Bioengineering Advances for Economically Disadvantaged Societies

This talk will present scientific breakthroughs such as the use of cellular phone for medical imaging in small clinics and rural areas, detecting internal bleeding remotely in rural areas through multi-frequency spectroscopy, a simple electrolytic means for low power electricity, using classifiers to augment lack of expert medical care in rural areas, treatment of cancer in rural clinics and others.

i4Energy Seminar: Smart Grid Development at SMUD

The Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) is committed to advancing smart grid technologies in its service territory. Last year SMUD was awarded $127.5 million through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) to advance smart grid implementation by several years.

TRUST Security Seminar: Coordination and Control of Distributed Energy Resources for Provision of Ancillary Services

On the distribution side of a power system, there exist many distributed energy resources (DERs) that can be potentially used to provide ancillary services to the grid they are connected to. An example is the utilization of power electronics grid interfaces commonly used in distributed generation to provide reactive power support. While the primary function of these power electronics-based systems is to control active power flow, when properly controlled, they can also be used to provide reactive power support.

New Media RoundTable: A Variation on the Powers of Ten, Futurefarmers

Futurefarmers’ Amy Franceschini and Michael Swaine are currently working on a new project for the Berkeley Art Museum. This new project, A Variation on the Powers of Ten, uses the opening scene of the 1977, Charles and Ray Eames film to frame ten discussions with a diverse range of researchers.

Research Exchange: Research to Further Education

As a nation, over half of our students fail Algebra every year. Agile Mind was founded with the mission of changing what happens between educators and students in the classroom in ways that improve the quality of instruction of high school mathematics and science, especially in underserved areas.

Dr. Gary Baldwin dies at 67

Dr. Gary Baldwin, Director of Special Projects, CITRIS @ Berkeley, passed away on November 16, 2010, after a short battle with cancer.

EECS Colloquium: Feedback Motion Planning with Sum-of-Squares Verification

In this talk, I will present a nonlinear feedback control synthesis algorithm which combines randomized motion planning algorithms, popular in robotics, with sum of squares optimization. In order to drive the system to a goal state or limit cycle, the algorithm systematically populates the controllable subset of state space with a sparse set of trajectories which are locally stabilized with linear feedback and verified with sums of squares; we have now developed efficient methods for performing this verification along trajectories and around limit cycles, on systems with hybrid dynamics, and on systems with mixed polynomial/trigonometric nonlinearities.

TRUST Security Seminar: Electronic Voting Security in India

India uses paperless electronic voting machines (EVMs) nationwide, and the Election Commission of India, the country’s highest election authority, has long maintained that the machines are “perfect,” “infallible,” and “fully tamper-proof.”

New Media RoundTable: Student Research Panel, Caitlin Marshall and William Brown III

Caitlin Marshall’s larger research focuses on voice prosthesis and synthesis, minority discourse, and the sound of civics. Each year in America ten to twelve thousand individuals undergo cancer treatment necessitating laryngectomy, the surgical removal of the larynx. With their sound sources removed, laryngectomees are rendered mute. To counter what many patients describe as the disability of silence, nearly all opt for prosthesis and speech therapy.

Research Exchange: Formal Methods for Dependable Computing: From Models, through Software, to Circuits

Computing has become ubiquitous and indispensable: it is embedded all around us, in cell phones, automobiles, medical devices, and much more. This ubiquity brings with it a growing challenge to ensure that our computing infrastructure is also dependable and secure. We need to develop and maintain complex software systems on top of increasingly unreliable computing substrates under stringent resource constraints such as energy usage.

Research Exchange: Leveraging Machine-learning and Crowdsourcing to Process Text Messages in the world’s Less-resourced Language

Text-messaging has quickly become the dominant form of remote communication in much of the world, surpassing email, phone calls and even grid electricity. This has social development and crisis response organizations to leverage mobile technologies to support health, banking, access to market information, literacy and emergency response.