Robotic Mice Take Over Qualcomm Center at Jacobs School Sunday

Don't worry, these mice don't bite. They're really robots designed to find the center of a maze as soon as possible, without needing cheese as a reward.

In all, 28 teams, and their micromice, will compete all day Sunday, May 20, at the Qualcomm Center, on the ground floor of Jacobs Hall, also known as EBU 1 on the UC San Diego campus. The teams hail from as far as China, and as close as UC San Diego. Teams from UCLA, UC Riverside and other Southern California campuses also are set to attend.

The mice are completely autonomous and the goal is to get to the center of the maze as fast as possible. They typically use a microcontroller (a small computer on an integrated circuit) and infrared sensors reflecting off the walls to make their way through the maze. Some also use a wireless interface to transmit debugging data back to their team’s laptop.

Most teams build the robots with off-the-shelf components. But some prefer to put together a custom circuit board, chassis and other parts. All robots map the maze, then return to the starting point and make a run for the center, using the fastest route they’ve found. Some prefer to map the whole maze, then plot a route to the center. Others prefer to map the maze only until they’ve figured out where the center is, then make a run for it. Teams are not allowed to reprogram their robots after they’ve seen the maze.

The competition is open to the public and hosted by UCSD IEEE at the Jacobs School of Engineering.

Shake, Rattle and Roll

Jacobs School researchers put a five-story building through motions from the 7.9 earthquake that took place in 2002 in Denali, Alaska. The results were quite impressive. See for yourself in the video below:

From Garage Band to Facebook Game to PNAS Paper

  

Ian B. Murphy over at DataInformed wrote a great article charting the course of some interesting music research from electrical engineering here at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego. The story connects the dots from a garage band, to a Facebook game, all the way to a new paper in PNAS.

The Value in a Facebook Game: Training Machines to Characterize Music Selections

A related press release from the Jacobs School is here.

Cubic and the Jacobs School of Engineerint at UC San Diego to Collaborate On Next Generation Intelligent Travel Research

The San Diego Union Tribune ran news of the new research partnership between  Cubic Transportation Systems (NYSE:CUB) and the Jacobs School of Engineering here at UC San Diego. 

Cubic will contribute $500,000 over five years to the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering to fund research done by faculty, students and Cubic Transportation Systems staff.  The project aims to achieve a better understanding of the application and utilization of emerging technologies, with the ultimate goal of making transportation easier, more convenient, more economical and environmentally greener for transit operators and their customers.  

Read the story in the Union Tribune. 

Read the press release on the Jacobs School website.

Ortiva Wireless bought by Allot Communications

Allot Communications  (NASDAQ: ALLT) announced last week that it is acquiring Ortiva Wireless, the company launched by University of California, San Diego Electrical Engineering Professor Sujit Dey in 2004 to manage mobile video and rich media content delivery. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Allot, which is based in Tel Aviv, said in a May 1 statement that incorporating Ortiva’s “leading-edge mobile video optimization solution” with its own Allot Service Gateway technology will “allow mobile service providers to effectively manage the ever-increasing volume of video traffic on their networks, which according to Allot’s latest Global MobileTrends report, now represents 42% of mobile data traffic worldwide.”

We asked Dey for his thoughts on the acquisition and he responded:

 “I am pleased with the intended acquisition as it will be complimentary and strategic, in line with rising market demand for integrated mobile data management solutions. Allot’s fast expanding customer base will be beneficial for deployment of Ortiva’s video delivery solutions globally. Allot is committed to expanding the operations in San Diego, so it is good for the San Diego economy. I truly appreciate the support and encouragement that I received while founding Ortiva and later from UC San Diego, including from Dean Frieder Seible and the Jacobs School, Calit2, the ECE department, the von Liebig Center, and the Technology Transfer office.”

News of the acquisition sent Allot’s stock climbing in response to analysts’ expectations that the company’s momentum in the network traffic management sector will continue, particularly as the market for smart phones and computer tablets expands. RCR Wireless reported that “mobile video is expected to comprise 41% to 67% of telecom network traffic by 2015.”

San Diego-based Xconomy reported that Allot intends to maintain Ortiva’s San Diego office and expects the 41-person staff here to grow. 

Dey (third from the left in photo) talked about the process of launching Ortiva Wireless and the challenges of commercialization during a recent dinner celebrating the 10^th anniversary of the von Liebig Center for Entrepreneurism and Technology Advancement, which offers seed funding and advisory services and is part of the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego. It was with a grant from the von Liebig Center, that Dey created a prototype that became the core technology to launch Ortiva Wireless.

Interdigital Innovation Challenge / Vote!

The InterDigital Innovation Challenge (I2C) is an opportunity for individuals or teams from any North American college or university to compete for $175,000 in prizes by testing out proposals and prototypes for wireless technologies before a panel of esteemed judges from industry and academia.

The Jacobs School of Engineering has a team in the competition. Public voting closes on April 30.

I voted for the Mobile 3D Video System.

Mobile 3D Video System (UC San Diego team)

Application Areas:
* Radio Signal Propogation and Processing
* Compression and Data Management Techniques


Quick Pitch

We propose to develop a system delivering immersive 3D video on mobile platforms, with applications in gaming, e-commerce, entertainment

Abstract

The prominence of 3D video technology has skyrocketed. The 2009 movie Avatar in 3D became the highest grossing movie of all time. Such a movie requires left and right views of a scene. Many video games which provide a 3D experience require multiple views of a scene. Such data is costly to store and to transmit. This project studies how to efficiently compress multiple-view video data, how to allow the scene to be viewed from any angle at different levels of precision, and how to reliably transmit the data over mobile wireless channels. This project has important applications in consumer electronics, e-commerce, entertainment, health care, science, and education.


The Team

The interdisciplinary project team consists of four faculties in the ECE Dept. at UC San Diego: Prof. Larry Milstein, an expert in communication systems, and cross-layer optimization; Prof. Pamela Cosman, an expert in image and video processing over network, and cross-layer optimization; Prof. Sujit Dey, an expert in multimedia networking and embedded systems; and Prof. Truong Nguyen, an expert in 3D video processing and communications. Our interdisciplinary team is uniquely qualified to address all theoretical and practical issues, proposed in this project.

We spent some time with Research Expo 2012 grand prize winner Carolyn Schutt after the April 12 competition and festivities to talk about her research and other student experiences. Watch our video on YouTube. Carolyn is a PhD student in bioengineering here at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. She entered her work in the nanoengineering category and won the school-wide Rudee Outstanding Poster Award and best poster for the Department of NanoEngineering for her research developing a new imaging technique that could lead to highly-sensitive light imaging deeper inside the body, improving the way we diagnose breast cancer. Read our full news release here.