KPBS: S.D. Colleges Undergo Green Renovation

Here is a story that KPBS did at the end of February about "how San Diego's colleges and universities are stepping up with their own green construction projects."

S.D. Colleges Undergo Green Renovation Be sure to check out the video that is embedded on the KPBS page as well.

The video highlights that UC San Diego has reduced energy consumption by 20 percent, thanks in large part, to a series of energy efficiency projects.

Learn more about sustainability at UC San Diego at: Sustain.UCSD.edu

Structural Engineers Quoted in LaFee Story

Last week, Scott LaFee wrote an interesting story in the San Diego Union Tribune that looked at some of the similarities between Chile and California, both in terms of earthquakes and building codes.

Frieder Seible, Dean of the Jacobs School of Engineering and professor of structural engineering, provided insights, as did structural engineering professor Jose Restrepo.

The deeper, stronger temblors in Chile often last for up to two minutes, while California quakes typically persist for 10 to 15 seconds, said Frieder Seible, dean of the Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California San Diego and an international expert on bridge and highway seismic safety.

Still, researchers such as Seible said every strong quake is potentially devastating and that most offer new insights. Both the magnitude-6.9 Loma Prieta temblor in 1989, which killed 63 people and caused $6 billion in damage, and the 6.7 Northridge quake in 1994, which killed 72 people and caused $20 billion in damage, resulted in significant revisions to seismic standards and building codes.

Read the full story here.

Context in Computer Vision

MIT news quoted computer science professor Serge Belongie last week on a story about context within object identification / computer vision systems. Belongie and a variety of his students have been working on the context issue for a while now.

For related work from Belongie's UCSD Computer Vision Lab check out:

http://vision.ucsd.edu/project/shape-matching

and

http://vision.ucsd.edu/project/weakly-supervised-object-recognition-and-localization

Fuel Cell FYI

UC San Diego's fuel-cell project is mentioned in a fuel-cell overview piece in the San Diego Union Tribune by Onell R. Soto.

The city of San Diego and the University of California San Diego are cooperating on a fuel-cell project. They plan to trap methane that is now being burned off at the Point Loma Wastewater Treatment Plant and clean it up.

It looks like part of the reason the fuel-cell story ran in Sunday's paper is that there are a couple of fuel-cell workshops today.

Fuel-cell workshops
When: Monday March 8, 1 p.m. for businesses and institutions; 6 p.m. for homeowners.

Where: California Center for Sustainable Energy, 8690 Balboa Ave., San Diego.
Information: energycenter.org

Knight Science Journalism Tracker

The Knight Science Journalism Tracker. Not familiar? Check it out.

http://ksjtracker.mit.edu/

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.)