|
|
Document ActionsForefront Fall 2007Cover StoryGreen Future: Engineers Forge Novel Technologies For A Sustainable WorldEngineering faculty members (clockwise, from left) Arun Majumdar, Samer Madanat, Paul Wright, Arpad Horvath and Jasmina Vujic on the banks of Strawberry Creek on campus. They are just five of the many UC Berkeley researchers working on new technologies, infrastructures and other novel approaches to curb carbon emissions and reverse centuries of global climate change. Features
Project Genie: Berkeley’s piece of the computer revolutionMid-1960s computers were enormous, room-filling machines that only major corporations, government agencies and universities could afford. Prohibitively expensive, they functioned like today’s programmable-memory calculators: no words, no images, no sounds or music, no networking, just number crunching. IBM manufactured most of these mainframes to run the accounting systems and print the paychecks of the world’s corporations. 
An Intentional Life: Software engineer Charles Simonyi (B.S.’72 Eng Math) scores success with space sojournAlumnus Charles Simonyi scores success with space sojourn He is no stranger to bold ventures. At age 17, he left his family behind in communist Hungary, with no intention of returning, to pursue his dream of becoming a computer programmer. When government authorities discovered the defection, it was his father who took the punishment by having his electrical engineering professorship stripped from him. The boy would not see his family again until 1989, when the Iron Curtain fell. 
Societal-Scale Mind: Questions for S. Shankar SastryThe new engineering dean talks about his visions for the College, the biggest challenges in the field, and why he may still have your business card. 
Carpool lanes: A tale of two studiesThe state’s first carpool lane was installed on the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge in 1971 to encourage carpooling and move more people more quickly. But Bay Area traffic congestion, up by 6 percent last year according to transit officials, still gets worse every year; and carpoolers complain that life in the fast lane is not fast enough, due to pokey hybrids and scofflaws. Contents |
