jasodhara Raj and Arnaud Bard de Coutance

Designing resiliency for the pandemic flu

02/23/18 Fung Institute — For their capstone project at the Fung Institute, a trio of master of engineering students are working on a software solution to combat the inefficiencies that currently impede efforts to report and track outbreaks of influenza.