Monday, December 13, 2010

Thursday, December 9, 2010

Nanoengineers from UC San Diego Win the IDTechEx Printed Electronics Academic R&D award

Left: NanoEngienering PhD student Joshua Windmiller
From the NanoEngineering website:

Congratulations to Joshua Windmiller and NanoEngineering Professor Joseph Wang's Nanobioelectronic Sensor team on winning the IDTechEx Printed Electronics Academic R&D award at the 2010 Printed Electronics USA conference and tradeshow for their work on textile-based printed bioelectronic sensors.

From Printed Electronics World:

The University of California, San Diego won this award for its work on textile based printed bioelectric sensors. The University fabricated thick-film (screen-printed) amperometric sensors that were printed directly onto the elastic waist of undergarments for physiological monitoring. Additionally, they demonstrated the highly sensitive detection of trace concentrations of explosive agents using screen-printed sensors on GORE-TEX®fabrics. The University reports, "Our research has demonstrated the feasibility of employing screen-printed biosensors for a number of utilitarian applications leading to the realization of a new class of wearable biosensors that enables a "wear and forget" paradigm."

This is tied into the "smart underwear" project that made headlines around the world earlier this year:





This prestigious, world-renowned award is given to an academic research organization that has made a significant contribution over the past 24 months to the understanding of the principles and accrued knowledge behind printed electronics or photovoltaics.

Another photo of Josh below:




Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Stefan Savage and Pavel Pevzner named 2010 ACM Fellows

Congrats to Stefan Savage and Pavel Pevzner, both named 2010 ACM Fellows.

Pavel Pevzner

Stefan Savage

Stefan Savage is being recognized by the ACM “for contributions to large scale systems and network security.”

Pavel Pevzner is being recognized by the ACM “for contributions to algorithms for genome rearrangements, DNA sequencing, and proteomics.”

Both are professors in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego.

UC San Diego computer science professor Stefan Savage’s work has focused on the security threats enabled by broad Internet connectivity; including worms, viruses, denial-of-service, botnets and spam. He is known for advancing a quantitative approach towards computer security, including the development of empirical techniques to measure and analyze global-scale attacks and efforts to identify the economics driving modern attackers.

Savage is part of the Systems & Networking and Security research groups in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego. Savage is also the Acting Director of the UC San Diego Center for Networked Systems. His interests range from the economics of e-crime, to characterizing availability, to automotive systems to routing protocols and data center virtualization.


UC San Diego computer science professor Pavel Pevzner’s work has focused broadly on algorithmic aspects of bioinformatics. Bioinformatics has become a part of modern biology and often dictates new fashions, enables new approaches, and drives further biological developments. Pevzner’s work focuses of DNA sequencing, proteomics, and genome rearrangements, the key areas of algorithmic biology. He authored influential graduate and undegraduate textbooks on bioinformatics algorithms and is now interested in new approaches to interdisciplinary computer science education and introducing computer science to education of biologists. 
Pavel Pevzner is the Ronald R. Taylor Professor of Computer Science at UC San Diego; Director of the NIH Center for Computational Mass Spectrometry; and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Professor.

Friday, December 3, 2010

What is the state of certain kinds of security problems in the real web?


Another tidbit related to the history sniffing story from computer scientists at UC San Diego.

“The tool we ended up with is useful for answering questions that no one knew how to answer at all before: ‘what is the state of certain kinds of security problems in the real web?’” said computer science professor Hovav Shacham from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. 

The UC San Diego computer scientists did this while working on the cutting edge of how to efficiently do information tracking in a JavaScript setting.

History Sniffing and Browser Tracking / What about Mobile Browsers?



While the original history sniffing research presented at CCS10  did not look at mobile browsers, the UC San Diego computer scientists say that is something they are looking into now. 

“In general, the mobile browsers and mobile sites seem to be way behind in security,” said computer science professor Hovav Shacham from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. 

A few more details on the History Sniffing / Browser History / JavaScript story from UC San Diego


Another tidbit on the history sniffing story from the computer scientists here at UC San Diego:

The UC San Diego computer scientists added their new JavaScript information flow engine to the Chrome browser, but the approach could be implemented in other browsers. The history-sniffing detection tool currently adds an additional 60 to 70 percent to total page loading time over a fast network – fast enough to be a useful research tool but too slow for consumer use.

The Forbes story is below: 

History Sniffing: How YouPorn Checks What Other Porn Sites You’ve Visited and Ad Networks Test The Quality of Their Data

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

FICO, UC San Diego Announce Winners of International Predictive Analytics Competition

SAN DIEGO, Nov 24, 2010 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- FICO , the leading provider of analytics and decision management technology, and the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) today announced the winners of the seventh annual UCSD-FICO Data Mining Contest. Participants from six countries on four continents were among the winners who developed predictive analytics to determine which consumers were most likely to shop online.

This year, contestants were given anonymous data for more than 130,000 consumers. The data included no personally identifiable information. Based on that data, competitors built models to predict which consumers were most likely to buy products online. Participants were judged on how accurately they were able to predict future purchases.

The competition was divided into two categories -- one category utilized raw data, and one category utilized transformed data -- and each category had a Graduate and Undergraduate division. The top three finishers in each category and each division shared $10,000 in cash prizes.

"Students around the world look forward to the UCSD-FICO Data Mining Contest each year as an opportunity to put the skills they've learned in the classroom to use in a rigorous real-world competition," said professor Charles Elkan of UC San Diego Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) within the Jacobs School of Engineering.

"It's been exciting to see the growth of this competition since its inception, with over 140 participants from six continents competing this year. We are proud of all the students who participated, and we appreciate FICO's ongoing commitment to developing and encouraging the next generation of innovators in predictive analytics," said Elkan.   (Read the full press release here.)

CRCA event / Jeremy Douglass introduces Get Lamp

Get Lamp is a documentary film about text-based computer games. In the late 1970s, Adventure and Zork broke ground in the early computer game genre that is still being created today as "interactive fiction”. CRCA’s own video game scholar and postdoctoral researcher, Jeremy Douglass, who appears in the film, will introduce a screening with comments on connections to his research.

For more information about Jeremy’s work: http://jeremydouglass.com/
For more information about Get Lamp: Trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzOPVe7Usms and Film: http://www.getlamp.com/

For more information about CRCA : http://crca.ucsd.edu

When?
Text Adventures featuring Yra van Dijk and Jeremy Douglass
Thursday 9th December 2010, 5pm-7pm,  followed by a reception
Calit2 Auditorium, First Floor, Atkinson Hall
UCSD Voigt Drive, La Jolla

$1000 Elevator Pitch Competition / UC San Diego Entrepreneur Challenge

December 3 at 5 PM is the deadline for submitting a pitch for the $1000 Elevator Pitch Competition sponsored by the UC San Diego Entrepreneur Challenge.

Eligibility Requirements (partial). Full details here.

Each team must consist of at least one full time student, post-doctoral trainee, or recent graduate from either UCSD or the other Torrey Pines Mesa Research Institutions (The Salk Institute, Burnham Institute, Scripps Research Institute, and the Scripps Institute of Oceanography).  Recent graduates must have received their UCSD degree after August 15th in the year the current Challenge begins.

The Student/post-doc must be an active, contributing team member who is the founder or co-founder of the team, and, together with all other student/post doc team members, hold in the aggregate at least 20% of the ownership interest in the company which is the subject of such team’s submission in the competition.

Tonight: Science to Idea to Company

Learn how laboratory projects are turned into commercial ventures. The event is Dec 1, 2010: "Understanding Tech Transfer"

Where: Rady School of Management, UC San Diego
When: Dec 1, 6 to 7:30 pm

RSVP