Trumpet Tuner is Mostly Automatic

Vote for UC San Diego Bioengineering's Jason Caffrey's device in the 2011 LabVIEW Student Design Competition!  (Must vote by July 15th, and voting instructions are at the bottom of this blog post.)

UC San Diego bioengineering undergraduate Jason Caffrey created an amazing LABVIEW-interfaced device to semi-automatically tune a trumpet. Jason entered it for the annual contest by National Instruments, the vendor of LABVIEW. More detail is below. The punch line is that he needs your vote, now, if you think his design is worthy. (Bioengineering professor Gert Cauwenberghs served as the faculty advisor on the project.)

One part of the contest is a TECHNICAL COMPETITION. For this, Jason is in the finals as one of TWO U.S. entrants invited to NI headquarters and FOUR worldwide entrants being considered for an overall prize.

The other part of the contest is a POPULAR COMPETITION. For this, he is close to the top but needs your vote.

Please find below a 4-step process to view and then for Jason Caffrey's LabVIEW student design competition submission, a device to semi-automatically tune a trumpet. Attached also are two screen snapshot images to help.

1) Go to the submission webpage: https://decibel.ni.com/content/docs/DOC-16427

2) Click the "Register" button near the top left of the screen and create an account (Image: Step 2). (This requires entering your email address, etc.)

3) Scroll down to the near the bottom of the page until you see the "Like" button and click it (Image: Step 3). The number next to it should increase by one.

4) Refresh the page (press F5) and then repeat step 3. (This is important to do, due to a glitch at the voting 
website.) Check that the "like" # has incremented !

Pulse Summer 2011 is Out

Read Pulse the Jacobs School of Engineering alumni magazine (PDF)

Read Pulse the Jacobs School of Engineering alumni magazine (HTML)

The cover of Pulse is dedicated to the four new Master of Advanced Study programs being launched this fall by the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.

Intracranial Pressure in Microgravity...the movie

Props to the hardworking students (including Jacobs School of engineering students) involved in this project.

The original story:

As Gravity Wanes and Pressures Gain, It's Pain and Bane for the Brain




The Saganites team: Mehria Sayad-Shah (bioengineering), Edward Grigoryan (physiology-neuroscience), Kevin Patterson (cardiovascular technology), Tom Hegstad (major: mechanical engineering), and J.R. Bachman (bioengineering).

Engineering Art Show

Jacobs School of Engineering faculty, students and staff were well represented in the Art of Science show sponsored by UC San Diego's Science and Engineering Library. Engineering students Christopher Doran (Electrical and Computer Engineering) and Kim Wright (Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering) took two of the top three awards in the student category. Doran's piece, "A Tapestry in Silicon," took second place in the student show. It is described by the artist as:

Monocrystalline silicon flakes transferred to carbon adhesive. The silicon started as a uniform 300 nanometer-thick sheet, but later assumed the unique flake structure from the uneven mechanical forces originating from the textured tacky carbon surface. While crystalline silicon is hard and brittle in the macro-scale, when it is sufficiently thinned like can be seen here, it can become quite bendable. The distinct coloring originates from the differential interference contrast microscope that imaged the sample, which uses interference from split polarized light rays to enhance the visibility of thin layers that might otherwise be transparent.

All submissions are now on exhibit in the Science and Engineering Library, which is located within the Geisel Library. Or you can view them on the library's Flickr stream. The competition is designed to show that science is beautiful and the submissions did not disappoint, according to the library:

The images submitted ranged from nano corn fields, forests, and gardens to visual demonstrations of supersonic turbulence, fire whirls, and fans of flame. Also submitted were striking images of data simulating the evolution of galaxy clusters and the UCSD logo depicted using 1 million E. coli cells. One image (Nano Party) was created in celebration of UC San Diego’s 50th anniversary.

Blocking Spammers for Zero Cost

CSE researchers Kirill Levchenko, Andreas Pitsillidis,Neha Chachra, Brandon Enright, Tristan Halvorson, Chris Kanich, He Liu, Damon McCoy, Geoffrey Voelker, Stefan Savage along with colleagues in the Computer Science Division at UC Berkeley and the International Computer Science Institute have conducted a large-scale empirical study to measure the spam value chain in an end-to-end fashion. They have used their data to offer evidence that the spammers' payment tier is the most concentrated and valuable asset in the spam ecosystem, and one for which there may be a truly effective intervention through public policy action in Western countries. Click Trajectories: End-to-End Analysis of the Spam Value Chain. Read more: New York Times, Scientific American, New York Times Editorial. Listen to: NPR, All Things Considered

Pioneer Programmers at UC San Diego Indirectly Inspired the Birth of Java

Ken Bowles, a former UC San Diego professor, and his students, are the subjects of a lengthy profile in next month's issue of Spectrum IEEE. Bowles and his team created in the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s the UCSD p-system, a computing system that was portable from one type of computer to another. The system could handle fairly sophisticated graphics (for its time) and included fairly modern features, including a full-screen text editor and drop-down menus.

According to the Spectrum IEEE story, this work "influenced academic computer science, the design of the Pascal programming language, object-oriented programming, and graphical user interfaces. Although that work did not produce a commercial success, the story of these visionary programmers and their audacious plans offers some unique insights into how the computer industry evolved—for example, why the Apple Macintosh is what it is. It also explains how an accident of fate would later bring these ideas to the world again in the form of Java."

James Gosling, best known as the father of Java, worked on machines that ran the UCSD p-system as a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University. He used an approach he developed while working on these machines when creating Java, according to this story.

Read more at:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/javas-forgotten-forbear/1

Jacobs School Ph.D. Student Wins Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship

Congratulations to UC San Diego student Siarhei Vishniakou, one of eight Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship winners this year. The fellowship enables Ph.D. students (in a team of two) in EECS to pursue their futuristic innovative ideas. In 2011, the fellowship received 146 applications from teams in 11 of the top U.S. universities. Vishniakou was recommended by Prof. Deli Wang and collaborated with Paul Brochu of UCLA on the proposal “I-SENSE – Innovative Technology Enabling New Life-style”.