When Solar Meets Shade

Large-scale integration of solar into the power grid will requrire solutions to the complications that arise when clouds pass over solar panels and trigger transint drops in generated electricity.

Environmental engineering professor Jan Kleissl from the MAE Department at the Jacobs School recently won an approximately $500,000 grant to address related issues. In particular, he is working on models for predicting when these cloud-triggered power drops will occur.

“Once a cloud arrives, the power output from our photovoltaic panels can decrease 40 to 80 percent within a few seconds, and when the cloud leaves the power output increases just as dramatically,” said Kleissl. “Utilities and operators of large power plants want to be able to predict the timing of these transitions so that they can charge up energy storage systems in advance to ‘smooth’ the clear-cloudy transition or prepare other generation to make up for the lost solar power.”

Read all about the new grant, the new project, and a wealth of background information in the story "How to Manage California’s Alternative Energy Grid When the Sun Doesn’t Shine" by Rex Graham, linked from the UC San Diego sustainability Web site.

Update: An LA Times story today highlights this work: "State regulators approve $9 million in solar research grants, PG&E solar contract"

NanoEngineering Tidbits and Twitter

I just updated the research profiles of three faculty members affiliated with the Department of NanoEngineering at the Jacobs School. Also, NanoEngineering at UCSD is on Twitter. I wonder if they will keep their updates to 140 nanometers, rather than 140 characters...

Below are the updates I just added to the Jacobs School faculty profiles database.

Sadik Esener: Research expertise: Photonics and opto-electronics, including biophotonics, cancer nanotechnology, optical data storage, and optical interconnects.

Liangfang Zhang: Research expertise: Synthesis and engineering of lipid- and polymer-based nanomaterials for biomedical applications.

Rich Herz: Research expertise: Dynamics of diffusion, adsorption and reaction in porous solid media including heterogeneous catalysts. He also simulates and analyzes processes for conversion of biomass to power and fuels.

Ingolf Krueger / Car Software / San Diego Union Tribune

Ingolf Krueger, a computer science and engineering professor at the Jacobs School, is quoted in a story today about the runaway Prius in the San Diego Union Tribune. Read the full story by Mike Lee here.

Krueger directs the "Service-Oriented Software and Systems Engineering Laboratory" (S3EL) in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. He also directs the "Software & Systems Architecture & Integration" (SAINT) functional area within the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2).

KPBS recently tapped Krueger's expertise in automotive software, for a piece called "Are Car Electronics Too Complex?"

Some links to Krueger's work with car software is below:

This past fall, Krueger co-organized the Symposium on Automotive/Avionics
Systems Engineering (SAASE) 2009.

In 2008, Krueger co-organized the Automotive Systems Track at the
International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE):

Krueger also co-organized the 2004 and 2006 Automotive Software Workshops.

Two of Krueger's grad students are presenting research on improving the diagnostic systems of cars at Research Expo 2010, the graduate student research showcase of the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.

Calit2 researchers at UC San Diego honored for innovations in networking

Researchers from the University of California, San Diego participated in two of the four groundbreaking projects that today were named recipients of the 2010 Innovations in Networking Awards. The awards are given annually by the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) for the innovative use and expansion of high-performance networking.

For the third year in a row, the award for Experimental/Developmental Applications went to researchers affiliated with the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2). UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering electrical and computer engineering professor George Papen picked up the award on behalf of his colleagues on the Scalable Energy Efficient Datacenters (SEED) project.

In 2009, Calit2's GreenLight project – which also focuses on energy efficiency in computing -- picked up the same award, and in 2008, the award in the same category went to CineGrid, the digital cinema consortium incubated in the UCSD division of Calit2.

Calit2 was also honored indirectly in the High Performance Networking Applications category, for its joint project with Australia's Monash University. Monash professor David Abramson accepted the award on behalf of the two institutions.

Read the full story by Doug Ramsey at Calit2 here.

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