Luke Barrington in Atlantic Wire's "5 Predictions for the Future of Music"

Carl Frazen included Luke Barrington's research into iTunes Genius (and how the UC San Diego homegrown algorithms can create equally good playlists by just analying audio content and not using any collaborative filtering).

Watch the related video on how the same music-tagging algorithms create at UC San Diego are being used to create a new kind of music search engine.

UC San Diego Ranks 6th in Nation for R&D Dollars

The University of California, San Diego again ranks sixth among top U.S. universities in federal research and development expenditures for fiscal-year 2008, with $491 million in federal R&D money and $842 million in total R&D expenditures. The numbers were announced by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Johns Hopkins University led the survey, followed by UC San Francisco, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the University of Michigan (all campuses combined), UCLA, UC San Diego, Duke University, the University of Washington, the University of Pennsylvania, and Ohio State University. UC Davis and UC Berkeley ranked 16th and 18th, respectively.

UC San Diego’s faculty and alumni have created nearly 200 start-up companies, including many regional biotech companies. According to a recent study of the university’s economic impact, UC San Diego contributes more than $7.2 billion in direct and indirect spending and personal income each year to the California economy, generating more than 39,000 jobs. Read the full press release, written by UC San Diego’s Paul K. Mueller.

The North County Times covered this story, and included a nice graph.

Play the facebook music discovery games

HerdIt is fun...and it's a total chance to brush up on your 1980s music trivia while on Facebook.

New Music Search Engine on the Way

New Music Search Technologies: Video

Electrical engineers at UC San Diego have created a new breed of search engine for music (as well as Facebook games that provide researchers with the information needed to improve the new search engine). This video highlights the capabilities of the new music search engine (http://herdit.org/music/index.html), which will be available for beta testing next week. Register for the music search engine beta test at: http://herdit.org/music/





Watch the same video on YouTube:



Help Luke Barrington out: Play his music discovery games on Facebook:



If you only have 15 seconds, watch the video below:

Digital Signs for Emergencies, Environmental Monitoring and Much More

Researchers from the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) are installing a number of LED digital signs in classrooms throughout UC San Diego, with the eventual goal of outfitting the entire campus with the notification system. Not only are the scrolling signs capable of broadcasting tailor-made information specific to certain classrooms via embedded computers, they will eventually alert faculty, staff and students during emergency situations. The sensor-equipped signs will also collect data pertaining to the classroom environment, such as light, temperature, humidity, particle concentration, and even carbon dioxide levels.

The digital signs project is a partnership between Calit2's Circuits Lab, the Jacobs School of Engineering's Teams in Engineering Service (TIES) program and UCSD's DEMROES group, or Decision Making Using Real-Time Observations for Environmental Sustainability, which operates a sophisticated network of wireless meteorological sensors to collect a variety of atmospheric data.

Calit2's Tiffany Fox wrote this article. Read the full story here.

Read the full story in Spanish here.

Photo caption (above): A student listens to a lecture in Center Hall, where four of the LED digital signs have been installed. The signs are capable of broadcasting tailor-made information specific to certain classrooms and will eventually alert faculty, staff and students during emergency situations.

TV Refresh Rate Research

"Now, a recent study by researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) claims that 240Hz televisions could indeed be a smarter buy than previously thought."

This is a quote from a recent news story in the Korea Times entitled "Samsung, LG Debate on TV Refresh Rate," by Kim Yoo-chul. The story describes research that Electrical engineering professor Truong Nguyen and electrical engineering graduate student Stanley Chan have submitted to the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing ICASSP 2010.

Read the full Korea Times story here.

Programming Contest Preliminaries

On October 17, 2009, UCSD students competed head-to-head during the Fall 2009 UCSD Programming Contest, pumping out code over the course of five hours.

Top honors and $1000 go to first-year CSE Graduate Student Do-Kyum Kim for solving 4 problems with a combined time of 616 minutes. Sophomore David Michon placed second, also solving 4 problems. Haoxi Fang, Jason Obenberger and Eric Levine rounded out the top 5.

The following are the top finishers:

>> 1 Do-Kyum Kim
>> 2 Dave Michon
>> 3 Haoxi Fang
>> 4 Jason Obenberger
>> 5 Eric Levine
>> 6 James Lintern
>> 7 Eric Slaughter
>> 8 Jeffrey Lu
>> 9 Van Lam
>> 10 Justin Huang
>> 11 Brian McMahon
>> 12 Cassidy Queen
>> 13 Timothy Martin
>> 14 Christopher Rebert
>> 15 David Lluncor
>> 16 Allan Souza
>> 17 Avinash Ananthakrishnan
>> 18 Scott Baar
>> 19 Norberto Salazar
>> 20 Virginia Tice

Thanks go to Mike Dini and The Dini Group for providing the prizes, pizza and soda. Michael Vrable and Michael Taylor ran the contest, with help from undergraduate Jesse Weinstein. UCSD Programming Team Captain Elliott Slaughter and UCSD Programming Team Setup Czar Justin Huang created the score-boarding infrastructure.

The top students will go on to compete in the ACM Southern California
Regionals on November 7.

More details, and photos, are available at http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/groups/UCSDProgramContest/fa09/results/.