Our Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Divisions both ranked third in the 2016 Academic Ranking of World Universities. UC Berkeley was once again named the top public university worldwide. The ARWU annually ranks more than 1,200 universities on the quality of both faculty and research.
EECS came in third after Stanford and MIT in both fields. The CS top five was rounded out by Harvard and Princeton, while Nanyang University and Georgia Tech followed Berkeley in the EE top five.
Incoming CS Assistant Professor Jonathan Ragan-Kelley, alumnus Shoaib Kamil (Ph.D. CS 2012 under Profs. Armando Fox and Kathy Yelick) and alumnus Wojciech Matusik (B.S. EECS 1997), along with other researchers at MIT CSAIL, Adobe, U. of Toronto, Texas A&M, and U. of Texas have developed Simit, a programming language that can speed up computer simulations 200-fold or reduce the code they require by 90 percent.
The language has applications outside simulations, and there are even plans for it to augment machine learning, data analytics, optimization and robotics in addition to a version of Google's PageRank algorithm.
EECS Alumnus Jacques I. Pankove (BS EE 1944/MS EE 1948), who received the Distinguished Engineering Alumnus award in 2000 for building the first gallium nitride light-emitting diode (LED), died on July 12, 2016 at the age of 94.
A refugee of Czarist Russia, Pankove grew up in Marseilles before emigrating to the US after the Nazi invasion of France. While at Berkeley, Pankove built a Morse code Translator, showing his creativity involving diverse disciplines: software (how to decipher the dot and dash code), electronic circuits, and optics (to make luminous characters appear at a central visual spot). He left Berkeley to earn a PhD in Physics from the University of Paris but returned to the EECS Department in 1968 as a visiting McKay Lecturer. He subsequently took a job working on transistors at RCA Lab where he and Edward Miller demonstrated the first blue electroluminescence from zinc-doped gallium nitride.
In addition to being a prolific inventor with over 90 US patents, Pankove authored a seminal textbook Optical Processes in Semiconductors in 1972 using his class notes as a lecturer at Berkeley.
A new undergraduate program that integrates the study of engineering and business, the Management, Entrepreneurship, & Technology Program (M.E.T.), will be taught at Berkeley’s top-ranked Haas School of Business and the College of Engineering. The Business + EECS track combines study in these two areas so that students can pursue interests in creating new technologies, software or mobile apps, as well as ventures that take these products to market and deliver significant social impact.
M.E.T. students will enroll in one program but earn two Bachelor of Science degrees, one in engineering and one in business administration. The integrated curriculum consists of liberal arts, engineering and business courses and can be completed in four years.
Prof. Michel Maharbiz and Jose Carmena's paper on Neural Dust is featured by the online journal Neuron (Vol. 91, Issue 3, August 2016) in an article titled "Wireless Recording in the Peripheral Nervous System with Ultrasonic Neural Dust". They, with Profs. Elad Alon and Jan Rabaey and a team of engineers, have built the first dust-sized, wireless sensors that can be implanted in the body that could monitor internal nerves, muscles or organs in real time. And because they are batteryless, they could also be used to stimulate nerves and muscles, opening the door to “electroceuticals’ to treat disorders such as epilepsy , to stimulate the immune system or bring down inflammation. Articles have also appeared in:
The Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation was spotlighted in an article in the California Council on Science & Technology (CCST) website titled “UC Berkeley and UC San Diego Explore Engineering Education of the Future through Making”. The Jacobs Institute is UC Berkeley’s interdisciplinary hub for students, teachers and practitioners who work at the intersection of design and technology to turn insights into prototypes and through testing and iteration design solutions that benefit people and society. Prof. Björn Hartmann is the interim faculty director.
Alumnus Billy Klüver (EE MS 1955/ Ph.D. 1957), who then became an assistant professor in EECS from 1957-58 is featured in a Little Atoms online article titled “How AT&T shaped modern art”. Born in Monaco in 1927, Klüver installed a television antenna on top of the Eiffel tower and developed underwater filming equipment for Jacques Cousteau before coming to Cal. He eventually joined Bell Telephone Laboratories where he began collaborating with artists on works incorporating new technology and was co-founder of Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.). Klüver felt artists "helped make technology more human."
The research of Prof. Alexandra von Meier is featured in an IEEE Spectrum article titled “Detecting Cybersecurity Threats by Taking the Grid’s Pulse”. In 2013 Prof. von Meier and collaborator Alex McEachern built a “micro-PMU (phaser measurement units)” that could take snapshots of distribution grids, whose power flows have become increasingly complex. While developing this advanced power sensor they produced a promising tool to protect power grids from cyber attack and will compete in a $77M power grid cyber security R&D contest that DARPA is kicking off next month.
Prof. Seth Sanders is featured in a Yahoo Financearticle about his participation in a panel discussion on Advancements in Storage Technology at the STUDIO Conference in San Francisco on August 3. Prof. Sanders is the chief scientist and co-founder of Amber Kinetics, Inc., developer of the world’s first commercially ready four-hour flywheel energy storage system.
