News

Illustration of person reading a book with digital assistant in foreground

Alexa and Siri can hear this hidden command. You can’t

05/10/18 New York Times — EECS Ph.D. candidate Nicholas Carlini and other Berkeley cybersecurity researchers have been embedding commands into music and spoken text that human listeners can't hear but smart devices can. Carlini hopes to secure AI systems against attacks that he assumes "malicious people" are already working on.

Why some cities have had enough of Waze

05/07/18 US News & World Report — Start-up-turned-tech-giant Waze solves traffic problems for some users, but creates challenges for others by overwhelming local streets. "There's nothing inherently wrong with routing apps, but the problem is overuse," says Alexandre Bayen, director of Berkeley's Institute of Transportation Studies.

How to interact with robots

05/04/18 Wired — EECS professor Anca Dragan discusses one of the big challenges in her field of human-robot interaction: getting robots to anticipate human behavior. “It's not enough to know what people are currently doing. They need to know what's going to happen in the future.”

Joseph Charbonnet and his Grad Slam presentation

Berkeley water engineer lands 2018 ‘Slammy’

05/04/18 Graduate Division — At the UC-wide Grad Slam competition on May 3, environmental engineering doctoral student Joseph Charbonnet brought home the first-place ‘Slammy' - and $9,000 in prize money - for his three-minute talk on using manganese-coated sand to capture, clean and re-use stormwater.

Vazirani elected to National Academy of Sciences

05/01/18 — Umesh Vazirani, the Roger A. Strauch Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, is one of five Berkeley faculty members newly named to the National Academy of Sciences.

The HAB project: A platform for space research

04/30/18 — The student group Space Technologies at Cal is developing a balloon-based platform for near-space research. They recently launched a high-altitude balloon from Memorial Glade.

When geneticists talk sloppily about race

04/30/18 The Atlantic — Bioengineering professor Ian Holmes writes about how a geneticist's recent op-ed in The New York Times caused controversy when it used sloppy language to talk about the tricky relationship between race and genetics research.

Archer team members Anjali Banerjee, Tyler Heintz and Alice Ma at Caffe Strada

Scarred by attack, student entrepreneurs fight global terror

04/30/18 — In the wake of the 2016 terrorist attack in Nice, France, that claimed the life of a classmate, Berkeley students in the European Innovation Academy technology entrepreneurship program have embarked on a new mission - fighting global terrorism through startups that are gaining traction far beyond campus.

AI: The revolution hasn’t happened yet

04/25/18 Medium — EECS and statistics professor Michael Jordan writes about the opportunity and imperative of developing a "human-centric engineering discipline" to address the ethical concerns of artificial intelligence.

Fans cheer for the UC Berkeley Overwatch team

New esports space coming to Foothill

04/20/18 — Campus leaders are planning to convert a community room in the Foothill Residence Hall into a new facility dedicated to competitive student video game teams, ESPN reports.

Berkeley engineers among new faculty elected to AAAS

04/18/18 — Berkeley Engineering faculty members Eric Brewer and James Demmel are among nine UC Berkeley researchers elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a society founded in 1780 to honor exceptional scholars, scientists, artists and innovators from around the world.

Lydia Sohn, UC Berkeley professor of mechanical engineering

Berkeley engineers squeeze cells through microtubes to detect cancer

04/17/18 — Research led by Lydia Sohn, professor of mechanical engineering, could greatly improve the speed and accuracy of cancer diagnosis by exploiting the different speeds with which cancerous and healthy cells move through micropores.

EECS senio Tammy Nguyen in a Soda Hall computer lab

More female computing grads challenge tech’s bad bros

04/16/18 Mercury News — More and more women are getting computer science and electrical engineering degrees from Berkeley and Stanford, reversing a national trend. But the growing and heated debate over the technology industry's male-dominated culture hasn't escaped the attention of those female students, said EECS professor John DeNero.

schematic illustrating the variation of electron energy in different states, represented by curved surfaces in space

Valleytronics discovery could extend limits of Moore’s Law

04/16/18 Berkeley Lab — New research from Berkeley Lab, co-led by materials science and engineering Ph.D. candidate Shuren Lin, finds useful new information-handling potential in tin sulfide, a candidate “valleytronics” transistor material that might one day enable chipmakers to pack more computing power onto microchips.

Diagram of how thin film device converts waste heat into energy

Thin film converts heat from electronics into energy

04/16/18 — Nearly 70 percent of the energy produced in the United States is wasted as heat - from exhaust pipes, high-speed electronics and other sources. Now Berkeley engineers have developed a thin-film system that can produce energy from these waste sources at unprecedented levels.

New technology could wean battery world off cobalt

04/11/18 — A research team led by Gerbrand Ceder, professor of materials science and engineering, has devised a way to build lithium battery cathodes using materials that have greater capacity, and a far lower price, than the traditional cobalt.

Tiny StimDust device shown atop a dime, and schematic drawing detaililng its components

Tiny nerve stimulator gains sophistication

04/10/18 — Berkeley engineers, led by EECS professors Rikky Muller and Michel Maharbiz, have taken implanted neural dust sensors forward by building the smallest, most efficient wireless nerve stimulator ever.

Making computer animation more agile, acrobatic — and realistic

04/10/18 — EECS grad student Xue Bin “Jason” Peng and his colleagues have made a major advance in realistic computer animation, using deep reinforcement learning to create a virtual stuntman that mimics natural motions.

Where are all the driverless cars?

04/04/18 Car Connection — Firms testing self-driving cars have slowed their programs, and did not beat a path to the door of the California DMV, which on April 2 was to begin issuing permits for testing on the state's roads. Berkeley transportation engineer Steve Shladover says that's because those companies are still trying to work out some challenging wrinkles.

You do belong in science

04/03/18 — The Double Shelix podcast, hosted by Berkeley bioengineering Ph.D. candidates Sally Winkler and Kayla Wolf, is posting a special series of episodes this month on the the theme of belonging in STEM.