Berkeley Engineering In The News

Press coverage of Berkeley Engineering people and news.

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.

Mar 26, 2013 Berkeley Research Mind over matter

Neuroengineer Jose Carmena and bioengineer Michel Maharbiz do research in BMI, an emerging technology for retraining the brain to operate a prosthetic device such as an artificial limb. They are supported by the campus's new Bakar Fellows Program, which helps early-career faculty pursue innovative research with commercial potential.

Mar 22, 2013 SynBERC BIOFAB engineers cooperate to establish precision grammar for programming cells

Researchers at BIOFAB, a collaboration among academia, industry and government, have created a professional-grade collection of public domain DNA parts, in effect establishing rules for the first language for engineering gene expression and greatly increasing the reliability and precision by which biology can be engineered. Bioengineering professor Adam Arkin is BIOFAB's co-director.

Mar 22, 2013 Berkeley Lab Researchers use metamaterials to observe giant photonic spin Hall effect

Engineering a unique metamaterial of gold nanoantennas, Berkeley Lab researchers, led by Berkeley mechanical engineering professor Xiang Zhang, were able to obtain the strongest signal yet of the photonic spin Hall effect, an optical phenomenon of quantum mechanics that could play a prominent role in the future of computing.

Mar 22, 2013 Berkeley Lab Simulations yield clues to how cells interact with surroundings

Cells interact constantly with their surroundings, but it’s very difficult to observe the main player in this interaction – a protein called integrin. Mohammad Mofrad, associate professor of bioengineering and mechanical engineering, and bioengineering graduate student Mehrdad Mehrbod have developed a computer model of integrin that gives researchers a new way to explore how the protein connects a cell’s inner and outer environments.

Mar 18, 2013 Association for Computing Machinery EECS alumni Micali and Goldwasser win Turing Award

Ph.D. EECS alumni Silvio Micali and Shafi Goldwasser have been named winners of the ACM Turing Award, considered the Nobel Prize of computer science. The two, both now computer science professors at MIT, pioneered the field of provable security, which laid the mathematical foundations that made modern cryptography possible.

Mar 18, 2013 CITRIS Connected Corridors aims to boost efficiency of existing roads

Connected Corridors, a project led by engineering professors Alex Bayen and Roberto Horowitz, is developing technologies to help Caltrans gather and analyze traffic data. A goal of the research: to make existing roadways more efficient, rather than launching new highway-construction projects.

Mar 13, 2013 U.S. News & World Report Berkeley Engineering ranks among top 3 graduate schools

Along with MIT and Stanford, Berkeley Engineering is once again ranked among the top three schools for graduate study, according to the Best Graduate Schools 2014 guidebook from U.S. News & World Report. All departmental programs earned spots in the top 10, with No. 1 rankings going to computer science and environmental engineering.

Mar 05, 2013 Wired Return of the Borg: How Twitter rebuilt Google’s secret weapon

Borg is a Google software system that coordinates tasks across the search giant's vast fleet of servers. At Twitter, a small team of engineers has built a similar system using Mesos, an open-source software platform developed by UC Berkeley researchers. Ben Hindman, who founded the Mesos project as an EECS Ph.D. student, now oversees its use at Twitter.

Mar 05, 2013 Sacramento Business Journal Assembly honors Weili Dai for 'Breaking the Glass Ceiling'

Marvell co-founder Weili Dai, B.S. ’84 CS, was one of 11 remarkable California women honored Monday by the state assembly's Legislative Women's Caucus with a "Breaking the Glass Ceiling" award, saluting her work as an entrepreneur and technology pioneer.

Feb 28, 2013 Daily Cal Apple (and EECS) alum Steve Wozniak to keynote Berkeley commencement

Berkeley’s Class of 2013 has chosen Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, EECS '86, to be keynote speaker at its May 18 Commencement Convocation at Memorial Stadium.