EECS faculty envision California’s next-gen infrastructure

EE Profs Claire Tomlin,  Costas Spanos and Connie Chang-Hasnain, and CS Prof. David Culler, are featured in a Berkeley Engineer article titled “Smart moves: California’s next-gen infrastructure,” which describes current UC Berkeley research projects that promise to transform the way we live.  “What’s enabling these infrastructure changes is our ability to compute faster, to share information faster and to provide that information to users very quickly,” says Tomlin.   She envisions “rail-to-drone” expressways, converting railroad rights-of-way to aerial corridors where closely-spaced fleets of drones travel safely.  Spanos predicts self-monitoring buildings so smart they band together and form bargaining alliances, and Chang-Hasnain’s team have been working on manufacturing highly efficient but low-cost solar cells by growing nanoscale “forests” of expensive photovoltaics on inexpensive silicon substrates. The Berkeley Institute for Data Science, co-founded by Culler, is “equipping students not just to consume data but to produce insight” which will help guide the changes to come.