News

Making furniture from fungi

12/16/15 Scientific American — For three years, doctoral mechanical engineering student Sonia Travaglini has been studying inventor Phil Ross's mushroom composite as a sustainable alternative to wood, plastic and other materials.

Three scientists elected to National Academy of Inventors

12/15/15 — The National Academy of Inventors has elected three UC Berkeley faculty members to its ranks in honor of their innovation and creativity leading to patented inventions that have made a tangible impact on society. The new members include Chenming Hu, an EECS professor in the graduate school, and Paul Wright, the A. Martin Berlin Chair in Mechanical Engineering.

Microscopic images of conventional and bidirectional freeze-casting

The artificial materials that came in from the cold

12/15/15 Berkeley Lab — Researchers led by Robert Ritchie, professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and engineering, have developed a freeze-casting technique that enables them to design and create strong, tough and lightweight materials comparable to bones, teeth, shells and wood.

Tech titans create nonprofit to develop artificial intelligence

12/15/15 Bloomberg Business — A group of prominent Silicon Valley entrepreneurs has established a nonprofit organization to develop "digital intelligence" that will benefit humanity. “This collection of people is stunning,” said EECS professor and company adviser Pieter Abbeel, who said he expects the company's research and ideas to be “impressive and surprising.”

Prynt’s instant photo-printer and color photos

Polaroids for the smartphone set, with a video twist

12/09/15 — Prynt, a San Francisco-based startup founded by two graduates of a Berkeley Engineering entrepreneurship program, is bringing instant print photography to smartphones.

Roundtable tackles issues facing women in tech

12/07/15 — The lack of women in technology-related positions might seem like an overwhelming challenge. But that didn't stop a group of motivated women engineers, data scientists and senior tech managers from taking steps to tackle the problem in a summit held at Berkeley earlier this fall.

"Average" photos from hogh school yearbooks through the decades

Evolution of the (forced) smile

12/04/15 MIT Technology Review — Mining a vast database of high-school yearbook photos, EECS Ph.D. candidate Shiry Ginosar and her team used a machine-vision algorithm to reveal the change in hairstyles, clothing and even smiles over the past century.

Cambridge launches new center to study AI and the future of intelligence

12/04/15 Phys.org — The University of Cambridge is establishing a new interdisciplinary research center to address technical, practical and philosophical questions related to artificial intelligence, thanks to a landmark grant of £10 million from the Leverhulme Trust. EECS professor Stuart Russell, a leading AI researcher at Berkeley Engineering, will collaborate on the project.

Dan Fletcher named to Foreign Policy’s 2015 Global Thinkers list

12/03/15 Foreign Policy — Bioengineering professor Daniel Fletcher has been named a top innovator of 2015 by Foreign Policy magazine for his development of the CellScope Loa, a 3D-printed plastic base that turns a cell phone into a disease-finding video microscope.

Berkeley, lab and Tsinghua partner on energy and climate

12/02/15 — The Berkeley Energy & Climate Institute, led by mechanical engineering professor Paul Wright, is partnering with Berkeley Lab and Tsinghua University to form the Berkeley Tsinghua Joint Research Center on Energy and Climate Change, which aims to develop scientifically based clean energy solutions.

AMP Lab: Solving big data’s biggest problems

12/02/15 Berkeley Research — The AMP Lab, launched in 2011 by Michael Franklin and colleagues in computer science, has already had an outsized impact on industry, from battling cancer to getting an answer from Siri.

Awarded works at 3D Printing Designathon

3D printed assistive technology gets boost from UC Berkeley designathon

12/01/15 3Dprint.com — Several Berkeley engineering and design organizations held a 3D Printing Designathon for assistive technology at Sutardja Dai Hall on Nov. 14-15 commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Schematic of a laser beam energizing a monolayer semiconductor

Coming to a monitor near you: a defect-free, molecule-thick film

11/30/15 — A team of research engineers at UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab, led by EECS professor Ali Javey, has discovered a simple way to fix defects in atomically thin monolayer semiconductors using an organic superacid, opening the door to transparent LED displays, nanoscale transistors and more.

Russell wins technology policy award for AI work

11/30/15 World Technology Network — EECS professor Stuart Russell, a leading thinker in the field of artificial intelligence, has won the 2015 World Technology Award in the area of Policy. Other finalists for the award included Pope Francis and economist and author Thomas Piketty.

Google picks Diane Greene to expand its cloud business

11/23/15 NY Times — Google, playing catch-up in the booming cloud computing market, has named VMware co-founder Diane Greene (M.S.'88 EECS), a respected Silicon Valley entrepreneur and technologist, to head its cloud business that caters to companies.

James Demmel among 3 new AAAS fellows

11/23/15 — Three UC Berkeley faculty members are among 347 new fellows named to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, including James Demmel, professor of mathematics and of computer sciences, who was cited for his distinguished contributions to the theory and practice of numerical linear algebra.

Seeking data wisdom

11/23/15 Berkeley Research — Science and engineering have a way of turning what seems like fantasy into reality - like "mind reading," or genetic organ formation, two promising research areas that rely on a powerful interlocking of science, computation and statistics that EECS and statistics professor Bin Yu calls "data wisdom."

Berkeley Engineering team wins $10,000 for cloud-storage innovation

11/23/15 Daily Californian — The EECS graduate student duo of Tae Joon Seok and Sangyoon Han has come away with $10,000 after winning third place in a national competition among collegiate inventors for their cloud-technology innovation, called the Silicon Waveguide Array Photonic Switch.

The superior stethoscope

11/20/15 Time — The Eko Core smart stethoscope, developed by CEO Connor Landgraf (B.S'13, M.Eng'14 BioE) and his team at Eko Devices, has been named one of the 25 best inventions of 2015 by Time magazine.

Engineering student Akol Kuan high-fives sixth-graders at Beacon Day School

Of war, water and working to fix South Sudan

11/18/15 — Civil engineering undergrad Akol Kuan brought tales of his native South Sudan to Oakland's Beacon Day School, where sixth graders had just finished reading A Long Walk to Water, a novel that follows the hardships and heartbreaks of two Sudanese 11-year-olds.