Facetime with Facebook

UC San Diego students and faculty got some quality “face time” with Facebook last Thursday. At a morning lecture in the Calit2 auditorium, Jeff Rothschild (photo, right), Facebook's vice president of technology, spoke about scaling, or how a growing company addresses technological and organizational challenges. Watch the video of Rothschild at: http://video-jsoe.ucsd.edu/asx/JeffRothschildFacebook.asx

Facebook’s Taner Halicioglu (photo, left) also came to campus. Halicioglu earned some of his computer science “street cred” here at the Jacobs School. He graduated from Revelle College in 1996, and joined Facebook as the company’s first outside hire, in 2004.

Below are a few more details from Halicioglu’s talk, as reported in Roxana Popescu’s “@ UCSD” story. http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/thisweek/2009/10/12_facebook.asp

“He [Halicioglu] recalled how he ‘pretty much lived in the data center’ in his first months with the company and summarized some of the company’s core principals with playful alliterations. Simplicity is sublime. Abstraction is awesome. Data is delicious.”

Facebook representatives also participated in a series of technical meetings with UCSD faculty and students, hosted by Amin Vahdat, a professor of computer science and engineering and director of the Center for Networked Systems at the Jacobs School of Engineering.

Tijuana River photographs by Founding Dean of Jacobs School on Display at Calit2

Lea Rudee—the founding dean of the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering—is an accomplished photographer whose work Tijuana River is part of a seven-artist show focused on hot-button issues tied to the border dividing San Diego and Tijuana.

Tijuana River documents the river’s meandering path across the border and its many roles as drainage creek, city water supply, border crossing obstacle, and preserved salt marsh. “In less than 100 miles, the Tijuana River has many identities,” said Rudee in an interview with Calit2’s Doug Ramsey. (Read the full Calit2 press release here.)

“Tijuana/San Diego: Cooperation and Confrontation at the Interface” opens officially on Oct. 15 in the gallery@calit2 on the first floor of Atkinson Hall on the University of California, San Diego campus. The gallery is part of the UC San Diego division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2).

Rudee noted that on the U.S. side, most of the water becomes part of San Diego’s water supply. “On the Mexican side, some of the water serves Tijuana, but occasional floods produce damage to downstream development, causing resentment by the local inhabitants.” It took Rudee over four years to document on film every stretch of the Tijuana River.

Rudee is a professor emeritus in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and former trustee and president of San Diego’s Museum of Photographic Arts.

Tijuana River is part of the Calit2 exhibition “Tijuana/San Diego: Cooperation and Confrontation at the Interface” that deals head-on with politics, immigration, the environment and other hot-button issues - through the lens and sensibility of artists working in multiple media.

Exhibition Hours
October 5-November 25, 2009 Monday-Friday, 11am-5pm* gallery @ calit2 Atkinson Hall University of California, San Diego 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093 Map & Directions: http://atkinsonhall.calit2.net/directions/ http://gallery.calit2.net/ http://www.calit2.net/ * [Note: Closed Nov. 11 in observance of Veterans Day]

Panel Discussion*
October 15, 2009, 4-5pm
Calit2 Theater, Atkinson Hall, UC San Diego
Gallery Reception*
October 15, 2009 5-7pm
Lobby and Gallery, Atkinson Hall, UC San Diego

* Note: Panel discussion and gallery reception open to the public; RSVP requested to Trish Stone, Gallery Coordinator, tstone@ucsd.edu or (858) 336-6456 .

Stem Cell Techniques Advance Liver Research

UC San Diego researchers are using stem cell technologies in order to do the basic research necessary to develop treatments for liver fibrosis—which according to information on PubMed is “the excessive accumulation of extracellular matrix proteins including collagen that occurs in most types of chronic liver diseases.”

Put another way, liver fibrosis is the formation of scar tissue in response to liver damage. Hepatic stellate cells--the major cell type involved in liver fibrosis--are responsible for secreting collagen that produces a fibrous scar, which can lead to cirrhosis.

The high-throughput cellular array technology developed by UCSD researchers systematically assesses and probes the complex relationships between hepatic stellate cells and components of their microenvironment. The scientists found that certain proteins are critical in regulating activation of hepatic stellate cells and that the proteins influence one another’s actions on the cells. The findings were published in a paper entitled “Investigating the role of the extracellular environment in modulating hepatic stellate cell biology with array combinatorial microenvironments” in the September 2009 issue of Integrative Biology. Authors: David A. Brafman, Samuele de Minicis, Ekihiro Seki, Kevan D. Shah, Dayu Teng, David Brenner , Karl Willert and Shu Chien.

Read more here:
http://www.jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/news/news_releases/release.sfe?id=895

This interdisciplinary research project involved both Dr. Shu Chien, Jacobs School bioengineering professor and Director of the Institute of Engineering Medicine at UCSD; and Dr. David Brenner, Vice Chancellor for Health Sciences and the Dean of the UCSD School of Medicine.

Computer Science Alum "Building" Rome in a Day

Computer scientists around the world are working on various projects that involve automated reconstruction of 3-D images from photos pulled off the Web. One of the researchers working in this area is Sameer Agarwal, who earned his computer science PhD here at the Jacobs School of Engineering. Agarwal is now Acting Assistant Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington.

National Geographic recently profiled Agarwal's "building-Rome-in-a-day" work. Read the story at http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/09/090924-flickr-rome-build-day.html

Sameer Agarwal earned his PhD in the Computer Vision Laboratory at UC San Diego, where Serge Belongie was his advisor. At UCSD, Agarwal worked on a similar project--from pictures to three dimensions--with Department of Computer Science and Engineering PhD student Manmohan Chandrakar (who just started a post-doc at UC Berkeley with Prof. Ravi Ramamoorthi). Excerpt from that 2008 story below:

Your pictures of the Grand Canyon, Times Square or other destinations may be pretty good, but wouldn’t it be nice to show them off in three dimensions? An award-winning 3D reconstruction algorithm designed by a team of computer science researchers from UC San Diego brings this dream within the grasp of reality.

This research gets at the heart of “autocalibration,” a well-studied, fundamental problem in computer vision. Autocalibration aims to recover the three dimensional structure of a scene using only its images, acquired from cameras whose internal settings and spatial orientations are unknown.

Cybersecurity Expert and Computer Science Professor Stefan Savage Giving Lecture

Inside the Mind of an Internet Criminal: How Economics Impact Cyber Security

Presented by: Stefan Savage, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering University of California, San Diego

Program Overview

When asked why he robbed banks, Willie Sutton famously responded, "Because that's where the money is." Today, the same sentiment is widely applied to the Internet as well. The tremendous growth of on-line commerce has made Internet users, their computers and their data a valuable target for criminal actors. Compounding this raw opportunity, the Internet itself provides a uniquely efficient capability for perpetrating these crimes at scale. Indeed, over the last decade, the ability to easily compromise large numbers of Internet hosts has emerged as the backbone of a vibrant criminal economy encompassing unsolicited bulk-email, denial-of-service extortion, piracy, phishing and identity theft. Both the underlying platform (botnets) and the vertical applications built upon it (e.g., Spam, credit card theft, etc.) are themselves market commodities, bought and sold on the underground, and under constant pressure to innovate. However, in spite of the fact that virtually all on-line crime is economically motivated, the underlying economics are poorly understood and even more poorly quantified. Absent such knowledge, today's computer security efforts are inherently unfocused -- all the more so due to our inability to evaluate improvements to security on any quantitative basis. In this talk, Dr. Savage will survey this landscape and what is known about the criminal ecosystem underlying it, describe the fundamental asymmetries that have emerged between attacker and defender, and suggest a way forward for the security community.

Who Should Attend

Scientists, engineers, physicians, healthcare leaders, venture capitalists, technology and life sciences professionals, services providers, and business leaders.


About the presenter

Stefan Savage is an associate professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Washington and a B.S. in Applied History from Carnegie-Mellon University. Savage's research interests lie at the intersection of operating systems, networking and computer security and he currently serves as director of the Cooperative Center for Internet Epidemiology and Defenses (CCIED), a joint effort between UCSD and the International Computer Science Institute. Savage is a fairly down-to-earth guy and only writes about himself in the third person when asked.

To attend this event » Register Now!

Questions?

Please contact Bethany Kraynack at 858.964.1312 or bkraynack@connect.org

Structural Engineering Professor and von Liebig Center Featured in San Diego Business Journal

Jacobs School of Engineering structural engineering professor Yu Qiao (pictured above), his startup AgileNano and the UCSD William J. von Liebig Center are featured in a recent San Diego Business Journal story by Ned Randolph.

The subject: Agile Nano--the start-up company that crystalized around the nanotechnology based compressible energy absorbing liquid that Qiao and his team developed.

The material absorbs energy on a near molecular scale instead of relying on the mechanical properties of solid materials. One of the first applications the researchers are looking at: military helmets that better protect against brain trauma. Learn more about AgileNano's technology here.

“San Diego is a very unique community,” says Rosibel Ochoa, von Liebig Center executive director. “We all know each other, and everyone contributes. You can leverage a lot of resources for companies to get started and grow.”

Read the full story here: "Startups Connect With Investors on Their Way to Market"

Read a story in the Jacobs School alumni magazine Pulse about professor Yu Qiao's work in energy conservation and clean tech.

Create Critters. Learn Java. (Help Me Identify the Winning Student)

The UC San Diego undergraduate who created the toughest CSE8B Java critter is name-less. Do you know the winner's name? The needs-to-be-named person speaks at 1 min 40 seconds. Leave the person's name in the comments section of this post, or email me at dbkane AT ucsd DOT edu.

Check out the two minute video that tries to capture the energy and excitement exuding from CSE8B, which Beth Simon taught during the 2009 Winter Quarter. Any other comments on the class? Leave comments!

I shot video on the final lecture, when the students held a tournament in which their "critters" battled each other. To create critters, the students had to understand "inheritance" in the computer science/Java sense of the word. Each student extend the critter class in a unique way, and then the various critters battled.