News

Lee Fleming, Coleman Fung and Dean Shankar Sastry

Fung Institute celebrates five-year anniversary

10/24/16 — Lee Fleming, faculty director of the Fung Institute for Engineering Leadership, reflects on the institute’s first five years and looks ahead as the M.Eng. program grows and moves into new offices in Shires Hall.

Building the Berkeley Hyperloop

10/24/16 — Berkeley Hyperloop, currently crowdfunding for a January 2017 launch, is taking on an ambitious design challenge — and it’s part of a rich ecosystem of Berkeley students applying classroom learning and hands-on design skills to real-world challenges.

THIMBY team members in the tiny house they constructed for a statewide competition.

A grand tiny house

10/24/16 — A team of Berkeley students recently designed and built a tiny house for a statewide competition encouraging alternative and environmentally sustainable housing.

The world according to Dot

10/24/16 — A team of undergraduates has found early success with a company that builds beacons to make the Internet of Things more intuitive.

Wildfire management vs. suppression benefits forest and watershed

10/24/16 — An unprecedented 40-year experiment in Yosemite National Park, led by a team of Berkeley civil and environmental engineers, strongly supports the idea that managing fire, rather than suppressing it, makes wilderness areas more resilient to fire, with the added benefit of increased water availability and resistance to drought.

NSF awards $3 million grant to development engineering program

10/20/16 — The National Science Foundation grant will support graduate students working to find innovative solutions to food, energy and water challenges in developing countries.

Spring 2017 Commencement

10/11/16 Berkeley Engineering Commencement — Congratulations on your upcoming graduation! Celebrate a job well done at commencement on Tuesday, May 16, at the Hearst Greek Theatre, UC Berkeley.

Huawei puts $1M into AI research partnership with UC Berkeley

10/11/16 TechCrunch — China's Huawei on Tuesday announced a $1 million partnership between its Noah's Ark Laboratory and the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) Lab to perform basic research into machine learning, computer vision and other areas of artificial intelligence.

Ali Javey and graduate student Sujay Desai with a vacuum probe station

Smallest. Transistor. Ever.

10/10/16 — For more than a decade, engineers have been racing to shrink the size of components in integrated circuits. Now, a research team led by EECS professor Ali Javey has surpassed a theoretical limit of physics and created the smallest transistor reported to date.

Jacobs Design Conversations: Elizabeth Gerber

10/10/16 Jacobs Institute — Elizabeth Gerber from Northwestern University discusses "Understanding and Designing for Collective Innovation." October 13, Noon-1 p.m., 310 Jacobs Hall

Berkeley research team and their autonomous car

Berkeley team recognized for autonomous car research

10/05/16 — ME professors Francesco Borrelli and Karl Hedrick, Ph.D. student Ashwin Carvalho, and Associate Director for Self-Driving Vehicle Development Chan Kyu Lee were in attendance for the U.S. Department of Transportation's announcement of a new policy on Automated Vehicle Development.

Drawing of rural well-water treatment system

Berkeley startup helps people find out what they’re drinking

10/04/16 California magazine — SimpleWater, launched by a team of Berkeley engineers and entrepreneurs, offers a water-testing and product-recommendation service called Tap Score that helps users of private wells learn about and treat potential contaminants in their drinking water.

$3.4 million PEER study to quantify seismic performance of retrofitted homes

10/04/16 PEER — The California Earthquake Authority has awarded a $3.4 million, 3.5-year research contract to the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center for a project to evaluate the effectiveness of seismic retrofitting on single family wood-frame buildings.

Dubon named to UC Davis chancellor search committee

10/04/16 University of California — MSE professor Oscar Dubon, Berkeley Engineering's associate dean for equity and inclusion and student affairs, has been named by UC President Janet Napolitano to join an advisory committee helping in the international search for a new chancellor to lead UC Davis.

3 from EECS win CITRIS Athena Awards

09/29/16 CITRIS — EECS professors Tsu-Jae King Liu and Claire Tomlin, and alumna Vidya Ganapati (M.S.'12, Ph.D.'15), are among the inaugural winners of the CITRIS Athena Awards, recognizing the accomplishments of technology leaders and organizations fostering interest in computer science for the next generation of women and girls.

Photo illustration of woman in technology

Women in Tech conference Oct. 5

09/29/16 — "Women in Technology: Recognizing Leaders, Inspiring the Next Generation," a daylong symposium on diversity in the tech sector, on Wednesday, Oct. 5 in Banatao Auditorium.

SCET alum builds the supermarket of the future

09/27/16 Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology — SCET alum Chai Mishra believes his new food delivery service, Movebutter, will not only change the way we shop for food, but will make the entire food value chain more affordable, equitable and ethical.

A sinking skyscraper and a deepening dispute

09/23/16 New York Times — The sinking and leaning Millennium Tower in San Francisco is highlighting the risks posed by San Francisco's relatively unfettered rash of skyscraper-building, both because of the quality of the soil and the city's position between two major earthquake faults. "This is the first sentinel telling us maybe we should be a little more careful," says civil engineering professor Nicholas Sitar.

Jitendra Malik of UC Berkeley and Fei-Fei Li of Stanford

A lesson of Tesla crashes? Computer vision can’t do it all yet

09/21/16 New York Times — EECS department chair Jitendra Malik, a researcher in computer vision for three decades, doesn't own a Tesla, but he has advice for people who do. “Knowing what I know about computer vision,” he said, “I wouldn't take my hands off the steering wheel.”

Fiona Doyle wins SME metallurgy award

09/21/16 — MSE professor Fiona Doyle, dean of the Graduate Division, has been selected by the Society for Mining, Metallurgy & Exploration as the 2016 recipient of the Milton E. Wadsworth Award, which recognizes distinguished contributions that advance understanding of the science and technology of non-ferrous chemical metallurgy.