News

Grad students’ payment platform wins $250K startup challenge

12/18/15 — An Internet of Things payments platform, DotDashPay, created by two computer science Ph.D. candidates, has won the inaugural UC Berkeley Startup Challenge sponsored by Pejman Mar Ventures.

Lavanya Jawaharlal on females of color in STEM

12/16/15 Blum Center — Mechanical engineering senior Lavanya Jawaharlal talks about her hopes that STEM Center USA, the nonprofit startup she founded with her sister, can help shatter the glass ceiling for women in STEM fields.

Students engineer solutions to industry challenges

12/16/15 — Three energy-related devices developed by students in the Fung Institute for Engineering Leadership's Master of Engineering capstone project course are featured in a video from the Berkeley News team.

Building an organ in the marsh

12/16/15 — A Louisiana native and environmental engineering Ph.D. student, Madeline Foster-Martinez is studying the fluid dynamics of a local marsh to better understand tidal wetland restoration.

QuakeCAFE: A mobile wake-up call for Californians

12/16/15 CITRIS — No one likes to be reminded that there's a 99.7% chance that California will experience a major earthquake in the next 30 years. But a little preparedness can go a long way, and a new mobile-friendly website called QuakeCAFE can help.

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.