“When we bounce signals off the ceiling, we take advantage of much more bandwidth than we could if we restricted ourselves to a horizontal plane,” says Amin Vahdat, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, who specializes in large-scale data center architecture and deployment and is working with Dr. Zheng on the project. Dr. Vahdat, who is on sabbatical leave from the university, is also a principal engineer at Google.
Meet the Founders and CEOs of Biological Dynamics, Cognionics, App2you and EarthRisk Technologies TODAY at a Technology and Student Showcase, part of the 10th Anniversary Celebration of the von Liebig Entrepreneurism Center at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.
Meet the founders and entrepreneurs that have launched 4 exciting technology companies.
Hear how they are bringing new innovations to the market and the role of the von Liebig Center in the
transition out of the laboratory.
Two spacecraft equipped with cameras to be operated by UC San Diego students, many of them from the Jacobs School of Engineering, are now in orbit around the moon. They were launched in September.
The Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission will measure the gravity of the Earth's satellite in unprecedented detail, according to NASA. It also will answer questions about the moon's internal structure.
Also on board the two spacecraft are cameras that will allow middle school classrooms to request pictures of the surface of the moon. The requests will come to a mission command center at UC San Diego, operated by undergraduate students, many of them engineering majors. The students will communicate with NASA's mission control and make sure the cameras take the requested pictures. The mission will being in March of this year and last until May.
The MoonKAM project is led by Sally Ride Science, in collaboration with undergraduates at UC San Diego.
Find out more about MoonKAM here.
Then read recent news coverage of the mission in the San Diego U-T and on KPBS.
A National Medal of Science, a Marconi Prize, a new student center and many important research findings. It’s been a busy year at the Jacobs School of Engineering. We wanted to provide a look back on some of this year’s stories, in case you’ve missed some of the exciting news we had in 2011.
What would happen to your beloved Christmas decorations and family nick-knacks during an earthquake? A team of engineers at the Jacobs School helped answer this question during an episode of the TV show "Totally Unprepared."
The show was trying to help Los Angeles resident Heather Kram figure out what would happen to her unsecured collection of Nightmare Before Christmas snow globes and figurines during a temblor. The seismic testing team at the Jacobs School set up four curio cabinets filled with globes and other curios on one of the school's shake tables.
Two of the cabinets were secured to the wall with furniture straps, the doors were closed with child safety locks and the items on the shelves were glued with museum putty. Meanwhile, for the two other cabinets, the doors were just closed, without latches and their contents just sat on the shelves, unsecured. One of the two was attached to the wall with furniture straps; the other was not.
"That one cabinet doesn't look too good," said Andy Gunthardt, a senior development engineer who supervises the Jacobs School's shake tables.
All four cabinets held steady during a small simulated shaker. But during a major simulated quake, the unstrapped cabinet collapsed and snow globes and figurines flew all over the shake table. The cabinet that was strapped but didn't have museum putty or child locks was emptied of its contents too. Meanwhile, the two fully secured cabinets stood almost undisturbed.
After all the shaking was done, the show's host urged everyone to remember to get prepared. In this case, it means running to the store and getting some furniture straps, child safety locks and museum putty.
Read more about Totally Unprepared's snow globe episode here.
The show is funded by the California Emergency Management Agency, the California Earthquake Authority and the California Seismic Safety Commission.
