DARPA Challenge Comes to UC San Diego

Every few years the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) holds a public competition to stretch the outer limits of what technology can do. Two years ago they dispersed 10 large, red weather balloons at undisclosed locations across the U.S. The celebrated 2009 DARPA Network Challenge to find the balloons was solved in just nine hours by a team from MIT. Now, Manuel Cebrian, a member of that winning team, is aiming for a repeat win – only this time, the challenge is exponentially harder.

According to Dr. Cebrian – who is now a research scientist at the University of California, San Diego – instead of just looking for 10 balloons, the new DARPA Shredder Challenge’s ultimate puzzle involves piecing together roughly 10,000 pieces of different documents that have been shredded. “This is almost certainly the most challenging puzzle ever created,” said Cebrian. “A combinatorial number of possibilities makes the problem intractable by computer algorithms alone. A combination of crowd-sourcing and advanced computer-vision algorithms is necessary. This is exactly our approach.”

Interested in participating or to learn more? Visit the UCSD Shredder Challenge Team online athttp://shredder-challenge.ucsd.edu.), or contact the UCSD team at shredder-challenge@ucsd.edu.

Read the full story by Tiffany Fox from Calit2. 

World Premier: Forbidden Tomb of Genghis Khan

What: World Premier: Forbidden Tomb of Genghis Khan at Calit2, UC San Diego.

A National Geographic Expedition Documentary featuring
Calit2 Research Scientist, Albert Yu‐Min Lin, PhDA National Geographic Expedition Documentary
featuring Calit2 Research Scientist, Albert Yu‐Min Lin, PhD (and a Jacobs School of Engineering
alumnus).

When: Wednesday, November 9, 2011. 7PM Documentary, 8PM Panel Discussion with the Expedition Team.

Where: Calit2 Auditorium, Atkinson Hall | University of California San Diego

Forbidden Tomb of Genghis Khan will also be featured on the National Geographic Channel
Wednesday, November 9 at the following times: at 9pm EST, 8pm CT, 7pm MT, 9pm PT, 8pm AK, 7pm HI

The State of the Network

The Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA) is pleased to invite you to:

CRCA Exchange #7 : The State of the Network

Featuring CRCA/Calit2 researchers Hans-Werner Braun, Peter Otto and Michelle Daniels.

Thursday April 14, 5pm - 7pm
CRCA Performative Computing Lab
Room 1606
Atkinson Hall
UCSD Voigt Drive, La Jolla

Presentations are followed by refreshments and are open to the public.

High Performance Wireless Network - Hans-Werner BraunThe High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network (HPWREN) started in the year 2000 via a National Science Foundation network research grant, with additional NSF funding awards since, HPWREN functions as a collaborative cyberinfrastructure on research, education, and first responder activities. The project supports a high-performance wireless network in San Diego, Riverside, and Imperial counties. Th e network includes backbone nodes, typically on mountain tops, to connect often hard-to-reach areas in remote environments. HPWREN interconnects with the rest of the Internet at the San Diego Supercomputer Center here at UCSD. More information on HPWREN can be found at http://hpwren.ucsd.edu/

Sonic Arts Research - Peter Otto and Michelle DanielsPeter Otto (Director Sonic Arts Research Calit2) and Michelle Daniels (Graduate Student Music) present current projects underway in the the field of networked audio. The Sonic Arts Research Group partners in the film industry to find solutions for remote recording, mixing, editing, and composing projects.

CRCA Exchange is a series of free lecture and discussion events open to the general public. The organizers would appreciate it if you could share this announcement with any relevant distribution lists to which you have access.

The CRCA Exchange series is supported by The Center for Resea rch in Computing and the Arts, in conjunction with Calit2 and the UCSD 50th Anniversary.

For more information, please visit this link: http://crca.ucsd.edu/exchange/

Electrical Engineers Engage with Audi on Urban Car Problems

There is an interesting Calit2 story out today about a new research initiative launched by Audi, its Electronics Research Laboratory in Silicon Valley, the University of California, San Diego and three other major U.S. research universities will develop technologies aimed at easing the congestion, dangers and inconveniences that often confront drivers in the world’s biggest cities

The new three-year research initiative is called “Audi Urban Intelligent Assist.” The aim is to take connected car, driver assistance and infrastructure electronics to the next level of providing detailed information so motorists have a better sense of the driving conditions surrounding them.

“Safety on urban roads will require a very deep understanding of the driver and his or her environment,” added UC San Diego electrical and computer engineering professor Mohan Trivedi, director of the university’s Laboratory for Intelligent and Safe Automobiles (LISA), within the Jacobs School of Engineering. “With the proliferation of consumer electronics devices in and on-board vehicles, a major challenge in front of us is to ensure that assistance systems really help rather than distract or irritate the driver.”

Read the full story on the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering site.

Related links:

Laboratory for Intelligent and Safe Automobiles
UCSD Computer Vision and Robotics Research Lab
Audi USA
Audi News
Electronics Research Laboratory

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

Valley of the Khans Project in San Diego Business Journal

Luke Barrington, a UC San Diego electrical engineering PhD candidate and Albert Yu-Min Lin, who earned his undergrad and graduate degrees from the Jacobs School, are in a recent San Diego Business Journal article that describes the “Field Expedition: Mongolia — Valley of the Khans Project” that Lin is leading. The article also discusses the San Diego firm -- Digitaria Interactive Inc. -- that helped build the online experience that is so crucial to this National Geographic project that enables people from around the world to help in their exploration from their computers. Learn how you can participate here.

StarCAVE Up for an "Immy"

Today is the last day to vote for the Calit2 StarCAVE for an immersive Technology Award / You can vote! (one vote per IP address). http://www.immersivetech.org/summit/immys/

Learn more from the Calit2 story from Tiffany Fox



San Diego, Oct. 4, 2010 -- Immersive virtual reality has been a cornerstone of Calit2’s research into scientific visualization from the institute’s very beginning almost 10 years ago. The latest validation of that research may be handed out on Oct. 21 in Los Angeles, when Calit2 could win one of the inaugural Immersive Tech Awards, dubbed the ‘Immys’.

Calit2 StarCAVE nominated for immersive Technology Award / You can vote!

The StarCAVE at Calit2 is among the nominees for the 2010 Immersive Technology Awards. You can vote for StarCAVE here: http://www.immersivetech.org/summit/immys/

Learn more from the Calit2 story:

San Diego, Oct. 4, 2010  -- Immersive virtual reality has been a cornerstone of Calit2’s research into scientific visualization from the institute’s very beginning almost 10 years ago. The latest validation of that research may be handed out on Oct. 21 in Los Angeles, when Calit2 could win one of the inaugural Immersive Tech Awards, dubbed the ‘Immys’. 

From Grad Student to CEO!

Check out this event on Friday Oct 8 at Calit2:

From GSR to CTO: A Celebration and Contemplation on Information Theory and its Applications
Graduate student researchers (GSRs) from the Jacobs School of Engineering's Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department recently received significant recognition for their research achievements. Five were nominated for the prestigious Student Paper Award at the International Symposium on Information Theory, and two won a coveted Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship.
To celebrate these accomplishments, Calit2's Information Theory and Applications Center (ITA) asked the students to present their work, and invited three of the communications industry's leading innovators -- all of them Chief Technology Officers -- to share their views on the future of the information theory field, and to answer the questions: What does it take to transform great research into commercial success? And to go from GSR... to CTO?

The five GSR presenters will be:

- Hessam Mahdavifar, on Achieving the Secrecy Capacity of Wiretap Channels Using Polar Codes;
- Jayadev Acharya, on Reconstructing Strings from their Substring Compositions;
- Brian McFee, on Metric Learning for Information Retrieval;
- Nikhil Karamchandani, on Function Computation via Subspace Cooling; and
- Eitan Yaakobi, on Multiple Error-Correcting WOM-Codes.

The afternoon speakers will include Ramesh Rao, director of Calit2 at UC San Diego, who will talk about information theory in the context of Calit2's mission; and ECE chair Larry Larson, who will open the afternoon session.
Subsequently, three CTOs will engage in a panel discussion and Q&A session with the audience about their respective journeys from GSR to CTO, and their advice to graduate students:
- Roberto Padovani, Executive VP and CTO, Qualcomm, Inc. and Member, NAE;

- Arogyaswami Paulraj, CTO, Beceem, Inc., Member, NAE and Professor Emeritus, Stanford University; and

- Nambi Seshadri, CTO, Broadcom Inc

MORE INFORMATION:

Everyone is invited to attend, but food will be limited to participants who RSVP in advance to John Minan at jminan@ece.ucsd.edu. Space is limited, so please respond early.

New! Calit2 Research Video

December 2010 marks the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology's 10th anniversary. Calit2's research unites faculty, students and technical professionals at UC San Diego and UC Irvine with private-sector partners and state or federal funding agencies to explore how emerging information technologies and ...telecommunications can transform arenas vital to the state's economy and our citizens' quality of life. In its second decade, Calit2 aims to focus much of its research on four application thrusts of broad societal importance: culture; energy; the environment; and health.



To do so, Calit2 will continue to invest in the development of cutting-edge technologies that can enable advances across multiple sectors and industries. Building on past successes, Calit2 will focus these enabling technologies on wireless communications, photonics, cyberspace, as well as nanotechnology and micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS). The institute will continue to develop 'living laboratories' and research spaces to house multidisciplinary collaborations -- ensuring that the breadth and crosscutting nature of Calit2's research teams will result in new technologies, systems and expertise that are consistent with the institute's successes to date.See More

YY Zhou / More Reliable Computing

Calit2's Tiffany Fox wrote a nice profile on Yuanyuan (YY) Zhou, a computer science professor here at the Jacobs School of Engineering.

“People always ask why their systems fail, and the computer industry is starting to pay attention to this reliability issue,” explains Zhou, who joined the UCSD Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) in the Jacobs School of Engineering in the summer of 2009. “Fundamentally, my research is about making computer systems less vulnerable to attacks so they crash less. When Windows crashes, it’s more of an inconvenience, but when an e-commerce site crashes it can really be a problem.”


Zhou is the first holder of the Qualcomm Endowed Chair in Mobile Computing. The chair is one of four established in the Jacobs School of Engineering through Qualcomm’s original $15 million commitment to the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2). Read the story on the Calit2 news site.

Check out a few more great photos of computer sicnece professor YY Zhou taken by Erik Jepsen on the Calit2 Flickr site.

Popular Science Deems Calit2 "Awesome"

Popular Science Magazine recently featured "30 Awesome College Labs" and Calit2 at UC San Diego is among them. (From the link above, image 23 in the gallery is Calit2).

Check out the Calit2 Flikr stream for more "awesome" from Calit2.

Data Center Goes to DC (Direct Current not the US Capital)

Yesterday, a consortium of researchers from the public and private sectors embarked on a real-world experiment to gauge whether large computing facilities can operate on less power if they cut alternating current (AC) out of the equation.

At the University of California, San Diego, engineers switched a set of servers in a campus data center to operate continuously on 380-volt direct current (DC) – as part of a project that allows researchers to track in great detail the energy savings that servers and data centers can hope to achieve through a variety of architectural and procedural efficiencies, including the use of DC power.

The experiment at UC San Diego is part of Project GreenLight, a National Science Foundation-funded initiative that has deployed a modular data center on campus with sensors and other instruments to measure the energy efficiency of information and communication technologies – and to help researchers build greener IT systems and software.

“The UC San Diego campus has made substantial investments for energy savings,” said Thomas A. DeFanti, principal investigator on Project GreenLight and a senior research scientist in the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2). “The switch to DC powering of servers holds great potential on a campus where supercomputers and other high-tech facilities represent a disproportionately large share of energy consumption."

It is estimated that companies could save billions of dollars each year in capital costs and ongoing energy savings by using all-DC distribution in their data centers.

“The coupling of renewable energy systems that generate DC power with large consumers of DC is the wave of the future for energy efficiency,” said Byron Washom, director of strategic energy initiatives at UC San Diego. “Our contracted 2.8 MW fuel cell that utilizes renewable methane gas will only occupy the land area of a tennis court, yet it produces more DC power than that required by the San Diego Supercomputer Center.”

Read the full story on the Calit2 Web site.

Check out the Calit2 Flikr photo stream.

Above photo caption: UCSD electrical technician flips the final switch on the GreenLight Instrument to convert two of its racks to DC-DC power.

Software for Efficient Computing in the Age of Nanoscale Devices

San Diego, CA, August 19, 2010 -- As semiconductor manufacturers build ever smaller components, circuits and chips at the nano scale become less reliable and more expensive to produce. The variability in their behavior from device to device and over their lifetimes – due to manufacturing, aging-related wear-out, and varying operating environments – is largely ignored by today’s mainstream computer systems.
Now a visionary team of computer scientists and electrical engineers from six universities is proposing to deal with the downside of nanoscale computer components by re-thinking and enhancing the role that software can play in a new class of computing machines that are adaptive and highly energy efficient.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) today awarded a $10 million, five-year grant to researchers who will explore “Variability-Aware Software for Efficient Computing with Nanoscale Devices.” The grant is part of the funding agency’s Expeditions in Computing program, which rewards far-reaching agendas that “promise significant advances in the computing frontier and great benefit to society.”

Read more of this Calit2 story written by Doug Ramsey.

Variability Expedition at Variability.org

Researchers on the team include: Rajesh Gupta, Ranjit Jhala, Sorin Lerner, Tajana Simunic Rosing, Steve Swanson and Yuanyuan (YY) Zhou from UC San Diego; Lara Dolecek and Puneet Gupta from UCLA Engineering; Subhasish Mitra from Stanford; Dennis Sylvester from Michigan; Rakesh Kumar from UIUC’s Coordinated Science Laboratory; as well as Nikil Dutt and Alex Nicolau from UCI’s Center for Embedded Computer Systems.

Computer Vision, Face Recognition and Bluffing

Check out this video illustrating a UC San Diego project involving computer vision, speech analysis and neuroscientific analysis. Video credit: Calit2.

The video includes Mohan Trivedi, an electrical and computer engineering professor here at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.



Additional folks with "speaking roles" in the video:
Ashish Tawari: Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) PhD student at UC San Diego.
Clarissa Lock: Physchology graduate student at UC San Diego

Check out more videos on the Calit2 YouTube channel.

High Tech iPad App

John Kooker (third from left) ended the presentation of the winning project with a demonstration of his iPad-based interface on the new HIPerSpace installation in Jacobs Hall (fka EBU1). More photos here.

Electrical engineering (ECE) graduate students created an iPad application that turns the iPad's cool touch interface into a doorway for the cutting edge visualization tools being developed here at UC San Diego.

The students created these projects for the course ECE 291. More details are below, and the full story is on the Jacobs School Web site. (The original Calit2 story was written by Maureen Curran at Calit2 here at UC San Diego)

"My favorite part of doing the project is getting hands-on experience with this incredible new visualization technology," enthused Kooker, "Being able to contribute to that significantly in one quarter was really fun. Also, being able to play with brand new technology, the iPad, was just a thrill."

Kooker's interface ("OptiActor") supports the majority of existing HIPerSpace/OptiPortal applications (primarily visualization apps, including image and video viewers, maps and weather and scientific data visualizations). It has true multitouch and accelerometer-based interaction.

"You have multitouch in your hands, you can paint with your fingers, throw images around, and pinch to zoom, while watching the wall. It's really fun," explained Kooker. It also supports mouse and keyboard emulation, which enables use with older applications that do not support multitouch.

NSF Reviews CIAN's Efforts to Create Transformative Optical Technologies

"CIAN is focused on the innovations that are necessary to reframe the problems of access networks and determine if there's a common protocol for optics,” explained CIAN Deputy Director Shaya Fainman, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at UC San Diego. “Our vision is to develop novel optical networking architectures, create low-cost optoelectronic technologies, test them through our unique testbed infrastructure, prove their relevance and commercialize them through entrepreneurs and industrial partners."

Read the latest on CIAN in a story by Calit2's Tiffany Fox.

Jacobs School of Rock is Coming on June 4

Props to Alex Matthews from Calit2 (and the band CODE) for designing the flyer for the 2010 Jacobs School of Rock.

The video from Jacobs School of Rock 2009 is below:

Calit2 UCSD Undergraduate Summer Research Scholars

The list of Calit2 UCSD Undergraduate Summer Research Scholars is out, and many of the students are Jacobs School of Engineering undergraduates.

Avinash Ananthakrishnan, Junior, Computer Engineering (minor: Cognitive Science)
advisor: Zhongren (Arnold) Cao, Calit2
Scalable and Energy Efficient Embedded Digital Signal Processing Implementation for High Order MIMO-OFDM Systems

Thomas Chew, Freshman, Bioengineering: Biotechnology
advisor: Shu Chien, Bioengineering
Effects of Shear Stress and Chemical Environment on Stem Cell Differentiation

Ronnie Fang, Junior, Chemical Physics / Engineering Physics (minor: Biology)
advisor: Liangfang Zhang, NanoEngineering
Scaling Up of Lipid-Polymer Hybrid NanoParticles for Drug Delivery

Roger Huang, Junior, Aerospace Engineering
advisor: Jan Kleissl, Mechanical/Aerospace Engineering
Application of Total Sky Imagery to control energy storage on the UCSD campus

Suraj Kedarisetty, Junior, Bioengineering (minor: Chemistry)
advisor: Nathan Delson, Mechanical/Aerospace Engineering
Improve Patient Safety through the Development of Intelligent Medical Simulators

Daniel Lew, Junior, Bioengineering: Premed
advisor: Martin Haas, Cancer Center and Biology
BMI-1 Promotes Cellular Invasion and Drug Resistance in Head and Neck Cancer Stem Cells

Nicole Lim, Freshman, Bioengineering: Biotechnology (minor: Law & Society)
advisor: Joseph Wang, NanoEngineering
Smart NanoScale Devices

Kristian Madsen, Junior, Electrical Engineering
advisor: Deli Wang, Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE)
Vertical Nanowires and Heterostructures for Photoelectrochemical Water Splitting

Emi Nakayama, Junior, Chemical Engineering
advisor: Jennifer Cha, NanoEngineering
A Mechanism Control the Size of Microbubbles for Ultrasound Imaging and Drug Delivery

Perry Naughton, Sophomore, Electrical Engineering
advisor: Deli Wang, Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE)
Low Cost Solar Cells using Simple and Inexpensive Spray Pyrolysis Technique (SPT)

Bryan Ransil, Freshman, Computer Science
advisor: Falko Kuester, Structural Engineering
Human-Data Interaction

Arvind Satyanarayan, Junior, Computer Science
advisor: Jim Hollan, Cognitive Science
Interaction Techniques for Large Wall Displays

Emily Schoenhoff, Sophomore, Bioengineering
advisor: Robert Sah, Bioengineering
Cartilage Degradation in Aging Humans - Collagen Network

Justin Tse, Junior, Bioengineering: Biotechnology
advisor: Adam Engler, Bioengineering
Directing Mesenchymal Stem Cell Migration with Matrix Elasticity

Alan Turchik, Junior, Mechanical Engineering
advisor: Tom Levy, Anthropology, Calit2
Camera Stablization for Aerial Photogrammetric Systems

Grant Van Horn, Sophomore, Computer Science
advisor: Serge Belongie, Computer Science and Engineering (CSE)
GroZi and Visipedia

Christopher Wei, Sophomore, Bioengineering: Biotechnology
advisor: Kun Zhang, Bioengineering
De Novo Assembly of the Microbial Genome

David Yi, Junior, double major: Bioengineering: Premed and Biochemistry/Cell Biology
advisor: Weg Mendoza Ongkeko, Surgery
Identification of a Distinct Subpopulation of Cancer Stem Cells Critical for Metastasis and Tumor Growth in Human Anaplastic Thyroid Cancer

Larry Smarr is the mystery photo in UT Science Quest

From Science Quest in the San Diego Union Tribune:

In the print edition of Monday's Quest section, we ran a photo with the headline, "Who is it?" Were you able to guess who it was? No? You're looking a Larry Smarr of UC San Diego, who is considered to be among the world's most influential computer scientists.