Undergrads on Solar Power Demonstration Project in Kenya: finalists in national competition

Congratulations to the Global TIES team "Kenya Solar Power." The team, which is building a prototype for a solar electric installation for a computer training center in Mbita, Kenya, won a spot as a finalist in the National Idea to Product Competition for Social Entrepreneurship.

Senior, Priya Raval wrote the proposal. Clarke Guest is the faculty advisor and Zach Salin is the TA.

We'll be following this story and this worthy project.

Serge Belongie Lab in Wired

Kristin Branson earned her computer science PhD in Serge Belongie's UCSD Computer Vision lab here at the Jacobs School. Now, a fellow at Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Farm Research Campus, Branson and her work is highlighted in a Wired magazine web story by Alexis Madrigal on the Wired Science blog.

Kristin is leading an effort to track the behavior of fruit flies using video. Software takes that video data and provides behavioral information...what fruit flies do, and when.

Branson, and her former PhD advisor Serge Belongie, are both quoted in the story.

Some of Branson's publications from her time at UCSD are below. A quick look at the list, and you see that Branson is not new to the intersection of computer science and animal behavior. She was part of the Monitoring Animal Behavior project.

Babenko B., Branson S., Belongie S., "Similarity Functions for Categorization: from Monolithic to Category Specific ", International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), Kyoto, Japan, 2009. [BibTex][pdf]

Agarwal S., Branson K., Belongie S., "Higher-Order Learning with Graphs", International Conference On Machine Learning (ICML), Pittsburgh, PA, 2006. [BibTex][pdf]

Branson K., Belongie S., "Tracking Multiple Mouse Contours (Without Too Many Samples)", IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), San Diego, CA, June, 2005. [BibTex]

Belongie S., Branson K., Dollár P., Rabaud V., "Monitoring Animal Behavior in the Smart Vivarium", Measuring Behavior, Wageningen, NL, pp. 70-72, 2005. [BibTex][pdf]

Branson K., Rabaud V., Belongie S., "Three Brown Mice: See How They Run", IEEE International Workshop on Performance Evaluation of Tracking and Surveillance (PETS), Nice, France, October, 2003. [BibTex][pdf]