Jacobs School at the La Jolla Research and Innovation Summit

A number of different engineering faculty from the Jacobs School presented this week at the La Jolla Research and Innovation Summit. According to the event organizers, the summit is:

"...an invitation only program where San Diego’s leading scientists and engineers describe their innovative research to more than 100 venture capitalists in a closed meeting was developed to bring together our leading scientists with active venture capitalists from across the U.S. In this unique setting, VCs have the opportunity to learn from and build relationships with researchers working
on advances five and ten years into the future."

Jacobs School professors who presented are below:

Joseph Ford, Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering, UC San Diego (Bruce Lieberman from Xconomy included Ford's solar concentrator technology in Xconomy summit his write up. Graduate student Jason Karp will present related solar concentrator work on April 15 at the Jacobs School of Engineering Research Expo 2010. It's THE place to connect with the engineering innovators and leaders of today (and tomorrow).

William Gerwick, Professor, Center for Marine Biotechnology and Biomedicine, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego and Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, UC San Diego (Computer science professor Pavel Pevzner works with Gerwick on related projects. Read more about the collaboration aimed at discovering drug targets from natural compounds here.)

The High Tech/IT Panel Presentation was a Jacobs School sweep:

Sadik Esner, Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, UC San Diego

Rajesh Gupta, Professor and Qualcomm Endowed Chair, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, UC San Diego

Stefan Savage, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, UC San

(Graduate students from the labs of Esner, Gupta and Savage are all presenting at Research Expo 2010.)

The afteroon session included a political scientist from UC San Diego who is affiliated with Calit2...yes, you guessed the name right: James Fowler, Author, Connected; Associate Professor, Center for Wireless and Population Health Systems, CALIT2, and Department of Political Science, UC San Diego.

Non-volatile Memories Workshop 2010

Non-volatile Memories Workshop 2010

What: Non-volatile Memories Workshop 2010
Where: University of California, San Diego
When: April 11-13, 2010
URL: http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/education/workshops/NVMW2010.htm

The Center for Magnetic Recording Research, the Non-Volatile Systems Laboratory, and the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology at UCSD will be hosting the first UCSD Non-Volatile Memories Workshop on April 11-13, 2010.

The workshop will bring together scientists and engineers from industry and academia who are working on advanced non-volatile storage devices and systems. The goal is to facilitate the exchange of ideas, insights, and knowledge within this broad community of practitioners and researchers, and to foster the establishment of new collaborations that can propel future progress in the design and application of non-volatile memories.

The program will take a “vertical” approach, with technical sessions that encompass solid-state and magnetic storage technologies; coding techniques for data integrity, preservation, and security; system-level storage architectures; and new applications enabled by advances in these areas.

Related: Check out this flash paper (below) from the Jacobs School:

Grupp, L., Caulfield, A.M., Coburn, J., Yaakobi, E., Swanson, S., Siegel, P., "Characterizing Flash Memory: Anomalies, Observations, and Applications" To appear in MICRO'09. (pdf) (Flash memory summit slides) (More information about our flash characterization project is available here.)

2010 Distinguished Educator Award of the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society

Congratulations to electrical and computer engineering (ECE) professor Gabriel Rebeiz. He received recipient of the 2010 Distinguished Educator Award of the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society (MTT-S).

This award is given to a distinguished educator in the field of microwave engineering and science who exemplifies the special human qualities of the late Fred J. Rosenbaum who considered teaching a high calling and demonstrated his dedication to the MTT-S through tireless service.

Prof. Rebeiz has been cited for his "Outstanding Achievements as an Educator, Mentor And Role Model of Microwave Engineers and Engineering Students".

The award will be conferred at the annual Society Awards Banquet to be held during the International Microwave Symposium the week of May 23 to 28, 2010 in Anaheim, California.

Read more about professor Rebeiz's work in press releases linked below:

Toward Cheaper Imaging Systems for Identifying Concealed Weapons on the Human Body

Two-Antenna Quad-Beam 11-15 GHz Phased Array RFIC Targeted at Satellite Systems and Advanced Radars

Most Complex Silicon Phased Array Chip in the World Developed at UC San Diego

Serge Belongie's Top Ten TPAMI List

"We still don't know what a "part" is, but that philosophical sticking point didn't stop this paper from making a big impact in object category detection."

That's what computer science professor Serge Belongie said about paper #9 in the Serge Belongie list of all-time Top 10 IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI) papers. (This is part of an on-going TPAMI 30th anniversary celebration organized by the IEEE Computer Society’s Publishing Services Department .)

Serge's paper # 9...in case you were not sure based on his description is: "Learning to Detect Objects in Images via a Sparse, Part-Based Representation by Shivani Agarwal, Aatif Awan, and Dan Roth," IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, vol. 26, no. 11, pp. 1475-1490, Nov. 2004, doi:10.1109/TPAMI.2004.108

Jose Restrepo Offers Insights on Building Codes in Chile

In a Q&A by the Voice of San Diego, structural engineering professor Jose Restrepo provides insights on the building codes in Chile as well as some thoughts on readiness of California's buildings for an earthquake.

Restrepo is one of the structural engineering professors at the Jacobs School who builds and tests large-scale and full-scale models of buildings and other structures and then tests them on the world's largest outdoor shake table out at the UCSD Englekirk Structural Engineering Center.

One of Claire Trageser's quiestions and Jose Restrepo's answers are below. Read the full Q&A here.

UPDATE #1: Restrepo is also in this Univision story (you may need to get the latest version of Flash for the video to play).

So then these building codes in Chile helped them avert some of the
disaster?

Absolutely. Chile has an earthquake every 20 to 30 years, so they were very well aware that they were going be hit by a big earthquake. In Chile, they have a tradition in their building codes to be very strong. They also have a very good education system, where they go to universities for six years, so when they're finished they are very well trained. The training of architects and contractors, when it goes hand in hand with the building codes, gives a very good result.

Undergrads on Solar Power Demonstration Project in Kenya: finalists in national competition

Congratulations to the Global TIES team "Kenya Solar Power." The team, which is building a prototype for a solar electric installation for a computer training center in Mbita, Kenya, won a spot as a finalist in the National Idea to Product Competition for Social Entrepreneurship.

Senior, Priya Raval wrote the proposal. Clarke Guest is the faculty advisor and Zach Salin is the TA.

We'll be following this story and this worthy project.

Serge Belongie Lab in Wired

Kristin Branson earned her computer science PhD in Serge Belongie's UCSD Computer Vision lab here at the Jacobs School. Now, a fellow at Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Farm Research Campus, Branson and her work is highlighted in a Wired magazine web story by Alexis Madrigal on the Wired Science blog.

Kristin is leading an effort to track the behavior of fruit flies using video. Software takes that video data and provides behavioral information...what fruit flies do, and when.

Branson, and her former PhD advisor Serge Belongie, are both quoted in the story.

Some of Branson's publications from her time at UCSD are below. A quick look at the list, and you see that Branson is not new to the intersection of computer science and animal behavior. She was part of the Monitoring Animal Behavior project.

Babenko B., Branson S., Belongie S., "Similarity Functions for Categorization: from Monolithic to Category Specific ", International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), Kyoto, Japan, 2009. [BibTex][pdf]

Agarwal S., Branson K., Belongie S., "Higher-Order Learning with Graphs", International Conference On Machine Learning (ICML), Pittsburgh, PA, 2006. [BibTex][pdf]

Branson K., Belongie S., "Tracking Multiple Mouse Contours (Without Too Many Samples)", IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), San Diego, CA, June, 2005. [BibTex]

Belongie S., Branson K., Dollár P., Rabaud V., "Monitoring Animal Behavior in the Smart Vivarium", Measuring Behavior, Wageningen, NL, pp. 70-72, 2005. [BibTex][pdf]

Branson K., Rabaud V., Belongie S., "Three Brown Mice: See How They Run", IEEE International Workshop on Performance Evaluation of Tracking and Surveillance (PETS), Nice, France, October, 2003. [BibTex][pdf]