From Reseach Expo Best Poster Winner to CEO

Raj Krishnan won best poster at Research Expo in 2009. Check out the posters for Research Expo 2012.
Raj Krishnan earned his PhD in Bioengineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering in 2010. He recently came back to campus, and the Jacobs School of Engineering, to give a talk at a von Liebig Entrepreneurism Center 10th Anniversary event. Krishnan provided an overview of how we went from graduate student to entrepreneur, and how the von Liebig Center helped in this process. http://www.vonliebig.ucsd.edu/

Nanotrees harvest the sun’s energy to turn water into hydrogen fuel

University of California, San Diego electrical engineers are building a forest of tiny nanowire trees in order to cleanly capture solar energy and harvest it for hydrogen fuel generation. Reporting in the journal Nanoscale, the team said nanowires, which are made from abundant natural materials like silicon and zinc oxide, also offer a cheap way to deliver hydrogen fuel on a mass scale.

The trees’ vertical structure and branches are keys to capturing the maximum amount of solar energy, according to Deli Wang, professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. In images of Earth from space, light reflects off of flat surfaces such as the ocean or deserts, while forests appear darker. That’s because the vertical structure of trees grabs and adsorbs light while flat surfaces simply reflect it, Wang said, adding that it is also similar to retinal photoreceptor cells in the human eye.

Wang’s team has mimicked this structure in their “3D branched nanowire array” which uses a process called photoelectrochemical water-splitting to produce hydrogen gas. Water splitting refers to the process of separating water into oxygen and hydrogen in order to extract hydrogen gas to be used as fuel. This process uses clean energy with no green-house gas by-product. By comparison, the current conventional way of producing hydrogen relies on electricity from fossil fuels

“Hydrogen is considered to be clean fuel compared to fossil fuel because there is no carbon emission, but the hydrogen currently used is not generated cleanly,” said Ke Sun, the first author of the article and graduate student in the Wang group who led the project.

Stay tuned, we'll have more about this exciting project next week.

Research Expo Poster Titles are Online

230 cutting-edge Research Expo poster titles are online. Check them out and see the future of engineering. Find out where many different engineering fields are moving. Get the inside scoop.

Research Expo / Learn about Research Advances First

The UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering invites you to campus for Research Expo 2012. See engineering advances before they are widely disseminated. Meet 230+ talented graduate students at the poster session.  Learn at the faculty talks and network at the reception.

Research Expo is Thursday, April 12 from 1:30-6:00 p.m. http://www.jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/re/

Research Expo at a Glance
* 230+ graduate student posters highlight engineering research
* Ten-minute faculty talks from all six engineering departments
* Meet faculty, students and technologists at the networking reception

Stay all afternoon or just a few hours in your area of interest. Recruit students, learn about the latest research breakthroughs, spark a collaboration.

Research Expo is a unique opportunity for industry engineers, scientists, investors and recruiters to access talent and advanced research across all six departments of the Jacobs School of Engineering.

Attend Research Expo. Your brain will thank you! http://www.jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/re/

Advice for DECaF

People hire people, not resumes. Talk to everyone and make sure you mention offers you've received from other companies. Always end on a positive note and smile.
These were some of the pieces of advice that members of Women in Computing and tutors in the CSE department at the Jacobs School of Engineering gave to a standing-room only crowd last week in preparation for DECaF, the job fair that concludes Engineering Week here on campus.
The presenters knew what they were talking about. They had landed jobs at Yahoo!, Google, Facebook and Apple, among other companies. They had decided to put on the presentation to make sure more students land jobs with these companies.
As a CS student, it's important to study for interviews, explained Brina Lee, a first-year graduate student who has worked at Yahoo! Studying in groups is the best way to go. Picking a language that you already know well and sticking with it is the best approach. Recruiters are looking for good problem-solving skills rather than knowledge of a particular language. Students also should be comfortable writing code on a white board, without the help of a compiler. They should also be familiar with running time and data structures.
"Introduce yourself with confidence and stick your foot in the door," Lee said.
Below is a slideshow with the presentation she and fellow WIC members gave:








Created with flickr slideshow.

Mystery Game Kicks Off E-Week

Lab coats, portals and mysterious cubes started appearing on the UC San Diego campus last night, Tuesday, Feb. 21. In case you were wondering, they were all part of Aperture Labs, the event that kicked off E-Week at the Jacobs School of Engineering.

The Triton Engineering Student Council (TESC) started off its slew of big events in celebration of the National Engineers Week by showing off the mysterious Aperture Labs. Most volunteers were as unsure of what was to happen as the participants. As Justin Huang, president of TESC, noted, “All they know is that they’re here as test subjects!”

The event was inspired by Portal, an acclaimed video game, which probably was the only thing engineering students from diverse backgrounds had in common as they filled up the conference room in the Computer Science and Engineering Building. Luis Meraz, a TESC board member who was in charge of the event, worked hard with his team of volunteers to make sure the event was as close to the real game as possible. To ensure this, the volunteers wore lab coats and were identified as Aperture Lab Scientists and students were given orange vests for ‘protection.’ The students, in teams of four, were required to complete a scavenger hunt using portals; create a potato battery; and answer an engineering quiz. The team that completed all the parts in the least amount of time won. Each team was also provided with a ‘cube’, with all the materials needed to complete the course. 

As Meraz explained to the participants, “The cube is your best friend”.

Participants had a great time in this event, and some good exercise too, due to portals being placed at distant locations around the campus. The good news: Valve Corporation, developer of Portal and a sponsor for the event, made sure participants could look forward to shirts, posters, stickers, jackets and cake at the end of the game. 

See more Aperture Labs pictures here.

Story by Abhinav Jha

Some Encryption Keys Vulnerable, Researchers Say

Researchers at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego and at the University of Michigan recently announced that they were able to compromise one in every 250 public encryption keys used for SSL website security on the Internet. The security flaw mainly affects embedded devices such as routers and VPN devices, as opposed to popular web sites.  The main issue was that the encryption keys weren’t generated as randomly as they should have been, allowing potential attackers to efficiently discover devices’ private keys.

Nadia Heninger, a postdoctoral researcher in the computer science department at the Jacobs School of Engineering, and colleagues Zakir Durumeric, Eric Wustrow, and J. Alex Halderman of the University of Michigan plan to publish their results after they have contacted the manufacturers of the vulnerable devices to alert them of the flaw.

More on the study and on how the researchers broke the encryption keys here.

Read an item for the University of Michigan here.