Berkeley Engineering In The News

Press coverage of Berkeley Engineering people and news.

May 23, 2013 New York Times Engineers see a path out of green card limbo

In a video and story, foreign engineering graduate students at U.C. Berkeley reflect on how immigration reform could make it easier for highly skilled workers like them to stay in the United States.

May 20, 2013 Sacramento Bee Corrosion plagues new Bay Bridge span

A comprehensive investigation by the Sacramento Bee of constructions problems on the new Bay Bridge quotes Berkeley materials science & engineering professor Thomas Devine as saying Caltrans used the wrong tests for corrosion, resulting in "essentially useless" findings. He called the agency's research "woefully inadequate" and "meaningless" for detecting "environmentally assisted cracking."

May 20, 2013 Information Week How password strength meters can improve security

Password strength meters aren't just window dressing, but can result in stronger passwords when users are forced to change "important" accounts, according to a new study by UC Berkeley researcher Serge Egelman and colleagues at the University of British Columbia and Microsoft Research.

May 14, 2013 Forbes Student entrepreneurship is humming at elite universities

“I am young, have time and am willing to take the risk. We want to innovate and deliver awesome engineering products,” says mechanical engineering major Timothy Lee in a story examining the passion of student entrepreneurs and UC Berkeley's expanding efforts to nurture them.

May 14, 2013 CNN Tech Molding the next generation of computer scientists

Kevin Wang always had the teaching bug in him. Now the 2002 EECS alumnus and Microsoft developer is combining his passion and his profession through Technology Education and Literacy in Schools (TEALS), an initiative founded by Wang and supported by Microsoft that places high-tech professionals as part-time teachers in high schools.

May 13, 2013 Innovations Berkeley engineer is Oxford-bound

Graduating senior Daniel A. Price, who will pursue research in medical diagnostic equipment at Oxford University this fall as a Rhodes Scholar, talks about his studies, his research and future plans.

May 13, 2013 Innovations Plate piles keep levees intact

In the basement of Davis Hall, Hamed Hamedifar (Ph.D.’12 CEE) is rattling scale models of levees on a shake table, aiming to bolster the strength of levees in places like the California Delta.

May 02, 2013 Daily Californian Breaking news: engineers will get jobs

Reporting on the Wall Street Journal’s annual “Highest-Paid College Majors” list, the Daily Clog notes that seven out of the 10 majors listed were off-shoots of engineering, which is good news for Cal students.

Apr 24, 2013 Daily Cal PiE wins $25,000 for hosting high school robotics competition

Pioneers in Engineering, a Berkeley Engineering student group, has won $25,000 in the Zipcar Students with Drive contest for reaching out to underprivileged high schools and promoting education in science, technology and engineering through a robotics competition.

Apr 22, 2013 Daily Cal Berkeley junior wins prestigious Goldwater scholarship

Ritankar Das, 18, a junior double-majoring in bioengineering and chemical biology, has been selected as a 2013 Goldwater scholar, the premier undergraduate award of its type in these fields.

Apr 16, 2013 Mercury News Experts tackle questions about broken Bay Bridge anchor rods

Two Berkeley Engineering professors, metallurgical engineer Tom Devine and mechanical engineer Robert Ritchie, field questions about why 32 high-strength threaded steel anchor rods in the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge weakened and snapped.

Apr 11, 2013 Berkeley Patch College, TI cut ribbon on $2.2 million electronics design lab

Texas Instruments and the College of Engineering today opened the doors to a state-of-the-art electronics teaching lab in Cory Hall, made possible by major gifts from TI and Agilent, that will encourage ingenuity among undergraduate engineering students.

Apr 10, 2013 Contra Costa Times Metallurgists say Bay Bridge bolt failure could have been prevented

There are plenty of possible explanations for why 32 huge high-strength steel rods on the new Bay Bridge have snapped, says materials science professor Tom Devine, "but there are no excuses to have them behave in a brittle way."

Apr 08, 2013 KQED California vies for drone-testing contracts

As the FAA pushes ahead with plans to test-fly unmanned nonmilitary drones at six sites around the country, including possibly some in California, Dean of Engineering Shankar Sastry weighs in on some of the concerns — safety, privacy, technology — that must be addressed.

Apr 05, 2013 I-School Computers that can identify you by your thoughts

Instead of typing your password, in the future you may only have to think it, according to a study by School of Information researchers and an EECS undergrad that explores the feasibility of brainwave-based computer authentication.

Apr 05, 2013 CITRIS Paris, San Francisco choose Inria and CITRIS to conduct 'smart city' research

The mayors of Paris and San Francisco recently signed an agreement focusing on the digital economy and smart cities, and designated France's Inria (National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control) and UC's CITRIS (Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society) to carry out joint research on the topic.

Apr 03, 2013 Berkeley Research Beyond genomics – mining the proteome

Amy Herr, associate professor of bioengineering and a 2013 Bakar Fellow, is on the front lines of proteomics research – the ambitious effort to determine the variety and function of all human proteins.

Mar 27, 2013 Wired BOINC enlists Android phones in search for black holes

Computer science professor David Anderson, creator of the BOINC platform that runs SETI@home and other crowd-sourced projects, is now trying to capture the computing power of smart phones with software for Android phones that would help Einstein@home search for black holes.

Mar 27, 2013 QUEST Students build 3D printing vending machine

Combining 3D printing technology with the convenience and accessibility of Redbox DVD dispensers, Berkeley student entrepreneurs have built a vending machine with a seemingly infinite selection of products. The Dreambox, which now lives in Etcheverry Hall, is the first fully automated 3D-printing vending machine.

Mar 26, 2013 The Atlantic Making art out of earthquakes

Industrial engineering professor and artist Ken Goldberg discusses his latest project – an "Internet-based earthwork" called Bloom, which makes the constant low-level seismic action of the Hayward Fault near campus visible as a dynamic artwork.