Union Tribune Story: UCSD part of $1.6 million smart-grid grant

Check out Onell Soto's story in today's San Diego Union Tribune on the new smart-grid grant that UC San Diego is part of.

Two Jacobs School Employees on "40 under 40" List from Urban League of San Diego County

The Urban League of San Diego County, Equal Opportunity Day and Diversity Summit announced its first class of Forty Under 40 awardees on October 1, 2010. Terrance Mayes, director of Engineering Student Services at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering, and Ebonee Williams, Managing Director, Bernard and Sophia Gordon Engineering Leadership Center at the Jacobs School of Engineering, are two of the award winners. (Photos to come.)



The award is intended to introduce young leaders who are playing critical roles in the community and professional arenas within San Diego County.  The Forty Under 40 awards program honors 40 men and women under the age of 40 who have been making headlines in their fields. Read more.

Tau Beta Pi / Computer Science Honor Society Wins Outstanding Chapter Award

UCSD's engineering honor society, Tau Beta Pi, was awarded the "nation's most outstanding chapter" award, which they also won in 2007.
The chapter was established in 1994 and with more than 150 members is one of the most visible and active student organizations on campus. The chapter provides community service and works with other student organizations to plan campus-wide events. TBP offers free tutoring for all engineering students in lower and upper division engineering classes, and sends members to local grade schools each week to teach basic science and engineering principles using experiments.

Read through the chapter's calendar of events to get a sense of the whirlwind of activities that the members organize each month. Coming up is the LED Pumpkin Carving Contest, IM Dodgeball, a Kayaking excursion, several community service opportunities, and its spring ThinkGREEN! event to encourage high school students to pursue careers in sustainable and renewable energy.
Tau Beta Pi is open to the top eighth of juniors and top fifth of seniors at the Jacobs School. To be initiated, prospective members are required to put in 15 hours of work for the honor society. Members are encouraged to continue participating in activities long after the minimum service requirement is met.

2010 Programming Contest

On October 16, 2010, UCSD students participatedin the Fall 2010 UCSD Programming Contest over the course of five hours. 36 students participated and 20 pizzas were consumed. Below is a summary of thecontest, more details (photos and detailed results) are available at: http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/groups/UCSDProgramContest/fa10/results/

The contest consisted of 8 problems, and the top honors go to Elliott Slaughter for solving 5 problems with a combined time of 420 minutes. Junior David Michon placed second, and Haoxi Fang,Van Lam, Andrew Chen, and Matt Der rounded out the top six, each with 4 problems solved. Below is a list of the top fifteen placers in the contest:
1 Elliott Slaughter
2 David Michon
3 Haoxi Fang
4 Van Lam
5 Andrew Chen
6 Matt Der
7 Ellison Bayan
8 Justin Yuhsong Huang
9 Yimai Fang *
10 Rohan Anil
11 Timothy Martin
12 Daniel Price
13 Eric Dorman
14 Yixin Zhu
15 Tim Wheeler
16 Adrian Teng-Amnuay

* unofficial contestant

Thanks go to Mike Dini and The Dini Group for providingthe prizes, food and drink, and support for the contest. Michael Vrable, Mohammad Moghimi, Do-Kyum Kim,Keliang Zhao and Faculty Coach Michael Taylor ran the contest, with help from UCSD Programming Team Co-Captain Justin Huang, CSES President Chris Moghbel, and other folks at CSES. Additional results (and photos) can be viewed here: http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/groups/UCSDProgramContest/fa10/results/

StarCAVE Up for an "Immy"

Today is the last day to vote for the Calit2 StarCAVE for an immersive Technology Award / You can vote! (one vote per IP address). http://www.immersivetech.org/summit/immys/

Learn more from the Calit2 story from Tiffany Fox



San Diego, Oct. 4, 2010 -- Immersive virtual reality has been a cornerstone of Calit2’s research into scientific visualization from the institute’s very beginning almost 10 years ago. The latest validation of that research may be handed out on Oct. 21 in Los Angeles, when Calit2 could win one of the inaugural Immersive Tech Awards, dubbed the ‘Immys’.

Jacobs School Engineers at "SUPERMATH: Better Living Through Analytics"

SUPERMATH, is a one day conference in San Diego bringing together national analytics experts and business practitioners across industries for a day of thought provoking presentations and discussions to inspire, educate and collaborate.

Jacobs School engineers will be participating in participate in the SUPERMATH "Expo and Neighborhoods."

Elelctrical and computer engineering PhD student Anup Doshi will present some of his work on innovative approaches to making future automobiles safer and “intelligent.”

Yuvraj Agarwal (Ph.D.'09), a Research Scientist in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering will be highlighting various aspects of SleepServer, a software-only approach for reducing energy consumption.

Elelctrical and computer engineering PhD student Luke Barrington will describe his work on the Valley of the Khans virtual exploration project.

Conference details below:

On November 10, 2010, San Diego Software Industry Council (SDSIC.org) will be hosting a first-of-its-kind event – "SUPERMATH: Better Living Through Analytics” - to showcase and celebrate the history and innovation of analytics technologies and applications. The invitation-only conference will also include an Expo open to the public, to demonstrate how analytics affect our lives today and tomorrow.

There are four Neighborhoods for participation:
• Healthcare and Medicine
• Energy and CleanTech
• Security, Fraud and Risk
• Social Networks and Marketing/Sales

The Conference will be held at the Del Mar Marriott and the expo is open to the public. The rest of the conference requires paid admission.

CAPTCHA Project on NPR Weekend Edition

The August 2010 CAPTCHA paper from computer scientists at UC San Diego made it's way to NPR's Weekend Edition on Sunday. Listen to the story, "Spammers Use the Human Touch To Avoic CAPTCHA"

The paper referenced in the NPR story is below:
Re: CAPTCHAs -- Understanding CAPTCHA-Solving from an Economic Context, by Marti Motoyama, Kirill Levchenko, Chris Kanich, Damon McCoy, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Stefan Savage from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at UC San Diego, published in Proceedings of the USENIX Security Symposium, Washington, D.C., August 2010.


Savage talks big picture about CAPTCHAs and hits one of the findings from the paper:
 

"On the one hand, CAPTCHAs do not keep the bad guys out, but at the same time, they actually are effective at keeping the problem in control," Savage says.


Below is the abstract to the paper Re: CAPTCHAs -- Understanding CAPTCHA-Solving from an Economic Context:
Reverse Turing tests, or CAPTCHAs, have become an ubiquitous defense used to protect open Web resources from being exploited at scale. An effective CAPTCHA resists existing mechanistic software solving, yet can be solved with high probability by a human being. In response, a robust solving ecosystem has emerged, reselling both automated solving technology and realtime human labor to bypass these protections. Thus, CAPTCHAs can increasingly be understood and evaluated in purely economic terms; the market price of a solution vs the monetizable value of the asset being protected.We examine the market-side of this question in depth, analyzing the behavior and dynamics of CAPTCHA-solving service providers, their price performance, and the underlying labor markets driving this economy.