Selective Scanning for Faster Prostate Pathology

In new work from the UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering and the UCSD Medical Center, computer vision and machine learning techniques are being used to create an automated system to analyze low magnification images of prostate tissue sections and select those parts of the specimen that should be scanned at high magnification for examination by human diagnosticians. Pathologists hardly ever view entire images at high resolution, but rather concentrate on a few relevant parts. The new system selects the parts that warrant scanning at high magnification.

The very large sizes of image files generated by digital microscopes with a scanning mechanism can make it hard for pathologists at different locations to consult with each other by sharing files through the Internet. The new approach can decrease the space required for storage and time for transmission by a factor of ten.

The new collaborative work from UCSD electrical engineering Ph.D. student Mayank Kabra, computer science professor Yoav Freund and UCSD Medical Center clinical pathology professor Steve Baird will be presented on Thursday 17 January 2008 at the Workshop on Bio-Image Informatics: Biological Imaging, Computer Vision and Data Mining, 2008, hosted by UC Santa Barbara’s Center for Bio-Image Informatics.

Read the full abstract here: Selective Scanning for faster Prostate Pathology
Mayank Kabra ECE, UC San Diego; Yoav Freund CSE, UC San Diego; Steve Baird School of Medicine, UC San Diego

Two ECE Profs, Two Spin-Outs, Two Product-Award Nominations…Just One Award

Products from two different companies spun out by electrical engineers at UC San Diego are finalists for CONNECT’s 2007 Most Innovative New Product “MIP” Award – in the Communications Technology & Hardware category.

CONNECT is a globally recognized public benefits organization that fosters entrepreneurship in San Diego. The winning product will be announced at a December 14, 2007 award ceremony.

The two UCSD spin-out companies are Mushroom Networks, Inc., founded by Rene Cruz, and Ortiva Wireless founded by Sujit Dey – both of whom are electrical engineers at the Jacobs School.

Mushroom Networks was nominated for its Broadband Bonding Network Appliance and Ortiva Wireless for Ortiva Mobile Content Delivery Network.

Mushroom Networks’ Broadband Bonding Network Appliance provides cost-effective accelerated Internet connectivity to entities within multi-tenant buildings who wish to aggregate multiple Internet access lines for increased performance and reliability. With the Broadband Bonding Network Appliance, up to five DSL, cable modem or T1 services can be combined.

The Ortiva Wireless Mobile Content Delivery Network gives content providers and aggregators an innovative, hosted means of managing and delivering content to mobile subscribers. It delivers smooth video, clear audio, and rich multimedia experience to mobile users under highly variable wireless network conditions. Ortiva’s mobile network operator solutions extend the coverage and expand the availability of rich media content.

Rene Cruz, an electrical engineer from UCSD, founded Mushroom Networks in 2004 with Dr. Cahit Akin. Cruz currently serves as Chief Science Officer. Cruz works in the area of performance analysis of communication networks and has developed traffic and service models for communication networks that have been widely adopted within the research community. He is an internationally recognized expert in the area of Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees in packet switched networks, and was elected to be a Fellow of the IEEE on the basis of these accomplishments.

Sujit Dey, an electrical engineer from UCSD, founded Ortiva Wireless in 2004 based on technologies developed at the Jacobs School. Dey heads the Mobile Systems Design and Test Laboratory within the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Jacobs School. He has twenty years of experience in research, technology, and product development in wireless networks, wireless multimedia, systems, circuits, and design tools. He currently serves as the Chief Technologist for Ortiva Wireless.

In 2004, Dey won a grant of $50,000 from the Jacobs School's von Liebig Center for Entrepreneurism and Technology Advancement to build a first proof-of-concept for software that dynamically shapes data in applications as a function of network and device conditions and constraints.

Rene Cruz received commercialization advisory services and incubation space from the von Liebig Center.

Electrical Engineering Professor Pam Cosman Elected an IEEE Fellow

Electrical engineering professor Pam Cosman was recently elected an IEEE Fellow for for contributions to image and video compression and wireless communications.

Here are a couple of in-progress video interviews with Professor Cosman.

Watch a 4 minute video of Pam Cosman talking about her award, her research, where she sees electrical engineering going in the future and her advice for people thinking about studying engineering.

Here is a 5 minute video of Professor Cosman talking about some of her experiences when she was an electrical engineering student.

3D Reconstruction: UCSD's Latest Contribution

Augmented reality walkthroughs of a building or a city, online alignment of a camera network and 3D navigation through a collection of photographs are just a few of the potential applications of an algorithm created in the computer science department at UC San Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering.

For this work, UCSD computer scientists earned was one of three honorable mentions for the David Marr prize which is the best paper award at the world’s premier computer vision conferences, ICCV, the International Conference on Computer Vision which took place last month in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

“The algorithm is very much practical. We have performed real-life 3D reconstructions. In fact, the significance of the paper lies in our approaches for designing a theoretically correct algorithm that also works well in practice,” explained Manmohan Chandraker, the first author on the award-winning ICCV paper and a fifth-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UCSD’s Jacobs School of Engineering.

A longer story on this research is still in the works. Check out this low-fidelity video that gives a taste of the research.

If you have trouble with the streaming file above, you can check out the video on You Tube.

Audition Laboratory

link here

From Voracious Savants to Media Stars

UCSD freshmen and twins Aaron (far left) and David Swartz (right), along with
Andrew Smith (front middle) and David Wong (back center), took top honors in the
Qualcomm Innovator Challenge for BookPal. Image credit: Nelvin Cepeda Union-Tribune

The four UCSD undergrads who won the QUALCOMM Innovator Challenge with their BookPal design were featured last week in a Today's Local News story by Triveni Sheshadri.

The UCSD Guardian ran a story as well. (You need to scroll down the page to get to it.)

UCSD takes 2nd and 5th in ACM SoCal Programming Contest

UC San Diego computer science students took 2nd and 5th at last weekend's ACM Southern California Regional Programming Contest.

The UCSD computer scientists made up 4 of the 63 teams and faced off against teams from schools like CalTech, Harvey Mudd, USC, UCLA, UCSB, UNLV, and UCI.

“We did extremely well. We placed second and fifth. UCSD was the only school to have two teams place in the top five,” said Michael Taylor, the UCSD computer science professor who served as the 2007 ACM Programming Team Faculty Coordinator.

A team from Caltech took first place. The results are available here and a whole bunch of pictures are posted here.

UCSD’s team “Canada” took second place.
Members below:
Aaron Barany (Aaron created the "underwater statue" image about half way down the page)
Timothy Bollman
Keliang Zhao

UCSD’s team “Paper” took fifth place.
Members below:
Andrew Chain
Eli Friedman
Kei Shun Ma

The other two UCSD teams:
Iman Sadeghi
Taurin Tan-atichat
James Whiteside

Erik Buchanan
Rene Claus
Elliott Slaughter

Professor Taylor thanks this year's student coaches: Michael Vrable, William Matthews, Nakul Verma, and Md. Kamruzzaman as well as UCSD’s sponsor, Mike Dini of the Dini Group.

Here is a fun link from Professor Taylor’s Web site. It’s a self-maintaining directory of people named Michael Taylor.