News

Tapping the West’s water

09/12/11 — Two years ago David Sedlak, UC Berkeley professor of civil and environmental engineering, was invited to speak at the Nobel Conference in Minnesota about his area of expertise: urban water systems. Seeing an opportunity to tell the story of the water delivery networks that are falling apart under our feet, Sedlak did more than deliver a talk describing the problem. He came up with an idea to help solve it.

In vino veritas

09/12/11 — As any wine-sipping oenophile knows, the quality of a wine is influenced, among other things, by the geography, geology and climate of the specific vineyard in which the grapes are grown. The French even have a word for it - terroir - which can be loosely translated as “a sense of place.” For Berkeley Engineering alum Jason Mikami, whose boutique winery produces a handcrafted Zinfandel wine using grapes from his family's estate, the terroir of the vineyard is not only evident in his wines, but also in his own journey as a winemaker.

The World Trade Center: Work of genius, undone by the unthinkable

09/10/11 New Jersey Star-Ledger — With a career spanning five decades, UC Berkeley alumnus Leslie Robertson was the lead structural engineer of the World Trade Center, responsible for conceiving and executing the design and overseeing the work of engineers, draftsmen and technicians that allowed the towers to rise higher than any building before them. Ten years after the buildings were lost, he quietly carries with him an unresolved anguish. "I was ready to pack my bags, not because I felt I let anybody down, but simply due to the suffering associated with my work," he said. But Berkeley Engineering professor Robert Bea, one of the country's leading forensic engineers, describes Robertson's design as excellent.

Keith Tantlinger, inventor of cargo container, dies at 92

09/06/11 The New York Times — Nearly six decades ago, Keith W. Tantlinger, who studied mechanical engineering at Berkeley, built a box -- or, more accurately, the corners of a box. It was a seemingly small invention, but a vital one: it set in motion a chain of events that changed the way people buy and sell things, transformed the means by which nations do business and ultimately gave rise to the present-day global economy. Mr. Tantlinger's box is known as the shipping container.

U.S. firms pledge more engineering internships

09/01/11 AAAS Science Insider — During a meeting of the President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, a group of some 50 U.S. companies promised to create thousands of internships for engineering students as a way to increase the number of U.S. citizens who earn engineering degrees and enter the profession. The increase in internships "is a tremendous boon for students," said panelist S. Shankar Sastry, dean of the college of engineering at UC Berkeley. "And it's scalable: If 50 companies join in today, you can expect many more to follow."

President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness announces industry leaders’ commitment to double engineering internships in 2012

08/31/11 Whitehouse.gov — The President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness has announced that 45 industry leaders have committed to double the engineering internships available at their companies in 2012. "For America to stay competitive in the global market, we must train and retain the world's best engineers," said U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu. Intel CEO and Berkeley alumnus Paul Otellini stated, "Looking forward, this nation is at risk of a significant shortfall of qualified experts in science and math to meet the country's needs. Today's announcement is about inspiring and encouraging our next generation of engineers."

The brittleness of aging bones – more than a loss of bone mass

08/29/11 Berkeley Lab — New research at Berkeley shows that at microscopic dimensions, the age-related loss of bone quality can be every bit as important as the loss of quantity in the susceptibility of bone to fracturing. Using a combination of x-ray and electron based analytical techniques as well as macroscopic fracture testing, the researchers showed that the advancement of age ushers in a degradation of the mechanical properties of human cortical bone over a range of different size scales. "In characterizing age-related structural changes in human cortical bone at the micrometer and sub micrometer scales, we found that these changes degrade both the intrinsic and extrinsic toughness of bone," says Berkeley Engineering materials scientist Robert Ritchie.

UC Berkeley third in Washington Monthly’s annual rankings

08/29/11 Daily Californian — The Washington Monthly released its annual College Guide and Rankings Monday, ranking UC Berkeley third among national universities based on its contribution to the public good, ahead of Stanford, Harvard and MIT. UC Berkeley ranked first in science and engineering PhD's awarded, second in faculty in national academies and third in faculty receiving significant awards.

TRUST develops ‘science base’ for cybersecurity

08/23/11 Communications of the ACM — TRUST, a research center funded by the National Science Foundation and based at UC Berkeley, is developing what it calls a cyber-security "science base" -- a principled approach to developing "trustworthy systems" in which security is an integral part and not "bolted on like an afterthought." Shankar Sastry, dean of Berkeley's College of Engineering and TRUST's director and principal investigator, hopes the project will reduce the huge amount of time and resources the computer science community spends on fending off attacks on a piecemeal basis.

Berkeley bywords: Made in the U.S.A.

08/18/11 — When it comes to manufacturing know-how, Berkeley Engineering is the College of Big Shoulders. From minuscule chips to massive aircraft, we invent the tools and methods that power the assembly lines of American manufacturing.

Tracking the mighty microbe

08/18/11 — Jillian Banfield studies very, very small things, but her work is vast in its scope and impact. So vast, in fact, that her discoveries have implications for space, the human body and nearly everything in between. Banfield, a biogeochemist, geomicrobiologist and professor of materials science and engineering, studies microbes-their function and potential both individually and in groups. “Microorganisms are essentially everywhere,” says Banfield, “and they carry out all the really essential transformations that drive earth's biogeochemical cycles.”

To catch a speeding bullet

08/18/11 — In 1992, East Palo Alto, a city of 24,000 on the San Francisco Peninsula, logged the highest homicide rate in the nation per capita. The sounds of gunfire worried Robert Showen (B.S'65 EECS), who worked at SRI International in Menlo Park, just two miles from East Palo Alto's border. Showen specialized in acoustics and radio wave propagation, and it occurred to him: What if technology could locate the gunfire and tell police where it's coming from? Today, Showen's ShotSpotter systems are located in more than 70 sites across the nation and around the world. Think of a ShotSpotter system as an electronic citizen calling 9-1-1.

Tough act to follow

08/18/11 — MIT rejected him. CalTech rejected him. So did Duke and UCLA. But Berkeley saw potential in the teenager from a small Catholic high school in Modesto, and from the time he arrived on campus, Matthew Zahr didn't disappoint. The civil and environmental engineering student graduated this spring with a 3.988, earning his major's top undergraduate award, the department citation, and was nominated, along with four others, for Berkeley's highest undergraduate honor, the University Medal.

How the private sector can help curb our engineering shortage

08/04/11 The Washington Post — Berkeley alumnus and Intel CEO Paul Otellini, now serving on President Obama's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, explains how a chronic shortage of engineering students threatens America's role as the world's leading innovator and continues to impede our nation's fragile economic recovery. The council's high-tech education task force is focused on programs that will yield 10,000 more engineering graduates in the United States each year.

The science of cyber security

08/04/11 U.S. News & World Report — Imagine a large cyber-network with its own built-in "immune system" that can recognize and destroy foreign invaders, just like the human body. "We no longer can afford to be reactive in our attitudes about cyber security," says Shankar Sastry, dean of the College of Engineering at UC Berkeley, and principal investigator and director of the Team for Research in Ubiquitous Secure Technology (TRUST), focused on developing cyber security science and technology aimed at radically transforming the ability of organizations to design, build, and operate trustworthy information systems for the nation's critical infrastructure.

Intel Labs opens latest Intel Science and Technology Centers

08/03/11 Intel — Aimed at shaping the future of cloud computing and how increasing numbers of everyday devices will add computing capabilities, Intel Labs announced the latest Intel Science and Technology Centers (ISTC) both headquartered at Carnegie Mellon University. The center combines top researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, Georgia Institute of Technology, University of California Berkeley, Princeton University, and Intel. The researchers will explore technology that will have has important future implications for the cloud.

XSEDE project brings advanced cyberinfrastructure, digital services and expertise to scientists and engineers

07/25/11 National Science Foundation — The NSF has launched a massive five-year, $121 million project involving 17 institutions, including UC Berkeley, to bring advanced digital services to the nation's scientists and engineers. Collectively known as the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), the new project replaces the TeraGrid, which for 10 years provided researchers with computational and data resources in an open infrastructure to support scientific discovery.

In search of a robot more like us

07/11/11 The New York Times — Designing a robot to mimic the basic capabilities of motion and perception would be revolutionary, researchers say. Yet the challenges remain immense, far higher than artificial intelligence hurdles like speaking and hearing. The limits of today's most sophisticated robots can be seen in a robotic towel-folding demonstration pioneered by a group of students at the University of California, Berkeley, last year. "Our end goal right now is to do an entire laundry cycle," said Pieter Abbeel, a Berkeley computer scientist who leads the group.

Preflight interview: Rex Walheim, Mission Specialist

07/08/11 NASA — Space shuttle Atlantis lifted off July 8 on the final flight of the shuttle program, STS-135, a 12-day mission to the International Space Station. Atlantis carries a crew of four and the Raffaello multipurpose logistics module containing supplies and spare parts for the space station. The STS-135 astronauts are: Commander Chris Ferguson, Pilot Doug Hurley, and Mission Specialists Sandy Magnus and Berkeley Engineering alumnus Rex Walheim. Read a pre-flight interview with Rex Walheim here.

ATIC and UAEU appoint Berkeley Engineering’s Bernhard Boser to inaugural ATIC Professorship for Semiconductor Research

06/29/11 Al Bawaba — ATIC and United Arab Emirates University (UAEU) have today announced the appointment of Professor Bernhard E. Boser from the University of California, Berkeley to the newly created ATIC Professorship for Semiconductor Research. Extending Abu Dhabi's collaboration with internationally recognized academic institutions, the first incumbent of the ATIC Professorship for Semiconductor Research, Prof. Boser joins UAEU from the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley.