Sustainability Talk Tomorrow

THE GREENOVATION FORUM: SENSING AND SUSTAINABILITY

Wednesday, December 2, 2009 at the CALIT2 Auditorium at Atkinson Hall, UC San Diego

Reception: 4:00 PM
Program: 4:30 PM

As we reach the beginning of December, there are looming signs that the Climate Change conference in Copenhagen will not reach an agreement. What lies ahead and how can we reach an agreement to stem the growth in emissions?

Join the Greenovation forum at UC San Diego to learn about a more sustainable approach to sustainability. We will discuss how sensor technology can help achieve sustainability at lower cost. The San Diego region is home to a number of promising sensor companies. Come and join the discussion about how sensor research and commercialization can pave the way for a more sustainable future!

The program will feature the following speakers:

Professor Larry Smarr, Director, California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (CALIT2) and computer science professor at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering

Shimon Gersten, Chief Technology Officer, Talon Communications

Professor Jan Kleissl, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department

Professor Vish Krishnan, Rady School of Management

This event is free and open to the public, but seating is limited. For more information and to RSVP, visit http://ssi.ucsd.edu/greenovation.

Systems Biology and Insulin Resistance

Researchers from the University of California, San Diego recently offered the sharpest-yet picture of how core biochemical pathways in skeletal muscle cells and fat cells are altered in people who suffer from insulin resistance—a primary defect in type 2 diabetes and obesity. Taking a systems biology approach, the bioengineers and medical researchers also determined how a common class of drugs for treating insulin resistance—TZDs—alter these same core pathways. This led the team to uncover previously unknown effects of TZDs and insights that could lead to improved drug therapies for insulin resistance.

The team—led by investigators from the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and School of Medicine—recently published their findings in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

“When you are insulin resistant, your metabolism suffers. If you take a TZD for your insulin resistance, will the drug fix the dysfunction in muscle and fat tissues? Will these changes be functionally related to drug efficacy? These are some of the questions we addressed in our new study,” say UC San Diego faculty members Dr. Shankar Subramaniam and Dr. Dorothy Sears, co-corresponding authors of the new paper. The collaborative project involved Dr. Subramaniam’s Bioinformatics and Systems Biology laboratory in the Department of Bioengineering at the Jacobs School of Engineering, Dr. Sears and her colleagues in the Department of Medicine, and Pfizer, Inc.

Read the PNAS paper online.

Read the full press release.

Gaming Site Profiles Music Search Project

IGN Music profiled the electrical engineering music search engine project from the Jacobs School of Engineering.

Games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band rank players based on how good they are at replicating a musical performance,while Herd It gives props based on how good they are at predicting the "herd's" opinion on the style, emotion, instrumentation, etc. of music. All of this happens in realtime via Facebook -- check out http://www.blogger.com/www.herdit.org.

They also embedded the music search engine YouTube video.

IGN is a leading Internet media and services provider focused on the videogame and entertainment enthusiast markets...lots of interested eyes!

Carbon Nanotubes for Cell Phone Batteries?

In a recent paper in Applied Physics Letters, Prabhakar Bandaru, a professor in the UCSD Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, along with graduate student Mark Hoefer, have found that artificially introduced defects in carbon nanotubes can aid the development of "supercapacitors" that could be used in batteries and battery charging technologies of the future.

Read Andrea Siedsma's full press release here.

Walking AT work with "Active Desk"

Ernesto Ramirez has designed and built "Active Desk" — a raised work station connected to a standard treadmill that allows him to walk while he works. Ramirez is affiliated with the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) at UC San Diego. (Read the full story by Tiffany Fox from Calit2, excerpted below).

His project stems from a body of scientific research that links sedentary behavior (like sitting at a desk all day) with an elevated risk of mortality from all causes and from cardiovascular disease.

Currently located on the sixth floor of Calit2's headquarters in Atkinson Hall, the work station consists of a $200 Ikea desk and a $100 treadmill that allows the user to control his or her walking speed. Ramirez says his average pace is 1.5 miles per hour — fast enough to burn about 2.54 calories per minute, but not so fast that it makes him too breathless to have a conversation.

Caleb, the Data Mining Undergrad

Below is an email from a Jacobs School undergraduate who is taking advantage of the many research opportunities available to undergraduates at the Jacobs School and at UC San Diego, more generally.

My name is Caleb Sotelo; I'm a third year in pursuit of a BS in Computer Science, and an undergrad member of the Gordon Engineering Leadership Center. This past summer I was funded by CAMP (California Alliance for Minority Participation) through UCSD's Academic Enrichment Programs office to find and engage in a research project for [CSE] 199 credit.

I decided I wanted to pursue data mining, without any substantial knowledge of the discipline. Finding a project was as easy as searching the CSE website for professors by their research interests. I met with computer science professor Charles Elkan, who recommended a project based on my experience with Java and software engineering.

I was privileged enough to receive a travel scholarship to present my research at the SACNAS National Conference in Dallas, TX, where I received an award for Outstanding Contribution and Research Presentation in the area of Computer and Information Technology. The software is now nearly release-ready, and we're hoping to submit a paper to a Machine Learning journal by the end of the month. My experience researching as a UCSD undergrad been excellent.

My mentor, Charles Elkan, has entrusted me with much responsibility and is eager to provide me with advice, resources, and more, and programs like AEP and SACNAS are invested in my success. The Jacobs School of Engineering is a top-notch engineering school and a rewarding place to invest your time; I would highly recommend taking 199 [Independent Study for Undergraduates] to any engineering student to get your feet wet.

Abstract below:

A GRAPHICAL INTERFACE FOR VISUAL DISCOVERY OF PATTERNS IN DATA


Caleb D. Sotelo, Department of Computer Science & Engineering, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA.
A typical challenge in data mining is the discovery of patterns that are actually interesting to the user, as opposed to patterns that are coincidental or already well-known. A solution to this problem is to create a system that allows the user to fluidly explore the rule space and facilitates discovery by users of significant patterns. One such system was proposed and implemented by Lei Zhang and others [1] for Motorola Inc., but to our knowledge no similar system exists as open source software. Rapidminer is a widely-used, highly functional, and robust open source data mining environment written in Java. We are developing a graphical interface extension to Rapidminer that will allow for intuitive and user-friendly pattern exploration, inspired by the Motorola system. Future work will add novel interactive capabilities.
REFERENCES
[1] Zhang, L., Liu, B., Benkler, J., Zhou C. “Finding actionable knowledge via automated comparison.” IEEE ICDE, 2009.

Removing fog from video

Sunny San Diego has a foggy marine-layer side that never gets mentioned on national tv. The only way to get rid of the marine layer on some days is to drive east until it eventually disappears. When you have fog on your video, driving towards Julian is not an option...but that is where research from the video processing lab in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering comes in.

Kris Gibson gave me a quick description of his de-hazing for video at the poster session at the Center for Wireless Communications (CWC) recent Research Review (PDF of agenda).