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Postdoc Amal El-Ghazaly with EECS professor Jeffrey Bokor

California Alliance improving pipeline to the professoriate

03/13/18 — Women and underrepresented minorities in STEM fields, like EECS postdoc Amal El-Ghazaly, are moving into the pipeline for coveted faculty positions thanks to a creative coalition of four elite universities, led by UC Berkeley.
Marissa Louie with several of her plush friends

The hidden social mission behind a trending toy

03/13/18 — A herd of stuffed animals with mix-and-match parts paid a visit to a Sutardja Center classroom to help students learn how they can design products to have a social impact - a subject dear to the heart of Animoodles CEO (and industrial engineering alumna) Marissa Louie.
Roads dividing in a forest

New machine learning method sees the forests and the trees

03/06/18 Berkeley Lab — In an effort to teach computers to guide science, researchers at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley have come up with a novel machine learning method, which they call "iterative Random Forests," that enables scientists to derive insights from systems of previously intractable complexity in record time.
Brown fat tissue from a mouse

Brown fat flexes its muscle to burn energy — and calories

03/06/18 — Scientists at the UC Berkeley, including bioengineering professor Sanjay Kumar, have discovered that the same kind of fat cells that help newborn babies regulate their body temperature could be a target for weight-loss drugs in adults.
Robotic surgical arm picking up grains of rice from a moving platform

How flight simulation tech can help turn robots into surgeons

03/02/18 Wired — Robotics researchers from Berkeley's AUTOLab, led by IEOR and EECS professor Ken Goldberg, have built a heaving robotic platform - mimicking the motion of a breathing, heart-beating human patient - to help develop algorithms that robotic surgical assistants can use to guide their cutting.
Graphic illustrating how the brain

Retraining the brain’s vision center to take action

03/01/18 — Neuroscientists, including Berkeley EECS professor Jose Carmena, have demonstrated the astounding flexibility of the brain by training neurons that normally process input from the eyes to develop new skills, in this case, to control a computer-generated tone.
Grace O

Mechanical engineering to aid back surgery

02/28/18 Berkeley Research — Lower back pain is not as common as the common cold, but it's close, and treating it surgically comes with significant risk. Grace O'Connell, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, is heading a project aimed at predicting which patients are most vulnerable to secondary fractures or disc degeneration following spinal fusion surgery.
Ion Stoica with members of the RISELab team

$10 million award for RISELab’s AI research

02/27/18 — Berkeley's RISELab, led by EECS professor Ion Stoica, has received an Expeditions in Computing award from the National Science Foundation, providing $10 million in funding over five years to enable game-changing advances in real-time decision making technologies.
Teresa Meng

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.”
Warning flag with skull and crossbones

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.
Anca Dragan and Raluca Ada Popa

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.
Clarity team working on computers

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.