Research News
Ying Cui Receives NSF CAREER Award for Optimization Research
Ying Cui, an assistant professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at University of California, Berkeley, has received the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation. The CAREER Award is among the NSF’s most prestigious honors for early-career faculty. It will provide approximately $631,492 over five years to…
Read MoreUC Berkeley researchers tackle bidder collusion in high-stakes auctions
In recent years, economists and regulators have begun examining how artificial intelligence is being used to set prices and bids across a range of markets. In some sectors, including housing, companies rely on automated pricing systems that analyze market conditions and competitors’ data to recommend prices in real time. Supporters argue such tools improve efficiency,…
Read MoreWhen AI Image Generators Refuse
New UC Berkeley benchmark examines the trade-off between safety and usability in text-to-image models Text-to-image (T2I) models have become a central part of today’s artificial intelligence ecosystem, powering tools that generate images from short text descriptions. As these systems grow more capable and widely deployed, concerns about safety have followed closely behind. Developers have introduced…
Read MoreHow AI prompting shapes accuracy, efficiency and cost
New UC Berkeley research maps how AI reasoning strategies affect accuracy, efficiency As large language models (LLMs) move from research labs into classrooms, offices and engineering workflows, “prompt engineering” has become a central practice for shaping how LLMs reason and respond. A new study led by UC Berkeley researchers goes beyond the general understanding that…
Read MoreThe innovation power couple: Study shows how patenting boosts pure research
The new study, published in the journal Science, reveals that researchers who both publish papers and file patents—dubbed “Pasteur’s quadrant researchers” after pioneering microbiologist and chemist Louis Pasteur—produce work that is more novel and more influential than those who stick to just one activity. The finding challenges long-held assumptions that scientists should focus pure research…
Read MoreUC Berkeley IEOR-led Team Takes Second Place for Predictive Model Aiming to Improve Rail Safety
UC Berkeley IEOR PhD student Alberto Gennaro and his team are applying data-driven modeling to a problem that directly affects the safety and reliability of railroads: predicting when train wheels are likely to fail. Their project earned second place in the 2025 INFORMS Railway Applications Section Problem Solving Competition, which invites researchers and practioners to…
Read MoreUC Berkeley IEOR at the 2025 INFORMS Annual Meeting
UC Berkeley IEOR faculty, students, and alumni brought home several awards at the 2025 Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) Annual Meeting. Below is a list of their accomplishments: Renato D.C. Monteiro, a UC Berkeley IEOR PhD alum (Class of 1988) and Coca-Cola Foundation Chair Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School…
Read MoreUC Berkeley IEOR professor and alum earn international prize for breakthroughs in optimization
UC Berkeley Professor Alper Atamturk and UC Berkeley alum Andrés Gómez have been awarded the 2025 INFORMS Computing Society Prize, an honor recognizing outstanding contributions at the intersection of computing with operations research. They share the award with their collaborator Shaoning Han. The team is recognized for a sequence of five papers introducing new mathematical…
Read MoreAre we truly on the verge of the humanoid robot revolution?
By Kara Manke In two new papers, UC Berkeley roboticist Ken Goldberg explains why robots are not gaining real-world skills as quickly as AI chatbots are gaining language fluency. August 27, 2025 AI chatbots have advanced rapidly over the past few years, so much so that people are now using them as personal assistants, customer service representatives and even…
Read MoreUC Berkeley Researchers Win Top Honors at World’s Leading Robotics Conference
A team of researchers from UC Berkeley has received the Best Paper Award on Robot Learning at the 2025 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), considered the world’s premier conference in robotics and automation. The event was held in Atlanta 19-23 May. The award went to UC Berkeley IEOR Professor Ken Goldberg, his…
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