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Decoding pictographs: There’s an app for that

06/26/12 — Never mind the labyrinthine streets, chaotic traffic and unfamiliar food: If you talk to many foreign travelers to China, they'll tell you the most challenging part of a journey there is the language barrier. And it's not just the spoken language; the written characters of Chinese are equally confounding. With thousands of symbols making up the Chinese script, deciphering a street sign, menu or train ticket can be an onerous task for tourists.

For good design, start with the end user

06/26/12 — “If you're an engineer and you're working on a project to improve parks, you could stay in a lab. Or you could go to up to Tilden Park and get a fuller context of what visitors experience,” says Lora Oehlberg, a mechanical engineering graduate student and an instructor in a sequence of classes known as the human-centered design course thread.

UC Berkeley Nuclear Engineering Department receives American Nuclear Society Presidential Citation

06/21/12 Virtual Strategy — The UC Berkeley Nuclear Engineering Department has been awarded an American Nuclear Society Presidential Citation for serving at the leading edge of communication to educate California and the nation about radiological impact to the U.S. from the Fukushima incident. "The efforts by UC-Berkeley Nuclear Engineering faculty and students to provide accurate and authoritative information to the public following Fukushima were outstanding and serve as a model to emulate," said ANS President Eric Loewen.

Bioengineering professor Amy Herr receives 2012 Young Innovator Award from Analytical Chemistry

06/15/12 American Chemical Society — Dr. Amy E. Herr of UC Berkeley is the recipient of the Analytical Chemistry 2012 Young Innovator Award, recognizing the contributions of an individual who has demonstrated exceptional technical advancement and innovation in the field of micro- or nanofluidics in his or her early career. Dr. Herr's research interests include use of scale-dependent phenomena to develop new tools for quantifying biomolecules in complex biological fluids.

UC Berkeley announces 2012 Bergeron Scholars

06/12/12 Wall Street Journal Market Watch — UC Berkeley has announced the 2012 Bergeron Scholars. This year's Scholars are the first women to benefit from the program funded by Sandra and Douglas Bergeron in Fall 2011. The Berkeley Bergeron Scholars Program provides scholarships, program support and mentorships to five undergraduate women each year pursuing careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Berkeley Engineering student chosen to carry Olympic torch through England

06/10/12 Inside Bay Area — Kylan Nieh, a UC Berkeley student from Fremont, is among 22 "inspiring Americans" chosen by Coca-Cola to carry the Olympic torch next month in Oxford, England. Nieh, an accomplished gymnast who once competed in the Junior Olympics, is now working toward degrees in computer science and business administration. He teaches a leadership and public speaking course at the Haas School of Business and is president of Nestle-sponsored Very Best in Youth Foundation, a program that spotlights teens who have affected other people's lives profoundly.

VMware names Berkeley Engineering alumnus as first VMware Fellow to recognize exceptional leadership and technology contributions

06/07/12 Yahoo Finance — VMware, Inc., the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, has announced the appointment of two VMware Fellows, recognizing the continued and dramatic contributions by outstanding VMware people to its products, the company and the industry at large. As the inaugural VMware Fellows, Mike Nelson (Ph.D.'88 EECS) and Ole Agesen are being honored by endowments in their names of $800,000 each to UC Berkeley and Stanford University, their respective alma maters.

UC Berkeley Steel Bridge Team takes first place at Nationals

05/31/12 — The CEE Steel Bridge team and their entry, ApoCALypse, took first overall at the 2012 ASCE/AISC Student Steel Bridge Competition held at Clemson University, South Carolina over the Memorial Day weekend. "We held our breath when they announced third place (Cal Poly), and when MIT got second, we started cheering like crazy--for them--and for us, because we knew we were first," said Sabrina Odah, bridge project manager.

Berkeley wins 2012 National Student Steel Bridge Competition

05/31/12 American Society of Civil Engineers — UC Berkeley students have been named champions in the 2012 National Student Steel Bridge Competition. The mission of the competition is to supplement the education of civil engineering students with a comprehensive, student-driven project experience from conception and design through fabrication, erection, and testing, culminating in a steel structure that meets client specifications and optimizes performance and economy.

Keen on big data: Why UC Berkeley might have an edge over Stanford

05/30/12 TechCrunch — Berkeley is hosting a conference this week entitled Data Edge which promises to explore many of the most interesting questions about defining, understanding and extracting value from big data. In this video interview, Professor Marti Hearst defines our "age of big data" and discusses what Berkeley is doing to encourage and incubate big data entrepreneurs, particularly in the areas of healthcare and privacy.

First direct observation of oriented attachment in nanocrystal growth

05/25/12 R & D Magazine — Through biomineralization, nature is able to produce such engineering marvels as mother of pearl, or nacre, the inner lining of abalone shells renowned for both its iridescent beauty and amazing toughness. Key to biomineralization is the phenomenon known as "oriented attachment," whereby adjacent nanoparticles connect with one another in a common crystallographic orientation. Researchers at Berkeley Lab, including Berkeley Engineering professor Jillian Banfield, have reported the first direct observation of what they have termed "jump-to-contact," the critical step in oriented attachment.

Whose lab are you wearing?

05/22/12 Berkeley Science Review — When most of us think of electronics, we think of the sturdy stability of silicon and plastic. Flexibility is a trait that belongs to the organic world, where materials come in all shapes and stiffness. However, advances in materials science and electrical engineering have paved the way for a new type of electronic device: one that can bend and fold just like a piece of paper. From flexible displays to disposable RFID tags, these new materials have enabled electronics to end up in places they never have before. They could even, thanks to Berkeley electrical engineering and computer sciences professor Ana Claudia Arias, end up in our own clothing.

Robotics spark youths’ math, science interests

05/20/12 San Francisco Examiner — Budget cuts have made it tough for public schools to provide much more than the basics, prompting fears that the next generation will lack knowledge of science, technology, engineering and math. But more students and educators in San Francisco are discovering that robotics competitions, such as the one sponsored by UC Berkeley's Pioneers in Engineering (PiE), are an appealing way to promote these so-called STEM fields. "Now, I think engineering isn't as hard or as impossible," said Andy Wong, robotics team captain at Galileo Academy of Science and Technology, which partnered with Balboa High School to win first place in this year's PiE competition.

The education of a maker

05/17/12 — Parents like Tony DeRose (Ph.D'85 CS), senior scientist and research group lead at Pixar Animation Studios, are all too familiar with the difficulty of finding something engaging for their children to do with their hands. “When my son grew out of Legos at about eight years old, we realized there wasn't much for him to graduate into,” DeRose says. That's when DeRose and his son began working on projects in their garage. Most of the projects went unfinished until they discovered the Maker Faire. From there, DeRose and his son were hooked. DeRose wanted to bring the Maker Faire to more students and co-founded the Young Makers program in 2010.

Preventive medicine for pipelines

05/17/12 — Nationwide, our network of more than 2.5 million miles of pipeline is aging. More than a third of the pipeline infrastructure is over 50 years old, and a reliable method to monitor corrosion hasn't really existed. Until now. Jerome Singer, professor emeritus of EECS and engineering science, and two Berkeley Engineering alums have developed a way to keep tabs on pipeline health by using an MRI machine similar to the ones used in hospitals. Their technology is called the Magnetic Response Imaging System (MRIS), and it will be able to look at the state of underground pipelines.

Hats off to 2012 graduates

05/17/12 — The world is now wealthier by well over 1,300 newly minted Berkeley Engineers–a proud moment we celebrated on Saturday, May 12 with the college's 143rd commencement exercises in the Greek Theatre. In the morning, we saluted our master's and doctoral candidates, including the first cohort to graduate from the college's new professional master of engineering program. Commencement speaker Thomas Siebel, chairman of First Virtual Group, reminded graduates that “luck, they say, is where preparation meets opportunity. Be ready. Luck happens.” In our baccalaureate ceremony that afternoon, Marvell co-founder Weili Dai (B.S'84 CS) encouraged the graduates with her own story. Watch a slideshow of the festive events.

Floating robots provide insight into Delta waters

05/15/12 ABC News — UC Berkeley engineering researchers have developed floating robots that may help California in a number of scenarios. The sensors are equipped with GPS receivers and cellphone technology that provide data showing their exact movements in the waterway in real time. They can also deliver information on pollution, salinity and other variables. "The goal here is to be able to show the currents on a scale that was previously unknown, so we can understand better how the Delta works," UC Berkeley electrical engineer Alex Bayen said.

iPhone powered by viruses? Berkeley scientists move closer

05/14/12 ABC News — Viruses might eventually be able to power the very phone, computer or tablet you're reading this article on. Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Berkeley Lab have been able to generate power using a harmless human virus that can covert mechanical force into electricity. "In near future, we believe that we can develop personal electric generators," said Seung-Wuk Lee, a faculty scientist at Berkeley Lab and professor of bioengineering at UC Berkeley.

Weili Dai’s commencement address to Berkeley Engineering students

05/14/12 San Francisco Chronicle — Entrepreneur Weili Dai, the co-founder of Marvell Technology Group Ltd. and Berkeley Engineering alumna, may be the first woman to deliver the commencement address to a UC Berkeley College of Engineering graduating class. This commentary is excerpted from the speech she gave to the Class of 2012 on Saturday, May 12