Wake Up! SleepServer is Here

UC San Diego computer scientists are presenting a new “green computing” paper on Thursday June 24 in Boston at the 2010 USENIX Annual Technical Conference. (read the full story here and check out photos here)

The paper presents the latest on a UC San Diego technology that enables people who usually keep their work computers on all night and over the weekend to put them in low-power sleep mode before they go home. Also, SleepServer allows people to maintain an active presence on voice over IP, IM and peer to peer networks.

Over a two week period last September, 30 people in the computer science building at UC San Diego saved 60 percent energy, on average, compared to leaving the computer on 24/7 (which is what many of the people were doing).

UC San Diego Research Scientist Yuvraj Agarwal from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering developed SleepServer, and its technological predecessor Somniloquy. (Agarwal earned his PhD in computer science from UC San Diego in 2009).

There are related solutions out there, but according to Agarwal, none of the other solutions are able to run pared down versions of applications such as Skype in order to maintain network presence even when the computer is in sleep mode.

“SleepServer: A Software-Only Approach for Reducing the Energy Consumption of PCs within Enterprise Environments” by Yuvraj Agarwal, Stefan Savage and Rajesh Gupta from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.

In Proceedings of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC '10), June 2010.

Yuvraj Agarwal Photos

Photos below for the new story:
Enterprise PCs Work While They Sleep, Saving Energy and Money

Caption info for the graphs is available in the PDF of the SleepServer paper. The photo credit for any of the portraits of Yuvraj Agarwal is: UC San Diego / Erik Jepsen

Robot Swarms on DC Airwaves

Last November, Jorge Cortes became the PI on an NSF grant entitled “Distributed Ocean Monitoring via Integrated Data Analysis of Coordinated Buoyancy Drogues.”

The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is one of the kinds of situations this technlogy would be used in, when it's ready to move from the lab to the ocean.

This technology was recently featured in the weekly radio segment produced by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). You can listen to the very short piece here: WTOP, which is a huge news-only radio station in the Washington DC area.


The first paragraph of the 2009 press release from the Jacobs School of Engineering is below.

To develop control systems for “swarms” of miniature robotic ocean explorers that could one day help predict where ocean currents will carry oil spills, engineers at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering recently won a nearly $1.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation. The engineers are leading the development of the control systems for swarms of small, inexpensive, underwater robotic ocean drifters that researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at UC San Diego are designing, building and deploying.

"Wireless Sensors Win" in the News

Yu "Mike" Chi and his winning wireless sensor startup, Cognionics, made their way into Xconomy last week, complete with the photo of Mike trying to hold three oversized checks.

The San Diego Union Tribune ran the Xconomy story as well.

Too Much or Too Little Sun?

"Are San Diegans Getting Too Much Or Too Little Sun?" This KPBS segment covers an issue in San Diego...lots of sun. Even in our "June Gloom" month it's sunny.

Transcript and audio are on the KPBS Web site for this story.

Music Search Researchers in New Scientist

A NewScientist story called "Computerised critics could find the music you'll like," highlights the music annotation and related music-meets-machine-learning research being done here at the Jacobs School.

The reporter, MacGregor Campbell, talks to electrical engineering (ECE) graduate student Luke Barrington about the research described in the From a Queen Song to a Better Music Search Engine story from last year.

From the NewScientist story:

Barrington is building software that can analyse a piece of music and distil information about it that may be useful for software trying to compile a playlist. With this information, the software can assign the music a genre or even give it descriptions which may appear more subjective, such as whether or not a track is "funky", he says.

This work is being done in the Computer Audition Laboratory, which is led by ECE professor Gert Lanckriet.

Photos and Video: NanoEngineers Print and Test Chemical Sensors on Elastic Waistbands of Underwear

Here are three photos tied to the story "NanoEngineers Print and Test Chemical Sensors on Elastic Waistbands of Underwear".

There is a YouTube video of one a UC San Diego chemcial engineering undergraduate who worked on printing the electrodes onto underwear waistbands.