Concrete Canoe Floats off UC San Diego Campus

Savage Conficker Quote

Computer science professor Stefan Savage from the Jacobs School is quoted in a New York Times online story by John Markoff on the computer worm Conficker.

Or perhaps the Conficker botnet’s masters have something more Machiavellian in mind. One researcher, University of California at San Diego computer scientist Stefan Savage, has suggested the idea of a “Dark Google.” What if Conficker is intended to give the computer underworld the ability to search for data on all the infected computers around the globe and then sell the answers? Malware already does this on a focused basis using a variety of schemes that are referred to as “spear phishing,” in a reference to the widespread use of social engineering tricks on the Net.

Concrete Canoe Commotion

What's all the concrete commotion on campus these days?

Believe it or not, it's Concrete Canoe commotion. A team of Jacobs School undergraduates has spent the last six months designing and building a high-tech concrete canoe. On Thursday March 19, the students load up the canoe and prepare to ship it to Hawaii, for a big intercollegiate concrete canoe competition.

Watch a one-minute video. And stay tuned for a report from the Thursday concrete canoe lift off.

Andrew Chien quoted in New York Times

Andrew Chien, director of research at Intel and a former full-time faculty member at the Jacobs School of Engineering is quoted in a John Markoff New York Times piece about a bump in enrollment in computer science programs.

The computer science department at the Jacobs School is working on a variety of ways to draw a wider swath of students into computer science. The video below illustrates one such project, organized by Jacobs School computer science professors Beth Simon and Bill Griswold.

BioEngineer Makes His Mark

Jacobs School bioengineering professor Trey Ideker—a network and systems biology pioneer—has won the International Society for Computational Biology’s Overton Prize.

The Overton prize is awarded each year to an early-to-mid-career scientist who has already made a significant contribution to the field of computational biology.

Read the full story here.

Crash Test Tomatoes...EGames 2009 Video

EGames 2009 at the Jacobs School...who knew crushing tomatoes was so much fun?

And rockets propelled by bottle rockets...those never go out of style!

Read the Jacobs School Web story here, and click below for a 1min 20 second video.

Student-Run Job Fair at Jacobs School

A couple of weeks ago, Jacobs School undergraduates put on a huge engineering job fair called DECaF. More than 70 companies came to campus to recruit engineering students from the Jacobs School. Watch the video below for a glimpse of the event, and/or read the Web story running here.