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A new design for engineering education

06/24/13 Daily Californian — In an op-ed article, Dean Shankar Sastry and Executive Associate Dean Fiona Doyle write about how a recent $20 million gift from the Jacobs Foundation will pave the way for a complete reinvention of engineering education at Berkeley, providing all students - especially undergraduates - with opportunities to design and build early and often.

Spark, born in Berkeley’s AMPLab, ‘rewrites future of big data’

06/21/13 Wired — Teaming with a particularly ambitious group of computer scientists from UC Berkeley, Yahoo is installing a new data crunching platform called Spark, which is about 100 times faster than the mighty Hadoop - an open source software creation that underpins a Who's Who of the internet, including Facebook and Twitter - and could very well replace Hadoop as the stuff that fuels the modern web.

Sastry reappointed to second term as dean of engineering

06/20/13 — S. Shankar Sastry has accepted reappointment as dean of the College of Engineering, effective July 1, 2013, the campus has announced. Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost George Breslauer said Sastry's "accomplishments as a leader have been exemplary, as have his research, scholarship, and professional reputation."

Student hacker wins award for wearing a ‘white hat’

06/19/13 Los Angeles Times — Berkeley computer science junior Skyler Rojas has been awarded $2000 by the Information Systems Security Association at the Cornerstones of Trust conference for choosing a career in cybersecurity. Rojas, who is interning this summer at Symantec, says his dream job would be "penetration tester" - someone who works from the inside to find network vulnerabilities.

Yablonovitch elected to membership in Royal Society

06/19/13 Royal Society — Eli Yablonovitch, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, is one of two Berkeley scientists elected as 2013 foreign members of the United Kingdom's distinguished Royal Society, a fellowship of eminent scientists, engineers and technologists.

$20 million gift launches design institute

06/18/13 — I just returned from Chicago, where I had the great honor of taking the stage with President Bill Clinton and Dr. Paul Jacobs, chairman and CEO of Qualcomm and chair of our advisory board, as Paul announced a $20 million commitment that he and his wife, Stacy, are making to launch an Institute of Design Innovation here in the college.

From problem to prototype

06/18/13 — For bioengineering undergraduate students Nasim Barzanian, Sakthivel Nagaraj, Neil Ray and Jeffrey Yang, inspiration took the form of a ballpoint pen, which sparked their development of an innovative technology for laparoscopic surgery. The student team formed during a bioengineering course, which partnered undergraduates with a physician to address a real clinical challenge, providing in-depth experience with the formal engineering design process.

Now and forever Berkeley Engineers

06/18/13 — Berkeley Engineering held its 144th Commencement on Sunday, May 19, at the Hearst Greek Theatre. Berkeley Engineer Dan Mote, president-elect of the National Academy of Engineering, urged undergrads to seek greatness "at the edges." DARPA director Arati Prabhakar delivered the commencement address to Ph.D. and master's candidates. Another Berkeley Engineer, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, gave the university-wide commencement address. Of all his accomplishments, Wozniak said his proudest moment, still, was the day he graduated from Berkeley.

Manufacturing energy

06/18/13 — Lindsay Miller (Ph.D'12 ME) opted to pursue graduate studies at Berkeley because of the university's reputation for groundbreaking alternative energy research and its multidisciplinary approach. As a post-doc in Paul Wright's lab, she became intrigued by the process of turning a prototype into a device ready for real-world application. “My research was trying to make wireless sensor nodes that never die - batteries that can be recharged infinitely by the energy available in the environment,” says Miller.

Cal EECS professor receives prestigious international award

06/13/13 Contra Costa Times — Electrical engineering and computer science professor Eli Yablonovitch is one of two recipients of the 2012 Harvey Prize, a prestigious international award for his "pioneering discoveries in photonics, optoelectronics, and semiconductors."

Small gadgets that make you healthier

06/12/13 Scientific American — A new movement that combines traditional medical record keeping and public health surveillance with data mining and mobile phone technologies holds great promise for patients and researchers alike. Steven DeMello, director of health care at CITRIS, says mobile diagnosis and surveillance could help blunt the impact of changing demographic trends.

Hyundai Center of Excellence dedicated at UC Berkeley

06/12/13 — The Hyundai Center of Excellence in Integrated Vehicle Safety Systems and Control was dedicated on Wednesday at Berkeley's Hesse Hall. Engineers from Hyundai and Berkeley will collaborate “to design the car of the future,” said Dean Shankar Sastry.

Computer memory can be read with a flash of light

06/11/13 Nature — Modern computer memory technologies come with a trade-off between speed and retention time. But a prototype memory device, co-developed by Berkeley Engineering materials scientist Ramamoorthy Ramesh, combines speed, endurance and low power consumption by uniting electronic storage with a readout based on the physics that powers solar panels.

Berkeley’s little legged robots grow wings and tails

06/05/13 IEEE Spectrum — Berkeley Engineering students have been exploring what you can do when you give ground robots bio-inspired accessories, and they've got some little legged robots doing cool new stuff thanks to the addition of wings and tails.

Academic-industrial team to uncover innovations in systems engineering

05/30/13 iCyPhy — UC Berkeley has partnered with Caltech, IBM and United Technologies Corp. to launch Industrial Cyber Physical Systems (iCyPhy), a Berkeley-based research consortium that will identify and develop new engineering techniques to make it easier to successfully build products and services that combine complex software, hardware and mechanical components.

Bolts along Bay Bridge bike path fail

05/29/13 San Francisco Chronicle — Civil engineering professor Bob Bea comments on yet another problem with bolts on the new span of the San Francisco Bay Bridge, currently under construction: "This is not pretty. … If we are being challenged by straightforward, simple things, it raises serious questions about what we've done on complex situations."

Engineers see a path out of green card limbo

05/23/13 New York Times — In a video and story, foreign engineering graduate students at U.C. Berkeley reflect on how immigration reform could make it easier for highly skilled workers like them to stay in the United States.

How password strength meters can improve security

05/20/13 Information Week — Password strength meters aren't just window dressing, but can result in stronger passwords when users are forced to change "important" accounts, according to a new study by UC Berkeley researcher Serge Egelman and colleagues at the University of British Columbia and Microsoft Research.

Corrosion plagues new Bay Bridge span

05/20/13 Sacramento Bee — A comprehensive investigation by the Sacramento Bee of constructions problems on the new Bay Bridge quotes Berkeley materials science & engineering professor Thomas Devine as saying Caltrans used the wrong tests for corrosion, resulting in "essentially useless" findings. He called the agency's research "woefully inadequate" and "meaningless" for detecting "environmentally assisted cracking."