Car Talk

Want to know what tomorrow's cars will be able to do? Head on over to the Laboratory for Intelligent and Safe Automobiles (LISA) at the Jacobs School of Engineering. Led by Mohan Trivedi, a professor of electrical engineering, who also is a researcher at Calit2, the lab aims to understand driver behavior and improve technology.

Bonus: LISA is looking for volunteers for test drives in its new simulator.

"Understanding driver behavior is critical to reducing fatalities on U.S. roads," Trivedi said in a lengthy feature that ran in the latest edition of at / UCSD, UC San Diego's alumni magazine. "So in a very real sense, the students who volunteer to spend 30 minutes in the simulator could be saving lives down the road."

Read the whole story here.

Oct 1: Find Out How to Become a National Geographic Young Explorer

Hey Jacobs School engineering students!

A daylong workshop National Geographic’s Young Explorers Grants program will be held at Atkinson Hall’s Calit2 Auditorium on October 1 from 9:45 a.m. to 3 p.m. 

Young Explorers Grants support individuals ages 18 to 25 in their pursuit of research-, exploration- and conservation-based field projects. This workshop will enable students interested in pursuing Young Explorers Grants to meet with recent grant recipients and National Geographic staff, explorers, conservationists and researchers. They will learn about the kinds of projects the program aims to support and will have an opportunity to discuss their ideas for field projects with National Geographic grantees and staff. Lin and other UCSD-based grantees will take part in the workshop.

“Until starting the Young Explorers program in 2006, we tended only to fund more established researchers. We have now realized that, by supporting younger individuals on their first field projects, we can reach a dynamic, new sector,” Francis said. “With our increasingly diverse media and growing number of Young Explorers, we hope to better fulfill the National Geographic vision, which is to inspire people to care about the planet.”

The Oct. 1 workshop will be hosted by UCSD with support from the National Geographic Society, the Brinson Foundation, The North Face, Lucy and Henry Billingsley and ProBar. 

 “We are hosting the workshop to make students more aware of a tremendous opportunity,” said Ramesh Rao, director of the UCSD division of the Calit2 and a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Jacobs School. “We are very proud of our joint Engineers for Exploration program with National Geographic, and this workshop will expose more students to the excitement of exploration – and the role science and technology can play in discovery.”

More info: National Geographic Explorers to Speak at UC San Diego

Welcome Jacobs School of Engineering Students

Welcome Week 2011 at UC San Diego starts this Sunday.  To all the incoming engineering students, have a fantastic journey...and don't forget to thank your high school teachers when you run into them in the coming years. And be sure to keep with the latest of live at the Jacobs School via this blog, Facebook or Twitter.

And have you been to the IDEA Student Center at the Jacobs School of Engineering lately?

Michael Taylor has been coding for 86% of his life.

Computer science professor Michael Taylor recently updated his faculty profile...and it's a good read. Spoiler alert: at the end of his bio, you learn that Taylor has been coding for 86% of his life. Search the faculty profiles of the professors at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. Read about Taylor's research below.

Professor Taylor directs the UCSD Center for Dark Silicon, which focuses on the most important technological challenge that computer engineers face today. Dark Silicon is caused by the utilization wall, which states that, with each new process generation, the percentage of transistors that a chip can switch at full frequency is dropping exponentially due to power constraints. This has led to increasingly larger and larger fractions of a chip's silicon area that must remain passive, or dark. The GreenDroid project, jointly led by Prof. Taylor and Prof. Swanson, attacks this dark silicon problem directly through a set of energy-saving accelerators, called Conservation Cores, or c-cores. C-cores are a post-multicore approach that constructively uses dark silicon to reduce the energy consumption of an application by 10x or more. To examine the utility of c-cores, they are developing GreenDroid, a multicore chip that targets the Android mobile stack. Their mobile application processor prototype targets a 32-nm process and is comprised of hundreds of automatically generated, specialized, patchable c-cores.

Taylor also leads the Kremlin project, which attacks a fundamental source of unused silicon in multicore systems: the enormous programmer effort required to parallelize applications. Kremlin is a software engineering tool that, given a serial program, tells users which regions they should parallelize. It also provides an approximate upperbound on how much speedup programmers can expect after they have parallelized the code. Taylor's group pioneered the novel hierarchical critical path analysis (HCPA) technique used in Kremlin. Professor Taylor served as lead architect of the 16-core Raw tiled multicore processor, one of the earliest multicore processors (2002), which contained approximately 110 Million transistors, and was perhaps the largest academic processor chip prototype of its time. This work foreshadowed industry's shift to multicore. Over the next few years, 16-core processors will appear as products from Intel and AMD. 

Capsule Bio:

Michael B. Taylor has been an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego since 2006. Prior to his research on GreenDroid, Kremlin, SD-VBS, and Raw, he co-authored the first version of the Connectix VirtualPC x86-to-PowerPC translator, and hacked microkernels at Apple. He was awarded the NSF CAREER Award in 2009 and the Intel Foundation Ph.D. Fellowship in 2003. Taylor received a Ph.D. in EECS from MIT in 2007, and an A.B. from Dartmouth College in 1996. He has been coding for 86% of his life.

Computer Science Professor Rocks on New Movie Soundtrack

Computer science professor Serge Belongie is taking a next step in his—musical—career: Belongie and his band, SO3, are featured on the soundtrack of a new movie that will screen at 4 p.m. Sept. 15 at the UC San Diego Price Center Theater.

“The PhDMovie” is a live-action adaptation of the popular online series PhD Comics. It was produced in partnership with Caltech and filmed there. The Caltech connection is how Belongie’s band got the movie gig. Belongie earned his bachelor’s degree at the Pasadena campus and has kept in touch with Bill Bing, the director of bands at Caltech, ever since.

Bing passed some of Belongie’s music on to the movie’s music director. Jorge Cham, the creator of PhD Comics, heard some of SO3’s songs. He invited the band to contribute three songs to the movie adaptation of his work. “Invincible” is used during the movie’s opening scenes. Two other songs, “Streets” and “Johnnie on the Underground,” are used later on, during transition scenes.

If you’re curious about the movie and Belongie’s band, or are already a fan, be sure to head out to the Price Enter this Thursday. And bring some friends.

Meanwhile, take a listen to "Johnny on the Underground" and watch one of the band's latest hits, "I Just Want You To (Dance With Me Tonight)" on YouTube.

You can also listen to SO3's hit "Invincible" right here:

Photo: Courtesy of Serge Belongie/ Jeff Brown

UC San Diego Bioengineers Named 2012 Siebel Scholars

Five bioengineering Ph.D. students from the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering are among the recipients of the annual Siebel Scholars awards. 


The Siebel Scholars program recognizes the most talented students at the world’s leading graduate schools of business, bioengineering, and computer science.


With the 2012 class of Siebel Scholars, 85 new scholars join an ever-growing, lifelong community of leaders. Today, 700 Siebel Scholars are active in a program that fosters leadership, academic achievement, and the collaborative search for solutions to the world’s 
most pressing problems.


“We are proud to support the Siebel Scholars Class of 2012 as they collaborate and forge lifelong ties with this engaged community of leaders,” said Karen Roter Davis, Executive Director of the Siebel Scholars Foundation. “They are joining an exceptional group of talented individuals working together with the Siebel Foundation to address critical societal issues in health, food, and energy.”


Siebel Scholars are selected from among students who rank at the top of their class, and are chosen by the dean of their respective schools on the basis of outstanding academic achievement and demonstrated leadership. This year’s honorees from the Jacobs School of Engineering are below. (Read the press release from the Siebel Foundation.)

Jessica DeQuach
Che-Ming Jack Hu
Dan Kagan 
Lauren Hruby Jepson

Nathan Lewis

Engineering Students Help to Launch Moon Camera Project at Cape Canaveral

Two spacecraft headed to the moon Friday, Sept. 9, are carrying a battery of digital cameras manned by a team of students at UC San Diego, including undergraduates from the Jacobs School of Engineering.
Operating from their ground station at UC San Diego, the undergraduates will take requests from middle school classrooms across the nation and aim the cameras at areas of the moon the middle schoolers want to photograph. The images will be available on the MoonKam website, where students can learn more about lunar features and possible landing sites for future missions. The MoonKam program is led by Sally Ride, the first American woman to fly into space and a physics professor at UCSD.
MoonKam is hitching a ride on GRAIL A and B, two spacecraft designed to study the gravity of the earth’s satellite. The two crafts are set to reach orbit in 2012. Their mission will last approximately 80 days.
Veronica Wu, a mechanical and aerospace engineering student, is the team lead of the Orbits team for MoonKAM. The team uses software to determine which areas of the moon can be photographed based on the spacecraft’s orbits.
Wu became interested in outer space and space shuttles in fifth-grade. She decided to study engineering in hopes of conducting research on spacecraft and space exploration. She now plans to earn a master’s and doctorate in astronautics engineering and narrowed her research interests to human space flight and planetary rovers.
By the way, if you want to watch the launch of the two GRAIL spacecraft on NASA TV, you’ll have to wake up early. The launch window opens at 8:33:25 a.m. and 9:12:31 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time.
Photo: Courtesy of NASA