Computer Scientists Win Google Grant for Energy Efficient Computing Research

Computer science professors Tajana Simunic Rosing, Steven Swanson and Amin Vahdat are in the news today. Why? They won a Google research grant, which will provide funding for their ongoing research on energy efficiency in computing. The grant is for $100,000 according to an Xconomy story by Gregory Huang who is Editor at Xconomy Seattle.

Here is the blog post from Google (via Xconomy).
The New York Times blog post is here.
The North County Times blog post is here.

In the last issue of Pulse, the Jacobs School alumni magazine, I wrote about how Tajana Simunic Rosing is working to make data centers both green and flexible.

She and Amin Vahdat were are also part of the Multi-Scale Systems Center (MuSyC), which will focus on tackling a critical issue affecting multiple scales: energy efficiency.

Here is the Web page for computer science professor Steven Swanson.

Natural Ventilation Instead of Air Conditioning

What if breeze outside could be used to cool a building...kind of like a natural fan. That is part of the idea behind a new grant to mechanical enginering professor Paul Linden, who also directs UC San Diego Sustainability Solutions Institute.

We wrote about Linden's work with natural ventilation in conjunction with the San Diego Children's Museum. (It was a past issue of Pulse the Jacobs School alumni magazine.)

Below is part of the announcement that the UC San Diego Sustainability Solutions Institute put out today.

...but first...if you are still reading, you'll probably be interested in UC San Diego's Greenovation Forums. The next one is about sustainability and nature.

UC San Diego Sustainability Solutions Institute (SSI’s) Director and Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE) professor Paul Linden has been awarded $1.9 Million dollars from the California Energy Commission (CEC) to study the potential for natural ventilation retrofits in California’s commercial building stock. The contract is part of the Public Interest Energy Research (PIER) program and involves partnerships with Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, UC Berkeley Center for the Built Environment, ARUP San Francisco, and CPP Wind.


Buildings are responsible for approximately 35% of greenhouse gas emissions. It is estimated that natural ventilation in new construction and, more importantly, retrofits could significantly reduce the carbon footprint of California’s commercial building stock. However, the implementation of natural ventilation is impeded by a number of significant barriers.

The goal the research is to conduct a comprehensive study of these issues and provide the knowledge and new tools to the community that will allow owners, designers and policy makers to make informed decisions about the implementation of natural ventilation in California. The proposed program will also provide the first tool in a recognized building energy simulation program to allow the different design alternatives to be analyzed, and for the potential energy savings and greenhouse gas emission reductions to be calculated accurately. The present limitations make wind-driven natural ventilation a risky strategy for a designer to recommend and so severely hamper its adoption. This program should remove these barriers and provide the tools and information for the appropriate implementation of natural ventilation in commercial buildings.

More information about the CEC’s Building End-Use Energy Efficiency Research program can be found here.

UCSD Alumni Magazine is Online

The latest issue of the UCSD alumni magazine is now online. You can get the online/print hybrid experience at: http://www.pursuantmedia.com/ucsd/0110/

Or hit this page for the UCSD alumni magazine:

Page 25 includes a Q&A with engineering alum Matt Newsome.

Wind Turbines on the UCSD Earthquake Shake Table

Coming soon to an earthquake shake table in San Diego..

Structural engineers from the UC San Diego Jacobs School of engineering will shake a wind turbine in the next couple of weeks at the Englekirk Structural Engineering Center.

Check out the live webcam: http://nees.ucsd.edu/resources/video-sw.shtml

Here is a PDF with more info about the project.

Botnet Judo / Spam Templates in the News

Ars Technica and The Wired Campus blog from The Chronicle of Higher Education both wrote, this week, about new spam-related computer science research to be presented in about a month at the being presented by UC San Diego and

The paper the stories described is "Botnet Judo: Fighting Spam with Itself." It will be presented at the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS). Andreas Pitsillidis, Kirill Levchenko, Christian Kreibich, Chris Kanich, Geoffrey M. Voelker, Vern Paxson, Nicholas Weaver, and Stefan Savage are the authors, from the Department of Computer Science at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and from the International Computer Science Institute at UC Berkeley.

A short bit of the Ars Technica story is below:

The creators of Botnet Judo, thanks to their work on Storm, decided that the use of templates might provide an opportunity to recognize any spam based on the same template. Since normal e-mail would be very unlikely to match a template by chance, this method should have a very low false-positive rate, where a legitimate message is recognized as spam.

Better Computing, Communication for Emergency Medical Personnel at Disaster Sites

photo caption: WIISARD SAGE principal investigator William "Bill" Griswold tests display of 'rich feeds' data from multiple sources during a 2008 MMST emergency preparedness exercise in southern San Diego County.

Computer science professor William Griswold is helping to lead a UC San Diego project to find better ways for emergency officials and first responders to talk to each other and share data on the ground at the scene of a natural or man-made disaster – even when the local communications infrastructure is out of commission.

“As the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti has demonstrated so starkly, communication is a critical ingredient in any medical response to a disaster,” said William Griswold, principal investigator on the WIISARD SAGE project and a professor in the Computer Science and Engineering department of UCSD’s Jacobs School of Engineering. “A critical issue for disaster response is group or collaborative computing in mobile environments. With this new project, we hope to overcome several inter-related problems that inhibit the successful use of information technologies at disaster sites to manage medical care.” (Griswold is also leading CitiSense, the Jacobs School project to create a pollution monitoring network that relies on cell phones and small environmental sensors that people wear.)

Read the full story from Calit2's Doug Ramsey here.

Approximately $1.5 million annually over two years in “stimulus” funding under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) from the National Library of Medicine (NLM) will underwrite the WIISARD SAGE project. NLM is one of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

NanoEngineering Professor and "Nanoburrs"

Liangfang Zhang, the second author on the "nanoburr" paper in last week's PNAS that has received alot of attention is now a professor in the Department of NanoEngineering at the Jacobs School.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Researchers at MIT and Harvard Medical School have built targeted nanoparticles that can cling to artery walls and slowly release medicine, an advance that potentially provides an alternative to drug-releasing stents in some patients with cardiovascular disease.

The particles, dubbed “nanoburrs” because they are coated with tiny protein fragments that allow them to stick to target proteins, can be designed to release their drug payload over several days. They are one of the first such targeted particles that can precisely home in on damaged vascular tissue, says Omid Farokhzad, associate professor at Harvard Medical School and an author of a paper describing the nanoparticles in the Jan. 18 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The MIT nanoburr press release (excerpted above) is here.

More information from MIT on the nanoburr research is here.

The paper is here (PNAS site license may be required)

Chan, J.; Zhang, L.; Tong, R.; Ghosh, D.; Gao, W.; Liao, G.; Yuet, K.; Gray, D.; Rhee, J-W.; Cheng, J.; Golomb, G.; Libby, P.; Langer, R.; Farokhzad, O. C. "Spatiotemporal controlled delivery of nanoparticles to injured vasculature", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2010.