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The humble bicycle propelled AIDS-orphan Chris Ategeka from rural East Africa to UC Berkeley, driving him to success as an engineer, inventor and social entrepreneur.
Tag: engineering
Building an LGBT community for STEM majors
April 30, 2013:
An appreciation for diversity and a passion for energizing student life led Paul Zarate,a senior majoring in mechanical engineering, to found the Berkeley chapter of Out in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (oSTEM), a national organization dedicated to the professional development of LGBT students.
Ten Berkeley faculty named to American Academy of Arts and Sciences
April 24, 2013:
Ten Berkeley professors have been named members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a prestigious 233-year-old honorary society of national leaders from academia, business, public affairs and the humanities.
Campus poised to join Obama’s BRAIN initiative
April 2, 2013:
President Barack Obama has announced a major national initiative to understand how the brain works and how it goes awry. Neuroscientist John Ngai, chemist Paul Alivisatos and chemical engineer Jay Keasling were on hand at the White House to lend support to the so-called BRAIN initiative, which Ngai termed “our moon project.”
Connected Corridors aims to up efficiency of existing roadways
March 18, 2013:
Connected Corridors, a project led by engineering profs 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.
Cockroaches teach robots how to balance
February 26, 2013:
How do you design a mobile robot that keeps its balance? Berkeley scientist Shai Revzen and his colleagues have been studying the steady-footed cockroach for keys to this vexing problem. Their theory: it’s not in a better algorithm, but better leg design. Discovery News reports.
Scientists create automated ‘time machine’ to reconstruct ancient languages
February 11, 2013:
Ancient languages hold a treasure trove of information about the culture, politics and commerce of millennia past. Yet, reconstructing them to reveal clues into human history can require decades of painstaking work. Now, UC Berkeley scientists have created an automated “time machine,” of sorts, that will greatly accelerate and improve the process of reconstructing hundreds of ancestral languages.
The making of a ‘lifetime mentor award’ winner
January 28, 2013:
Mechanical-engineering professor Alice Agogino has been named winner of the AAAS Lifetime Mentor Award. In a Q&A with the NewsCenter, she talks about her influences and her efforts to transform a profession, from human-centered design to blogging and Barbies.
USAID chief lauds Blum Center as model in search for global solutions
October 11, 2012:
USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah visited campus and encouraged students to join the search for open source solutions to pressing global problems.
Students’ yurt-style design embraced by Pinoleville Pomo Nation
September 21, 2012:
A yurt-style house design conceived in last spring’s E10, Engineering Design and Analysis, was used as the base concept for several successful housing grant applications by members of the Pinoleville Pomo Nation, who will use the funds to build up to 26 new homes in the Mendocino County community of Ukiah.
Bancroft Library’s Regional Oral History Office looks for Bay Bridge accounts that span the years
July 9, 2012:
Interviewers at the Bancroft Library’s Regional Oral History Office (ROHO) are betting there are just as many cool stories to tell about the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as about its colorful cousin.
Key to good design? Start with the end user
July 5, 2012:
An engineer working on a project to improve parks would do well to visit a nearby park to get “a fuller context of what visitors experience,” says mechanical engineering grad student Lora Oehlberg. Oehlberg instructs classes at Berkeley known as the human-centered design course thread, looking at incorporating the needs of the end user into the engineering of goods, products or services.
Cal engineering students win national steel bridge competition
June 1, 2012:
UC Berkeley civil engineering students speed-built a winning steel bridge called ApoCALypse to take first place in the 2012 Student Steel Bridge Competition, an annual contest sponsored by the American Institute of Steel Construction and the American Society of Civil Engineers. Only 47 teams from a field of nearly 200 nationwide advanced to the finals, which were held at Clemson University in South Carolina over the Memorial Day weekend.
Media Advisory: Engineers to toss 100 sensors downriver in Delta field test
May 4, 2012:
UC Berkeley engineers will conduct their inaugural field test of the Floating Sensor Network project on Wednesday, May 9, in Walnut Grove, Calif. They developed floating sensors that can be rapidly deployed in response to emergencies such as levee breaches or oil spills. The fleet includes robotic sensors that can swim around obstacles to target areas of interest and transmit live data to researchers using GPS receivers and mobile phone technology.
Comerio leads national roundtable on integrated disaster recovery
March 19, 2012:
Northern California experts, including UC Berkeley architecture professor Mary Comerio, are heading up a national roundtable on improving responses after major disasters.
Scott Shenker elected to National Academy of Engineering
February 9, 2012:
Engineering professor Scott Shenker joins the ranks of the National Academy of Engineering, bringing to 92 the total number of UC Berkeley faculty members given the prestigious honor.
Leaping lizards and dinosaurs inspire robot design
January 4, 2012:
Undergraduate and graduate students teamed up with biologist Robert Full to study how lizards use their tails when leaping. What they found can help design robots that are more stable on uneven terrain and after unexpected falls, which is critical to successful search and rescue operations.
College of Engineering launches collaboration with Shanghai innovation hub
November 15, 2011:
The College of Engineering announced Nov. 11 a new partnership with the Shanghai Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Park, one of China’s top high-tech parks, to develop a platform for expanding industrial and academic research collaborations in Asia and fostering global learning opportunities for UC Berkeley students.
Chancellor Birgeneau visits South Korea on Asia trip
November 8, 2011:
Chancellor Birgeneau and campus faculty experts are on a swing through Asia this week.
Researchers turn viruses into molecular Legos
October 19, 2011:
UC Berkeley researchers have turned a benign virus into building blocks for assembling structures that mimic collagen, one of the most important structural proteins in nature. The “self-templating assembly” process they developed could eventually be used to manufacture materials with tunable optical, biomedical and mechanical properties.
Robotic roach gets wings, sheds light on evolution of flight
October 17, 2011:
When UC Berkeley engineers outfitted a six-legged robotic bug with wings in an effort to improve its mobility, they unexpectedly shed some light on the evolution of flight. The wings nearly doubled the running speed of the 25-gram robot. Find out why that wasn’t good enough for takeoff.
From EECS, an intelligent approach to mobile news
September 15, 2011:
Two grad students in EECS have developed a computer model that makes it easy to read summaries of news articles on smart phones and cell phones.
Ferroelectrics could pave way for ultra-low power computing
September 12, 2011:
UC Berkeley engineers have shown that by using ferroelectric materials, they can pump up the charge accumulated at a capacitor for a given voltage, a phenomenon called negative capacitance. The achievement could reduce the power draw of today’s electronics, and break the bottleneck that has stalled improvements in computer clock speed.
Engineering alum reflects on World Trade Center towers he helped build
September 11, 2011:
Leslie Robertson, a 1952 UC Berkeley civil engineering graduate, was the lead structural engineer of the World Trade Center towers. Ten years after their collapse, Robertson continues to carry with him the suffering of those who died that day.
UC Berkeley robotics expert named among world’s top young innovators
August 23, 2011:
Pieter Abbeel, a UC Berkeley, professor known for his novel work in the field of machine learning in robotics – including robots that can fold laundry – has been named to a prestigious list of 35 of the world’s top young innovators by Technology Review magazine.
Historian of science Roger Hahn dies at 79
August 8, 2011:
Roger Hahn, emeritus professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, and a leader in shaping the academic field of the history of science, died unexpectedly on May 30 in New York City.
To catch a speeding bullet
August 1, 2011:
East Palo Alto’s soaring homicide rate in the 1990s prompted EECS alumnus Robert Showen, an acoustics specialist in neighboring Menlo Park, to develop technology that could locate gunfire and tell police where it’s coming from.
Invisibility cloak makes bumps disappear
July 29, 2011:
It can’t quite cover Harry Potter, yet, but an invisibility cloak developed by UC Berkeley engineers was able to bounce visible light waves away from a microscopic object about as big as a red blood cell. The experiment using the reflective silicon oxide and silicon nitride material was described in the journal Nano Letters.
Laundry duty getting you down? Robots to the rescue!
June 29, 2011:
Folding laundry may seem mundane, but for a robot, identifying a 3-D object and manipulating it correctly, it’s an exercise that requires intelligence that humans may take for granted. Pieter Abbeel and his team of engineers are developing increasingly efficient strategies and algorithms to help robots fold towels, forming the foundation for the next generation of robotics that could increase the independence of disabled people, protect soldiers in combat and more.
A pillow fight on auto-pilot
June 13, 2011:
In a recent Pioneers in Engineering competition, local high school engineers scrambled to design and assemble robots destined to pile pillows in a goal. For the Berkeley Engineering honors students behind the contest, it’s a chance to build and teach.
