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Civies play with their food to fight hunger
IT'S IN THE CAN :
CEE students recently participated in Canstruction, a charity
event featuring local architects and engineers who create
sculptures out of canned food, which is then donated to local
food banks. The civies named their structure “Blowing
away the Hunger Blues” and built it as a tribute to
New Orleans. “The water spout symbolizes the flood,” says
CE Ph.D. student Pedro Santos Vieira, “and the saxophone
rising from it symbolizes the rebirth of a new New Orleans.” The
team spent two months designing and constructing it; they
used 1,000 tuna and 1,500 salmon cans. Pictured, from left,
are graduate students Long Nguyen, Roxana Hernandez, Kofi
Inkabi, senior Doug Wahl, and graduate students Pedro Santos
Vieira and Seulkee Lee with a close-to-final version of the
sculpture. (Photo provided by Pedro Santos Vieira)
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What is the future of the semiconductor industry? Well, Rick Cassidy
just might know. For more than 25 years, R.B. “Rick” Cassidy
has worked in the semiconductor industry and today is president of
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) North America, the
world’s first and largest dedicated semiconductor foundry.
On Friday, December 9, Cassidy will present his thoughts on the industry’s
future and the key role he sees for today’s engineering students.
The talk will be of special interest to students in EECS, MSE, ME,
IEOR, Physics, Chemistry, Chemical Engineering, and Management of Technology,
and takes place from 4 to 5 p.m. in the Banatao Room, 290 Hearst
Memorial Mining Building. Free giveaways and refreshments will be provided.
Cassidy’s job is to grow TSMC’s business in North America,
and it’s been a challenge. The industry slowed over the last
few years, and some say it has reached maturation, even saturation.
Yet Cassidy, who achieved his success by envisioning opportunity and
relentlessly pursuing it, says semiconductors are still a very hot
technology. [FULL STORY]
At the conclusion of the Berkeley Technology Breakthrough Competition,
two engineering teams had out-researched, out-presented, and outsmarted
their 41 competitors to take home $15,000 in award money. The second
annual competition took place on Thursday, November 17, at the Berkeley
Art Museum and was hosted by the Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology
(CET). The competition’s goal is to reward Berkeley engineers
and scientists “who are working on high-impact science and technologies
that can be applied and widely used within five years.”
During the competition, five teams of finalists each gave a six-minute “elevator
pitch” and fielded questions from a panel of venture capitalists
and IT executives. After a 30-minute break, during which judges deliberated
in seclusion and audience members endured the suspense by snacking
on elegant appetizers in the lobby, the winners were announced. [FULL STORY]
Can you engineer a system as well as nature? That’s the underlying
question behind a new reality TV show on Animal Planet called “Chasing
Nature.” Two Berkeley graduate students answered the challenge
when they and other top engineering students were flown to Australia
to film the show.
Ph.D. students Ilan Gur (MSE) and Anthony Levandowski (IEOR) star
as two of the engineers-turned-cast members. “It was fun to do
engineering outside the context of my Ph.D. research and to experience
the making of a television show,” Gur says. “All in all,
it was a fantastic experience.”
In each episode, teams of students recreate some physical characteristic
of a particular animal in a special effects studio doubling as a lab,
then test their solution. Gur’s team was assigned to replicate
the bat’s sonar-based echolocation; their task was to build something
that would locate objects in a room for a teammate wearing a blindfold.
The room was set up in a movie studio with access to the flying apparatus
and harnesses used in the movie “Matrix.” [FULL STORY]
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