UCSD Entrepreneur Challenge Final Business Plan Competition Prizes Increased to $100k

UCSD Entrepreneur Challenge Final Business Plan Competition Prizes Increased to $100k

Always striving to create the most unique entrepreneur environment, the UCSD Entrepreneur Challenge has year over year been able to expand it's prize offerings.  This year they are excited to be able to increase our $80k prize package to $100k and expand the resources they are able to provide to aspiring entrepreneurs.

(Be sure to also check out the Startup Job Fair on Monday May 9, organized by the UCSD Entrepreneur Challenge).

The $100k in prizes offered will encompass 
1) Cash
2) Legal Services provided by DLA Piper
3) Incubation Services 
4) Financial Services


The Deadline for submission is Friday May 13 at 11:59pm.  Submissions consist of a 1500 word Executive Summary and 15 slide Powerpoint deck.
The top 5 submissions will pitch live on June 1st at the Neurosciences Institute Auditorium for our final Judging Panel:


Ernest Rady--Namesake Rady School of Management, Rady Childrens Hospital
Saeed Amidi--Founder Plug and Play Tech Center--seed funders of Paypal
Gail Naughton--Dean of the College of Business Administration at SDSU
Leo Spiegel--Managing Partner Mission Ventures
Blaise Barrelet--Founder and CEO Anametrix and WebSideStory (acquired by Adobe for $1.8 Billion)
Mary Ann Beyster--President for the Foundation of Enterprise Development
Bruce Breslau--Senior Vice President Market Manager at Union Bank of California

SUBMIT HERE
Submission Guidlines can be found here

 *NOTE THAT ALL E. CHALLENGE COMPETITIONS ARE SEPARATE AND INDEPENDENT

"UCSD Entrepreneur Challenge is bringing to light the vibrant, yet underground entrepreneurial scene in San Diego. Thanks to programs like these, we are sure to see the growth of San Diego as a well known entrepreneurial hot spot. Thank you UCSD Entrepreneur Challenge."

--Daniel Bonsoms (Babson College--Ranked #1 in Entrepreneurship)

Weekend Reading from Jan Kleissl: Convective heat transfer on leeward building walls in an urban environment: Measurements in an outdoor scale model

New paper from environmental engineering professor Jan Kleissl and Jacobs School PhD student Anders Notrott (and A. Inagaki, M. Kanda from Tokyo Institute of Technology).

"Convective heat transfer on leeward building walls in an urban environment: Measurements in an outdoor scale mode". It appears this week online in the International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer.

Abstract: Convection over the building envelope is a critical determinant of building cooling load, but parameterization of convection in building energy models and urban computational fluid dynamics models is challenging. An experimental investigation intended to clarify the heat transfer mechanism of a convective wall boundary layer (WBL) on a leeward, vertical building wall was conducted at the Comprehensive Outdoor Scale Model (COSMO) facility for urban atmospheric research. Comparison of mean and turbulent temperature fluctuation intensity profiles showed that the dominant regime of the WBL flow was turbulent natural convection. Implications for parameterization of convective heat fluxes in urban areas are discussed.

Notrott and Kleissl worked together on the California solar map project: Engineers Help Power Solar Use by 'Mapping' the Sun

Startup Job Fair / UCSD Entrepreneur Challenge

The first annual Startup Job Fair is this Monday May 9th, 2011 from 5PM to 8PM.
Where? UCSD Student Services Center, Multipurpose Room

The student-organizers of the event expect 30 startup companies to attend, including:

BrightScope, Client Radius, SOOVO, Open Candy, Edge Tech Wireless, Zenobia Therapeutics, Precision Point, Cloud Canvas and Congionics.

The organizers give special thanks to:
CONNECT, CommNexus San Diego, Tech Coast Angels,  von Liebig Center and BIOCOM.

The Startup Job Fair is hosted by the UC San Diego Entrepreneur Challenge and Ansir Innovation Center

Bioengineer Kun Zhang Wins Stem Cell Grant to Study Stem Cell Mutations

Bioengineering professor Kun Zhang took home one of the 8 CIMR grants that went to UC San Diego today. (Read the original press release by Debra Kain.)

The summary of Zhang's newly funded project:

Kun Zhang, assistant professor, Department of Bioengineering, Jacobs School of Engineering and the UCSD Institute for Genomic Medicine, was awarded $1,382,140 to study mutations associated with stem cell reprogramming and differentiation. By understanding the functional consequences of mutations that can arise during the course of reprogramming a patient’s own stem cells into pluripotent stem cells, the researchers hope to clear one of the biggest hurdles in the field of hIPS cells – the risk of cancer.  The scientists will comprehensively identify genetic changes in protein coding sequences, or exomes, through large-scale DNA sequencing, with the goal of better understanding of how such mutations occur and propagate. Read about Zhang's recent Nature paper on stem cell mutations.

Learn about Zhang's recent Nature paper.

Media coverage from the Zhang Nature paper:
Nature News & Views
MIT Technology Review
San Diego Union Tribune
Los Angeles Times
NPR Science Friday

MicroMouse the Maze Solving Robot / Cool video from 2010

Here is text and video from an electrical engineering undergrad's blog post regarding a maze-solving robot designed and built here at the Jacobs School of Engineering by the UCSD IEEE Micromouse team:

We took a mouse to UCLA last weekend for an unofficial competition. It was actually a much more interesting competition than the official IEEE southwest area competition since several bots actually solved the maze. The maze was more reasonable than the SW area maze. Even though it was only 13x13 instead of 16x16, the walls were properly aligned and well-programmed bots didn’t have many problems getting stuck. This is a video of our mouse’s shortest solution path. Unfortunately, we only took 2nd place since one of the teams from UCLA had a much smaller and more maneuverable robot.

Junkyard Derby Prep

Below is an email that gives an inside look at Junkyard Derby, one of the great Jacobs School of Engineering annual events.

If you've never participated in the Junkyard Derby before, I can assure you that 15 seconds is a VERY long time, especially when other teams get all the best junk you wanted.

Dear Derby Junkies,

If you have done so already, thank you for registering for the 2011 Junkyard Derby. If you haven't done so yet, go do it now! Don't miss the biggest and funnest engineering event of the year. 

As a friendly reminder, all payments and registrations are due May 6th.

Junk Collections:

Do you want a head start at grabbing junk? 2 easy steps:

1. Attend 3 out of the 4 Saturday Junk Collections. The dates for the Junk Collections coming up are April 30th, May 7th, and May 14th, 2PM-5PM in Regents Parking Lot P705. You must help out at the Junk Collection for at least an hour each in order to be counted toward the head start. Make sure you sign in and out for your team.
2. A 15-second head start in grabbing junk, and DECaF points if you sign in for your org.

If you've never participated in the Junkyard Derby before, I can assure you that 15 seconds is a VERY long time, especially when other teams get all the best junk you wanted. 

Also, it is very important for as many teams as possible to attend these junk collections. The junk we collect in the upcoming weekends is all the junk YOU guys will get to use at the Derby. So the more people that go collect junk, the more and "better quality" junk you will get for your cars. 

How to build a Derby car:

Never participated in Junkyard Derby before? Worried about the seemingly insurmountable task of using power tools for some hands-on engineering? TESC has got you covered.

Come to the TESC GBM on May 4th at 7:30 PM in EBU2-584 (room subject to change).

Hope to see you at the Junk Collection tomorrow!

--

GreenDroid Research in MIT Technology Review

Research led by computer science professors Michael Taylor and Steven Swanson is covered in Technology Review today by Tom Simonite.

The first paragraph from the Technology Review GreenDroid project is below:

A processor etched with circuits tailored to the most widely used apps on Android phones could help extend the devices' battery life. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego have created software that scans the operating system and a collection of the most popular apps and then generates a processor design tailored to their demands. The result can be 11 times more efficient than today's typical general-purpose smart-phone chip, says Michael Taylor, who leads the GreenDroid project with colleague Steven Swanson.

The Jacobs School covered this work back in August when the UC San Diego computer scientists presented at HotChips 2010.

The first two paragraphs of the Jacobs School of Engineering GreenDroid story are below:

A new smartphone chip prototype under development at the University of California, San Diego will improve smartphone efficiency by making use of “dark silicon” – the underused transistors in modern microprocessors. On August 23, UC San Diego computer scientists presented GreenDroid, the new smartphone chip prototype at the HotChips symposium in Palo Alto, CA.


Dark silicon refers to the huge swaths of silicon transistors on today’s chips that are underused because there is not enough power to utilize all the transistors at the same time. The new GreenDroid chip prototype from computer scientists at UC San Diego will deliver improved performance through specialized processors fashioned from dark silicon. These processors are designed to run heavily used chunks of code, called “hot code,” in Google’s Android smartphone platform.