News

Mechanical flying cockroach unveiled at Cal lab

10/30/11 ABC News — Recently, the Department of Homeland Security issued a proposal for a disposable robot that could be used in search and rescue missions. This week, a lab at UC Berkeley unveiled a contender: a mechanical cockroach with wings. "What's really interesting here," says Ron Fearing, professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences, "is that we don't have things that fly really well, that fly like birds. And we don't have things that run really well, like a cockroach or a rat can. But combining the two, we can actually do more than with either of them by itself."

California turns to Chinese company, labor to build most of new Bay Bridge span

10/19/11 Public Radio International — Much of the actual construction of San Francisco's new Bay Bridge was actually done in China. The bridge was then shipped piece by piece to the port of Oakland for assembly. California officials have estimated that they'll save at least $400 million by relying on low-wage Chinese labor. UC Berkeley civil engineering professor William Ibbs says doing it this way makes a lot of sense.

Hybrid Wisdom Labs launches a speedy, scalable engine for visualizing customer insight

10/19/11 TechCrunch — Ken Goldberg, a professor of New Media, Robotics, and Industrial Engineering at UC Berkeley, launched an interesting new startup from the stage of The Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco today, called Hybrid Wisdom Labs. The startup, according to its founder, has emerged from "more than a decade of robotics and social media research at UC Berkeley."

Manufacturing: The road to economic recovery

10/17/11 — We have become a nation of traders, regulators and middle parties. But are we still a nation of designers and makers? In the 1950s, manufacturing contributed more than 25 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product. Today, that share has fallen to below 12 percent. China is rapidly overtaking the United States as the world's largest manufacturing nation.

Seeds of social change

10/17/11 — In Vietnam, less than five percent of women finish college-often because they can't afford the relatively small fees. Without skills, many young women have no choice but to take work that pays poverty-level wages. But thanks to a Seattle startup called Vittana, the brainchild of EECS alum Kushal Chakrabarti (B.S'04 EECS), some will benefit from a micro-loan that finances their education. "Education is the single most powerful tool we have to fight global poverty, enrich communities and transform lives," says Chakrabarti.

Field report from Nicaragua

10/17/11 — David Olmos (B.S'11 ME) spent his summer working with the nonprofit organization blueEnergy in Central America as part of an internship with Cal Energy Corps, a program launched in spring 2011 to help develop sustainable energy and climate solutions around the world. Now a graduate student in mechanical engineering, Olmos sent this report from the field.

Paving the way

10/17/11 — Often it's only an unexpected pothole or a bumpy road that draws our attention to pavement conditions. But for civil and environmental engineering professor Carl Monismith (B.S'50, M.S'54 CE), the ups-and-downs of pavement have been worth his ongoing consideration for the past 60 years. As the co-director of the Pavement Research Center (PRC), Monismith has been studying pavement design and technology since 1951.

The electric Leaf’s true believers won’t leave well enough alone

10/14/11 The New York Times — Within weeks after Nissan first began delivering the Leaf to buyers last December, do-it-yourselfers were looking for ways to make the new electric car -- an engineering marvel from one of the world's leading automakers -- even better. Among those applying their engineering skills to the task was Berkeley Engineering alum Gary Giddings, a passionate supporter of electric vehicles. "At this point in my life, my goal is to spend whatever time I have trying to help E.V.'s become successful," Mr. Giddings said.

Berkeley Engineering professor Lisa Pruitt wins A. Richard Newton Educator Award

10/12/11 Marketwire — The Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology announced today the 2011 A. Richard Newton Educator Award, which recognizes teaching practices, techniques or innovative and new education approaches that attract girls and women to math, computing, and engineering. The first winner of the new award is Lisa Pruitt, professor of mechanical engineering at UC Berkeley. Lisa Pruitt is deeply committed to ensuring the technological prowess of our society and economy, and works tirelessly and enthusiastically to invite and inspire a full spectrum of participants to pursue engineering endeavors.

ACM, IEEE Computer Society honor UC Berkeley professor Susan L. Graham for software development tools

09/29/11 Association for Computing Machinery — Susan L. Graham of the University of California Berkeley will receive the ACM-IEEE Computer Society Ken Kennedy Award for contributions to computer programming tools that have significantly advanced software development. Graham's research covers many areas of software, including human-computer interaction, programming systems, and high-performance computing. Her research collaborations have led to the construction of several interactive tools to enhance programmer productivity as well as programming language implementation methods that foster performance and software quality.

Berkeley Lab tests cookstoves for Haiti

09/28/11 PhysOrg.com — The developers of the fuel-efficient Berkeley-Darfur Stove for refugee camps in central Africa, including Berkeley Engineering professor Ashok Gadgil, are at it once again, this time evaluating inexpensive metal cookstoves for the displaced survivors of last year's deadly earthquake in Haiti.

$7.5 million DOE grant will help develop new generation of advanced reactors

09/22/11 Massachusetts Institute of Technology — MIT has been awarded $7.5 million as part of a new initiative by the Department of Energy to support research and development on the next generation of nuclear technologies. The Integrated Research Projects were established to help ensure that the country maintains a leading role in nuclear energy research. The Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering and the MIT Reactor Lab will work together with their partners at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Wisconsin at Madison on the project over the next three years to develop the path forward to a test reactor and ultimately a commercial high-temperature salt-cooled reactor.

Ali Javey wins APEC Science Prize for Innovation Research and Education

09/13/11 Business Wire — U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu has awarded the 2011 APEC Science Prize for Innovation, Research and Education to Dr. Ali Javey, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley. The ASPIRE Prize recognizes young scientists who have demonstrated a commitment to both excellence in scientific research, as evidenced by scholarly publication, and cooperation with scientists from other Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation member economies.

We welcome 1,400 new engineering leaders

09/12/11 — Remember your first week at college? Chances are you're still in touch with the friends you made during that time. Mindful of how formative those early days can be – not to mention the entire college experience – we put a lot of thought and effort into welcoming more than 900 incoming first-year and transfer students to Berkeley Engineering for 2011–12

An intelligent approach to mobile news

09/12/11 — Do you read news on your cell phone? According to a 2010 Pew Research Center study, 33 percent of cell phone owners now check news, weather and sports headlines on their mobile phones. Yet searching for and reading news on a 3.5-inch screen isn't easy. Earlier this year, EECS Ph.D. students Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick and Mohit Bansal teamed up on a project that may alleviate the problem.

Tapping the West’s water

09/12/11 — Two years ago David Sedlak, UC Berkeley professor of civil and environmental engineering, was invited to speak at the Nobel Conference in Minnesota about his area of expertise: urban water systems. Seeing an opportunity to tell the story of the water delivery networks that are falling apart under our feet, Sedlak did more than deliver a talk describing the problem. He came up with an idea to help solve it.

In vino veritas

09/12/11 — As any wine-sipping oenophile knows, the quality of a wine is influenced, among other things, by the geography, geology and climate of the specific vineyard in which the grapes are grown. The French even have a word for it - terroir - which can be loosely translated as “a sense of place.” For Berkeley Engineering alum Jason Mikami, whose boutique winery produces a handcrafted Zinfandel wine using grapes from his family's estate, the terroir of the vineyard is not only evident in his wines, but also in his own journey as a winemaker.

The World Trade Center: Work of genius, undone by the unthinkable

09/10/11 New Jersey Star-Ledger — With a career spanning five decades, UC Berkeley alumnus Leslie Robertson was the lead structural engineer of the World Trade Center, responsible for conceiving and executing the design and overseeing the work of engineers, draftsmen and technicians that allowed the towers to rise higher than any building before them. Ten years after the buildings were lost, he quietly carries with him an unresolved anguish. "I was ready to pack my bags, not because I felt I let anybody down, but simply due to the suffering associated with my work," he said. But Berkeley Engineering professor Robert Bea, one of the country's leading forensic engineers, describes Robertson's design as excellent.

Keith Tantlinger, inventor of cargo container, dies at 92

09/06/11 The New York Times — Nearly six decades ago, Keith W. Tantlinger, who studied mechanical engineering at Berkeley, built a box -- or, more accurately, the corners of a box. It was a seemingly small invention, but a vital one: it set in motion a chain of events that changed the way people buy and sell things, transformed the means by which nations do business and ultimately gave rise to the present-day global economy. Mr. Tantlinger's box is known as the shipping container.

U.S. firms pledge more engineering internships

09/01/11 AAAS Science Insider — During a meeting of the President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, a group of some 50 U.S. companies promised to create thousands of internships for engineering students as a way to increase the number of U.S. citizens who earn engineering degrees and enter the profession. The increase in internships "is a tremendous boon for students," said panelist S. Shankar Sastry, dean of the college of engineering at UC Berkeley. "And it's scalable: If 50 companies join in today, you can expect many more to follow."