FICO, UC San Diego Announce Winners of International Predictive Analytics Competition

SAN DIEGO, Nov 24, 2010 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- FICO , the leading provider of analytics and decision management technology, and the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) today announced the winners of the seventh annual UCSD-FICO Data Mining Contest. Participants from six countries on four continents were among the winners who developed predictive analytics to determine which consumers were most likely to shop online.

This year, contestants were given anonymous data for more than 130,000 consumers. The data included no personally identifiable information. Based on that data, competitors built models to predict which consumers were most likely to buy products online. Participants were judged on how accurately they were able to predict future purchases.

The competition was divided into two categories -- one category utilized raw data, and one category utilized transformed data -- and each category had a Graduate and Undergraduate division. The top three finishers in each category and each division shared $10,000 in cash prizes.

"Students around the world look forward to the UCSD-FICO Data Mining Contest each year as an opportunity to put the skills they've learned in the classroom to use in a rigorous real-world competition," said professor Charles Elkan of UC San Diego Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) within the Jacobs School of Engineering.

"It's been exciting to see the growth of this competition since its inception, with over 140 participants from six continents competing this year. We are proud of all the students who participated, and we appreciate FICO's ongoing commitment to developing and encouraging the next generation of innovators in predictive analytics," said Elkan.   (Read the full press release here.)

CRCA event / Jeremy Douglass introduces Get Lamp

Get Lamp is a documentary film about text-based computer games. In the late 1970s, Adventure and Zork broke ground in the early computer game genre that is still being created today as "interactive fiction”. CRCA’s own video game scholar and postdoctoral researcher, Jeremy Douglass, who appears in the film, will introduce a screening with comments on connections to his research.

For more information about Jeremy’s work: http://jeremydouglass.com/
For more information about Get Lamp: Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzOPVe7Usms and Film: http://www.getlamp.com/

For more information about CRCA : http://crca.ucsd.edu

When?
Text Adventures featuring Yra van Dijk and Jeremy Douglass
Thursday 9th December 2010, 5pm-7pm,  followed by a reception
Calit2 Auditorium, First Floor, Atkinson Hall
UCSD Voigt Drive, La Jolla

$1000 Elevator Pitch Competition / UC San Diego Entrepreneur Challenge

December 3 at 5 PM is the deadline for submitting a pitch for the $1000 Elevator Pitch Competition sponsored by the UC San Diego Entrepreneur Challenge.

Eligibility Requirements (partial). Full details here.

Each team must consist of at least one full time student, post-doctoral trainee, or recent graduate from either UCSD or the other Torrey Pines Mesa Research Institutions (The Salk Institute, Burnham Institute, Scripps Research Institute, and the Scripps Institute of Oceanography).  Recent graduates must have received their UCSD degree after August 15^th in the year the current Challenge begins.

The Student/post-doc must be an active, contributing team member who is the founder or co-founder of the team, and, together with all other student/post doc team members, hold in the aggregate at least 20% of the ownership interest in the company which is the subject of such team’s submission in the competition.

Tonight: Science to Idea to Company

Learn how laboratory projects are turned into commercial ventures. The event is Dec 1, 2010: "Understanding Tech Transfer"

Where: Rady School of Management, UC San Diego
When: Dec 1, 6 to 7:30 pm

RSVP

Valley of the Khans Project in San Diego Business Journal

Luke Barrington, a UC San Diego electrical engineering PhD candidate and Albert Yu-Min Lin, who earned his undergrad and graduate degrees from the Jacobs School, are in a recent San Diego Business Journal article that describes the “Field Expedition: Mongolia — Valley of the Khans Project” that Lin is leading. The article also discusses the San Diego firm -- Digitaria Interactive Inc. -- that helped build the online experience that is so crucial to this National Geographic project that enables people from around the world to help in their exploration from their computers. Learn how you can participate here.

Dispersive Grating

Given that cooking is on so many minds this afternoon (including mine), I have to agree to "dispersive grating" does sound like a messy and/or distributed method for grating carrots, cheese or turnips. But that's not the "dispersive grating" that UC San Diego electrical engineering PhD student Dawn Tan developed.

Scanning electron micrograph of dispersive grating before deposition of SiO2 overcladding. (Decorative blue filter added to image.)  Image credit: UC San Diego / Dawn Tan

Her dispersive grating is for manipulating light on the nanoscale in order to compress pulses of light on computer chips. This kind of on-chip pulse compression is crucial for making the optical interconnects that will replace the copper wires that connect chips in computers of the future.

Read more about this silicon photonics advance published in the journal Nature Communications.

On-Chip Light Pulses / Nature Communications

The idea of using light to carry information around within computers has been around for a long time, but making it happen has been difficult. Electrical engineers from UC San Diego took an important step forward when they created a light pulse compressor that works on silicon chips. Compressing light pulses on chips will be necessary to realize optical time division multiplexing or OTDM.

“In communications, there is this technique called optical time division multiplexing or OTDM, where different signals are interleaved in time to produce a single data stream with higher data rates, on the order of terabytes per second. We’ve created a compression component that is essential for OTDM,” said electrical engineering PhD student Dawn Tan, the first author on a new Nature Communications paper that describes the work.

The UC San Diego electrical engineers say they are the first to report a pulse compressor on a CMOS-compatible integrated platform that is strong enough for OTDM.

“In the future, this work will enable integrating multiple ‘slow’ bandwidth channels with pulse compression into a single ultra-high-bandwidth OTDM channel on a chip. Such aggregation devices will be critical for future inter- and intra-high speed digital electronic processors interconnections for numerous applications such as data centers, field-programmable gate arrays, high performance computing and more,” said Yeshaiahu Fainman, a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and the last author on the new paper.

Scanning electron micrograph of dispersive grating before deposition of SiO2 overcladding. It is this dispersive grating that is responsible for the record breaking pulse compression. (Decorative blue filter added to image.)  Image credit: UC San Diego / Dawn Tan

Scanning electron micrograph of dispersive grating before deposition of SiO2 overcladding. It is this dispersive grating that is responsible for the record breaking pulse compression. (Decorative blue filter added to image.)  Image credit: UC San Diego / Dawn Tan