About 18 months ago, computer science professor David Kriegman, and Jacobs School alumnus Satya Mallick launched a virtual makeover Web site, Taaz.com. The site, and associated startup company Photometria, Inc, grew out of their invention of an algorithm for separating gloss from non-gloss in digital images. It turned out that the algorithm is great for makeovers even if it was first developed for face recognition. Read the original Jacobs School press release here and watch the three minute video I made here.
At Taaz.com, anyone can apply thousands of makeup products, and try out new hairstyles, with the click of a mouse.
Estee Lauder recently incorporated Taaz.com's technology to their Web site with a "let's play makeover" widget.
People Espanol also offers visitors to its site the chance to change your look with their "Cambia tu Look" site, also based on Taaz.com technology.
Last April, Taaz.com put out a press release highlighting the winners of their celebrity look-a-like contest. Who knew celebrity hairstyles were attainable with a few mouse clicks...
A three-story structure shook as it was jolted by a strong simulated earthquake, but it didn’t collapse – just what UC San Diego structural engineers had hoped for. As part of a retrofit project, the engineers subjected the 1920s era reinforced concrete structure to a series of simulated earthquakes, measuring up to a 7.5 magnitude. The building suffered some damage but was still standing after all of the tests, a sign that the engineer’s retrofit model worked.
As part of the $1.24 million research project sponsored by the National Science Foundation under the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) program, the masonry-infilled, reinforced concrete frame representing structures built in California in the 1920s was tested at the NEES -UCSD Englekirk Structural Engineering Center, home of the world’s largest outdoor shake table.
The ultimate goal of this project is to provide methods to assess and improve the seismic performance of these older buildings by developing reliable analytical models and effective retrofit techniques. Read the full story here:
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“This is stuff the big traders will be interested in,” said George Varghese, a computer science professor at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and an author on the SIGCOMM paper, “but more importantly, the router vendors for whom such trading markets are an important vertical.”
That "stuff" is an inexpensive solution for diagnosing delays in data center networks as short as tens of millionths of seconds—delays that can lead to multi-million dollar losses for investment banks running automatic stock trading systems. Similar delays can delay parallel processing in high performance cluster computing applications run by Fortune 500 companies and universities.
University of California, San Diego and Purdue University computer scientists presented this work on August 20, 2009 at SIGCOMM, the premier networking conference.
The new approach offers the possibility of diagnosing fine-grained delays—down to tens to microseconds—and packet loss as infrequent as one in a million at every router within a data center network. (One microsecond is one millionth of a second.) The solution could be implemented in today’s router designs with almost zero cost in terms of router hardware and with no performance penalty. The UC San Diego and Purdue University computer scientists call their invention the Lossy Difference Aggregator.
“This is stuff the big traders will be interested in,” said George Varghese, a computer science professor at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and an author on the SIGCOMM paper, “but more importantly, the router vendors for whom such trading markets are an important vertical.”
Radhika Niranjan Mysore, a UC San Diego computer science graduate student, is the first author on the data center networking paper presented today at SIGCOMM 2009.
SIGCOMM is the premier academic networking conference.
“SIGCOMM was always a dream, and it was nice we could shoot for it,” said Radhika Niranjan Mysore, who presented this work at SIGCOMM 2009 in Barcelona, Spain on August 18, 2009.
“I am going to be meeting the smartest people from all over the world in the networking community. I’m going to be able to showcase our work to them and get feedback on my ongoing research. It’s a great opportunity.”
“I think PortLand is something that will be useful in the real world. The goal is to create a network fabric that allow you to buy any server, plug it in and have it just work,” said Mysore.
"We all put in a lot of work and made it possible in 5 months, and that is incredible…an incredible five months," said Mysore, who highlighted the important contributions of all the authors on the paper. The full list:
Radhika Niranjan Mysore, Andreas Pamboris, Nathan Farrington, Nelson Huang, Pardis Miri, Sivasankar Radhakrishnan, Vikram Subramanya, and Amin Vahdat from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California San Diego.
After completing her undergraduate degree in India, Radhika Niranjan Mysore worked for two years at Cisco, followed by a master’s degree at Georgia Institute of Technology, where she worked on systems research.
Next, she joined Amin Vahdat's research group at UC San Diego's Department of Computer Science and Engineering, within the Jacobs School of Engineering.
“The pace of learning is really fast at UCSD. There are great graduate students and a lot of interaction. It’s really nice,” said Mysore.
In June, Mysore finished the first year of her PhD in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego. This summer, she landed an internship at Microsoft Research, where she is working on data center storage issues.
“Getting an internship at Microsoft Research is a really great opportunity,” said Mysore.
Radhika Niranjan Mysore (above) is a UC San Diego computer science graduate student and the first author and presenter of the SIGCOMM 2009 paper entitled "PortLand: A Scalable Fault-Tolerant Layer 2 Data Center Network Fabric.
"SIGCOMM was always a dream, and it was nice we could shoot for it," said Mysore.
Amin Vahdat (above) is the senior author on the SIGCOMM 2009 paper. Vahdat is a computer science professor at UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering. The SIGCOMM paper describessoftware created at the University of California, San Diego that the creators hope will lead to data centers that logically function assingle, plug-and-play networks that will scale to the massive scale of modern data center networks.
A full prototype of PortLand, illustrated in Figure 1 from the paper, is currently running on a network in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering.
