News

Will we ride the Hyperloop before decade’s end?

08/14/13 CNN — In an op-ed article for CNN, Berkeley Engineering alumnus Saurabh Amin (Ph.D. '11 CEE), an assistant professor at MIT, writes that in putting his Hyperloop transportation system before the public in conceptual form, Elon Musk might be able to minimize the design bottleneck that slows most massive infrastructure projects to a crawl.

Elena Kassianidou wins HHMI Fellowship

08/14/13 — BioE graduate student Elena Kassianidou has been awarded an International Predoctoral Fellowship from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Kassianidou, from Cyprus, is pursuing her dissertation in Berkeley bioengineering professor Sanjay Kumar's lab.

Trillions of smart sensors will change life as apps have

08/06/13 SFGate — An array of small, high-tech water monitors being installed in the Sierra by a team led by Steven Glaser, systems engineering professor at Berkeley, represent of a new kind of sensor: one that feels as well as thinks, while using very little power.

Bringing design thinking to engineering

08/02/13 Forbes — Qualcomm CEO and Engineering Advisory Board chair Paul Jacobs discusses how today's education of an engineer can be dramatically improved, how design thinking and sustainability are critical to long-term innovation, and his $20 million commitment to Berkeley Engineering.

Using citizen videos, Rashomon Project seeks to protect activists

07/23/13 New Hampshire Public Radio — As citizen-generated media grows increasingly integrated into protest coverage, software developed by UC Berkeley researchers could help protect activists against unjust persecution. Berkeley Engineering professor Ken Goldberg talks about the CITRIS Data and Democracy Initiative's Rashomon Project, which he leads.

Dean discusses engineering education challenges

07/19/13 KQED California Report — “The business community is saying, ‘Give us more engineers' The students are saying, ‘More of us want to study engineering,'” Dean Shankar Sastry tells KQED. He has been able to increase the total number of Berkeley Engineering graduates by about 17 percent in the past five years, by doing more with less.

Researchers propose ‘neural dust’ to monitor brain from inside

07/17/13 ExtremeTech — Berkeley Engineering researchers have proposed a network of tiny implantable sensors that could function like an MRI inside the brain, recording data on nearby neurons and transmitting it back out. This long-lasting "neural dust," envisioned by graduate student Dongjin Seo and colleagues in EECS, would solve the problems of size and invasiveness posed by current brain imaging technologies.

Al Pisano named dean of engineering at UC San Diego

07/15/13 Berkeley Engineering — Albert P. (Al) Pisano, a distinguished member of the UC Berkeley College of Engineering faculty since 1983, has accepted appointment as Dean of the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego, starting September 1, 2013. Berkeley Engineering Dean S. Shankar Sastry called Pisano "an exceptional choice for this leadership position."

An illusion floats on Mining Circle pool

07/11/13 — The second of five large stainless-steel sculptures by Oakland artist Bruce Beasley was lowered into place Wednesday in the reflecting pool in front of the Hearst Memorial Mining Building.

Paying bug bounties is more cost-effective than a security team, study finds

07/10/13 PC World — Paying rewards to independent security researchers for finding software problems is a vastly better investment than hiring employees to do the same work, according to UC Berkeley computer science researchers who studied vulnerability reward programs run by Google and Mozilla.

Douglas C. Engelbart, inventor of the computer mouse, dies at 88

07/03/13 New York Times — Douglas C. Engelbart, 88, a visionary scientist and Berkeley electrical engineering Ph.D. whose host of inventions - among them the computer mouse - became the basis for both the Internet and the modern personal computer, died July 2 at his home in Atherton, Calif.

Promising cost analysis for thermoelectricity

07/01/13 Royal Society of Chemistry — Scientists, including Berkeley mechanical engineering Ph.D. candidate Shannon Yee, have derived a metric to analyze the cost of power generation using thermoelectric technology. The metric shows that thermoelectric devices have greater potential in large-scale power generation than previously thought.

On nuclear waste bill, senators look to public for help

07/01/13 New York Times — A pending Senate bill would solicit input from the public about where to bury the nation's nuclear waste. Per F. Peterson, professor of nuclear engineering, praised the action as "something highly unusual" in the creation of public policy that "establishes a strong foundation for the legislation to be successful" if passed by Congress.

The hidden cost of free apps: Mobile ads drain batteries

06/26/13 Information Week — The advertisements in a typical mobile app consume almost a quarter of the energy used by the app, according to research by Berkeley computer science graduate student Prashanth Mohan and his colleagues at Microsoft Research.

A new design for engineering education

06/24/13 Daily Californian — In an op-ed article, Dean Shankar Sastry and Executive Associate Dean Fiona Doyle write about how a recent $20 million gift from the Jacobs Foundation will pave the way for a complete reinvention of engineering education at Berkeley, providing all students - especially undergraduates - with opportunities to design and build early and often.

Spark, born in Berkeley’s AMPLab, ‘rewrites future of big data’

06/21/13 Wired — Teaming with a particularly ambitious group of computer scientists from UC Berkeley, Yahoo is installing a new data crunching platform called Spark, which is about 100 times faster than the mighty Hadoop - an open source software creation that underpins a Who's Who of the internet, including Facebook and Twitter - and could very well replace Hadoop as the stuff that fuels the modern web.

Sastry reappointed to second term as dean of engineering

06/20/13 — S. Shankar Sastry has accepted reappointment as dean of the College of Engineering, effective July 1, 2013, the campus has announced. Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost George Breslauer said Sastry's "accomplishments as a leader have been exemplary, as have his research, scholarship, and professional reputation."

Student hacker wins award for wearing a ‘white hat’

06/19/13 Los Angeles Times — Berkeley computer science junior Skyler Rojas has been awarded $2000 by the Information Systems Security Association at the Cornerstones of Trust conference for choosing a career in cybersecurity. Rojas, who is interning this summer at Symantec, says his dream job would be "penetration tester" - someone who works from the inside to find network vulnerabilities.

Yablonovitch elected to membership in Royal Society

06/19/13 Royal Society — Eli Yablonovitch, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, is one of two Berkeley scientists elected as 2013 foreign members of the United Kingdom's distinguished Royal Society, a fellowship of eminent scientists, engineers and technologists.

$20 million gift launches design institute

06/18/13 — I just returned from Chicago, where I had the great honor of taking the stage with President Bill Clinton and Dr. Paul Jacobs, chairman and CEO of Qualcomm and chair of our advisory board, as Paul announced a $20 million commitment that he and his wife, Stacy, are making to launch an Institute of Design Innovation here in the college.