Berkeley Engineering In The News

Press coverage of Berkeley Engineering people and news.

May 13, 2008 New Scientist New material may be step towards 3D invisibility cloak

Jason Valentine, a graduate student in the nano-engineering lab at the University of California at Berkeley, says his lab has created the first 3D material able to bend light in the opposite direction to natural materials.

May 12, 2008 The New York Times Army Corps says condition of many levees a mystery

Across America, flood levees protect big cities and small towns, wealthy suburbs and rich farmland. But the Army Corps of Engineers lacks an inventory of thousands of them and has no idea of their condition. Critics are troubled that the government doesn't know. Robert Bea, a UC Berkeley levee expert, said many levees are old, with rusting infrastructure and built to protect against relatively common floods. ''Once they do get an inventory,'' Bea said, ''I think we're not going to like what we find.''

May 12, 2008 Los Angeles Times A Southland traffic break

Some quicker commutes are a silver lining to high gas prices and a weak economy. Pravin Varaiya, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley who helps oversee the Freeway Performance Measurement System database, comments on how a declining economy eases traffic.

May 11, 2008 KCBS Berkeley researchers turn cell phones into medical imagers

Engineers at UC Berkeley have come up with an innovative new use for cell phones that may save countless lives. The hand held devices can now be turned into medical imaging devices. ”We took advantage of the fact that cellular phones are ubiquitous, everywhere you go,” said Cal Professor Boris Rubinski.

May 11, 2008 Nashua Telegraph: Medical Journal Telemedicine becoming more common every day

Boris Rubinsky, a professor of bioengineering and mechanical engineering at both Hebrew University in Jerusalem and UC Berkeley, has figured out that the most expensive and breakdown-prone parts of ultrasound machines, X-ray cameras, even magnetic resonance imagers, are the devices that process the raw data and convert it into images.

May 09, 2008 EE Times IP standards effort Rolls for wireless sensor nets

David Culler, a sensor network pioneer who is co-founder and chief technology officer of startup Arch Rock and co-chairman of Roll as well a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley, is part of a standards effort to provide one of the missing puzzle pieces for wireless sensor networks.

May 08, 2008 guardian.co.uk Why the future's green for IT

The report being written for the Joint Information System Committee (Jisc) says green IT is best achieved through the collaboration of IT and estates management. It finds that increased energy and computing costs can be offset by technologies such as grid computing and virtualisation. The need to reduce carbon the footprint is behind a cull of wasteful IT practices. Dave Berry, technology lead of the knowledge transfer organisation Grid Computing Now, explains how grid computing and virtualisation work: "The most famous example of grid computing is Berkeley University's SETI @t Home project - the search for extraterrestrial life. Berkeley has taken a complex research project and broken it up into lots of little tasks run on people's home computers."

May 08, 2008 Wired News The MicroFueler - A Washing Machine That Makes DIY Ethanol

E-Fuel Corporation has unveiled its EFuel 100 MicroFueler, a device about the size of a stacking washer-dryer that uses sugar, yeast and water to make 100 percent ethanol at the push of a button. "You just open it like a washing machine and dump in your sugar, close the door and push one button," company founder Tom Quinn told us. "A few days later, you've got ethanol." Making ethanol at home is not as easy as Quinn might have you believe, says Daniel Kammen, director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at UC-Berkeley. Making a lot of ethanol has generally required a lot of equipment, he told the New York Times, and quality control can be uneven. “There’s a lot of hurdles you have to overcome. It’s entirely possible that they’ve done it, but skepticism is a virtue,” Kammen says.

May 08, 2008 San Francisco Chronicle Professor rips Caltrans over maze rebuild

Caltrans should have been more concerned about public safety than public relations when it rebuilt the fire-blasted MacArthur Maze a year ago in an unfathomable 17 days, says UC Berkeley civil engineering professor Abolhassan Astaneh.

May 08, 2008 University of Western Ontario News End of semiconductor roadmap ahead

Eli Yablonovitch, professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley, is the founding experimentalist in photonic band gap materials and known as the first person to design artificial crystal structures that manipulate light in a special and promising way. As the 2008 Western Institute for Nanomaterials Science Distinguished Lecturer, Yablonovitch provided a look back at the growth, refinement and impacts of integrated circuits via silicon technology, and offered predictions about where the technology is going.

May 07, 2008 Business Week Is U.S. Innovation Headed Offshore?

Just as key manufacturing industries fled offshore in the 1970s and '80s, U.S. companies are now shifting more engineering and design work to low-cost nations such as China, India, and Russia. Surely, innovation itself must follow. Apparently not, according to a new study published by the National Academies, the Washington organization that advises the U.S. government on science and technology policy. The 371-page report titled Innovation in Global Industries argues that, in sectors from software and semiconductors to biotech and logistics, America's lead in creating new products and services has remained remarkably resilient over the past decade—even as more research and development by U.S. companies is done offshore. "This is a good sign," says Georgetown University Associate Strategy Professor Jeffrey T. Macher, who co-edited the study with David C. Mowery of the University of California at Berkeley. "It means most of the value added is going to U.S. firms, and they are able to reinvest those profits in innovation."

May 05, 2008 Business Wire FireEye Brings Anti-Botnet Protection to Higher Ed

FireEye, Inc., the leader in global anti-botnet protection, continues its anti-botnet offensive, helping educational institutions overcome their unique challenges to rid campus networks of stealth malware and botnets. Chief investigator Dr. Michael J. Staggs will co-present at the EDUCAUSE Security Professionals Conference, joined by Fred Archibald, network manager, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) at UC Berkeley in a discussion entitled “FireEye, Inc. and UC Berkeley: Combating Stealth Malware and Botnets in Higher Education.”

May 05, 2008 New Scientist Delaying data could cut net's carbon footprint

As energy prices soar, and governments and organisations start to sweat over their carbon footprint, the energy consumption of the internet is coming under scrutiny. Sergiu Nedevschi of UC Berkeley and colleagues at Intel Research labs in Berkeley and Seattle, have worked out how to make energy savings of around 50%, by delaying data flowing into a network by just a few milliseconds.

May 02, 2008 The Economist Bugs in the tank: Fuel’s future is in designing, not refining

Amyris Biotechnologies, a company in Emeryville, California, that spun out of the University of California at Berkeley several years ago, has pioneered a way of custom designing microbes to produce a whole range of specialised hydrocarbons—including molecules that are exact replicas of artemisinin, an anti-malarial drug, as well as fuels like petrol, diesel and aviation spirit.

May 01, 2008 San Francisco Chronicle HP Labs' find could revolutionize computing

HP Labs said Wednesday that it has proved the existence of a new element in electrical engineering that was first described in a scientific paper 37 years ago by Leon Chua, a professor of electrical engineering at Berkeley. He laid the theoretical foundation for the memristor in a paper he published in 1971.

May 01, 2008 The Chronicle of Higher Education New study debunks myth that most tech entrepreneurs are college kids

A new study from researchers at Duke University and Harvard University challenges the popular assumption that most technology entrepreneurs are twee college kids launching businesses from their dorm rooms. The research found that the median and average age at which U.S.-born entrepreneurs founded their technology and engineering companies was 39. UC Berkeley is included among the top ten schools awarding these entrepreneurs’ most advanced degrees.

May 01, 2008 East Bay Express Neat UC Berkeley gadget of the week

Boris Rubinsky, a Cal professor of bioengineering and mechanical engineering, has developed new technology that could make medical imaging cheaply and easily available around the world. Rubinsky has rigged a cell phone to collect electronic medical data from a patient, send it to a remote processing center, and return the images to the cell phone.

Apr 30, 2008 The Wall Street Journal HP thinks new 'memristor' could have big impact on data storage

Researchers at Hewlett-Packard Co. say they've built a new element of electronic circuitry that had previously existed only in theory. The notion of a memristor was postulated in 1971 by Leon Chua, an electrical engineering professor at UC Berkeley.

Apr 30, 2008 The New York Times Race is on to advance software for chips

In the computer world’s equivalent of “The Amazing Race,” three rival teams of computer researchers are working on new types of software needed to better use computer chips that can process many tasks at the same time. Stanford University and six computer and chip makers plan to announce Friday the creation of the Pervasive Parallelism Lab. Last month, Intel and Microsoft announced they were jointly financing new labs at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to tackle the same problem.

Apr 30, 2008 New Scientist Engineers find 'missing link' of electronics

Nanoscale circuits based on molecules used in sunscreen lotion have led to the discovery of the "missing link" of electronics engineering – a previously mythical device known as a "memristor." First predicted in 1971 by a young circuit designer called Leon Chua at UC Berkeley, the memristor could help develop denser memory chips or even electronic circuits that mimic the synapses of the human brain.