Nuno Vasconcelos Electrical Engineering Professor Quoted in Wall Street Journal

ECE prof Nuno Vasconcelos is quoted in an interesting story on counting crowds in Cairo by Wall Street Journal reporter Carl Bialik. Check out the Statistical Visual Counting Lab site.

History Sniffing Story on KPBS These Days

The UC San Diego computer scientists involved in the history sniffing research were on "These Days" on KPBS this morning. The transcript and audio file of the show with Hovav Shacham, Sorin Lerner, and Ranjit Jhala will be posted shortly here on the KPBS site. The Jacobs School of Engineering history sniffing press release is here.

Warehouse Fire Video / Story

In case you need a break from pre-superbowl hype, check out this research on how corrugated cardboard boxes stacked up very high in warehouses burns. They looked at cardboard boxes filled with Styrofoam cups. With warehouse fires, the trick is to get the fire out while just the outsides of the cardboard boxes is burning. Once the contents of the boxes catch fire, it's much harder to get the fire out. And this is why the researchers are studying how cardboard boxes burn...if you know exactly how they burn, you can set up better systems for getting the fires out before they get out of control.

Read the full story on the Jacobs School of Engineering news site:

UC San Diego Engineers Play Role in Warehouse Fire Safety

Check out the short video clip from YouTube embedded below.

The Future of Music Search and Discovery

Electrical engineering professor Gert Lanckriet recently won an NSF CAREER grant for work on developing automated ways to search, annotate and generally make sense of the ever-growing sea of digital music. More info on the funded project is below. Also, check out some cool related stories (and video!) from Lanckriet and his collaborators:

Electrical Engineers Go Head to Head with Genius on Music Playlists

Facebook Games for a Better Music Search Engine

From a Queen Song to a Better Music Search Engine 

CAREER: An Integrated Framework for Multimodal Music Search and Discovery.

A revolution in music production and distribution has made millions of songs instantly available to virtually anyone, on the Internet. However, a listener looking for "dark electronica with cello" or "music like U2's", without knowing a relevant artist or song name, or a musicologist wanting to search through large amounts of unknown ethnic music, would face serious challenges. Novel music search and discovery technologies are required to help users find the desired content.

The non-text-based, multimodal character of Internet-wide information about music (audio clips, lyrics, web documents, images, band networks, etc.) poses a new and difficult challenge to existing database technology that depends on unimodal, text-based data-structures. This project addresses two fundamental research questions at the core of addressing this challenge: (1) The automated annotation of (non-text-based) audio content with descriptive keywords; and (2) the automated integration of the heterogeneous content of multimodal databases, to improve music search and discovery on the Internet or in a personal database. The resulting architecture leverages the automation and scalability of machine learning with the effectiveness of human computation, engaging music professionals or enthusiasts around the world.

The research addresses questions at the core of multimedia information retrieval in general, enabling the design of a new generation of expressive and flexible retrieval systems for multimodal databases, with applications to music discovery, video retrieval, indexing multimedia content on the home PC, etc.

Engineer's Week is Coming

Jacobs School undergrads are going all out again this year to make National Engineers Week at UC San Diego useful, interesting and fun. And if you're a Jacobs School student, you might even get a job out of the deas (ie: DECaF career fair).

Check out all the Engineers Week events on the TESC site.

National Engineers Week site.

IDEaS: Innovation Day Expo and Symposia

Innovation Day Expo and Symposia (IDEaS) Feb. 22-25: this is a week of free events at UC San Diego that will feature dynamic leaders in the arts, sciences, technology, medicine and education who are making a positive impact in San Diego, the nation and the world.

Read the full story on the Jacobs School of Engineering news site.

Where Renewables / Electric Vehicles and the Electric Grid Meet

The intersection of renewable energy, electric vehicles, and the electric grid was the topic of conversation yesterday at a press conference here at UC San Diego.  Read the press release on the Jacobs School news site.