San Diego telecom history article in San Diego history journal

“Before Qualcomm: Linkabit and the Origins of the San Diego Telecom Industry,” by Joel West is the lead article of the Winter/Spring issue of The Journal of San Diego History.

The introductory paragraphs are excerpted in the link below at professor Joel West's blog "San Diego Telecom Industry".

http://sdtelecom.blogspot.com/2009/05/before-qualcomm.html

Rajesh Gupta is Assoc Dir of Calit2 at UC San Diego

Jacobs School computer science professor Rajesh Gupta has been appointed an Associate Director in the UC San Diego division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2). He says he hopes to do for the institute overall what he has been doing in his chosen field of wireless and embedded systems all along: reach out to industry.

Read Doug Ramsey's full story here.
Watch a web video interview with Rajesh Gupta here.

Of Pomegranate Juice and Longevity (and PLOS Genetics)

Bioengineering professor Trey Ideker is the senior author on a paper out today in PLOS Genetics that provides an explanation for the seemingly paradoxical finding that small exposure to oxidative conditions may actually offer protection from acute doses. (Full press release here, written by Debra Kain from the UC San Diego School of Medicine).

Remember that oxidative stress has been linked to aging, cancer and other diseases in humans.

“We may drink pomegranate juice to protect our bodies from so-called ‘free radicals’ or look at restricting calorie intake to extend our lifespan,” said Trey Ideker, PhD, professor of bioengineering at the Jacobs School of Engineering and chief of the Division of Genetics in the Department of Medicine at UC San Diego’s School of Medicine. “But our study suggests why humans may actually be able to
prolong the aging process by regularly exposing our bodies to minimal amounts of
oxidants.”

The paper is published in an open access journal (PLOS Genetics), so anyone can go directly to the paper and dig in (be sure to enjoy figure 3, which I find quite pleasing to look at.)

The first author is Ryan Kelley, who completed the Bioinformatics program at UC San Diego and is now working at Illumina.

CMRR Students Selected as Young Marconi Scholars

CMRR graduate student Eitan Yaakobi (in photo above) and CMRR visiting graduate student Marco Papaleo have been selected as Marconi Scholars for 2009 by the Marconi Society. The honor includes a $4,000 cash prize, which will be presented at the Marconi Society Award Dinner in Bologna, Italy, on October 9, 2009.

Eitan Yaakobi received his B.A. and M.Sc. degrees from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel, in 2005 and 2007, respectively, from the Computer Science Department. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, where he is associated with the Center for Magnetic Recording Research (CMRR). His advisors are Professor Paul Siegel, Professor Jack Wolf and Professor Alexander Vardy. His research interests include algebraic error-correction coding, coding theory, and their applications for digital data storage, and in particular for flash memories.

According to Yaakobi's reserach profile:

"Flash memories are, by far, the most important type of nonvolatile computer memory in use today. They are employed widely in mobile, embedded, and
mass-storage applications, and the growth in this sector continues at a
staggering pace. In this research we mainly focus on coding for flash memories
in order to improve the reliability, capacity and endurance of the memory."

Marco Papaleo is a visiting graduate student under Professor Paul H. Siegel and Professor Jack K. Wolf. He received his B.S. and M.Sc. degrees (summa cum laude) in telecommunication engineering from the University of Bologna, Italy, in 2003 and in 2006, respectively. He received an award for one of the three best theses in telecommunication engineering from University of Bologna for the academic year 2004-2005. In January 2006, he joined the Advanced Research Center on Electronic Systems for Information and Communications Technologies "Ercole De Castro" (ARCES) at the University of Bologna, where he also began his Ph.D. studies in 2007. In the summer of 2008 he was a visiting Ph.D. student at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) Institute of Communications and Navigation in Wessling. He was involved in the design and analysis of LDPC convolutional codes. In 2006, he was a visiting affiliate student at the University College of London (UCL), in England. His current research activities are focused on the next generation wireless telecommunication systems, for both terrestrial and satellite networks. In particular, he is interested in the design and performance
evaluation of error control coding (with emphasis on packet level coding).

Got a moment? Check out the CMRR Winter 2009 Report here.

(The Marconi prize also includes $1,000 to help defray travel expenses to the event in Bologna, Italy...hopefully some of that money can be used for buying food in Bologna...which is a stand-out food destination, even in Italy, where almost all the food is good.)

Bioinformatics and Systems Biology Student publications

(above: Nitin Gupta is a PhD student in bioinformatics at UC San Diego)

From Shankar Subramaniam, Chair of the Dept of Bioengineering and director of UC San Diego's Bioinformatics program.

We are witnessing the birth of a new era in biology. The ability to decipher the genetic code of living organisms is dramatically changing our understanding of the natural world and promises to substantially improve the quality of human life.

The new bioinformatics and systems biology site went live earlier this year. I especailly like the student publiations page because it pulls together many of the new papers from graduate students who are in different departments but are all working in the ares of bioinformatics.

Underwater Sensor Update

Yesterday, I posted a press release about Bridget Benson, the computer science PhD student who is building energy efficient underwater sensor networks that are badly needed by scientists who study watery environments. She is also the SoCal volunteer coordinator for Reef Check, a nonprofit that includes volunteer divers in their surveys of the Southern California coast.

Reef Check has a survey this Saturday in La Jolla Cove. But it looks like Bridget won't be there. Instead, she will run the survey the following weekend up in Palos Verdes, off the coast of Los Angeles.

I posted a photo from the Reef Check photo gallery showing Bridget Benson in her dive gear. Photo credit: Reef Check.

Underwater Sensor Nets: Sonar on the Cheap...sort of

Ever since (and I'm well sure before) the days of sending messages in bottles across the sea, it has been hard to get information to travel through the water. Sure, there are the expensive sonar systems that the Navy uses. But researchers collecting data on coral reefs or kelp beds don't have that kind of budget. A group of information technology pioneers at UC San Diego led by computer science PhD student Bridget Benson are well on their way to a new breed of cheap, reliable nets of underwater sensors for environmental monitoring. Yesterday, computer science professor Ryan Kastner presented some of the teams latest work on figuring out which hardward platforms are the least energy consuming at an IEEE workshop in Rome.

Back here in San Deigo, Bridget Benson, the PhD student leading the project, has an interesting perspective: can see the challenge from two sides, literally. In her spare time, Bridget works as a volunteer coordinator for the nonprofit group Reef Check. In this role, she gets experienced divers to help Reef Check monitor the California coastline. This is the kind of project that nets of underwater sensors could someday help with.


Learn more about Reef Check here. Their next dive in La Jolla cove is this Saturday, May 30.


Electrical engineering undergrad Brian Faunce is the person in the lowest photo of the bunch above.

“In class, you learn a lot of theory, but you don’t learn how to revise a schematic, layout the printed circuit board, assemble the circuit and then perform field tests. I have friends at other schools, and when it comes to internships and projects, they are just not available at other schools the way they are here,” said Faunce.