News

Engineering student Akol Kuan high-fives sixth-graders at Beacon Day School

Of war, water and working to fix South Sudan

11/18/15 — Civil engineering undergrad Akol Kuan brought tales of his native South Sudan to Oakland's Beacon Day School, where sixth graders had just finished reading A Long Walk to Water, a novel that follows the hardships and heartbreaks of two Sudanese 11-year-olds.

Berkeley Lab dedicates new computing center to late EECS professor

11/17/15 — Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has opened a new building dedicated to energy supercomputing and networking, and named it after the late Shyh Wang, an EECS professor and a pioneer in semiconductor lasers.

InDinero CEO Jessica Mah delivers Newton lecture

11/17/15 — At the October 27 Newton lecture, alumnus and InDinero co-founder Jessica Mah (B.S'10 EECS) talked about the experience of launching a multi-million-dollar business.

Science and the public good

11/17/15 — To be equitable and sustainable, international development goals need to incorporate innovations in science and technology and harness the data revolution.

Instant eSports

11/17/15 — Instant eSports, recently founded by three former EECS students, is a new type of media company for a new type of sports fan.

Celebrating World Toilet Day, reinventing sanitation

11/17/15 — United Nations World Toilet Day on Nov. 19 is environmental engineering doctoral student William Tarpeh's main chance - a time to proselytize about all things sanitation. For mechanical engineering grad student Emily Woods, it's a boost for Sanivation, the company she co-founded to convert human feces into charcoal for a poor community in Kenya.

Discarded circuit boards ready for processing

Filtering the e-waste stream

11/16/15 — Alumnus Glen Langstaff (B.S'77 ME/NE) wants to use new technology to make disposing of old technology cheaper and more efficient. Here's how:

Berkeley drone researchers win Microsoft Hololens research grant

11/13/15 CITRIS — Three faculty members from the UC Berkeley Robotics and Intelligent Machines Lab have won one of five academic research grants from Microsoft Research. The research by Allen Y. Yang, Claire Tomlin and Dean Shankar Sastry will be supported by a team of EECS undergraduates from the Virtual Reality @ Berkeley Club.

The problem with ‘help’ in global development

11/10/15 SSIR — To move beyond good intentions, the development paradigm must shift toward collaboration, community involvement, and empowerment, writes mechanical engineering Ph.D. candidate Julia Kramer in a commentary for the Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Darwin performs actions after virtual and real-world learning.

Robot toddler learns to stand by ‘imagining’ how to do it

11/10/15 MIT Technology Review — Instead of being programmed, Darwin, a robot in the lab of EECS associate professor Pieter Abbeel, uses brain-inspired algorithms to “imagine” doing tasks before trying them in the real world.

Roberto Horowitz named mechanical engineering chair

11/09/15 — Roberto Horowitz, the James Fife Endowed Chair Professor of Mechanical Engineering, has been named chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the College of Engineering.

Still no flying cars? The future of transit promises something even better

11/06/15 The Guardian — EECS professor Alexandre Bayen, director of the Institute for Transportation Studies, joins other transportation experts in discussing navigation and booking apps, driverless cars and automated buses, and other ways that technology promises to revolutionize the transportation industry.

blueEnergy project in Bluefields, Nicaragua

blueEnergy’s water and sanitation technology for Nicaragua

11/06/15 Blum Center — NGOs like blueEnergy, founded by Berkeley graduate Mathias Craig (B.S'01 CEE), are helping to provide residents of resource-rich but infrastructure-poor Nicaragua with access to clean water and improved sanitation.

Robots: Will they steal your job?

11/06/15 Fortune — At a Fortune Global Forum roundtable on automation, Berkeley Engineering professor and roboticist Ken Goldberg took issue with the notion that workers in routine and repetitive jobs are likely to be displaced by robots.

The Jawaharlal sisters appearing on "Shark Tank"

Pi-Bot inventors score $200,000 deal on ‘Shark Tank’

11/02/15 — Berkeley Engineering senior Lavanya Jawaharlal and her sister Melissa, both mechanical engineers, walked away from TV's investment reality show “Shark Tank” with a $200,000 deal that they will put toward taking their STEM robotics education concept nationwide.

3-D mapping your world with a backpack

11/02/15 KQED Quest — EECS professor Avideh Zakhor has extended 3-D mapping and rendering - what she calls ‘reality capture' - to interior spaces through a laser-equipped backpack that collects thousands of data points, then stitches them together into a 3-D model.

President Obama at White House astronomy night

Will STEM education be the child left behind?

11/02/15 NPR — Berkeley Engineers And Mentors (BEAM), a student volunteer group that teaches an after-school STEM program at a Berkeley elementary school, was featured in a Morning Edition report on the budget a policy hurdles facing STEM education.

UC Berkeley to co-lead regional big data ‘brain trust’

11/02/15 — UC Berkeley is teaming up with UC San Diego and the University of Washington to lead one of four regional innovation hubs established by the National Science Foundation to facilitate multi-sector collaborations that can accelerate advances in data science.

Sophie’s super hand

11/01/15 — Born with symbrachydactyly, eight-year-old Sophie doesn't have fully developed finger bones in her left hand, but with the help of a CITRIS Invention Lab team, she is the new user of a 3-D printed super hand.

Microscopic models of the human heart

11/01/15 — Bioengineering professor Kevin Healy and his team have developed a “heart on a chip” and “heart on a dot,” potentially opening more accurate and efficient drug screening methods.