Alumni notes
11/01/13 — News and photos of Berkeley Engineering alumni from decades past.
News
Farewell
11/01/13 — Obituaries for Berkeley Engineering faculty and alumni
Cracked encryption? Back doors? Cellphone snooping may be easier than ever
10/31/13 NBC News — Computer science professor Vern Paxson weighs in on the National Security Agency's interception of wireless communications, noting that even modern encryption may have flaws if done incorrectly. He also worries about allegations that the NSA is vacuuming up information at a heretofore unimagined scale.
Researchers developing brain-controlled prosthetic devices
10/31/13 USA Today — Scientists at the UCSF-UC Berkeley Center for Neural Engineering and Prostheses are among many teams nationwide working on brain-machine interfaces, promising bionic limbs controlled by users' thoughts. "We're still very far from decoding thoughts," says Berkeley bioengineer Amy Orsborn of the CNEP team. "These devices are not for mind control. They're for providing new means of control for sensory processes."
Berkeley crowdfunding symposium produces international research agreement
10/23/13 — The first international agreement to share research data on crowdfunding - an increasingly popular financing model that allows entrepreneurs to raise capital using social media - was framed during an Oct. 17–18 symposium organized by the College of Engineering's Fung Institute for Engineering Leadership.
Luck, smarts lead from Uganda to UC Berkeley
10/22/13 San Francisco Chronicle — The amazing journey of Christopher Ategeka, who went from teenage orphan and human scarecrow in Uganda to mechanical engineer at UC Berkeley (two degrees down, one more in the works), winning honors and prizes, founding a nonprofit and a biotech company, even giving a TED talk.
Campus information security office works to stay ahead of hackers
10/18/13 Daily Californian — UC Berkeley's Information Security and Policy Office, aided by EECS graduate students and professors, is undergoing a three-year overhaul to strengthen the campus's online security.
A carbon map to development
10/15/13 Daily Californian — In a Daily Cal op-ed, Dean Shankar Sastry calls for an international roadmap for economic growth, job creation and poverty alleviation that also contributes to controlling greenhouse gas emissions.
Randy Schekman awarded 2013 Nobel Prize
10/07/13 — Randy W. Schekman, professor of molecular and cell biology, has won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his role in revealing the machinery that regulates proteins in our cells. He shares the prize with James E. Rothman of Yale University and Thomas C. Südhof of Stanford University.
Dean Sastry appointed to United Nations scientific advisory board
10/04/13 UNESCO — On Sept. 24, the first day of the UN General Assembly, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced his decision to create a Scientific Advisory Board to inform international decision-making on sustainable development. Dean S. Shankar Sastry will serve as one of two U.S. representatives on the 26-member board, which includes leading figures in the natural, social and human sciences. “We must strengthen the interface between science and policy,” said Ki-moon, “so that the latest scientific findings are reflected in our high-level policy discussions.” Ki-moon made the announcement during the inaugural meeting of the High Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development, a platform created to realize the vision adopted at the UN's Rio+20 conference in 2012. He has entrusted UNESCO's Director-General to establish the advisory board.
The talk that wasn’t
09/27/13 Scientific American — A story from the Heidelberg Laureate Forum about EECS professor emeritus Manuel Blum -- a scientist, a teacher, a human, and "a person with a genuine curiosity about everything."
Flood fate: What Colorado’s disaster can teach us
09/24/13 California Magazine blog — Trying to plan and prepare for the kind of disastrous flooding that recently inundated Boulder, Colo., is a futile effort, says UC Berkeley hydrologist and assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering Sally Thompson. "Rainfall events like that are simply off the charts,” she says.
Berkeley to house NSF-funded nanoscale microscope
09/20/13 QB3 — Researchers using a new tool in QB3-Berkeley's Biomolecular Nanotechnology Center will investigate matter on an unprecedented scale, thanks to a $2 million NSF grant for the purchase and installation of a new ORION Nanofab microscope.
Bike path flaws add millions to Bay Bridge bill
09/12/13 San Francisco Chronicle — Robert Bea, CEE professor emeritus, says design and construction errors in the new Bay Bridge's bike and pedestrian path, which have already cost $3.8 million to remediate, are "symptomatic of a systemic problem ... I think it's becoming clear that the required level of scrutiny and checking has been deficient."
Design: The new toolkit for teaching engineering
09/11/13 — While some educators debate the pros and cons of online learning, we think there's a far more pressing and promising innovation that we need to offer today's engineering students: Immersion in experiential design.
With Melt app, Shane Wey rediscovers the power of voice
09/11/13 — For some, the explosion of visual media and the Internet's transformation as a space dominated by images feels inevitable. But Shane Wey (B.S. '10 EECS) sees things differently. Bucking the digital visual trend, Wey cofounded Melt, an audio-based micro-blogging app that underscores the power of voice. Have a listen.
March of the ‘zombie vortices’
09/11/13 — A team led by Philip Marcus, a mechanical engineering professor and computational physicist, shows how variations in gas density lead to instability, which then generates the whirlpool-like vortices needed for stars to form. According to the researchers' models, the change in density is what triggers the violent birth of a new star, upending an otherwise stable dead zone of gas-or what Marcus calls ‘zombie vortices'
Cypriot BioE student receives HHMI award
09/11/13 — Elena Kassianidou left her home to come study in the United States seven years ago. Now pursuing a Ph.D. in bioengineering at Berkeley, she recently became the first student from Cyprus - and the first Berkeley-UCSF bioengineering student - to be awarded the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's (HHMI) prestigious International Predoctoral Fellowship.
Berkeley Engineering team builds lamp robot at hackathon
09/09/13 Daily Pennsylvanian — A reporter for the Daily Pennsylvanian student newspaper shadows four Berkeley Engineering students as they try repeat the Berkeley team's 2012 victory at the PennApps Hackathon, the largest such student-run event in the country.
Berkeley’s computer science major places first in new ranking
09/06/13 Daily Californian — UC Berkeley won the top spot for computer science majors' return on investment in a new ranking compiled by Affordable Colleges Online, surpassing second-place Stanford in the comparison pitting lifetime earnings against educational costs.