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Berkeley Engineering alum A.K. Pradeep mines the brain for marketers

11/17/10 San Francisco Chronicle — A.K. Pradeep (Ph.D.'88 EECS) is a neuromarketer: He studies the inner workings of the human brain to find out not how people react to an array of stimuli, but why. He advises companies of all kinds - from banking to pharmaceutical to grocery chains - on how the female brain is different from the male brain, and how the young brain is unlike an old brain.

Engineering with broad shoulders

11/04/10 — A key tenet of Berkeley Engineering is to educate leaders. To us, engineering leadership extends beyond simply creating new technologies and managing technology innovation. Truly transformative engineering leadership calls for a comprehensive understanding of the economic, legal, social and environmental implications of novel and emerging technologies and services in societal scale systems.

New Blum Center headquarters opens on north side

11/04/10 — With campus and national dignitaries on hand and a sunny Homecoming Friday as a backdrop, the doors of Richard C. Blum Hall officially opened on Friday, October 8. It was a big occasion to celebrate what one project architect called a "little jewel box" of a building, small in scale but grand in its historic origins and its lofty goals. The program it will house also bears the name of Richard C. Blum, Haas alumnus, UC Regent and global philanthropist who championed the center to mobilize Berkeley students and faculty against global poverty.

Flight delays cost more than just time

11/04/10 — Domestic flight delays put a $32.9 billion dent in the U.S. economy, and about half that cost is borne by airline passengers, according to a study led by UC Berkeley researchers and released last month. The comprehensive report analyzed flight delay data from 2007 to calculate the economic impact on both airlines and passengers, including the cost of lost demand and the collective impact of these costs on the U.S. economy. The report was commissioned by the Federal Aviation Administration to clarify key discrepancies in earlier studies.

The fine art of engineering restraint

11/04/10 — Amid the busy world of Massachusetts General Hospital, Dino Di Carlo (B.S.'02, Ph.D.'06 BioE) experienced a well-known but oft-forgotten truism: technologies need to be simple to have an impact. As a postdoc there, Di Carlo observed that complex diagnostic technologies used in complex biomedical experiments often exacerbated research challenges, resulting in higher data failure rates. Today, the young assistant professor teaches the art of engineering restraint to his bioengineering students at UCLA and employs it in his research.

Singapore launches new CREATE research center with UC Berkeley

10/20/10 Nan Yang Technological University — The National Research Foundation announced today the addition of two new research centers to the CREATE (Campus for Research Excellence And Technological Enterprise) program. UC Berkeley's program will conduct research on "Building Efficiency and Sustainability in the Tropics." Professor S. Shankar Sastry, dean of engineering at UC Berkeley, said, "The M3 (Measuring, Modelling and Mitigation) agenda for energy consumption of new and existing buildings represents an exciting fusion of some of the most novel emerging technologies."

Flight delays cost you $17B, cost U.S. $33B, UC Berkeley study shows

10/18/10 San Francisco Business Times — A study from UC Berkeley's Institute of Transportation Studies crunched numbers from 2007 for the Federal Aviation Administration for a report showing that domestic airline flight delays cost the U.S. economy some $32.9 billion a year, and passengers pay half that cost, or about $16.7 billion. Civil engineering professor Mark Hansen, lead researcher on the study, said it was the first time anyone had analyzed data this way, coming up with a direct cost.

UC researcher puts buildings through earthquakes

10/14/10 ABC News — It is an uncomfortable fact for Californians that most of the structures in which we live and work pre-date the latest earthquake building codes. So how will those buildings fare in the next big one and how can we best fix them? Wael Hassan's dissertation at UC Berkeley looks at older forms of structural engineering to see how they will hold in a major earthquake. (Video)

Bionic legs allow paraplegics to get up and walk

10/11/10 TIME Magazine — A robotic exoskeleton called eLEGS enables people who have been paralyzed below the waist to walk again. The technology, the latest in a line of "human augmentation robotics systems" that Berkeley Bionics has created with the Robotics and Human Engineering Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, is geared toward consumers -- the 6 million or so paraplegics in the U.S. who are bound to wheelchairs.

Overestimate fueled state’s landmark diesel law

10/08/10 San Francisco Chronicle — California grossly miscalculated pollution levels in a scientific analysis used to toughen the state's clean-air standards, and scientists have spent the past several months revising data and planning a significant weakening of the landmark regulation. The problem, and the revised counting method, came to light after Robert Harley, a UC Berkeley professor of environmental engineering, and a colleague at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory did their own evaluation, which was published in December in the journal Atmospheric Environment. Harley found that the board's estimates of nitrous oxide were too high by a factor of 4.5 and its estimate of particulate matter was off by a factor of 3.1, an extraordinarily high amount to be off scientifically. "The difference is large enough that it changes policy," Harley said.

Educating transformational leaders

10/05/10 — Homecoming has a special significance for us this year, as we kick off the weekend on Friday, October 8, with the grand opening of Blum Hall. This dedication represents not only the expansion and renovation of the historic Naval Architecture Building. It is also the culmination of a five-year construction effort that has transformed the north side of campus and provided a new home for the Richard C. Blum Center for Developing Economies.

Teachers at the top of their game

10/05/10 — Berkeley faculty know their material. Yet to teach it so that students not only understand but find inspiration and wonder in it, takes special talent and dedication. In April, civil and environmental engineering professor Juan Pestana-Nascimento and associate professor Dan Klein of electrical engineering and computer sciences joined two other faculty members elsewhere on campus in receiving the Berkeley 2010 Distinguished Teaching Award. In the award's 51-year history, only 236 faculty have received it, among the thousands who have taught Berkeley courses.

Think globally, surf locally

10/05/10 — Modern surfboards are made with polyurethane foam, fiberglass and epoxy resin, decidedly unromantic and toxic petrochemicals that can harm workers and the environment during manufacture, then languish in landfills at the end of their life. Many manufacturers are making surfboards greener by switching to natural materials. They're doing the right thing, right? Not necessarily, says 26-year-old Tobias Schultz (M.S.'10 ME), a lightly tanned, blond-ponytailed Santa Cruz native who just graduated with his mechanical engineering master's and a certificate in Engineering and Business for Sustainability. He is also the author of an extensive study on the carbon footprint of the surfing lifestyle.

She paints for power

10/05/10 — What will power our next-generation gizmos? The microdevices, nanodevices and picodevices of the future? Our prediction: the Christine Ho battery. As an MSE graduate student, Ho (B.S.'05, M.S.'07, Ph.D.'10 MSE) developed a novel microbattery technology that promises to not only power the smallest of smart devices but also accelerate a variety of energy applications, from better home energy monitoring systems to large-scale energy storage solutions for wind and solar farms.

UC Berkeley professor James Demmel receives 2010 IEEE Computer Society Sidney Fernbach Award

10/01/10 PRWeb — James Demmel, UC Berkeley professor of mathematics and of computer sciences, has been named the recipient of the 2010 IEEE Computer Society Sidney Fernbach Award for his contributions to high-performance linear algebra software. The software he has helped develop is used by hundreds of sites worldwide, including all U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories, NASA research laboratories, many universities, and companies in the aerospace, environmental, pharmaceutical and other industries.

Experience keeps UC Berkeley’s Robert Bea in the hot spotlight

09/27/10 San Jose Mercury News — Shuttered in his home office, Robert Bea is plugging away at a report that will, once again, make him a target. The UC Berkeley engineering professor is investigating, with a group he assembled, the April explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico. The blast killed 11 workers and created the largest oil spill in U.S. history. The report, due in December, likely will place blame on oil giant BP, which leased the platform, and the facility's operator, Transocean. And it is likely to bring a volley of public-relations cannonballs to Bea's front door, as did his criticism of Army Corps of Engineers following the failure of the levees in Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005. But despite the stress, health problems and angst, Bea is not apologizing.

Silent and deadly: Smoke from cooking stoves kills poor people

09/23/10 The Economist — The appeal of a stove that produces more heat, more cleanly and with less fuel is clear. But Kirk Smith, a stove specialist at UC Berkeley, points out that most efforts to promote cleaner stoves have flopped. Too much emphasis has gone on technology and talking to people at the top, too little to consulting the women who actually do the cooking. Another lesson of past failures, says UC Berkeley professor Daniel Kammen, who runs the World Bank's clean-energy programs, is the need for better data about how stoves are actually used

UK animators use CellScope to film smallest stop-motion animation ever

09/20/10 Popular Science — Using a Nokia N8 smartphone and a CellScope -- developed by Berkeley Engineering's Daniel Fletcher and winner of a PopSci Best of What's New award in 2008 -- the team behind the Wallace & Gromit series has made the world's smallest stop-motion animation film. Nokia commissioned the film in celebration of CellScope's potential to improve medicine in the developing world. The film features a 0.35-inch-tall Dot as she runs through an obstacle course made of British currency and rides a bumblebee.

PG&E exceeded its own maximum pressure standard on San Bruno pipeline

09/17/10 San Jose Mercury News — Federal investigators have determined that the natural gas in the pipeline that exploded in San Bruno was running at a higher pressure than the maximum limit PG&E has told the public it maintained. "Between 375 and 400 psi still sounds safe, but it's all premised on a defect-free line," said Bob Bea, a professor of engineering at UC Berkeley with extensive pipeline experience. "Here's where the demands on the pipeline from internal pressure have to be matched with a set of capacity questions. Was the steel brittle? Did we have a combination of corrosion and fatigue?"