There's a Whole Lot of Shaking Going on

There was a whole lot of shaking going on today out at the Englekirk Structural Engineering Center at the University of California, San Diego. Check out the live web came...you might stumble on the end-of-the-day-powerful-shake test. We'll link to video of highlights of today's tests as soon as they are ready. Journalists from quite a few local and state media outlets attended today's tests...we'll link to the online stories as they are published.

In the meantime, here is the link to a recent post on our shake table.

Reef Research Getting Networked

Computer science professor Ryan Kastner and PhD student Bridget Benson are teaming up with Calit2 to develop an autonomous craft to collect data on the environmental conditions in the world's coral reefs. As part of this project, the computer science is developing underwater transducer modems that would transmit data from underwater sensors to the Reefbot.

"As hard as oceanographers are working to understand what's happening to the reefs, they're collecting very little data. Graduate students are getting up at the break of dawn, going out on the boat and coming back at dusk having only collected a few data points, when they need hundreds of thousands of data points. Having an automated craft that could be programmed from a laptop to explore a range of many hundreds of miles would be invaluable," says Doug Palmer, Principal Development Engineer at the University of California, San Diego division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2).

Read the full story from Calit2's Tiffany Fox here.

Suspicious URLs studied at UC San Diego

A lecture titled "Beyond Blacklists: Learning to Detect Malicious Web Sites from Suspicious URLs ," was part of UC San Diego's Center for Networked Systems' (CNS) recent Research Review. Read a full account of the research review here (written by Calit2's Tiffany Fox)

There are a number of lexical features and IP-based characteristics for detecting malicious URLs, spam phishing and other exploits that are relevant for trying to predict with Web sites are malicious. "There are various characteristics associated with these sites," said Justin Ma, the UC San Diego computer science grad student who gave the presentation. "The question is: How do you relate these properties of the URLs to the maliciousness of the Web sites?" (FYI, Just in Ma is third from the right in the photo above.)

Ma is part of a team (that includes computer science professors Stefan Savage and Geoff Voelker) that drew malicious URLs from those submitted to "phish tanks" by online users, and compared them with benign URLS from certain online directories that had been previously vetted for validity. Using a probabilistic linear model called "logistic regression" as a classifier, they reduced a set of 30,000 URL features down to 4,000 features for model analysis. They discovered that certain "red flags" indicate malicious intent, including:

1) suspicious ownership of the site

2) where the site is hosted geographically

3) the registration date of the site

4) what kind of connection the server is using

5) the presence of certain URL extensions.

The extension".com," for example, tends to signify a malicious Web site when it is found in the middle of a URL (i.e. "bankofamerica.com" is probably fine, but "bankofamerica.com.cz.rnl" should raise some eyebrows). Ultimately, the researchers would like to create a URL reputation service that will allow users to query URLs via a database to determine their validity.

Water conservation research featured in The Economist and other mass media

The Economist and many other major news outlets covered Jan Kleissl's water conservation research. The story is called "Twinkle, twinkle, little laser" and describes how water evaporating off a field causes lasers shooting above the field to twinkle...and encoded in this twinkling is information about the water needs of the crops in the field. Read the full story here. Check out a collection of water conservation news stories tied to this research project here.

Video Game Creature Comes to the Library

Sure, people come to the library and play muliplayer networked video games on their computers when they should be studying, but it's not every day that video games wander into the library and set up shop. But that's pretty much what happened recently at UC San Diego's Science and Engineering Library.

A group of UCSD alumni founded Presto Studios and created a video game called Journeyman Project “Legacy of Time.” The group of alumni, Michel Kripalani, Greg Uhler, and Farshid Almassizadeh, donated a life-sized model of one of the creatures from this computer game, Chameleon JumpSuit, to the library.

What's interesting to me is how much video games have changed in the last few years. This game was a CD-Rom game...and today so many of the computer games are multiplayer games distributed across the Web so you can be playing against people from all over the world. It makes me think that the special powers that Chameleon JumpSuit was endowed with might one day make their way to regular folks.

Graphics at UC San Diego

A graphic created by computer science grad student Iman Sadeghi landed on the cover of the January 2009 issue of Optics and Photonics News.

For this image, Sadeghi won the grand prize in the 2007 graphics contest for CSE 168 Rendering Algorithms. What the judges said back in 2007, "Inspiring artistic quality. Portraying nature is very hard, and Iman did a great job at that."

Pulse, the Jacobs School's alumni magazine, featured this image last year. Read the blurb here.

Live Cam from the Englekirk Structural Engineering Center

Live Web cam of a masonry structure...it's cooler than it sounds.


The link above is one of the live Web cams showing construction of a masonry structure that engineers will shake later in the month in order to learn how to devise better seismic retrofit schemes to make buildings safer. A media advisory is in the works...the test is tentatively scheduled for Monday January 26. Let me know if you want more info. Read about the most recent tests on the shaketable here. Video here.




With its one-of-a-kind facilities, the Englekirk Structural Engineering Center at the University of California, San Diego is enabling structural tests that have never been possible before. The Center is equipped with the world's first outdoor shake table adjacent to the country's largest soil-structure interaction facility, allowing researchers to perform dynamic earthquake safety tests on full-scale structural systems. The Center's blast simulator will be used to study the effects of bomb blasts and test new technologies to harden buildings against terrorist bomb attacks. A defining element of the Englekirk Center is strong collaboration with industry, and 45 companies and organizations among southern California's building industry participate on an advisory board and support research at the Englekirk Center.