News

Photo illustration: Brita filter pitcher in forest

Nature’s Brita filters

04/19/17 Salon — CEE professor Ashok Gadgil, co-lead for the Berkeley Lab's Water-Energy Initiative, talks about engineering new solutions to solve the water crisis using simple, cheap and abundant ingredients, like wood, sunlight, even human waste.

Image alchemist Alexei Efros wins ACM computing prize

04/18/17 ACM — The Association for Computing Machinery has awarded its 2016 Prize in Computing to EECS professor Alexei Efros "for groundbreaking data-driven approaches to computer graphics and computer vision."

Worker examining the damaged Oroville Dam spillway

Serious design, construction and maintenance defects doomed Oroville Dam, report says

04/18/17 LA Times — In the first major assessment of the Oroville Dam spillway failure in February, civil engineering professor emeritus Robert Bea, co-founder of Berkeley's Center for Catastrophic Risk Analysis, has concluded that design and construction flaws, as well as maintenance errors, were to blame.

Engineering student team readies competition house

04/17/17 ASCE — A group led by Berkeley civil engineering students will take an innovative, zero net energy house into a Denver competition this fall, organized by the U.S. Department of Energy.

The most robot-proof job of them all

04/14/17 Marketplace — EECS assistant Professor Anca Dragan talks with David Brancaccio about how her native Romania gave her a leg up on studying human-robot interactions, and on helping develop those skills for more would-be scientists.

An interstellar journey

04/13/17 — A group of Berkeley students is developing the tools and technologies for humanity's next big step - exploring the deep reaches of space.

Katherine Yelick, Hari Balakrishnan, Paul Jacobs and Andrea Goldsmith

Katherine Yelick, 3 alumni named AAAS fellows

04/12/17 AAAS — EECS professor Katherine Yelick is one of 228 newly elected fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation's oldest learned societies. Also honored in the 2017 class are Berkeley Engineering alumni Hari Balakrishnan, Andrea Goldsmith and Paul Jacobs.

Shoe-string theory

04/12/17 — A new study by Berkeley mechanical engineers finally shows why shoelaces keep coming untied.

Using brain implants to tune the mind

04/07/17 Kavli Foundation — EECS and neuroscience professor Jose Carmena joined a discussion of how the federally funded BRAIN Initiative could advance brain implants as treatment for a variety of illnesses and disorders, including epilepsy, depression, Alzheimer's and PTSD.

NSF’s $11M to fund natural hazards SimCenter

04/05/17 CITRIS — Structural engineering professor Stephen Mahin will lead a new center for computational modeling and simulation of the effects of natural hazards on the built environment, supported by a five-year, $10.9-million grant from the National Science Foundation.

Working on AR that will help us talk to robots

04/05/17 Wareable — Allen Yang, head of the Center for Augmented Cognition, discusses the burgeoning augmented and virtual reality programs at UC Berkeley, including efforts to build a multidisciplinary VR classroom - a sort of 21st century computer lab.

Students performing an exercise in Dan Garcia

Learning to think like a computer

04/04/17 New York Times — Computer science professor Daniel Garcia explains an all-important concept in computer science - abstraction - in terms of milkshakes. It's part of a hot trend in education: Demystifying the "magic" of computers and computational thinking.

Yuh-Jzer Joung, Liang-gee Chen and S. Shankar Sastry

Taiwan’s Science and Technology Minister Chen visits UC Berkeley

04/03/17 — A delegation led by Taiwan's new minister of science and technology, Liang-gee Chen, learned about entrepreneurial activity at UC Berkeley during an April 3 visit hosted by the Dado and Maria Banatao Center for Global Learning and Outreach from Berkeley Engineering (GLOBE).

Award presenter Hari Balakrishnan of MIT and honorees Rodrigo Fonseca, George Porter and Ion Stoica

X-Trace paper stands the Test of Time

04/03/17 UCSD — A paper on network tracing, authored a decade ago by five Berkeley Engineering grad students and professors, has won the 2017 NSDI Test of Time Award. Honored for their influential paper were former grad students Rodrigo Fonseca and George Porter (now CS professors at Brown University and UCSD, respectively) and EECS professors Ion Stoica, Randy Katz and Scott Shenker.

Students on a Tikkun Olam Makeover team that created a special glove that will allow a man who has little use of his hands to communicate with his computer.

Cal students pull a marathon to engineer disability solutions

03/23/17 Jewish News of Northern California — Fueled by energy drinks, adrenaline and a strong sense of wanting to make the world better, 11 teams of Berkeley students spent last weekend at Jacobs Hall, working with people with disabilities to create devices that could improve their lives.

In a sample of blood, researchers probe for cancer clues

03/23/17 — Berkeley bioengineers, led by Amy Herr, have made an important step toward liquid biopsy technology, which could allow patients to monitor cancer therapy through a simple blood draw.

A superfast lane for self-driving cars?

03/22/17 Fortune — Imagine a future where self-driving cars zip beside interstates at 120 mph, with absolutely zero congestion. That future could exist as soon as 2050, according to grad students Baiyu Chen (B.S.'14 CEE, M.S.'15 CEE, M.S.'17 EECS) and Anthony Barrs, whose Hyperlane idea was awarded top prize and $50,000 at the Infrastructure Vision 2050 Challenge.

Tarek Zohdi, Distinguished Teaching Award winner

ME’s Tarek Zohdi wins 2017 DTA

03/21/17 Center for Teaching & Learning — Mechanical engineering professor Tarek Zohdi is one of five winners of this year's Distinguished Teaching Award, honored for "teaching that incites intellectual curiosity." Also selected was Khalid Kadir, who created the Engineering, the Environment and Society course.

Shell and Berkeley officials at signing ceremony

EBI signs partnership with Shell to fund energy tech research

03/15/17 — UC Berkeley's Energy Biosciences Institute has entered into a five-year, multimillion dollar research agreement with Shell International Exploration and Production Inc. to fund research that meets the growing demand for energy in ways that are economically, environmentally and socially responsible.

A “VAST” step forward in cybersecurity

03/15/17 Berkeley Research — Working closely with cybersecurity experts at Berkeley Lab, CS professor Vern Paxson and postdoc researcher Matthias Vallentin are developing VAST, a system to help forensic analysts pinpoint how much of an organization's computer network has been compromised - and where.