UC San Diego Entrepreneur Challenge

UC San Diego's entrepreneurial spirit continues to grow. On Oct 1, 2008, you can experience the startup vibe at the fall kickoff event which features a keynote from Dr. Irwin Jacobs, Co-Founder and Chairman, QUALCOMM, Inc.

RSVP at: http://challenge.ucsd.edu

UC San Diego Honored by Buildings Magazine

According to Buildings Magazine, UC San Diego Ranked #3 in the nation within the "building market" for it's efforts to become the greenest university.

UC San Diego students in the photo above are part of a project to collect weather and climate information across the UC San Diego campus in order to find ways to save energy. On example: identify the sunniest rooftops on which to expand the solar-electric system and determine just how much sun we can expect on our coastal campus.

A snippet of the story in Buildings magazine is pasted below.

Although UC San Diego is fortunate to have the support and expertise of its forward-thinking administration, continuous-improvement practices are only possible when students and faculty are asked—and empowered—to think outside the box while learning the "art" of collaboration. Imagine how these future leaders will influence corporate and political America in the next decade.

Jacobs School Startup in New York Times

Quanlight, the LED startup company that emerged from the laboratories of Charles Tu, an electrical engineering professor (and Associate Dean) at the Jacobs School (photo above left), made its way to the New York Times today.

Quanlight's chief technical officer is Vladimir Odnoblyudov (photo above right), who earned his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from UC San Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering in 2006.


Below is a bit of the New York Times story by James Flanigan whose column about small-business trends in California and the West appears on the third Thursday of every month.

Blackbird invested $1 million two years ago in Quanlight, essentially backing the invention of Vladimir Odnoblyudov, an electrical engineer from Russia who came to the University of California, San Diego, for his doctorate.

Mr. Odnoblyudov, working with an engineering professor at the university, Charles Tu, developed a semiconductor for light-emitting diodes that provided greater stability for red light, a major need in liquid-crystal displays. Quanlight, with Mr. Senturia as chief executive and Mr. Odnoblyudov as technology officer, raised $3 million last year to develop the invention under license from the university. The process is less expensive than current technology, Mr. Senturia said, “but for red light, stable is more important than cheap. Quanlight’s red is wonderful for backlight on L.C.D. television.”

Electrical Engineers in Popular Science

Electrical engineering graduate student Eric Tremblay is featured in the recent issue of Popular Science for his origami optics project.

Read the full story here

Read the original press release here.

App2You Got Scobalized!

App2You the computer science startup from Jacobs School professor and database guru Yannis Papakonstantinou set up the online submission and review system for the approximately 1,000 companies that are submitting themselves for a spot on the next TechCrunch 50 List.

Robert Scoble highlighted this fact on his Twitter stream this week:


"App2You made the site that 1,000 companies entered their data into and managed the process behind the scenes of TC50.

03:41 PM September 10, 2008 from web"

Scoble rose to prominence as a revolutionary blogger for Microsoft. He is currently a video blogger for Fast Company and runs the popular Scobalizer blog.

The Animated Hair is Blowing in the Wind

Though the song says that "the answer my friend is blowing in the wind," UC San Diego computer scientists and graphics researchers are part of a group that has found the answer for getting hair on animated characters to blow in the wind.

They presented their findings last week at SIGGRAPH 2008, the most prestigous academic computer graphics conference. The work is a collaboration between researchers at UC San Diego, Adobe Inc, and MIT.

Discover Magazine ran a nice story about this work.

Here is the caption for the image at the top of this post:
The left two images demonstrate different aspects of a real hairstyle that the computer scientists captured. The third image from left is the reference photograph of the real hairstyle. The new algorithms created the image on the right, which has photorealistic highlights and texture, even through there are no photographs that were taken at that angle.

Computer Science Collaborator

Pieter Dorrestein, one of computer science professor Pavel Pevzner's collaborators here at UC San Diego, was featured in a short profile in The Scientist. Dorrestein and Pevzner devised a way to cut the time it takes to determine the structure of peptides derived from natural compounds from six months or a year to as little as one day. This advance may assist drug discovery researchers – who need to know as much as possible as quickly as possible about the natural products with antibiotic, antiviral and other pharmacologically interesting properties that they are probing.

They presented the work RECOMB 2008 (Research in Computational Molecular Biology) on March 31 in Singapore.