In case you need a break from pre-superbowl hype, check out this research on how corrugated cardboard boxes stacked up very high in warehouses burns. They looked at cardboard boxes filled with Styrofoam cups. With warehouse fires, the trick is to get the fire out while just the outsides of the cardboard boxes is burning. Once the contents of the boxes catch fire, it's much harder to get the fire out. And this is why the researchers are studying how cardboard boxes burn...if you know exactly how they burn, you can set up better systems for getting the fires out before they get out of control.
Read the full story on the Jacobs School of Engineering news site:
Electrical engineering professor Gert Lanckriet recently won an NSF CAREER grant for work on developing automated ways to search, annotate and generally make sense of the ever-growing sea of digital music. More info on the funded project is below. Also, check out some cool related stories (and video!) from Lanckriet and his collaborators:
CAREER: An Integrated Framework for Multimodal Music Search and Discovery.
A revolution in music production and distribution has made millions of songs instantly available to virtually anyone, on the Internet. However, a listener looking for "dark electronica with cello" or "music like U2's", without knowing a relevant artist or song name, or a musicologist wanting to search through large amounts of unknown ethnic music, would face serious challenges. Novel music search and discovery technologies are required to help users find the desired content.
The non-text-based, multimodal character of Internet-wide information about music (audio clips, lyrics, web documents, images, band networks, etc.) poses a new and difficult challenge to existing database technology that depends on unimodal, text-based data-structures. This project addresses two fundamental research questions at the core of addressing this challenge: (1) The automated annotation of (non-text-based) audio content with descriptive keywords; and (2) the automated integration of the heterogeneous content of multimodal databases, to improve music search and discovery on the Internet or in a personal database. The resulting architecture leverages the automation and scalability of machine learning with the effectiveness of human computation, engaging music professionals or enthusiasts around the world.
The research addresses questions at the core of multimedia information retrieval in general, enabling the design of a new generation of expressive and flexible retrieval systems for multimodal databases, with applications to music discovery, video retrieval, indexing multimedia content on the home PC, etc.
Jacobs School undergrads are going all out again this year to make National Engineers Week at UC San Diego useful, interesting and fun. And if you're a Jacobs School student, you might even get a job out of the deas (ie: DECaF career fair).
Innovation Day Expo and Symposia (IDEaS) Feb. 22-25: this is a week of free events at UC San Diego that will feature dynamic leaders in the arts, sciences, technology, medicine and education who are making a positive impact in San Diego, the nation and the world.
The intersection of renewable energy, electric vehicles, and the electric grid was the topic of conversation yesterday at a press conference here at UC San Diego. Read the press release on the Jacobs School news site.
Location: Jacobs Hall - Qualcomm Conference Center, UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. Map here.
Creativity, innovation and leadership are among the essential attributes of future engineers as identified in the Engineer 2020 report by the National Academy of Engineering. It is critical for students to have the ability to identify new needs and opportunities for technological innovation in highly complex and interdisciplinary domains. The goal of this talk is to discuss a “technological innovation start-up” model and its stages such as seed stage to start-up stage, early stage to expansion & lead stage.
Speaker Bio:
Speaker Bio
Cahit Akin, PhD – Principal, ITU Ventures/President & CEO, Mushroom Networks, Inc. received his PhD and MSE degree in Electrical Engineering and MS in Mathematics from University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He holds a BS degree in Electrical Engineering from Bilkent University, Turkey. Currently, he is a Principal at ITU Ventures, LLC, a seed stage Venture Capital firm with $200 million under management, where he has been working since 2001. Dr. Akin managed the Adaptive Systems Laboratory out of Cal-IT2 at University of California San Diego, and continues to be a volunteer scholar at Cal-IT2. Dr. Akin is a cofounder and investor in Mushroom Networks, Inc. where he is also the President and Chief Executive Officer. Previously, Dr. Akin has worked as a senior analyst at a boutique marketing consultancy firm on Wall Street New York, formulating marketing strategies for multi-billion dollar companies. Dr. Akin has worked on technical and research aspects of communications for over 7 years including several patents. Dr. Akin is a recipient of the NATO Graduate Study Scholarship award and was a national team member for International Mathematics Olympiad in 1993.
