Chechnya Jihad / Book Signing May 31 at UCSD Bookstore

Signing: May 31, Tuesday,  Noon

UCSD Bookstore

The accidental discovery in New Mexico of a super explosive—a thousand times more powerful than conventional ones—sends assistant professor Jean-Claude Delvaux into a whirlwind of travel, passion, and discovery. Delvaux meets with tragedy in Chechnya, while taking part in its liberation struggle, and emerges broken-hearted from the rubble of Grozny, swearing off violence. Destiny strikes again when Delvaux is lured by love and loyalty around the world and into the new nexus of conflict— a brutal jihad in the mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan. There, he meets Bin Laden and the dramatic end of the novel parallels recent events. 

Marc A. Meyers, Distinguished Professor of Materials Science at the University of California, San Diego, and Life Member, Clare Hall, Cambridge (UK), has carried out research within his field all over the world. His work with the Center for Explosives Technology Research (New Mexico), Japanese and Soviet research institutes, and the US Army, led him to imagine a chain of events which could lead to the frightening scenario in his first novel, Mayan Mars. His expertise in explosives, and his knowledge of Chechnya’s brutal war, inspired the situations and events in Chechnya Jihad. He is the recipient of numerous awards from international societies and the author or co-author, in addition to 350 papers, of three science & engineering books. Dr. Meyers lives in San Diego and travels extensively.  

Read about Meyers in the Del Mar Times "Del Mar science professor tackles ‘unfinished business’ of writing thriller and science fiction novels" 

Can't wait till Tuesday May 31? Then come to the book signing at Mysterious Galaxy on May 28 from 2 to 3:30 PM.

Celebrate the Intellectual, Entrepreneurial, Cultural and Economic Power of Alumni!

With a network 130,000 strong, UC San Diego alumni continue to change the world across all industries—from science, technology, medicine and public service to business, education, politics and the arts—and make a global impact. Come back to campus to reconnect with friends and celebrate the achievements of all UC San Diego alumni during the third annual Alumni Weekend, June 16-19, which includes our 50 Years|50 Leaders Alumni Celebration. 

Visit http://alumni.ucsd.edu/alumniweekend for details.

Stingray Autonomous Underwater Vehicle

There is an interesting, techy video on the UC San Diego "Stingray" autonomous vehicle on www.engineeringtv.com The video was shot at the Embedded Systems Conference 2011. Good job Chris Barngrover.

Also, the students themselves have a number of videos of their autonomous underwater vehicle on YouTube and on their IBOTICS site. Also, check out the related Stingray Underwater Craft video from Calit2.

University of California Research News

The University of California Office of the President recently launched a new UC research news website:

The site will highlight the depth and breadth of research across the University of California system and the value of research to Californians.

Features of the new site include:

 *   A weekly in-depth story
 *   Weekly video and multimedia features
 *   Faculty and graduate student profiles
 *   Research news highlights from the campuses
 *   Science Today radio interviews
 *   Daily images

FYI, the "shake, rattle, roll" video is about research from structural engineers here at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego. The image is of structural engineering professor Benson Shing.

Limbic Software (UCSD Alums) are Launching a New Game Monday

Friday May 20 at 4PM: We are giving away a free download of  Nuts! the new game from Limbic Software via the Jacobs School Facebook page. Limbic was started by UCSD computer scientists. Remember this story from the Jacobs School newsroom?  Cheat-Resistant 3D iPhone Game Relies on Score-Checking Replays

Jacobs School of Rock is June 3 / Porters Pub UCSD

Jacobs School of Rock is Friday June 3, here on the UCSD campus, at Porters Pub.

Jacobs School of Rock is FREE.

The bands (keep up with the latest Jacobs School of Rock details on Facebook.
Marlena Fecho
Five + 2
Telefunk
CODE
SO3
Foxxy Chancellor


Check out a video from Jacobs School of Rock 2009:

Spam study in the New York Times

The New York Times just posted a story about a new study from computer scientists here at UC San Diego and at UC Berkeley / International Computer Science Institute.

The paper describing the study is called "Click Trajectories: End-to-End Analysis of the Spam Value Chain".

The abstract is below, and a PDF of the paper is available here.

The New York Times article by John Markoff is here:
"Study Sees Credit Cards as ‘Choke Point’ for Spam"

Spam-based advertising is a business. While it has engendered both widespread antipathy and a multi-billion dollar anti-spam industry, it continues to exist because it fuels a profitable enterprise. We lack, however, a solid understanding of this enterprise’s full structure, and thus most anti-spam interventions focus on only one facet of the overall spam value chain (e.g., spam filtering, URL blacklisting, site takedown). In this paper we present a holistic analysis that quantifies the full set of resources employed to monetize spam email— including naming, hosting, payment and fulfillment—using extensive measurements of three months of diverse spam data, broad crawling of naming and hosting infrastructures, and over 100 purchases from spam-advertised sites. We relate these resources to the organizations who administer them and then use this data to characterize the relative prospects for defensive interventions at each link in the spam value chain. In particular, we provide the first strong evidence of payment bottlenecks in the spam value chain; 95% of spam-advertised pharmaceutical, replica and software products are monetized using merchant services from just a handful of banks.

The full list of authors: 

Kirill Levchenko, Andreas Pitsillidis, Neha Chachra, Brandon Enright, Mark Felegyhazi, Chris Grier, Tristan Halvorson, Chris Kanich, Christian Kreibich, He Liu, Damon McCoy, Nicholas Weaver, Vern Paxson, Geoffrey M. Voelker, Stefan Savage.

The authors affiliated with the following institutions:

Department of Computer Science and Engineering 

University of California San Diego

Computer Science Division

University of California, Berkeley

International Computer Science Institute 

Laboratory of Cryptography and System Security (CrySyS)

Budapest University of Technology and Economics