Junkyard Derby is this Week!

Jacobs School engineering students will transform junk into racecars this week at UC San Diego. The three-day marathon starts on Wednesday afternoon with the kick-off BBQ and junk-dash. It's a lot of fun to watch students diving into a pile of junk in search of that perfect racecar part. Grocery carts are always appealing...though I don't know how well the actually work in the end.

After two nights of furious building, the students race their junk cars down Peterson Hill, near the UC San Diego library.

Junkyard Derby 2009 Schedule:

Wednesday, May 6
Kickoff Event and BBQ :: 5-6pm

Build Time :: Junkyard open from 7pm-2am

Thursday, May 7

Build Day :: Junkyard open from 8am-2am

Friday, May 8
Race Day :: 10:30am-3pm at Peterson Hill

Junkyard Derby official rules

Junkyard Derby is a great event run by TESC (Triton Engineering Student Council) at UC San Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering

Surf's Up: Physics of Surfing

photo credit: Sean Masterson / For The Times

"A break from classes to learn how waves break."

That's the headline for a Los Angeles Times story by Tony Perry on the Physics of Surfing freshman seminar co-taught by Stefan Llewellyn Smith, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering from the Jacobs School and David Sandwell, professor of geophysics at UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Here is a story and video about the physics of surfing class from UC San Diego written by Ioana Patringenaru.

ABC = Amazon Belongie Connection

At least, that's one way to look at it. Earlier this week, Amazon Web Services LLC (AWS), a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc Amazon announced "AWS in Education," a set of programs that enable the academic community to easily leverage the benefits of Amazon Web Services for teaching and research.

Here is a quote from computer science professor Serge Belongie from the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.

“The grant we have received from the AWS in Education program will dramatically increase the reach of my student group's collaboration with the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) to develop distributed assistive computer vision technology for the visually impaired,” said Serge Belongie, Associate Professor at the University of California in San Diego.

Read more about this vision technology here.

Sleep Talking Slashdotted

Yuvraj Agarwal's sleep-talking, energy-saving technology landed on Slashdot yesterday.

USB-Based NIC Torrents While Your PC Sleeps

Posted by kdawson on Monday April 27, @09:47PM
from the talking-in-your-sleep dept.

jangel sends us to WindowsForDevices.com for news on a prototype device created by researchers from Microsoft and UC San Diego. It's a USB-based NIC that includes its own ARM processor and flash storage, and can download files or torrent while a host PC is sleeping. As a result, its inventors say, the "Somniloquy" device slashes power usage by up to 50x. The device requires a few tweaks on the host OS side save state before sleeping. The prototype works with a Vista host but the hardware comprising the NIC is based on a Linux stack. Here is the research paper (PDF).

Dino-Might? The T. rex question

Computer science professor Pavel Pevzer has been one of the voices in an ongoing scientific debate over T. rex fossils and whether soft issue is really from T. rex.

Last October, Scott LaFee covered the (then) latest dinoMight details for the San Diego Union Tribune. I never did link to that story, so here it is...

Update May 5:
National Geographic quoted Pavel Pevzner in a related story that ran on May 1, 2009.

MapLink - The UC San Diego Google Map Service....Finally

Campus recently launched MapLink 1.0, a modern interactive campus map based on the Google maps technology.

http://www-act.ucsd.edu/maps

>>I just clicked around a bit, and the satellite view is far better than the map view. Also, some of the road names around the engineering buildings don't seem right...but I'll to do a little more checking.

>>According to the email announcement of MapLink:

"MapLink is a web-based tool that allows you to find not only campus buildings but also relevant services like parking, restaurants, and shuttle stops, for both campus and the Hillcrest Medical Center.

Initially released in beta form in 2007, MapLink 1.0 now includes new features such as driving directions and better search capabilities, plus enhancements to make it more versatile, easier to maintain, and more responsive to users' feedback and questions. Another new feature allows users to link to specific map pages within MapLink, a refinement requested by many users."

Sleep Talking Saves Energy

Skyping while your computer sleeps.

IM'ing while your laptop snoozes.

Remote access to a sleeping desktop.

A new energy saving gadget will let you do all of this. The common thread? Your computer is "sleep talking." Really. It's asleep...but it appears awake to the network. And if you suddenly need all your computer's computational strength, the prototype, called Somniloquy (which means "talking in your sleep"), will wake up your computer via the USB bus.

Read the full press release here on sleep talking to save energy.

Or jump to the paper, presented on April 23 at USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 2009) by UC San Diego computer science Ph.D. student Yuvraj Agarwal.

Yuvraj Agarwal worked on this project when he was an intern at Microsoft Research, Cambridge in the summer of 2007, and continued afterwards at UC San Diego. Steve Hodges, Ranveer Chandra, James Scott, and Victor Bahl from Microsoft Research are Somniloquy co-inventors and authors on the NSDI 2009 paper. Agarwal’s Ph.D. advisor and paper-coauthor is computer science professor Rajesh Gupta from UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering.

Sleep Talking around the web

Fast Company by Ariel Schwartz

Tech Radar UK
EcoGeek picked up the story via TreeHugger via PhysOrg via EurekAlert via UC San Diego via me.
Engadget picked up the story on April 25.
Gizmodo too...via Engadget via PhysOrg via EurekAlert via UC San Diego

A nice story on WindowsForDevices.com
Slashdot picked up the WindowsForDevices.com story
UPI ran the sleep talking story
the LA Times technology blog linked to the story on the UC San Diego news site