Interdigital Innovation Challenge / Vote!

The InterDigital Innovation Challenge (I2C) is an opportunity for individuals or teams from any North American college or university to compete for $175,000 in prizes by testing out proposals and prototypes for wireless technologies before a panel of esteemed judges from industry and academia.

The Jacobs School of Engineering has a team in the competition. Public voting closes on April 30.

I voted for the Mobile 3D Video System.

Mobile 3D Video System (UC San Diego team)

Application Areas:
* Radio Signal Propogation and Processing
* Compression and Data Management Techniques


Quick Pitch

We propose to develop a system delivering immersive 3D video on mobile platforms, with applications in gaming, e-commerce, entertainment

Abstract

The prominence of 3D video technology has skyrocketed. The 2009 movie Avatar in 3D became the highest grossing movie of all time. Such a movie requires left and right views of a scene. Many video games which provide a 3D experience require multiple views of a scene. Such data is costly to store and to transmit. This project studies how to efficiently compress multiple-view video data, how to allow the scene to be viewed from any angle at different levels of precision, and how to reliably transmit the data over mobile wireless channels. This project has important applications in consumer electronics, e-commerce, entertainment, health care, science, and education.


The Team

The interdisciplinary project team consists of four faculties in the ECE Dept. at UC San Diego: Prof. Larry Milstein, an expert in communication systems, and cross-layer optimization; Prof. Pamela Cosman, an expert in image and video processing over network, and cross-layer optimization; Prof. Sujit Dey, an expert in multimedia networking and embedded systems; and Prof. Truong Nguyen, an expert in 3D video processing and communications. Our interdisciplinary team is uniquely qualified to address all theoretical and practical issues, proposed in this project.

We spent some time with Research Expo 2012 grand prize winner Carolyn Schutt after the April 12 competition and festivities to talk about her research and other student experiences. Watch our video on YouTube. Carolyn is a PhD student in bioengineering here at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. She entered her work in the nanoengineering category and won the school-wide Rudee Outstanding Poster Award and best poster for the Department of NanoEngineering for her research developing a new imaging technique that could lead to highly-sensitive light imaging deeper inside the body, improving the way we diagnose breast cancer. Read our full news release here.

The Jacobs School's in the Spotlight

The shake table at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego and PIs Tara Hutchinson, Jose Restrepo and Joel Conte were featured on all three major networks' nightly news April 17. Here are the stories:

NBC Nightly News

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

CBS Evening News

ABC World News

Additional media hits include:
USA Today

BBC News

The New York Times

Bloomberg BusinessWeek

Popular Mechanics 

Huffington Post

Daily Mail, U.K.

Engineers Put Five-story Buildling on Shake Table to Test for Earthquake and Fire Readiness

What happens when you put a fully equipped five-story building, which includes an intensive care unit, a surgery suite, piping and air conditioning, fire barriers and even a working elevator, through a series of high-intensity earthquakes?

Structural engineers at the University of California, San Diego are about to find out during a two-week series of tests conducted on the world’s largest outdoor shake table at the Englekirk Structural Engineering Center. The overarching goal of the $5 million project, which is supported by a coalition of government agencies, foundations and industry partners, is to ascertain what needs to be done to make sure that high-value buildings, such as hospitals and data centers, remain operational after going through an earthquake. Researchers also will assess whether the building’s fire barriers have been affected by the shakes.

More here

Shu Chien Honored by Columbia University

Bioengineering professor Shu Chien is being honored by Columbia University with an honorary Doctor of Science.

Columbia University will confer the honorary degree at commencement exercises on Wednesday, May 16. Chien is University Professor of bioengineering and medicine at UC San Diego and Director of the UC San Diego Institute of Engineering in Medicine.

From the Columbia University press release:

Shu Chien, Doctor of Science: As a doctor, researcher and professor, Chien has made seminal contributions to fields of biology, medicine and engineering. His primary areas of research are cardiovascular physiology, molecular and cellular bioengineering, and stem cell regulation. He is the author of more than 500 peer-reviewed scientific articles and editor of 11 books. He has been a leader of numerous professional societies and the recipient of countless awards, including the National Medal of Science, which he received from President Obama in 2011.

Learn more about Chien's research in this Jacobs School of Engineering story celebrating his National Medal of Science.

In San Diego on April 13? Shu Chien is giving the Richard Skalak Memorial Lecture today, April 13 from 4-6 p.m. at the Calit2 Atkinson Hall. Register here

Junkyard Derby 2011 Videos

Thanks to recent Jacobs School alumnus Wiseley Wu for sending the link to the Junkyard Derby 2011 YouTube playlist.

Be sure to check out the time lapse of the build process (second video...first is the playlist w/ all the videos).

Nanoengineer Liangfang Zhang wins American Chemical Society's Unilever Award for 2012

The American Chemical Society has awarded Lianfang Zhang, professor in the Department of NanoEngineering, the ACS Colloid and Surface Division Unilever Award for 2012. This award was established in 2004 to recognize work in the field of colloid or surfactant science by North American researchers in the early stages of their careers. The award recognizes Zhang’s research on biomimetic nanomaterials that integrate synthetic colloids with natural cellular membrane materials, and biologically responsive nanostructures for drug delivery.

For example, Zhang’s lab has shown that nanoparticles stuffed with a cocktail of cancer-fighting drugs can be hidden from the body’s immune system by simply wrapping them in the membrane of a red blood cell. His red blood cell membrane cloaked nanoparticles were featured in a front-page story by UT San Diego last November and in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Nanoparticles are less than 100 nanometers in size, about the same size as a virus. “This is the first work that combines the natural cell membrane with a synthetic nanoparticle for drug delivery applications.” said Zhang, who is also affiliated with Moores UCSD Cancer Center.

Zhang is also working on biologically responsive nanostructures that offer a new way to deliver antimicrobial agents directly to the site of bacterial infections such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. Zhang’s team use phospholipid liposomes to deliver the antibiotics. But liposomes by themselves wouldn’t last long enough to deliver an effective treatment so Zhang has stabilized them with chitosan-coated gold nanoparticles.

You can learn more about the Zhang Research Group’s gold nanoparticle-stabilized liposomes for bacterial skin infections at the April 12 Research Expo 2012 when Soracha Thamphiwatana, a nanoengineering graduate student in Zhang’s lab, will present a poster on this research, which was published last year in Chemical & Engineering News.

The Unilever Award is one of the most competitive and prestigious national awards offered by the ACS Division of Colloid and Surface Chemistry. Zhang will receive the award this summer during the 86^th ACS Colloids and Surface Science Symposium in Baltimore June 12.