Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Learning to Detect Malicous URLs

Computer science (CSE) PhD student Justin Ma gave a Google Tech Talk on May 10, highlighting his work on using machine learning to detect malicious URLs. The YouTube video is embedded below.


Dancing with the Starts College Dance Championship: UC San Diego Samba

If you haven't seen the UC San Diego Dancesport Team dancing a Samba on ABC's Dancing with the Stars (on national TV), check out the embedded video below. The UC San Diego student newspaper, The Guardian, has a nice story and provides some background on the Dancesport team at UCSD. Get more background in a UC San Diego news story by Christine Clark here.

Antwon Trink is one of the students who competed (and who is interviewed in the embedded video below). He is a structural engineering major at the Jacobs School of Engineering.

Does anyone know the names of the other Jacobs School of Engineering students who are on the UCSD Dancesport team? I know there is at least one bioengineering major...


Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Calit2 UCSD Undergraduate Summer Research Scholars

The list of Calit2 UCSD Undergraduate Summer Research Scholars is out, and many of the students are Jacobs School of Engineering undergraduates.

Avinash Ananthakrishnan, Junior, Computer Engineering (minor: Cognitive Science)
advisor: Zhongren (Arnold) Cao, Calit2
Scalable and Energy Efficient Embedded Digital Signal Processing Implementation for High Order MIMO-OFDM Systems

Thomas Chew, Freshman, Bioengineering: Biotechnology
advisor: Shu Chien, Bioengineering
Effects of Shear Stress and Chemical Environment on Stem Cell Differentiation

Ronnie Fang, Junior, Chemical Physics / Engineering Physics (minor: Biology)
advisor: Liangfang Zhang, NanoEngineering
Scaling Up of Lipid-Polymer Hybrid NanoParticles for Drug Delivery

Roger Huang, Junior, Aerospace Engineering
advisor: Jan Kleissl, Mechanical/Aerospace Engineering
Application of Total Sky Imagery to control energy storage on the UCSD campus

Suraj Kedarisetty, Junior, Bioengineering (minor: Chemistry)
advisor: Nathan Delson, Mechanical/Aerospace Engineering
Improve Patient Safety through the Development of Intelligent Medical Simulators

Daniel Lew, Junior, Bioengineering: Premed
advisor: Martin Haas, Cancer Center and Biology
BMI-1 Promotes Cellular Invasion and Drug Resistance in Head and Neck Cancer Stem Cells

Nicole Lim, Freshman, Bioengineering: Biotechnology (minor: Law & Society)
advisor: Joseph Wang, NanoEngineering
Smart NanoScale Devices

Kristian Madsen, Junior, Electrical Engineering
advisor: Deli Wang, Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE)
Vertical Nanowires and Heterostructures for Photoelectrochemical Water Splitting

Emi Nakayama, Junior, Chemical Engineering
advisor: Jennifer Cha, NanoEngineering
A Mechanism Control the Size of Microbubbles for Ultrasound Imaging and Drug Delivery

Perry Naughton, Sophomore, Electrical Engineering
advisor: Deli Wang, Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE)
Low Cost Solar Cells using Simple and Inexpensive Spray Pyrolysis Technique (SPT)

Bryan Ransil, Freshman, Computer Science
advisor: Falko Kuester, Structural Engineering
Human-Data Interaction

Arvind Satyanarayan, Junior, Computer Science
advisor: Jim Hollan, Cognitive Science
Interaction Techniques for Large Wall Displays

Emily Schoenhoff, Sophomore, Bioengineering
advisor: Robert Sah, Bioengineering
Cartilage Degradation in Aging Humans - Collagen Network

Justin Tse, Junior, Bioengineering: Biotechnology
advisor: Adam Engler, Bioengineering
Directing Mesenchymal Stem Cell Migration with Matrix Elasticity

Alan Turchik, Junior, Mechanical Engineering
advisor: Tom Levy, Anthropology, Calit2
Camera Stablization for Aerial Photogrammetric Systems

Grant Van Horn, Sophomore, Computer Science
advisor: Serge Belongie, Computer Science and Engineering (CSE)
GroZi and Visipedia

Christopher Wei, Sophomore, Bioengineering: Biotechnology
advisor: Kun Zhang, Bioengineering
De Novo Assembly of the Microbial Genome

David Yi, Junior, double major: Bioengineering: Premed and Biochemistry/Cell Biology
advisor: Weg Mendoza Ongkeko, Surgery
Identification of a Distinct Subpopulation of Cancer Stem Cells Critical for Metastasis and Tumor Growth in Human Anaplastic Thyroid Cancer

Anything but "hackadaisical"

Below is the "code like a girl" photo that includes five hard-core programmers from UC San Diego. The photo I used on the Jacobs School news page didn't include Janet Barrientos...nothing personal...it's just that the lighting was so much better in the photo with four students. Not pictured...the 6th teammate: Ashley McGuire.



(BTW, the hackadaisical headline will make sense when you read the paragraph below)

Computer programming students from the University of California, San Diego were anything but “hackadaisical” when a week-long Web programming extravaganza – Yahoo! Hack U – came to campus. In a 24-hour computer programming marathon that spanned an entire Thursday night, UC San Diego student teams hacked together a concert finder, a tool that adds favorite movies from friends’ Facebook profiles to your Netflix queue, a date-scheduling application, an early-morning multitasking program, and many other new online applications. Students created each app by combining tools, resources and data already available on the Web.

The camaraderie and energy generated by the overnight coding event inspired Gabriela Ponce and the rest of her all-female, all-freshman computer programming team to ask Yahoo! to track down their famed “code like a girl” tee-shirts. Four from the team wore their stereotype-breaking shirts the following week to their data structures midterm (CSE12).

Monday, May 17, 2010

Larry Smarr is the mystery photo in UT Science Quest

From Science Quest in the San Diego Union Tribune:

In the print edition of Monday's Quest section, we ran a photo with the headline, "Who is it?" Were you able to guess who it was? No? You're looking a Larry Smarr of UC San Diego, who is considered to be among the world's most influential computer scientists.

Luke Barrington and Brian McFee have been awarded the 2010 Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship

Congratulations to electrical engineering (ECE) PhD student Luke Barrington and computer science (CSE) PhD student Brian McFee. Luke and Brian have been awarded a 2010 Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (QIF), for their proposal, "Location-, Demographic-, Preference- and Content-Based Music Search and Recommendation," with their advisor Gert Lanckriet (ECE professor). Lawrence Saul (CSE professor) supported the proposal as secondary mentor.

The Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship selective is very selective and provides $100,000. In 2o10, it was awarded to six out of 80 submissions from five universities (Berkeley, Stanford, UCLA, USC, and UCSD).

Luke and Brian's project proposes advances in signal processing and machine learning to provide personalized, mobile music search and discovery.