News

An engineer’s guide to sexism

02/23/18 EE Times — It's not often a female engineer steps before hundreds of male colleagues at a major conference and gives a tutorial on the institutional sexism in their profession. But that's what happened at this month's International Solid State Circuits Conference, where Berkeley alum Teresa Meng (M.S.'84, Ph.D.'88 EECS), Stanford professor and Atheros Communications co-founder, addressed “Winning the game in a male-dominated industry.”

Why AI researchers should be more paranoid

02/23/18 Wired — A new report highlights risks of artificial intelligence, such as malicious self-driving cars or assassin robots. EECS professor Ion Stoica, who recently surveyed technical challenges in AI, said Berkeley is already trying to expose students flocking to the field to concerns over AI safety and security.

Award winners Lane Martin and Arvind Dasgupta with EH&S Director Patrick Goff and Vice Chancellor for Research Randy Katz

Prometheus Group honored for lab safety

02/23/18 — The Prometheus Group, headed by materials science and engineering professor Lane Martin, has won UC Berkeley's grand prize for lab safety for the team's commitment to safe practices in their work on functional complex-oxide thin-film materials.

Pandemic Resiliency team members Suyasha Gupta, Jasodhara Raj and Arnaud Bard de Coutance

Designing resiliency for the pandemic flu

02/23/18 Fung Institute — For their capstone project at the Fung Institute, a trio of master of engineering students are working on a software solution to combat the inefficiencies that currently impede efforts to report and track outbreaks of influenza.

EECS graduate student Noah Johnson and professor Dawn Song

Security for data analytics: Handling the two-edged sword

02/16/18 Berkeley Research — Data protocols meant to ensure privacy can end up blocking valuable, even life-saving analysis of that data. Now EECS researchers are trying a new approach that allows organizations to follow tight data security and privacy policies while enabling flexible data analysis.

Dam scanning

02/16/18 — Two civil engineering students built a 3-D model of Berkeley's campus to better understand what's going on with one of California's many aging dams.

Dean Sastry and Politecnico di Torino rector Marco Gilli hold the honorary degree

Dean Sastry honored with degree from Politecnico di Torino

02/16/18 — Dean S. Shankar Sastry received an honorary doctorate degree from Politecnico di Torino recognizing a career defined by technical and societal contributions.

2 young EECS faculty among new Sloan Research Fellows

02/15/18 — EECS assistant professors Anca Dragan and Raluca Ada Popa are among six young Berkeley faculty members named as 2018 Sloan Research Fellows. The selections “honor early-career scholars whose achievements mark them as among the very best scientific minds working today.”

Cheap, efficient cookstoves are small-tech solution with big payoff

02/13/18 — Ashok Gadgil, professor of civil and environmental engineering, redesigned a simple technology - the wood cookstove - to help women in refugee camps in Darfur, Sudan. The inexpensive and efficient Darfur stove not only reduced the danger of gathering firewood in the war-torn region, it also reduced health and climate risks from excessive smoke.

Reducing air pollution with smart design

02/13/18 CITRIS — Air pollution is a global epidemic that kills more than 3.2 million people prematurely each year. Clarity, an environmental tech startup out of the CITRIS Foundry, produces smart air-quality monitoring systems designed to reduce this number.

Stephen Mahin, earthquake engineering expert, dies at 71

02/13/18 — Civil and environmental engineering professor emeritus Stephen A. Mahin, former director of the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center, passed away on February 9. He was a world-renowned expert in earthquake engineering, with wide-ranging teaching, research and professional contributions to the field.

Celebrating diversity in engineering and science

02/13/18 — The Black Engineering and Science Students Association and the Black Graduate Engineering and Science Students celebrated milestone anniversaries with a daylong event at Alumni House on Feb. 10, including a keynote address by alumnus and UC Davis Chancellor Gary May.

Taking the stage

02/09/18 — Drew McPherson (B.S'17 ME) recently took the stage in San Francisco to give a talk at “People That Don't Normally Lecture.” He talked about the accident he had at 19 that left him paralyzed. He also talked about what came next: a desire to design and build things that help people meet a need.

Students in a cryptocurrency course at New York University

Cryptocurrencies come to campus

02/09/18 New York Times — UC Berkeley is one of several institutions rushing to add courses about Bitcoin, blockchain and other elements of virtual currency to the curriculum. EECS professor Dawn Song is co-teaching one such course to a standing-room-only audience of engineering, business and law students.

Computer vision to protect patients — and budgets

02/09/18 Berkeley Research — EECS professor Alexandre Bayen and Ph.D. student Pulkit Agrawal have developed a computer vision-based system to help memory care centers monitor falls by dementia patients and to reduce them where possible.

Berkeley Citation presented to Edward Lee

Edward Lee of EECS awarded Berkeley Citation

02/09/18 — Former EECS Chair and currently Professor in the Graduate School Edward Lee was presented with the prestigious Berkeley Citation on Thursday for his distinguished contributions to UC Berkeley.

Teaching AI about human values

02/08/18 Forbes — Computer scientist and robotics engineer Anca Dragan has a cool name, an impressive CV and an important job: ensuring that our interactions with robots and other artificially intelligent agents are positive ones.

Constance Chang-Hasnain, Diane Greene and Gary May

EECS professor Chang-Hasnain named to NAE

02/07/18 — EECS professor Constance Chang-Hasnain is among 83 new members elected to the National Academy of Engineering. Two alumni also were elected to the academy.

Grace OConnell, Laura Waller and Avideh Zakhor

Honors for three Berkeley Engineering faculty

02/07/18 — Three members of the Berkeley Engineering faculty - Grace O'Connell from mechanical engineering and Laura Waller and Avideh Zakhor from EECS - have recently received awards from scientific societies honoring their contributions to research and innovation in their fields.

Nikita Bier (right) being interviewed by Jeremy Fiance of the House Fund

How to build a viral app

02/06/18 Sutardja Center — Telling a Newton Lecture Series audience that he got "really good at failing," Berkeley alumnus Nikita Bier recounted his difficult journey to creating TBH, a viral app that allows teenagers to anonymously compliment each other through a series of polls.