Shu Chien interview

Below is an excerpt of an interview with Shu Chien, University professor of Bioengineering and Medicine at UC San Diego and Director of the Institute of Engineering in Medicine at UCSD. The interview is with the english language service of China Radio International (CRI).

CRI is owned and operated by the state in the People's Republic of China.

Chien said advances in science, technology and medicine are closely coupled with society, economy, and culture.

"Novel developments in science and technology can lead to new medical advances, which improve the economy, benefit the society, and help to advance culture," said Chien.

He said a great society with a strong economy can provide the resources needed to further develop science, technology and health care, thus constituting a positive feedback system for the good of the people.

"The reverse of this is a vicious cycle that leads to poor science, sick people, weak economy, unstable society, and disintegrated culture," said the bioengineering expert.

ENSPIRE History

I'm working on a story about ENSPIRE, part of E-Week for the next issue of Pulse, the Jacobs School alumni magazine.

Maria Cardona, one of the 2010 Pulse organizers and a chemical engineering undergrad just sent me a link to a blog that the organizers of ENSPIRE 2008 kept, documenting all the hard work that went into the event.

Check it out...it even has photos of students buying huge volumens of food and drink at Costco to feed the 400 8th graders that they inspired that day. Pretty cool.

Jacobs School of Rock

Watch the Jacobs School of Rock 2009 video below (on the Jacobs School YouTube channel or the Jacobs School video server).

And while you're rocking out to Jacobs School of Rock 2009, think ahead to JSOR 2010. It's coming. June will be here soon! If you are in San Diego, come out to the show. And for all the UCSD folks out there, if you want to get involved, check out the Jacobs School of Rock 2010 volunteer flyer here.






If you are into the intersection of music and engineering, be sure to check out the new search engine for music being developed by electrical engineers here at the Jacobs School.

Spammers survive botnet shutdowns: CSE in BBC

Computer science Stefan Savage is quoted in a BBC story about how work to shut down spam networks has not reduced spam levels. A bit of the BBC spam story is below.
(The cover story of the last issue of Pulse features two grad students who work on cybersecurity in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego.)

Hi-tech criminals persist with spam despite evidence that response rates are plummeting. Only 28 responses were recorded from a spam campaign of 350 million e-mails found a study carried out by Professor Stefan Savage and colleagues at the University of California, San Diego.

Of those 350 million, only 23.8% made it through spam filters to e-mail inboxes and resulted in more than 10,000 visits to site peddling cheap pills.

Professor Savage said it was difficult to draw conclusions based on its limited data but said even with response rates of 0.00001%, the most prolific spammers could potentially make millions of dollars per year.

Solar Story in the Union Tribune

Onell Soto from the San Diego Union Tribune covered the new UCSD solar story about the new MAE project to predict electric ouput from solar installations based on cloud cover.

Read the UT story here.

Read the UCSD story here.

A few sentences from the UT story is below:

Unexpected dips and spikes are difficult to deal with. For example, say all the solar-power systems in a neighborhood get shaded. Somewhere, a power plant has to kick out more juice. Transmission lines have to carry more power.

These things can be done smoothly, imperceptibly even, but it takes planning. That’s where Jan Kleissl’s sky-tracker comes in. The UCSD professor’s camera takes a picture every 30 seconds of a 25-square-mile circle of sky surrounding the university.

Kleissl plans to use $550,000 collected from California electricity customers — along with $137,000 from other sources — to, among other things, build a computer model for predicting where clouds will be up to three hours into the future.

When Solar Meets Shade

Large-scale integration of solar into the power grid will requrire solutions to the complications that arise when clouds pass over solar panels and trigger transint drops in generated electricity.

Environmental engineering professor Jan Kleissl from the MAE Department at the Jacobs School recently won an approximately $500,000 grant to address related issues. In particular, he is working on models for predicting when these cloud-triggered power drops will occur.

“Once a cloud arrives, the power output from our photovoltaic panels can decrease 40 to 80 percent within a few seconds, and when the cloud leaves the power output increases just as dramatically,” said Kleissl. “Utilities and operators of large power plants want to be able to predict the timing of these transitions so that they can charge up energy storage systems in advance to ‘smooth’ the clear-cloudy transition or prepare other generation to make up for the lost solar power.”

Read all about the new grant, the new project, and a wealth of background information in the story "How to Manage California’s Alternative Energy Grid When the Sun Doesn’t Shine" by Rex Graham, linked from the UC San Diego sustainability Web site.

Update: An LA Times story today highlights this work: "State regulators approve $9 million in solar research grants, PG&E solar contract"

NanoEngineering Tidbits and Twitter

I just updated the research profiles of three faculty members affiliated with the Department of NanoEngineering at the Jacobs School. Also, NanoEngineering at UCSD is on Twitter. I wonder if they will keep their updates to 140 nanometers, rather than 140 characters...

Below are the updates I just added to the Jacobs School faculty profiles database.

Sadik Esener: Research expertise: Photonics and opto-electronics, including biophotonics, cancer nanotechnology, optical data storage, and optical interconnects.

Liangfang Zhang: Research expertise: Synthesis and engineering of lipid- and polymer-based nanomaterials for biomedical applications.

Rich Herz: Research expertise: Dynamics of diffusion, adsorption and reaction in porous solid media including heterogeneous catalysts. He also simulates and analyzes processes for conversion of biomass to power and fuels.