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Berkeley Engineering Today
In November 2008, California voters passed a $9.95-billion bond issue to build a bullet train that would zip passengers between San Francisco and Los Angeles via the Central Valley at speeds up to 220 miles per hour. Clearly, many Americans are smitten with the romance of the rails. But last month, at an overflow symposium at UC Berkeley, a panel of experts in the fields of transportation engineering and city and regional planning urged caution.
Andrew S. Grove, the 73-year-old former chief executive of Intel, has long brought a piercing intellect and a personal passion to the subject of health care. Mr. Grove will deliver a presentation on Wednesday morning at a symposium in San Francisco, "Translating Technology into Cost-Effective Healthcare," focusing on the shortcomings in the medical innovation pipeline. "Why doesn’t technology give us medical treatments that are better, faster, cheaper? A system that works, heaven forbid, like the chip world." An answer, Mr. Grove says, lies in a concept called "translational medicine."
Software that deciphers botnet communications could help infiltrate criminals' networks. Researchers from UC Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University, including Berkeley Engineering professor Dawn Song and Ph.D. student Juan Caballero, have created a way to automatically reverse engineer the communications between compromised computers and their controlling servers.
Nov 11, 2009
Marin Independent JournalWorking artist: Engineer builds career melding technology with art - and whimsy
Engineering and art may seem worlds apart to some, but to Mill Valley artist Ken Goldberg they're complementary pursuits. Both require a magical combination of creativity, persistence and hard work. Case in point: Goldberg, a Berkeley Engineering professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences, is also director of the UC Berkeley Center for New Media, where he teaches and builds robots that do complex tasks. He also creates expansive, conceptual art installations that deal with the identity, nature and the Internet.
Despite all the attention it has received, the eyebar isn't the biggest danger on the eastern span of the Bay Bridge -- and it's not the reason the span is being replaced instead of retrofitted. At least one Bay Area engineer believes the span could still withstand a major earthquake and should be retrofitted. Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl, a UC Berkeley civil engineering professor and a frequent critic of Caltrans, says the eastern span would be more resistant to earthquakes and terrorist attacks than the single-tower suspension span under construction.
Nov 09, 2009
UC Berkeley NewsCenterIntel, Safeway luminaries to address how tech can lower health costs
Can technological innovation rein in our nation’s escalating health care costs? On Wednesday, Nov. 18, luminaries including Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel Corp., and Steve Burd, CEO of Safeway, will take up this question at the second annual A. Richard Newton Global Technology Leaders Conference, "Translating Technology into Cost-Effective Health Care," hosted by UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering in partnership with the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3).
Ultrasound and underwater sonar devices could "see" a big improvement thanks to the development at UC Berkeley of the world's first acoustic hyperlens, which provides an eightfold boost in the magnification power of sound-based imaging technologies. "We have successfully carried out an experimental demonstration of an acoustic hyperlens that magnifies sub-wavelength objects by gradually converting evanescent waves into propagating waves," said Berkeley Engineering professor Xiang Zhang, a principal investigator.
Ting Xu, a professor of materials science at the University of California at Berkeley, transforms molecules into mini hard drives with massive storage capacity. She has been named one PopSci's annual Brilliant 10 -- a selection of the brightest young researchers in the country.
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EventsNov 23, 2009 Physics Of Nanofilms And NanowiresDec 02, 2009 Due Processing: Incarceration and the Digital DivideDec 02, 2009 CE92 Intro to Civil Engineering Seminar - Fall 2009 |
