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Playing poker for
a purpose
PLACE YOUR BETS:
From left, CEE students Maggie Ortiz (senior), Helen Lam (junior),
Matt Vaggione (junior), and Johnny Mendoza (freshman) play No-Limit
Texas Hold ‘em Poker at an October 19 charity event in
Davis Hall. More than 30 CEE students and faculty members raised
about $300 for Hurricane Katrina survivors who are attending
Berkeley. While the stakes weren’t high (chips were valued
between five cents and two dollars), the civies showed plenty
of poker faces and serious play. Cal’s chapter of the
American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) hosted the fundraiser.
(Photo Credit: Rachel Jackson)
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Berkeley Innovation always begins with an annoying problem. This particular
evening, the issue is taking out the trash. Fourteen members of the
two-year-old club congregate in a loft-like space in Hearst Mining Building.
They’re given large pieces of butcher paper and color markers.
“For tonight’s brainstorm, we’re doing something
new called ‘Nine Windows,’” ME graduate student Jonathan
Hey tells members. “Creative people tend to think naturally in
time and space, so this is to remind you to do that.” The group
breaks into teams to brainstorm: What are the problems and solutions
associated with taking out the trash before, during, and afterward,
around and within the trashcan, and the trash itself? [FULL STORY]
A team of 10 Berkeley engineers recently raced against time and reconstruction
efforts to conduct a preliminary investigation of the 370-mile levee
and floodwall system in New Orleans. The Katrina Recovery Task Force
(KRTF), comprised of CEE faculty and graduate students, looked for failures,
evidence of what caused the failures, and factors that made certain
spots vulnerable. Engineers found a dozen or more breaches.
“We saw evidence of overtopping where a 25-foot wall of water
came straight down over the levee like a waterfall and eroded out the
base of the levee,” says CEE professor and levee expert Ray Seed.
“But the three downtown levee breaks were failures of soil, not
overtopping” as the Army Corps of Engineers originally concluded.
“In one place, we found a floodgate left wide open.”
In some cases, the levees weren’t built down far enough into
stable soil, the team concluded. In others, thoughtless engineering
or piecemeal construction led to failures. “One of the things
we discovered was the levees were of different heights,” says
team member and CEE graduate student Rune Storesund. “Because
they weren’t consistent, your lowest point is your weak point.”
[FULL STORY]
In the Soda Hall office of EECS professor Lotfi Zadeh, there are so
many books and papers stacked floor to ceiling that only a small footpath
remains. The contents represent a lifetime of work that began before
the age of computers and continues to proffer theories about them today,
55 years later.
At the center of it all is Fuzzy logic, a theory that challenges classical
logic’s belief in absolute true or false. Its applications can
be found in everything from cameras to car transmissions, elevator control
to medical instrumentation. Zadeh, known worldwide as the “Father
of Fuzzy logic,” will be at the center of the EECS department’s
November 2-5 conference and celebration commemorating the fortieth anniversary
of his pioneering theory.
Zadeh was born in Soviet Azerbaijan in 1921. When he was 10, his family
moved to Iran, where he attended an American Presbyterian missionary
school. “By six or seven, I already knew I wanted to be a scientist
or engineer,” he recalls. He studied electrical engineering at
the University of Tehran, graduating in 1942. He received his master’s
from MIT, his Ph.D. from Columbia, and, in 1959, was recruited to Berkeley
from a full professorship at Columbia. [FULL STORY]
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