(above: Nitin Gupta is a PhD student in bioinformatics at UC San Diego)
From Shankar Subramaniam, Chair of the Dept of Bioengineering and director of UC San Diego's Bioinformatics program.
We are witnessing the birth of a new era in biology. The ability to decipher the genetic code of living organisms is dramatically changing our understanding of the natural world and promises to substantially improve the quality of human life.
The new bioinformatics and systems biology site went live earlier this year. I especailly like the student publiations page because it pulls together many of the new papers from graduate students who are in different departments but are all working in the ares of bioinformatics.
Yesterday, I posted a press release about Bridget Benson, the computer science PhD student who is building energy efficient underwater sensor networks that are badly needed by scientists who study watery environments. She is also the SoCal volunteer coordinator for Reef Check, a nonprofit that includes volunteer divers in their surveys of the Southern California coast.
Reef Check has a survey this Saturday in La Jolla Cove. But it looks like Bridget won't be there. Instead, she will run the survey the following weekend up in PalosVerdes, off the coast of Los Angeles.
I posted a photo from the Reef Check photo gallery showing Bridget Benson in her dive gear. Photo credit: Reef Check.
Ever since (and I'm well sure before) the days of sending messages in bottles across the sea, it has been hard to get information to travel through the water. Sure, there are the expensive sonar systems that the Navy uses. But researchers collecting data on coral reefs or kelp beds don't have that kind of budget. A group of information technology pioneers at UC San Diego led by computer science PhD student Bridget Benson are well on their way to a new breed of cheap, reliable nets of underwater sensors for environmental monitoring. Yesterday, computer science professor Ryan Kastner presented some of the teams latest work on figuring out which hardward platforms are the least energy consuming at an IEEE workshop in Rome.
Back here in San Deigo, Bridget Benson, the PhD student leading the project, has an interesting perspective: can see the challenge from two sides, literally. In her spare time, Bridget works as a volunteer coordinator for the nonprofit group Reef Check. In this role, she gets experienced divers to help Reef Check monitor the California coastline. This is the kind of project that nets of underwater sensors could someday help with.
Electrical engineering undergrad Brian Faunce is the person in the lowest photo of the bunch above.
“In class, you learn a lot of theory, but you don’t learn how to revise a schematic, layout the printed circuit board, assemble the circuit and then perform field tests. I have friends at other schools, and when it comes to internships and projects, they are just not available at other schools the way they are here,” said Faunce.
UC San Diego are taking their career prospects into their own hands...literally. They are commercializing technologies, starting companies, and generally making futures for themselves and for many more people. One of the central events to the entrepreneurial culture that has grown strong over the past few years is the UC San Diego Entrepreneur Challenge.
More info below on the June 1, 2009 event:
Students at the University of California, San Diego will be vying for $80,000 in prizes that will be awarded on June 1st at the culminating event of the 3rd Annual UC San Diego Entrepreneur Challenge Business Plan Competition. The event, open to the public, will take place at the Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center in La Jolla from 6-8pm and will host the premier gathering of entrepreneurs, scientists, engineers, business professionals, and students from throughout the San Diego area. Five teams that have been selected from over 70 that entered the competition at the beginning of the academic year will have the opportunity to pitch their businesses to an all star panel of live judges including Rady School and SDSU business school deans Bob Sullivan and Gail Naughton, CONNECT CEO Duane Roth, President of the Foundation for Enterprise Development Mary Ann Beyster, and powerhouse investors Larry Bock and Leo Spiegel. The top three teams will be awarded a total of $40,000 in unrestricted cash prizes as well as $30,000 in services awarded by DLA Piper, a world class leading legal firm specializing in intellectual property and early phase start-ups. The remaining $10,000 cash will be divided to the winners of the competition’s subcategories: IT/High Tech, Biotech/Life Sciences, Social Entrepreneurship, Clean Tech, and a dedicated category for undergraduate participants. RSVP is required. RSVP at http://Challenge.ucsd.edu
Contact: Dany Kitishian CEO, UC San Diego Entrepreneur Challenge http://CHALLENGE.ucsd.edu (318) 278 7555
Time will tell how tweeting from the Jacobs School press office goes...my first update said that I was watching the Junkyard Derby video I made last week. And it's true, I was watching it again because I was exporting a higher resolution version for my colleagues over at CAP (the Corporate Affiliates Program) who are going to show it at the next CAP board meeting.
Congrats to the robotic mouse makers at the Jacobs School. They landed in the 18 May issue of ACMTechNews. (In the photo above, they are cutting their own metal pegs for the maze). The 4 minute video is here, if you haven't seen it already.
The RSS feed for ACMTechNews is here...and I also added it to my new list of tech sites at the bottom of the right-side column of this blog.
Robotic Mouse Makes Maze Debut at UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering UCSD News
University of California, San Diego (UCSD) Jacobs School of Engineering researchers have designed and built a robotic mouse and developed software to teach the robot to navigate through a maze. The robot navigates the maze using a pair of wheels and two self-lubricating sliders made from high-tech cutting board material. The robot, which is about the size of a cylindrical cookie jar, uses a set of distance sensors that project light onto the maze walls, which bounces back and is used to identify openings. The sensor-based approach gives the robot vision capabilities without having to deal with the complexities surrounding cameras, says UCSD student Jeffrey Wurzbach, who worked on the project. The robot was built for the MicroMouse competition, which tasks students with controlling an entire robotics system, including hardware, low-level code, high-level code, and all related debugging tools. UCSD professor Charles Tu says graduate school admissions committees and potential employers are looking for this kind of experience. In addition to designing and building the robot, the team spent five weeks building the 10-foot by 10-foot maze for the competition.
Bohemian Rhapsody is a heterogeneous song. We know that. Now, computers can "know" it too. I am still talking about the research in the press release I put out yesterday. This is a photo showing the new song segmentation process in action, for Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody.
(above: Nitin Gupta is a PhD student in bioinformatics at UC San Diego)
