Technology for Early-Cancer Diagnosis Leads Bioengineering Grad Student to Many Prizes and a Startup Company

Raj Krishnan is a bioengineering graduate student leading a research project that may change the way cancer is diagnosed. His goal is to create new tools that catch cancer at its very earliest stages by identifying secondary biomarkers that are present long before tumors appear or other biomakers are evident.

In 2009, Krishnan has won three major University of California awards for his research. He is also heading up a startup company that aims to make this technology available to the world, where it may help people catch cancer earlier...and when it comes to cancer diagnsis, earlier is certainly better.

Robotic Mice in a Maze

A couple of Fridays ago, I spent the afternoon with five of the Jacobs School undergrads who make up the UC San Diego MicroMouse team. They were deep into prep mode because the following morning, their robotic mouse had to be ready to solve a maze with no help from humans.

Of course there were midterms to be preparing for, and all the usual Friday afternoon distractions on a college campus, but none of that mattered. Software bugs had to be found and fixed. The maze had to be cleaned. And there was even another algorithm to be implemented.

If you have five minutes, watch the video embedded below [high rez YouTube version here] (or read the full story). I hope it gives you a glimpse of team engineering in action.



The students made the sofa in the background from the recycled wood from the deck they built as a level construction platform for the maze.



The fireworks (above) started when students cut nails for the maze.

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.