News

Berkeley junior wins prestigious Goldwater scholarship

04/22/13 Daily Cal — Ritankar Das, 18, a junior double-majoring in bioengineering and chemical biology, has been selected as a 2013 Goldwater scholar, the premier undergraduate award of its type in these fields.

Experts tackle questions about broken Bay Bridge anchor rods

04/16/13 Mercury News — Two Berkeley Engineering professors, metallurgical engineer Tom Devine and mechanical engineer Robert Ritchie, field questions about why 32 high-strength threaded steel anchor rods in the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge weakened and snapped.

College, TI cut ribbon on $2.2 million electronics design lab

04/11/13 Berkeley Patch — Texas Instruments and the College of Engineering today opened the doors to a state-of-the-art electronics teaching lab in Cory Hall, made possible by major gifts from TI and Agilent, that will encourage ingenuity among undergraduate engineering students.

Metallurgists say Bay Bridge bolt failure could have been prevented

04/10/13 Contra Costa Times — There are plenty of possible explanations for why 32 huge high-strength steel rods on the new Bay Bridge have snapped, says materials science professor Tom Devine, "but there are no excuses to have them behave in a brittle way."

California vies for drone-testing contracts

04/08/13 KQED — As the FAA pushes ahead with plans to test-fly unmanned nonmilitary drones at six sites around the country, including possibly some in California, Dean of Engineering Shankar Sastry weighs in on some of the concerns - safety, privacy, technology - that must be addressed.

Paris, San Francisco choose Inria and CITRIS to conduct ‘smart city’ research

04/05/13 CITRIS — The mayors of Paris and San Francisco recently signed an agreement focusing on the digital economy and smart cities, and designated France's Inria (National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control) and UC's CITRIS (Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society) to carry out joint research on the topic.

Computers that can identify you by your thoughts

04/05/13 I-School — Instead of typing your password, in the future you may only have to think it, according to a study by School of Information researchers and an EECS undergrad that explores the feasibility of brainwave-based computer authentication.

Beyond genomics – mining the proteome

04/03/13 Berkeley Research — Amy Herr, associate professor of bioengineering and a 2013 Bakar Fellow, is on the front lines of proteomics research – the ambitious effort to determine the variety and function of all human proteins.

The ethical engineer

04/02/13 — In a world shaped by technology, engineers have the power and hence the responsibility to exercise tremendous influence on society. They must be able to solve problems not only with design and invention, but also with an understanding of the full range of human consequences, from the legal and economic to the ethical.

Laying the CS pipeline

04/02/13 — EECS alum Kevin Wang has one objective in mind. “The ultimate mission is to have schools with computer science programs that are sustainable and can run themselves,” he says. That's why Wang has partnered with Microsoft to start the nonprofit Technology Education and Literacy in Schools (TEALS). The organization matches volunteer tech professionals with classrooms in their communities.

Building an LGBT community for STEM majors

04/02/13 — Despite the demands of schoolwork, mechanical engineering senior Paul Zarate has not only joined different student groups every year of his college career, but this past year he started his own. In 2011, Zarate founded the Berkeley chapter of Out in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (oSTEM), a national organization dedicated to the professional development of LGBT students in STEM majors.

Students build 3D printing vending machine

03/27/13 QUEST — Combining 3D printing technology with the convenience and accessibility of Redbox DVD dispensers, Berkeley student entrepreneurs have built a vending machine with a seemingly infinite selection of products. The Dreambox, which now lives in Etcheverry Hall, is the first fully automated 3D-printing vending machine.

BOINC enlists Android phones in search for black holes

03/27/13 Wired — Computer science professor David Anderson, creator of the BOINC platform that runs SETI@home and other crowd-sourced projects, is now trying to capture the computing power of smart phones with software for Android phones that would help Einstein@home search for black holes.

Mind over matter

03/26/13 Berkeley Research — Neuroengineer Jose Carmena and bioengineer Michel Maharbiz do research in BMI, an emerging technology for retraining the brain to operate a prosthetic device such as an artificial limb. They are supported by the campus's new Bakar Fellows Program, which helps early-career faculty pursue innovative research with commercial potential.

Making art out of earthquakes

03/26/13 The Atlantic — Industrial engineering professor and artist Ken Goldberg discusses his latest project – an "Internet-based earthwork" called Bloom, which makes the constant low-level seismic action of the Hayward Fault near campus visible as a dynamic artwork.

Simulations yield clues to how cells interact with surroundings

03/22/13 Berkeley Lab — Cells interact constantly with their surroundings, but it's very difficult to observe the main player in this interaction – a protein called integrin. Mohammad Mofrad, associate professor of bioengineering and mechanical engineering, and bioengineering graduate student Mehrdad Mehrbod have developed a computer model of integrin that gives researchers a new way to explore how the protein connects a cell's inner and outer environments.

Researchers use metamaterials to observe giant photonic spin Hall effect

03/22/13 Berkeley Lab — Engineering a unique metamaterial of gold nanoantennas, Berkeley Lab researchers, led by Berkeley mechanical engineering professor Xiang Zhang, were able to obtain the strongest signal yet of the photonic spin Hall effect, an optical phenomenon of quantum mechanics that could play a prominent role in the future of computing.

BIOFAB engineers cooperate to establish precision grammar for programming cells

03/22/13 SynBERC — Researchers at BIOFAB, a collaboration among academia, industry and government, have created a professional-grade collection of public domain DNA parts, in effect establishing rules for the first language for engineering gene expression and greatly increasing the reliability and precision by which biology can be engineered. Bioengineering professor Adam Arkin is BIOFAB's co-director.

Connected Corridors aims to boost efficiency of existing roads

03/18/13 Berkeley Research — Connected Corridors, a project led by engineering professors Alex Bayen and Roberto Horowitz, is developing technologies to help Caltrans gather and analyze traffic data. A goal of the research: to make existing roadways more efficient, rather than launching new highway-construction projects.

EECS alumni Micali and Goldwasser win Turing Award

03/18/13 Association for Computing Machinery — Ph.D. EECS alumni Silvio Micali and Shafi Goldwasser have been named winners of the ACM Turing Award, considered the Nobel Prize of computer science. The two, both now computer science professors at MIT, pioneered the field of provable security, which laid the mathematical foundations that made modern cryptography possible.