See you in 2010!

See you in 2010.

Due to the mandatory system wide furloughs and scheduled holidays, UC San Diego and the Jacobs School of Engineering will be closed from December 19th through January 3rd. The campus will resume normal business operations on Monday, January 4th.

Brain Observatory

I finally got around to getting my brain around the Brain Observatory at UC San Diego. Jacopo Annese’s Brain Observatory has been all over the news all over the world...the attention peaked recently when Annese and his colleagues "voyaged through the brain of the most famous medical patient in the history of science, Patient H.M., acquiring anatomical images and collecting 2401 paper-thin tissue sections during a 53-hour procedure." (The quote is from the Brain Observatory Web site.)

The story has been all over the news, but I'm partial to Greg Miller's story (prior to the huge media deluge) in the news section of the journal Science...and not just because I used to work there...it's a good story. You can read the PDF of the story at:
http://thebrainobservatory.ucsd.edu/pdf/jacopo-UCSD-brains.pdf

New Technology for Licensing from UC San Diego Technology Transfer Office

I just got the latest email newsletter from the UC San Diego Technology Transfer Office, which includes links to new technologies available for licensing that were developed at UC San Diego.

Below, I have pasted the Engineering/Physical Sciences Technologies:

Engineering/Physical Sciences Technologies:

High-Efficiency, High-Linearity, Acoustic to Ultrasonic Power Amplifier for Low-Cost Underwater Modem Applications (SD2010-161 and SD2010-817)

A Zero Turn-On Voltage Rectifier for Efficient Wireless Power Supplies and Energy Harvesting (SD2010-135)

A New Method to Synchronize Data Streams Over a Local Area Network (SD2010-035)

Improved Perfusion Imaging Using MRI With Velocity-Selective Arterial Spin Labeling Without Spatial Selectivity (SD2001-175)

Residential Broadband Access (SD2004-122)

Measuring User-Experience in Mobile Gaming Environments (SD2010-171)

A Digitally Controlled High-Frequency, Low-Power, Pulse Width Modulator for Wireless Communications (SD2010-110)

GUSTO: General Architecture Design Utility and Synthesis Tool for Optimization (SD2010-170)

If you are interested in any of the technologies listed, email invent@ucsd.edu with the case number in the subject line.

Boeing Dreamliner Landing Gear Braces Tested at UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering

Jacobs School structural engineering professor Hyonny Kim led testing of the first-ever composite landing gear braces, which were used for the new Boeing 787 aircraft, which took off for the first time today. (New York Times story here.)

Kim is an associate professor in structural engineering at the UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering, and he led a team of researchers that performed six months of rigorous Federal Aviation Administration tests on the composite landing gear braces.

“This was a very important test,” Kim said. “The quality standards of the testing, and keeping track of the data and documentation (for FAA certification) is extremely high. For us, we had to improve our methods and processes to get to be able to perform at the FAA certification level and we did. We have proven that we can do this level of testing. We have the facility and equipment and capability to do it. What we hope with this project is to demonstrate to the aerospace industry that UC San Diego is capable of and can perform aerospace certification testing for future projects.”

French Aerospace company Messier-Dowty tapped into the expertise of structural engineering professor Hyonny Kim this year to test the strength and durability of the first-ever composite landing gear braces for the commercial aircraft industry.

Read the full story here, on the Jacobs School of Engineering news site.

We also covered this story in the latest issue of the Jacobs School alumni magazine, Pulse.

Energy Efficient Computing on Multiple Scales

"Energy is one of the key issues to be solved in order for systems to work more efficiently," said UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering professor Tajana Simunic Rosing, who is leading MuSyC's Large-Scale Systems effort. "At a very small scale such as a brain-machine interface, without energy you cannot do anything at all. At a very large scale such as a data center, if you are not efficient about how you deal with energy, you go bankrupt."

This quote is from a Calit2 press release announcing Jacobs School computer science professor Tajana Simunic Rosing as one of the leaders of a new research center charged with finding ways to improve the design of computing systems ranging from large data centers to tiny brain sensors. In its first three years, the Multi-Scale Systems Center (MuSyC) will focus on tackling a critical issue affecting multiple scales: energy efficiency.

Doug Ramsey from Calit2 wrote the story. Read the full story on the Jacobs School of Engineering Web site, or on the Calit2 Web site.

Caption for above photo: MuSyC investigators at UCSD, pictured in front of Calit2's GreenLight Instrument modular data center, include (l-r) Rajesh Gupta, Tajana Simunic Rosing and Amin Vadhat. (Not pictured: SDSC's Allan Snavely)

I briefly covered this announcement in a story about Tajana Simunic Rosing's work on energy-efficient data centers in the latest Jacobs School alumni magazine, Pulse.

Albert Lin, a Materials Science alumnus named an adventurer of the year

Jacobs School alumnus Albert Lin (Ph.D. 2008)is one of the world's top adventurers, according to National Geographic Adventure magazine. Below are a couple of paragraphs from the Calit2 story on the award.

It’s not often that a materials scientist by training gets to be labeled one of the world’s top adventurers. But that’s the honor bestowed on Calit2 research scholar Albert Yu-Min Lin, 28, in the December 2009-January 2010 issue of National Geographic Adventure magazine. Lin is affiliated with Calit2’s Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology (CISA3).

Lin earned his Ph.D. in materials science and engineering from UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering in 2008. After graduation, “his mother, a former Hong Kong movie star, and his father, an astrophysicist, both urged him to get on with things as soon as possible, to find a job that would allow him to eat more steak, less ramen,” writes Luke Dittrich in the feature article, “Conjuring the Great Khan”, that is part of NG Adventure’s cover story. “Instead, Lin decided to begin his post-[doctoral] graduate career by organizing a high-risk, high-stakes project, one that offered little stability and even less promise of success.”

Read the full story on the Calit2 Web site.

How big is a zettabyte?

How big is a zettabyte and why might you care? Calit2's Doug Ramsey recently wrote a story that looks at how much information Americans are taking in. It also explains just how big a zettabyte is and what zettabytes have to do with you. (The New York Times and many other outlets covered the story this week.)

"The average American consumes about 34 gigabytes of data and information each day — an increase of about 350 percent over nearly three decades — according to
a report published Wednesday by researchers at the University of California, San Diego," the NYTimes wrote.

In the Calit2 story, Larry Smarr says:

"What is clear is that we consume orders of magnitude more information than can be stored on hard drives or transmitted over today's Internet," said Internet pioneer Larry Smarr, Director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) and a computer science professor at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. "Even small changes in how Americans consume information would have serious implications for network planners and require large-scale investments."

Related Links

How Much Information? 2009 Report on American Consumers

How Much Information? ProjectUC San Diego School of International Relations and Pacific Studies

Heart Mending with Stem Cells

Bioengineering professor Adam Engler and bioengineering Ph.D. student Jennifer Young landed in Technology Review today. Journalist Lauren Gravitz covered their presentation on Tuesday at ASCB 2009 where they reported advances in using embryonic stem cells (from chickens) to regenerate heart cells.

The big idea is that the bioengineers are working to re-create the physical consitions and cues within organisms that guide (at least in part) the differentiation process from stem cells to heart cells.

Read the Technology Review story here.

Read the Jacobs School of Engineering summary of the research here.

Below is related video from the Engler lab, which is part of UC San Diego's Institute of Engineering in Medicine.

KPBS covered Cell Phones, Sensors and Pollution Monitoring Story

Ed Joyce from KPBS, the San Dieog NPR station, ran a story on the new pollution monitoring system being developed by computer scientists at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.

Here is the cell phone and pollution monitoring story from KPBS.

BTW, you can follow Ed Joyce on Twitter at:

http://twitter.com/EnviroEd

San Diegans, Cell Phones, Air Pollution Monitoring Network

“San Diego County has 3.1 million residents, 4,000 square miles, and only five official EPA air quality monitors. We know about the air quality in those exact spots but we know much less about the air quality in other places. Our goal is to give San Diegans up-to-the-minute environmental information about where they live, work and play—information that will empower anyone in the community to make healthier choices,” said William Griswold, the principal investigator on the grant and a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.

So here is the deal: everyone has cell phones. What if those phones could be used to transmit environmental information collected by tiny, inexpensive sensors hanging from your backpack or board shorts...transmit that info to centralized computers that analyze it and send insights back to regular folks in real time?

That's the plan that computer scientists are putting into action now that they have a $1.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Read the full story here.

Also, KPBS has this story up on their web site.

Photo caption:
The CitiSense leadership team (l-r) includes computer science professor William Griswold, computer science professor Ingolf Krueger, School of Medicine/Calit2 professor Kevin Patrick, computer science professor Tajana Simunic Rosing, and computer science professor Hovav Shacham. (Not pictured: computer science professor Sanjoy Dasgupta).

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).

Single Sensor in Your Camera? Your next camera might benefit from this kind of research...

Future single-sensor cameras will surely be better at sampling all the light bands (red, green, blue) even through there is just one sensor. Ankit Jain is an electrical engineering graduate student at UC San Diego who is working on this issue.

Watch him give you a snapshot of the issue, in less than two minutes!

Ankit talked to me at last week's poster session for the Center for Wireless Communications (CWC) research review. I also talked to Cynthia Taylor "Will Starbucks Serve Servers? aka Thin-Client Computing with your Skinny Latte?"

and
Video Stabilization with Haleh Azartash

Mini-Robots on KPBS Radio

The ocean robots that Jorge Cortes is designing control systems for wound up on KPBS radio yesterday. This attention comes on the heels of a pair of NSF grants...one to the mechanical and aerospace engineers developing the control systems, and one to the Scripps Insititution of Oceanography researchers who are developing the drifting robots.

The thing to remember about these robots is that they can't really move forward or backward. They can move up and down, but to move horizontally, they are at the mercy of the ocean currents...kind of like the current in Finding Nemo.

Photo credit: Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.

Tracking Oil Spills with Robots

Not that anyone WANTS another oil spill...but when there is one, it would be nice to have a better idea of where the ocean currents are going to carry the oil. Presumably, this information would be useful in damage mitigation as well as clean-up efforts.

This oil-spill-tracking-via-swarms-of-coordinated-robots idea gets fleshed out more in a press release out today from the Jacobs School of Engineering about an almost $1.5 million NSF grant to a team led by MAE associate professor Jorge Cortes. The funding will enable the engineers to figure out how to implement the controls systems that keep swarms of underwater ocean robots in the kinds of formations that will enable them to collect the data necessary to figure out what is going on with ocean currents in the area.

The Scripps Institution of Oceanography researchers who are also on the grant say that there is a whole heck of a lot that we don't know about these kilometer-scale ocean currents...and if we did know more, we could use that knowledge to better understand ocean process, to figure out where we need marine protected areas, and to really understand where sewage is going once it is pumped out into the ocean.

At the same time, those Scripps researchers are leading a related grant to further develop the ocean robots.

Image credit: Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.

We're in the UCSD News...and (surprise) Blogging about It.

I guess it's impossible NOT to blog about the story that references this blog in This Week @ UCSD.

If you are new to the Jacobs School blog, stick around, click around and learn something new. If you're are part of the Jacobs School community (almni included of course) and have ideas about what you'd like to see on the blog, leave a comment or send me email at dbkane AT ucsd DOT edu

And while we're at it, check us out on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/UCSDJacobs

And on YouTube at: http://www.youtube.com/jacobsschoolnews



...later on in the story...

Will Starbucks Serve Servers?

Would you like thin-client computing with your skinny latte?

Tech-savy baristas may be asking you these kinds of questions, if the thin-client research that computer science PhD student Cynthia Taylor is working on takes off. At the poster session at the Center for Wireless Communications (CWC) research review on Friday, Taylor gave me a quick rundown on her research.

Take home message: she wants to turn your iPhone (and related PDAs and comm devices) into an input/output device that hooks into local servers as well as servers across the Web. This would let you do all kinds of things that are too demanding for the local computational resources of a PDA.

Window into Center for Wireless Communications (CWC) Poster Session

This is the first of four informal interviews with graduate students who presented at the UC San Diego Center for Wireless Communications (CWC) poster session today. The poster session was part of the CWC Research Review (PDF of agenda here), which happens twice per year. (Info of past reviews is here.)

This first interview is with Haleh Azartash, who is a graduate student in electrical engineering professor Dr. Truong Nguyen's Video Processing Group.

Her poster describes her work on software and algorithmic methods for minimizing and eliminating camera motion and shake in video footage: Real Time Affine Global Estimation using Phase Correlation

iPhone app with UCSD Roots Named One of 10 Best Apps by Gizmodo

The TowerMadness roll continues...Gizmodo named them one of the week's best iPhone apps. The fact that they created a free version of the game that is supported by ads that are "not very annoying" seems popular with the blogosphere.

...it's amazing the things you learn when you don't turn off a Google Alert.

Hey Jacobs School?! What/who else (related to engineering) should we be monitoring via Google Alerts?

Smarter Than Genius on Slashdot /.

Research on building algorithms that make playlists as well as iTunes Genius landed on Slashdot today...from the "from the put-that-man-down dept. "

http://apple.slashdot.org/story/09/11/05/227236/Going-Head-To-Head-With-Genius-On-Playlists?from=rss

Jacobs School on YouTube

Do you know of any Jacobs-School-related videos that you think should be on the Jacobs School of Engineering YouTube channel? Let me know. dbkane AT ucsd DOT edu

Bit by bit, I am transfering videos to one YouTube video channel:
http://www.youtube.com/jacobsschoolnews

Below is a video profile of Jacobs School electrical engineering professor Pam Cosman.

IEEE Xtreme 3.0

A team of Jacobs School undergrads calling themselves "Team 'The Bagpipe Lubricators'" placed 16th overall (and 6th from United States) in a 24-hour online computer programming contest run by IEEE called IEEE Xtreme 3.0.

The official IEEE results page highlights how two Jacobs School computer programming teams finished in the top 25. The Bagpipe Lubricators finished 16th in the world, and Team XYZZY finished 19th in the world. 700 teams registered.

Jordan Ree is the caption of the Bagpipe Lubricators, and Elliot Slaughter is captain of XYZZY. I'll update this posting with the full names of both of these teams, when I get that info.

These two Jacobs School teams finished first and second in the region.

More pictures are posted: http://ieee.ucsd.edu/photos/album.php?album_id=115

The Mountain Dew can and empty pizza boxes are great.

Jacobs School Photo Contest!! Deadline is Dec 4

Break out the cameras and start taking pictures of life at the Jacobs School. It's time for the Jacobs School student photo contest...brought to you by Engineering Student Services (ESS). All engineering students are invited to submit up to two (2) high resolution digital photos that somehow fit into the theme "Triton Engineering: Location, Innovation, Celebration!"

Note to Photoshop-fiends, Picasa-pros, and Gimp-Geniuses: you're NOT ALLOWED to digitally alter your photos after you take the picture. So think ahead and do all the cool effects on the front end, WHEN you take the picture. It's more fun that way. (And read all the fine print here...not that there is much to say...)

I'm excited to see what comes in. Every time I leave my office, I see something and think, "that would make a great photo."

Music Search Engine Video Featured by Technology Review

Technology Review featured the music search engine video from the Jacobs School on their Technology Review editors blog. What's cool is that the video includes a past winner of Technology Review's "TR 35" a prestigious list of top young innovators: UC San Diego computer science professor Serge Belongie. Serge sings and plays guitar with his band S03 in the second video clip of the YouTube video. Learn more about S03 on their myspace page:
http://www.myspace.com/so3music

Learn more about Serge Belongie's computer science research at:
http://vision.ucsd.edu/person/serge-belongie

But that's not all. One of professor Belongie's Ph.D. students is Carolina Galleguillos, the vocalist for Juna and the first performer you see in the Jacobs School music search video (in the silver dress). I also interview Galleguillos later on in the video...so be sure to watch through to the end...the video ends with her.

Your Cool Project Here!

Are you a Jacobs School student (present or past)? Are you a Jacobs School faculty member or staffer (or otherwise affililated with the Jacobs School)? Do you have an interesting story to tell? Send me email and let's get the conversation started. This is the Jacobs School blog. This is your blog.

dbkane AT UCSD DOT edu

TowerMadness Zero and "the Apple Blog"

On Halloween 2009, the Apple Blog featured TowerMadness, an iPhone app and game with roots in computer science at UC San Diego (see the story I wrote about TowerMadness here).

The team of iPhone app developers doesn't ever seem to slow down. They recently launched, "TowerMadness Zero", a free version of their award-winning tower-defense 3D game.

We recently featured TowerMadness in the Fall 2009 issue of the Jacobs School alumni magazine, Pulse. Check out the Pulse Towermadness story here...but to get the full effect, check out the graphic layout in the print version of Pulse and navigate down to page 14.

Twitter is a good place to get your TowerMadness fix.

Solar Video: Grad Students Help San Diego Get $154M in Bonds to Install Solar

Watch a video interview with Jan Kleissl and Michael Gollner and Karl Olney, two of the key Jacobs School grad students who helped San Diego get more than $154 M in bonds for installing solar in San Diego.







Update: Weds Nov 4

This story is now one of the rotating news stories on http://ucsd.edu/ Check out the screen shot below.

Pumking Carving, LEDs, and IEEE Fun at UCSD Jacobs

Next year, I hope someone tries to carve out some equation related to LED illumination...something like of the speed of light travelling from the LED to the pumpkin face.

See many more photos on the IEEE Web site:
http://ieee.ucsd.edu/photos/album.php?album_id=119

LED pumpkin carving at UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering was organized by the UCSD student chapter of IEEE. Be sure to check out the UCSD IEEE Web page for the latest news, photos and videos.

Jacobs School Grad Students Helped San Diego Region Win $154.6 Million in Bonds to Install Solar Panels

Under the guidance of environmental engineering professor Jan Kleissl, a group of Jacobs School graduate students, including Michael Gollner (bottom photo) and Karl Olney (middle photo) helped schools and other San Diego public institutions win more than $154 M in bonds for installing rooftop solar. (Prof. Kleissl is in the shades in the top photo with Gollner and Olney.)

The San Diego Union Tribune's Onell Soto covered this story. Reach Soto's story here:

http://www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/2009/oct/30/county-wins-big-share-solar-funds/?business&zIndex=191768

The first sentence of the Union Tribune story:

San Diego County has snagged 20 percent of $800 million in federal stimulus-backed financing for government solar projects nationwide, thanks to a team effort by city officials, school leaders, engineers and college students.

Stay tuned for video from the three guys in the photos above.

UPDATE NOV 2:

The video is embedded below, via both YouTube and the Jacobs School video portal.