See you in 2010!

See you in 2010.

Due to the mandatory system wide furloughs and scheduled holidays, UC San Diego and the Jacobs School of Engineering will be closed from December 19th through January 3rd. The campus will resume normal business operations on Monday, January 4th.

Brain Observatory

I finally got around to getting my brain around the Brain Observatory at UC San Diego. Jacopo Annese’s Brain Observatory has been all over the news all over the world...the attention peaked recently when Annese and his colleagues "voyaged through the brain of the most famous medical patient in the history of science, Patient H.M., acquiring anatomical images and collecting 2401 paper-thin tissue sections during a 53-hour procedure." (The quote is from the Brain Observatory Web site.)

The story has been all over the news, but I'm partial to Greg Miller's story (prior to the huge media deluge) in the news section of the journal Science...and not just because I used to work there...it's a good story. You can read the PDF of the story at:
http://thebrainobservatory.ucsd.edu/pdf/jacopo-UCSD-brains.pdf

New Technology for Licensing from UC San Diego Technology Transfer Office

I just got the latest email newsletter from the UC San Diego Technology Transfer Office, which includes links to new technologies available for licensing that were developed at UC San Diego.

Below, I have pasted the Engineering/Physical Sciences Technologies:

Engineering/Physical Sciences Technologies:

High-Efficiency, High-Linearity, Acoustic to Ultrasonic Power Amplifier for Low-Cost Underwater Modem Applications (SD2010-161 and SD2010-817)

A Zero Turn-On Voltage Rectifier for Efficient Wireless Power Supplies and Energy Harvesting (SD2010-135)

A New Method to Synchronize Data Streams Over a Local Area Network (SD2010-035)

Improved Perfusion Imaging Using MRI With Velocity-Selective Arterial Spin Labeling Without Spatial Selectivity (SD2001-175)

Residential Broadband Access (SD2004-122)

Measuring User-Experience in Mobile Gaming Environments (SD2010-171)

A Digitally Controlled High-Frequency, Low-Power, Pulse Width Modulator for Wireless Communications (SD2010-110)

GUSTO: General Architecture Design Utility and Synthesis Tool for Optimization (SD2010-170)

If you are interested in any of the technologies listed, email invent@ucsd.edu with the case number in the subject line.

Boeing Dreamliner Landing Gear Braces Tested at UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering

Jacobs School structural engineering professor Hyonny Kim led testing of the first-ever composite landing gear braces, which were used for the new Boeing 787 aircraft, which took off for the first time today. (New York Times story here.)

Kim is an associate professor in structural engineering at the UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering, and he led a team of researchers that performed six months of rigorous Federal Aviation Administration tests on the composite landing gear braces.

“This was a very important test,” Kim said. “The quality standards of the testing, and keeping track of the data and documentation (for FAA certification) is extremely high. For us, we had to improve our methods and processes to get to be able to perform at the FAA certification level and we did. We have proven that we can do this level of testing. We have the facility and equipment and capability to do it. What we hope with this project is to demonstrate to the aerospace industry that UC San Diego is capable of and can perform aerospace certification testing for future projects.”

French Aerospace company Messier-Dowty tapped into the expertise of structural engineering professor Hyonny Kim this year to test the strength and durability of the first-ever composite landing gear braces for the commercial aircraft industry.

Read the full story here, on the Jacobs School of Engineering news site.

We also covered this story in the latest issue of the Jacobs School alumni magazine, Pulse.

Energy Efficient Computing on Multiple Scales

"Energy is one of the key issues to be solved in order for systems to work more efficiently," said UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering professor Tajana Simunic Rosing, who is leading MuSyC's Large-Scale Systems effort. "At a very small scale such as a brain-machine interface, without energy you cannot do anything at all. At a very large scale such as a data center, if you are not efficient about how you deal with energy, you go bankrupt."

This quote is from a Calit2 press release announcing Jacobs School computer science professor Tajana Simunic Rosing as one of the leaders of a new research center charged with finding ways to improve the design of computing systems ranging from large data centers to tiny brain sensors. In its first three years, the Multi-Scale Systems Center (MuSyC) will focus on tackling a critical issue affecting multiple scales: energy efficiency.

Doug Ramsey from Calit2 wrote the story. Read the full story on the Jacobs School of Engineering Web site, or on the Calit2 Web site.

Caption for above photo: MuSyC investigators at UCSD, pictured in front of Calit2's GreenLight Instrument modular data center, include (l-r) Rajesh Gupta, Tajana Simunic Rosing and Amin Vadhat. (Not pictured: SDSC's Allan Snavely)

I briefly covered this announcement in a story about Tajana Simunic Rosing's work on energy-efficient data centers in the latest Jacobs School alumni magazine, Pulse.

Albert Lin, a Materials Science alumnus named an adventurer of the year

Jacobs School alumnus Albert Lin (Ph.D. 2008)is one of the world's top adventurers, according to National Geographic Adventure magazine. Below are a couple of paragraphs from the Calit2 story on the award.

It’s not often that a materials scientist by training gets to be labeled one of the world’s top adventurers. But that’s the honor bestowed on Calit2 research scholar Albert Yu-Min Lin, 28, in the December 2009-January 2010 issue of National Geographic Adventure magazine. Lin is affiliated with Calit2’s Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology (CISA3).

Lin earned his Ph.D. in materials science and engineering from UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering in 2008. After graduation, “his mother, a former Hong Kong movie star, and his father, an astrophysicist, both urged him to get on with things as soon as possible, to find a job that would allow him to eat more steak, less ramen,” writes Luke Dittrich in the feature article, “Conjuring the Great Khan”, that is part of NG Adventure’s cover story. “Instead, Lin decided to begin his post-[doctoral] graduate career by organizing a high-risk, high-stakes project, one that offered little stability and even less promise of success.”

Read the full story on the Calit2 Web site.

How big is a zettabyte?

How big is a zettabyte and why might you care? Calit2's Doug Ramsey recently wrote a story that looks at how much information Americans are taking in. It also explains just how big a zettabyte is and what zettabytes have to do with you. (The New York Times and many other outlets covered the story this week.)

"The average American consumes about 34 gigabytes of data and information each day — an increase of about 350 percent over nearly three decades — according to
a report published Wednesday by researchers at the University of California, San Diego," the NYTimes wrote.

In the Calit2 story, Larry Smarr says:

"What is clear is that we consume orders of magnitude more information than can be stored on hard drives or transmitted over today's Internet," said Internet pioneer Larry Smarr, Director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) and a computer science professor at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. "Even small changes in how Americans consume information would have serious implications for network planners and require large-scale investments."

Related Links

How Much Information? 2009 Report on American Consumers

How Much Information? ProjectUC San Diego School of International Relations and Pacific Studies