There is no doubt that the provision of energy to the world will be one of the defining challenges of the 21st century and our ability to raise to it will define our generation to future ones. Supplying the ever increasing demand of the world without inflicting considerable environmental impact and at a cost which does not stifle prosperity, especially in developing and emerging countries, will require a tremendous amount of ingenuity. A large amount of energy is consumed in the transportation of peoples and goods.

Survivable passive optical networks are desirable for applications in environments that are vulnerable and where providing power to the network infrastructure is difficult.

Transient stability is the ability of a power system to remain in synchronism when subjected to large disturbances and severe fluctuation in generation or load. This problem is receiving renewed attention because of the rising complexity of power grids and because of the stochastic nature of renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power. In this talk, Bullo and Dörfler present novel algebraic conditions for transient stability in power systems.

During the last two decades, a phenomenal growth has taken place in the deployment of solar cells or panels. The market has grown from about 40 MW in 1990 to more than 1500 MW  in 2010, and the price of the panels has gone down from about $7 /watt to less than $2 /watt during the same period. Innovation has played a key role in reducing the cost of manufacturing of the cells and modules. The goal is to reach grid parity without any incentive or subsidy.

The Shockley-Queisser (SQ) limit for a single junction solar cell is ~33.5 (under the standard AM1.5 flat-plate, solar spectrum).  Indeed detailed calculations show that GaAs is capable of achieving this efficiency. Nonetheless, the record GaAs solar cell had achieved only 26.4% efficiency in 2010.  Previously, the record had been stuck at 25.1% for almost two decades.  Why then the 7% discrepancy between the theoretical limit 33.4% versus the achieved efficiency of 26.4%?

Energy and water are precious, global, and interconnected resources. Water provides hydroelectric power and plays a growing role for irrigation of energy crops. At the same time, the thermoelectric sector is the largest user of water in the U.S., withdrawing 200 billion gallons daily for powerplant cooling. And while the energy sector uses water, the water sector is responsible for about ten percent of national energy consumption for moving, pumping, treating, and heating water.

Graphene, a unique two-dimensional carbon material, has many excellent properties, such  [HuiMing Cheng] as high specific surface area, good chemical stability, ultrahigh mobility, high electrical and thermal conductivity, as well as high mechanical strength and Young’s modulus. Therefore, graphene and its composite materials are expected to be used in many fields. This talk will focus on the synthesis and exploration of applications of graphene, graphene networks and their composite materials.

The Berkeley "Par Lab" was established in 2008 to address perhaps the greatest ever challenge in computing systems: the end of sequential processor performance scaling and the resultant need to move to parallel computing everywhere. Our ambitious goal is “to enable most programmers to productively write correct, portable, efficient software for manycore processors that will scale with the number of cores”. We formed a large co-located team of faculty and students collaborating to tackle this problem from applications down to architecture.

Scale-out architectures supporting flexible, incremental growth in capacity are common for computing and storage. However, the network remains the last bastion of the traditional scale-up approach, where increasing performance requires increasing levels of specialization at tremendous cost and complexity. Today, the network is often the weak link in data center application performance and reliability. In this talk, we summarize our work in bringing scale out growth of capacity to data center networks.

This talk will dicuss the chirp managed laser (CML), an alternative transmitter technology that allows a directly modulated laser to be used in high performance applications with a smaller size, lower power consumption, less device complexity and lower cost.  The CML comprises a directly modulated laser and an isolated passive optical filter, and can have lower power consumption than externally modulated transmitters.