News

Robert Full showing students the adhesive pads of a gecko

New course to tap Berkeley’s diversity and maker spirit

12/20/17 — Thanks to a $1 million grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Robert Full, professor of integrative biology and EECS, can realize a dream to show students how hacking the secrets of biology can help them design their future and give back to their communities.

Warren Hoburg with the Jungle Hawk Owl drone

Drone pioneer Warren Hoburg named Innovator of the Year

12/20/17 R&D — Aerospace engineer and astronaut candidate Warren "Woody" Hoburg (M.S.'11, Ph.D.'13 EECS) has been named Innovator of the Year by R&D Magazine for his pioneering work creating the Jungle Hawk Owl extended-flight drone.

Andrew Ng says factories are AI’s next frontier

12/18/17 MIT Tech Review — Artificial intelligence expert and Berkeley Engineering alum Andrew Ng (Ph.D.'03 EECS) is on a mission to AI-ify manufacturing, starting with partners like Foxconn.

University of Hong Kong names Xiang Zhang as new leader

12/15/17 — Mechanical engineering professor Xiang Zhang has been named the 16th president and vice-chancellor of the University of Hong Kong, among the most prestigious universities in Asia.

Illustration of autonomous vehicle situation on city street

Are we going too fast on driverless cars?

12/15/17 Science — Automakers, high-tech companies and politicians are solidly behind self-driving cars and trucks as a sure path to a better, more mobile society. But research on the social, economic and environmental effects of autonomous vehicles is sparse - something Berkeley transportation engineers are seeking to remedy.

Fight sexual harassment in tech — with technology

12/14/17 Mercury News — In a commentary piece, CITRIS post-doc Brandie Nonnecke reports on two novel ways that women-led Bay Area startups are using technology to address gender-based discrimination and harassment in the tech sector.

A new metacanvas for metamaterials

12/13/17 — Junqiao Wu and Jie Yao, professors of materials science and members of Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division, asked themselves how it might be possible to create metamaterial devices that could be erased and written over again - like an Etch A Sketch drawing toy - to quickly yield a quite different device.

Karen Taylor of Onederful pitching during SkyDeck

State grant accelerates UC Berkeley’s innovation and entrepreneurship

12/12/17 — Berkeley has announced promising early results from a $2.2 million state-funded grant, which has helped the campus, already a global hub for innovation, to expand its entrepreneurship activities with new facilities, courses and programs.

Liu, Yablonovitch honored as inventors

12/12/17 — EECS professors Tsu-Jae King Liu and Eli Yablonovitch are among three newly named Berkeley fellows of the National Academy of Inventors, an organization that champions the societal benefits of university research.

FLIPalliance: Dragan, Forbes, Fox, Joseph, Stephens-Martinez, Garcia, and Taylor

Berkeley’s FLIPalliance for diversity

12/09/17 — As part of its effort to attract talented women and minority graduate computer science applicants, Berkeley Engineering has joined the NSF-funded FLIP Alliance (Diversifying Future Leadership In the Professoriate).

Steven Conolly in his lab with two magnetic particle imaging prototypes.

Closing in on cancer

12/06/17 — Bioengineering and EECS professor Steven Conolly is building a new kind of medical diagnostic technology called magnetic particle imaging (MPI).

Computer scientist Randy Katz named vice chancellor for research

12/06/17 — EECS professor Randy Katz, who helped develop many of the wireless tools and fast, reliable computer storage we take for granted today, has been appointed vice chancellor for research at Berkeley, effective Jan. 1, 2018.

The robot Vestri plays with objects to learn how to complete a task.

New robots can see into the future

12/06/17 — Berkeley researchers, led by EECS assistant professor Sergey Levine, have developed a learning technology that enables robots to imagine the future of their actions so they can figure out how to manipulate objects they have never encountered before.

Winning students Eric Munsing, Allen Tang, Soeren Kuenzel and Jake Soloff with their prize check

Grad students win $100,000 in data science contest

12/04/17 — A team of UC Berkeley graduate students with serious data science and analysis skills, including EECS MS student Allen Tang and CEE Ph.D. candidate Eric Munsing beat teams from the likes of Harvard, MIT and Oxford to win the $100,000 top prize in an international data science competition staged by the hedge fund Citadel.

Randy Katz inducted into Silicon Valley Engineering Hall of Fame

11/29/17 — EECS professor Randy Katz (M.S. '78/Ph.D. '80), co-developer of the RAID concept for computer storage, has been inducted into the Silicon Valley Engineering Hall of Fame for his research and his "exemplary mentorship and teaching."

At Berkeley, ‘ethical hackers’ learn to wage cyberwar

11/29/17 New Yorker — EECS professor Doug Tygar is teaching a new generation of cyber security researchers to prevent cyberwar attacks by forensically examining them, and even sometimes mounting "ethical hacking" schemes of their own.

Mark Asta appointed Materials Sciences Division Director at the Berkeley Lab

11/28/17 — Mark Asta has been appointed Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division Director. Asta will step down from his current position as chair of the department of materials science and engineering on January 1, 2018, in order to begin the new position.

Frame grab from Slaughterbots video showing drone promoter

Professor’s eerie lethal drone video goes viral

11/20/17 SF Chronicle — "Slaughterbots," a not-so-futuristic video warning against the development of autonomous weapons, has gone viral. Co-created by EECS professor Stuart Russell and the Future of Life Institute, it was released this week at the United Nations Convention on Conventional Weapons in Geneva.

Siddharth Satishm Kunwoo Lee and Han Jin

Engineering alumni among Forbes 30 Under 30

11/17/17 — Three Berkeley Engineering alumni - Siddharth Satish and Kunwoo Lee from Bioengineering and Han Jin from Industrial Engineering and Operations Research - are among the young stars included in the 2018 edition of the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.

“blankie” developed at UC Berkeley that contains printed MRI coils

Medical electronics ‘like a second skin’

11/16/17 STAT — Using simple printers with special inks, EECS professor Ana Claudia Arias specializes in the development of low-cost, flexible and wearable electronics that can be used for medical monitoring and imaging.