News

Ruzena Bajcsy honored for ‘upending science’

02/27/20 Popular Mechanics — Popular Mechanics magazine named EECS professor Ruzena Bajcsy as one of 37 women who "upended science, tech, and engineering for the better." Bajcsy, who conducted pioneering work in robotics and artificial intelligence, joins a list that includes Katherine Johnson of NASA and Nobel Prize winner Marie Curie

Illustration of layered plasmonic nano-antenna arrays

Researchers develop novel way to shrink light to detect ultra-tiny substances

02/20/20 — The research could lead to the development of ultra-sensitive devices that can quickly detect pathogens in human blood.

Environmental engineering students win $25K grant from the EPA

02/20/20 — The team, supervised by Professor Ashok Gadgil, will use the money to develop ways to remove arsenic from drinking water in California.

Alumnus Darryll Pines named president of University of Maryland

02/18/20 UMD Right Now — Pines, the current dean of Maryland's A. James Clark School of Engineering, will start his appointment July 1.

Two engineering faculty named Sloan Research Fellows

02/12/20 — Sanjam Garg, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences (EECS), and Aditya Parameswaran, who has a joint appointment in EECS and the School of Information, were among nine Berkeley faculty members to win the prestigious research honor.

Two Berkeley Engineering professors named to NAE

02/06/20 — Per Peterson and Paulo Monteiro are among 78 Berkeley Engineering faculty members in the National Academy of Engineering

Berkeley’s data science division gets fresh new name

02/05/20 — The Division of Computing, Data Science and Society (CDSS) is the permanent name of Berkeley's interdisciplinary division launched in November 2018.

Technology developed by Berkeley robotics researchers put to real world use

01/29/20 New York Times — Covariant, an AI robotics company built on research that began at Berkeley, is garnering attention in the world of industrial automation.

Is spaghetti the key to building a better robot?

01/22/20 — Studying how spaghetti reacts to water might offer clues to how robots built from flexible materials can better mimic human movement, according to Oliver O'Reilly, professor of mechanical engineering.

Berkeley professor Doug Tygar, leading expert in cybersecurity and privacy, has died

01/17/20 I School — Doug Tygar, professor of computer sciences and information management, died on Thursday, Jan. 16, at the age of 57. Over his 20-year tenure at UC Berkeley, he made key contributions in the areas of computer security, cryptography, privacy and digital rights management.

French ambassador says global institutions needed to confront technology challenges

01/16/20 — Philippe Étienne said the quickening pace of technological change requires nations to immediately build “shared governance” of the internet through both existing and perhaps new global institutions.

UC Berkeley professor influences Facebook’s efforts to combat deepfakes

01/14/20 — The social media giant hired Hany Farid to help it detect fake videos, but Farid says company's new policy is problematic.

New discovery makes it easier to design synthetic proteins that rival their natural counterparts

01/08/20 — Researchers have created a synthetic membrane that could transform fields including medicine, life sciences, alternative energy and environmental science.

Tarek Zohdi named 2019 AAM Fellow

01/02/20 American Academy of Mechanics — Tarek Zohdi, Chancellor's Professor and Will C. Hall Endowed Chair in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, has been named the 2019 Fellow of the American Academy of Mechanics. This is an honor accorded to only one person per year in the country.

Anyscale co-founders Robert Nishihara, Ion Stoica and Philipp Moritz

Grad students, Databricks founder tackle programming challenge

12/17/19 Business Insider — RISELab spinoff Anyscale is building tools and infrastructure to run distributed applications, the next really hard problem for big data programmers.

Ceder peeks into the battery pipeline

12/16/19 Berkeley Lab — From cobalt-free to sodium-ion, Berkeley Lab scientist and MSE professor Gerbrand Ceder evaluates some of the most promising battery technologies in development.

Vacuum chamber used to test heat transfer

Heat energy leaps through empty space, thanks to quantum weirdness

12/11/19 — In a surprising new study, Berkeley researchers led by Xiang Zhang, professor of mechanical engineering, showed that heat energy can travel through a complete vacuum due to invisible quantum fluctuations, a discovery that could have profound implications for the design of computer chips.