Thursday, October 7, 2010

Calit2 StarCAVE nominated for immersive Technology Award / You can vote!

The StarCAVE at Calit2 is among the nominees for the 2010 Immersive Technology Awards. You can vote for StarCAVE here: http://www.immersivetech.org/summit/immys/

Learn more from the Calit2 story:


San Diego, Oct. 4, 2010  -- Immersive virtual reality has been a cornerstone of Calit2’s research into scientific visualization from the institute’s very beginning almost 10 years ago. The latest validation of that research may be handed out on Oct. 21 in Los Angeles, when Calit2 could win one of the inaugural Immersive Tech Awards, dubbed the ‘Immys’. 

Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Wireless Heart Monitor Research in Union Tribune / Yu Mike Chi and Gert Cauwenberghs

Congrats to electrical engineering PhD student Yu Mike Chi, bioengineering professor Gert Cauwenberghs and the rest of the crew who made it on the front page of the business section of today's San Diego Union Tribune.

Two photos from the San Diego Union Tribune story by Keith Darce "San Diego hosts global wireless health meeting" are below:




Shake Table on DIY Network

Check out Jacobs School researchers on House vs. Nature on the DIY Network.  The photo above is a screen shot from the episode...showing one of the computer rooms at the Englekirk Structural Engineering Center at the UC San Diego Jacobs School.

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Raj Krishnan Voice of San Diego Series / Part 2

Part 2 of the ongoing series about Raj Krishnan is up on the Voice of San Diego site.  (Part 1 is here)

The story includes some info about two other Jacobs School alums: Roy Lefkowitz and Gene Hsiao.

Lefkowitz won the NanoEngineering best poster award at Research Expo 2010: "An Early Point-of-Care Shock Diagnostic: Clinically Relevant Detection of Protease Activity in Whole Blood."

Lefkowitz was also among the inagural class of Sieble Scholars in the Department of Bioengineering at UC San Diego.

The other former grad student in the story is Gene Hsiao, who we wrote about for his work related to insulin resistance published in PNAS in 2009.

Monday, October 4, 2010

From Grad Student to CEO!

Check out this event on Friday Oct 8 at Calit2:

From GSR to CTO: A Celebration and Contemplation on Information Theory and its Applications
Graduate student researchers (GSRs) from the Jacobs School of Engineering's Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department recently received significant recognition for their research achievements. Five were nominated for the prestigious Student Paper Award at the International Symposium on Information Theory, and two won a coveted Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship.
To celebrate these accomplishments, Calit2's Information Theory and Applications Center (ITA) asked the students to present their work, and invited three of the communications industry's leading innovators -- all of them Chief Technology Officers -- to share their views on the future of the information theory field, and to answer the questions: What does it take to transform great research into commercial success? And to go from GSR... to CTO?

The five GSR presenters will be:

- Hessam Mahdavifar, on Achieving the Secrecy Capacity of Wiretap Channels Using Polar Codes;
- Jayadev Acharya, on Reconstructing Strings from their Substring Compositions;
- Brian McFee, on Metric Learning for Information Retrieval;
- Nikhil Karamchandani, on Function Computation via Subspace Cooling; and
- Eitan Yaakobi, on Multiple Error-Correcting WOM-Codes.

The afternoon speakers will include Ramesh Rao, director of Calit2 at UC San Diego, who will talk about information theory in the context of Calit2's mission; and ECE chair Larry Larson, who will open the afternoon session.
Subsequently, three CTOs will engage in a panel discussion and Q&A session with the audience about their respective journeys from GSR to CTO, and their advice to graduate students:
- Roberto Padovani, Executive VP and CTO, Qualcomm, Inc. and Member, NAE;

- Arogyaswami Paulraj, CTO, Beceem, Inc., Member, NAE and Professor Emeritus, Stanford University; and

- Nambi Seshadri, CTO, Broadcom Inc

MORE INFORMATION:

Everyone is invited to attend, but food will be limited to participants who RSVP in advance to John Minan at jminan@ece.ucsd.edu. Space is limited, so please respond early.

Friday, October 1, 2010

VIDEO: As a Jacobs School Engineering Undergrad You Can...

As a Jacobs School undergrad you can:

* use a weather balloon to perform experiments in space

* publish papers in with world-renowned NanoEngineers

*build robotic cars

*have a ton of fun and enjoy the campus

*share the lab bench with bioengineering professors

*build software with NASA

...but don't take my word for it...watch the video and see for yourself.



short version...b/c sometimes 2:22 is all the time you have!

Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Technologies to Track Disasters


Bruce Bigelow has an interesting story in Xconomy about the sensors, wireless networks, wind-speed monitors and other technologies deployed in San Diego County to track and perhaps predict wildfires. Some of this work is being done here at UC San Diego (see below) and read the full story here at Xconomy.
"A more sophisticated wireless sensor network, such as the High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network developed by researchers at UC San Diego, serves as a model of the type of network that could provide even more data, including imagery, that could help in the prediction of and response to disasters, according to Hans-Werner Braun of the San Diego Supercomputer Center."