Retrofit Tests for Older California Buildings

A three-story structure shook as it was jolted by a strong simulated earthquake, but it didn’t collapse – just what UC San Diego structural engineers had hoped for. As part of a retrofit project, the engineers subjected the 1920s era reinforced concrete structure to a series of simulated earthquakes, measuring up to a 7.5 magnitude. The building suffered some damage but was still standing after all of the tests, a sign that the engineer’s retrofit model worked.

As part of the $1.24 million research project sponsored by the National Science Foundation under the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) program, the masonry-infilled, reinforced concrete frame representing structures built in California in the 1920s was tested at the NEES -UCSD Englekirk Structural Engineering Center, home of the world’s largest outdoor shake table.

The ultimate goal of this project is to provide methods to assess and improve the seismic performance of these older buildings by developing reliable analytical models and effective retrofit techniques.
Read the full story here:

Watch a video of a related test below:

IEEE Spectrum has a new website

IEEE Spectrum
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/

Below is IEEE's summary of their new Spectrum site. Btw, if you type UCSD into their search box, the first story that pops up is about how electrical engineernig professor Stojan Radic is helping to invent a Terabit Internet.

IEEE Spectrum is now more user-friendly and easier to search. We have also expanded the free resources we offer to the public. In addition to theexpert-written articles and in-depth research visitors to the site can now access white papers, blogs, newsletters, and webinars reflecting the latest developments, standards, and best practices in engineering. With a history spanning 125 years, IEEE continues to serve as an authoritative resource for individuals in the tech sectors of government,industry, and academia worldwide. We hope you will continue to find value in our site.

"This is stuff the big traders will be interested in." SIGCOMM quote from computer science professor from UC San Diego.

“This is stuff the big traders will be interested in,” said George Varghese, a computer science professor at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and an author on the SIGCOMM paper, “but more importantly, the router vendors for whom such trading markets are an important vertical.”

That "stuff" is an inexpensive solution for diagnosing delays in data center networks as short as tens of millionths of seconds—delays that can lead to multi-million dollar losses for investment banks running automatic stock trading systems. Similar delays can delay parallel processing in high performance cluster computing applications run by Fortune 500 companies and universities.

University of California, San Diego and Purdue University computer scientists presented this work on August 20, 2009 at SIGCOMM, the premier networking conference.

The new approach offers the possibility of diagnosing fine-grained delays—down to tens to microseconds—and packet loss as infrequent as one in a million at every router within a data center network. (One microsecond is one millionth of a second.) The solution could be implemented in today’s router designs with almost zero cost in terms of router hardware and with no performance penalty. The UC San Diego and Purdue University computer scientists call their invention the Lossy Difference Aggregator.

“This is stuff the big traders will be interested in,” said George Varghese, a computer science professor at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and an author on the SIGCOMM paper, “but more importantly, the router vendors for whom such trading markets are an important vertical.”

Read the full press release here.

Materials Science Research Profiled in NSF Video

Computer Scientists Scale “Layer 2” Data Center Networks to 100,000 Ports and Beyond

Radhika Niranjan Mysore, a UC San Diego computer science graduate student, is the first author on the data center networking paper presented today at SIGCOMM 2009.

SIGCOMM is the premier academic networking conference.

“SIGCOMM was always a dream, and it was nice we could shoot for it,” said Radhika Niranjan Mysore, who presented this work at SIGCOMM 2009 in Barcelona, Spain on August 18, 2009.

“I am going to be meeting the smartest people from all over the world in the networking community. I’m going to be able to showcase our work to them and get feedback on my ongoing research. It’s a great opportunity.”

“I think PortLand is something that will be useful in the real world. The goal is to create a network fabric that allow you to buy any server, plug it in and have it just work,” said Mysore.

"We all put in a lot of work and made it possible in 5 months, and that is incredible…an incredible five months," said Mysore, who highlighted the important contributions of all the authors on the paper. The full list:

Radhika Niranjan Mysore, Andreas Pamboris, Nathan Farrington, Nelson Huang, Pardis Miri, Sivasankar Radhakrishnan, Vikram Subramanya, and Amin Vahdat from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California San Diego.


NetworkWorld's Bob Brown covered the story this week:
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/081709-portland.html

Getting to UC San Diego

After completing her undergraduate degree in India, Radhika Niranjan Mysore worked for two years at Cisco, followed by a master’s degree at Georgia Institute of Technology, where she worked on systems research.

Next, she joined Amin Vahdat's research group at UC San Diego's Department of Computer Science and Engineering, within the Jacobs School of Engineering.

“The pace of learning is really fast at UCSD. There are great graduate students and a lot of interaction. It’s really nice,” said Mysore.

In June, Mysore finished the first year of her PhD in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego. This summer, she landed an internship at Microsoft Research, where she is working on data center storage issues.

“Getting an internship at Microsoft Research is a really great opportunity,” said Mysore.

Computer Scientists Scale “Layer 2” Data Center Networks to 100,000 Ports and Beyond

Radhika Niranjan Mysore (above) is a UC San Diego computer science graduate student and the first author and presenter of the SIGCOMM 2009 paper entitled "PortLand: A Scalable Fault-Tolerant Layer 2 Data Center Network Fabric.

"SIGCOMM was always a dream, and it was nice we could shoot for it," said Mysore.

Amin Vahdat (above) is the senior author on the SIGCOMM 2009 paper. Vahdat is a computer science professor at UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering. The SIGCOMM paper describes software created at the University of California, San Diego that the creators hope will lead to data centers that logically function as single, plug-and-play networks that will scale to the massive scale of modern data center networks.

A full prototype of PortLand, illustrated in Figure 1 from the paper, is currently running on a network in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering.

Hovav Shacham Describes Electronic Voting Machine Vulnerabilities on NPR Science Friday

Bravo Hovav Shacham (above left) ! The computer science professor from the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering did a great job describing his computer security research on NPR Science Friday today.

Check out the 17 minute show here, which includes a great question from a voter in Louisiana, one of the states that uses a Sequoia voting machine that is similar to the one the researchers used to highlight safety vulnerabilities.

The key to all this work is return-oriented programming, which Shacham first described in 2007. Read the full press release here. Download the paper and watch videos here.

Nanomotors detect silver

NanoEngineering professor Joseph Wang is part of a team of researchers from the United States and Germany who have found that the speed of synthetic "nanomotors" responds to nearby concentrations of silver. The followins is an excerpt from a news story in "Chemistry World," published by the Royal Society of Chemistry.

The discovery suggests that nanomotors could be used to detect trace levels of silver and other toxic substances in water supplies - a practice that has previously required bulky instrumentation. Nanomotors are nano-sized machines that can convert energy into motion. For a long time the only known nanomotors were biological and made from natural proteins, but in the last decade scientists have been able to create synthetic nanomotors with similar activity.

Alex Zettl, a nanomotor researcher at the University of California at Berkeley, thinks the work is exciting because it shows that local chemical reactions can change the visible motion of an object. 'Overall, this is beautiful work and it will very likely lead to more exciting discoveries in ion chemistry and nanoparticle propulsion,' he said.

Image above displaying the movement of five randomly selected nanomotors over three seconds in 11 different metal-nitrate salt solutions showing increased motion in the presence of silver © The American Chemical Society
http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2009/August/14080901.asp

UC San Diego Robots Take Center Stage at National Robotics Conference

Robots created by UC San Diego engineers made their way to Austin, Texas recently. They took center stage during NI Week, the annual robotics extravaganza hosted by National Instruments.

During the keynote address, Tom Bewley, a mechanical and aerospace engineering professor at the UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering, and his Ph.D. students Christopher Schmidt-Wetekam and Nick Morozovsky of the UCSD Coordinated Robotics Lab, gave live demonstrations of their third generation multimodal hopping rover, iHop, and their miniature treaded rover, Switchblade, which can both pop wheelies and climb relatively large stairs. Both designs feature advanced feedback control algorithms to stabilize various maneuvers, trading off static stability for enhanced agility.

The team also introduced iceCube, a self-propelled, self-guided sphere, which is actuated via internal control moment gyros and was designed and built by Ph.D. student Andrew Cavender.

View a video of the demos and keynote address here or at
http://zone.ni.com/wv/app/doc/p/id/wv-1705/upvisited/y

The video is about 12 minutes long. If you have just a few moments, check out the "Switchblade" rover at the 10:00 minute marker in the video. You'll get to see Switchblade pop a wheelie AND climb translucent stairs.

New Video: Computer Scientists Demo Voting Machine Vulnerability

Computer scientists demonstrated that criminals could hack an electronic voting machine and steal votes using a malicious programming approach that had not been invented when the voting machine was designed. The team of scientists from University of California, San Diego, the University of Michigan, and Princeton University employed “return-oriented programming” to force a Sequoia AVC Advantage electronic voting machine to turn against itself and steal votes. Read the academic paper and learn about the computer scientists at https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/groups/security/avc/





the same video is also available via YouTube:

Voting security video interview with Hovav Shacham

Above is a four minute video on voting machine security from Hovav Shacham, a UC San Diego computer science professor. Shacham and colleagues presented this work on Monday August 10, 2009 at the 2009 Electronic Voting Technology Workshop / Workshop on Trustworthy Elections (EVT/WOTE 2009), the premier academic forum for voting security research.

The same video is also up on YouTube:

Images: Computer Scientists Take Over Electronic Voting Machine with New Programming Technique

Above are the three images from the pape“Can DREs Provide Everlasting Security? The Case of Return-Oriented Programming and the AVC Advantage” by Stephen Checkoway,University of California, San Diego; Ariel J. Feldman, Princeton University; Brian Kantor, University of California, San Diego; J. Alex Halderman, University of Michigan; Edward W. Felten, Princeton University; Hovav Shacham, University of California, San Diego.

The computer scientists presented this work on August 10, 2009 at the 2009 Electronic Voting Technology Workshop / Workshop on Trustworthy Elections (EVT/WOTE 2009), the premier academic forum for voting security research.

Digital Dandelions Set in Stone...Literally

"Digital dandelions" popped up all across the Internet almost exactly two years ago, when computer science researchers from UC San Diego presented a paper at 2007 SIGCOMM called,
“Orbis: Rescaling Degree Correlations to Generate Annotated Internet Topologies.”

The big idea: What looks like the head of a digital dandelion is a map of the Internet generated by new algorithms from computer scientists at UC San Diego. This map features Internet nodes – the red dots – and linkages – the green lines. But it is no ordinary map. It is a (mostly) randomly generated graph that retains the essential characteristics of a specific corner of the Internet but doubles the number of nodes.

Now, the digital dandelions have been set in stone...literally. The Computer Science Department at University College London liked the depictions of Internet topology and their resemblance to “digital dandelions” so much that they commissioned artist Hannah Griffiths to create a mosaic based on these depictions and have it on display in their new building.

The Department Head of CS at UCL, Anthony Finkelstein, forwarded the images to AminVahdat, the computer science professor at UC San Diego who led the research. Vahdat posted the images on his "Idle Process" blog. One of the images is above...but check out Idle Process for the rest.

The authors on the 2007 SIGCOMM paper about the digital dandelions are: Priya Mahadevan, Calvin Hubble and Amin Vahdat from UCSD’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering; and Bradley Huffaker and Dimitri Krioukov from CAIDA, the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis which is based at the University of California’s San Diego Supercomputer Center.

One of the images from the original UC San Diego press release, and a quote from the first author, are below.

Defending against denial of service attacks and large-scale worm outbreaks depends on network topology. Our work allows computer scientists to experiment with a range of random graphs that match Internet characteristics. This work is also useful for determining the sensitivity of particular techniques – like routing protocols and congestion controls – to network topology and to variations in network topology,” said Priya Mahadevan, the first author on the SIGCOMM 2007 paper. Mahadevan completed her computer science Ph.D. at UCSD’s Jacobs School of Engineering in 2007 and joined Hewlett Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, CA.