One of today’s biggest environmental concerns is the emission of greenhouse gases and other harmful substances from the burning of fossil fuels. There is much need today for alternative energy sources, one of which is biodiesel. UC Berkeley dining services consumes an incredible amount of oil that UC Berkeley could both process and use as its own created biodiesel. Along with being a more environmentally safe and less toxic energy source than traditional fossil fuels, biodiesel could be economically viable and practical for the university. The applications of the made bio-fuels include anything from heating the dormitories to powering buses and other campus vehicles. In the long term, UC Berkeley could offset its monetary costs by promoting a more resourceful, direct, and community-based way of operating its systems.
The earthquake that struck Haiti in January 2010 displaced over one million, and resulted in over 300,000 deaths, including a staggering 18,000 fatalities of highly-skilled professionals. Haiti’s largest public institution of higher learning, the Universite d’Etat d’Haiti (UEH), lost 90% of its physical infrastructure. In a response to the need that arose from this devastation, a group of UC students and faculty organized the UC Haiti Initiative (UCHI) to address the higher education and training needs that is critical to ensure Haiti’s long term success. UCHI believes that partnering directly with UEH students, faculty, and administration is the most promising poverty alleviation strategy that UC, as the world’s greatest institution of higher education, can engage in. UCHI will help train a new generation of leaders, researchers, and policy makers in the arena of global development. UC students and faculty will contribute to the creation of a progressive model of development: engaging an entire campus community in a respectful, sustainable advancement of higher education and community development in a global context, while also assisting in training Haiti’s future leaders and instilling confidence in the international community in a Haitian-led reconstruction process.
The goal of Pedal or Power Project (PPP) is to ease poverty through the proven power of a bicycle to solve transportation problems in developing countries. PPP will fabricate, assemble and distribute bicycles, both motorized and none motorized, in the country of Uganda depending on the need. The bicycle unique ability of having two power sources that can work simultaneously makes it efficient reliable and most important environmental friendly. Motorized bikes will be able to mount simple motors to bicycles or locally made wheelchairs in order to ease mobility for all. PPP is an attempt to solve Africa’s long standing ignored transportation dilemma especially among the poor in remote areas where infrastructure is lacking. For some villages even the limited resources are tens of miles away. These bikes are to be used by children, healthcare workers, and people with disability to more easily access limited resources.
We are developing a novel, easy-to-use, patent-pending, point-of-care platform for multiplexed, digital disease detection. We have applied digital Integrated
Circuit (IC) technology, the same technology that has underpinned the IT revolution, to encapsulate the performance of a laboratory assay in the palm of the hand. We envision that our device will be capable of communicating with computers via Ethernet and with cell phones via Bluetooth to enable truly distributed, low-overhead, diagnostic testing.
The project is a partnership between the Pinoleville-Pomo Nation (PPN) and the University of California, Berkeley. The purpose of this project is to develop a series of community-based service learning modules (CBSLM) in which graduate and undergraduate students at UC Berkeley will partner with members of the PPN to co-design a Tribal Energy, Land Use, and Sustainability (TELUS) Plan. The TELUS plan will aid the PPN in achieving their sovereignty, economic self-sufficiency, and environmental goals, as well as educating students at UC Berkeley and members of the PNN about designing sustainable communities, using the tenets of human-centered design.
Technology to Aid Multiple Users in Sharing Existing Applications: We propose an easy to implement interaction system that allows multiple users to share existing applications without modification. We call this system Metamouse. Metamouse provides each user their own mouse and cursor. These cursors are then mapped down to one metacursor, which interacts with the existing applications. This allows the applications to see just one cursor, as they expect, but the cursor is controlled by many students at once. Our preliminary tests have shown that this interaction paradigm is viable and achieves our goal of involving multiple students more thoroughly in a learning activity. We feel that with proper execution, this technology has the potential to enrich educational environments all over the world.
This project aims to determine suitable mobile technologies that will improve the health care system in Nigeria. Cell phone technologies are the most efficient way to get information to the majority of citizens in cities and in rural areas. Most of Nigeria does not have access to a constant electricity source. Mobile phones are much more versatile than computers or the Internet because they do not require electricity to run. Data can be collected and disseminated regardless of what the situation is regarding electricity. Mobile technologies are also a means to collect health information and surveys in a more organized manor.
