Gaming Site Profiles Music Search Project

IGN Music profiled the electrical engineering music search engine project from the Jacobs School of Engineering.

Games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band rank players based on how good they are at replicating a musical performance,while Herd It gives props based on how good they are at predicting the "herd's" opinion on the style, emotion, instrumentation, etc. of music. All of this happens in realtime via Facebook -- check out http://www.blogger.com/www.herdit.org.

They also embedded the music search engine YouTube video.

IGN is a leading Internet media and services provider focused on the videogame and entertainment enthusiast markets...lots of interested eyes!

Carbon Nanotubes for Cell Phone Batteries?

In a recent paper in Applied Physics Letters, Prabhakar Bandaru, a professor in the UCSD Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, along with graduate student Mark Hoefer, have found that artificially introduced defects in carbon nanotubes can aid the development of "supercapacitors" that could be used in batteries and battery charging technologies of the future.

Read Andrea Siedsma's full press release here.

Walking AT work with "Active Desk"

Ernesto Ramirez has designed and built "Active Desk" — a raised work station connected to a standard treadmill that allows him to walk while he works. Ramirez is affiliated with the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) at UC San Diego. (Read the full story by Tiffany Fox from Calit2, excerpted below).

His project stems from a body of scientific research that links sedentary behavior (like sitting at a desk all day) with an elevated risk of mortality from all causes and from cardiovascular disease.

Currently located on the sixth floor of Calit2's headquarters in Atkinson Hall, the work station consists of a $200 Ikea desk and a $100 treadmill that allows the user to control his or her walking speed. Ramirez says his average pace is 1.5 miles per hour — fast enough to burn about 2.54 calories per minute, but not so fast that it makes him too breathless to have a conversation.

Caleb, the Data Mining Undergrad

Below is an email from a Jacobs School undergraduate who is taking advantage of the many research opportunities available to undergraduates at the Jacobs School and at UC San Diego, more generally.

My name is Caleb Sotelo; I'm a third year in pursuit of a BS in Computer Science, and an undergrad member of the Gordon Engineering Leadership Center. This past summer I was funded by CAMP (California Alliance for Minority Participation) through UCSD's Academic Enrichment Programs office to find and engage in a research project for [CSE] 199 credit.

I decided I wanted to pursue data mining, without any substantial knowledge of the discipline. Finding a project was as easy as searching the CSE website for professors by their research interests. I met with computer science professor Charles Elkan, who recommended a project based on my experience with Java and software engineering.

I was privileged enough to receive a travel scholarship to present my research at the SACNAS National Conference in Dallas, TX, where I received an award for Outstanding Contribution and Research Presentation in the area of Computer and Information Technology. The software is now nearly release-ready, and we're hoping to submit a paper to a Machine Learning journal by the end of the month. My experience researching as a UCSD undergrad been excellent.

My mentor, Charles Elkan, has entrusted me with much responsibility and is eager to provide me with advice, resources, and more, and programs like AEP and SACNAS are invested in my success. The Jacobs School of Engineering is a top-notch engineering school and a rewarding place to invest your time; I would highly recommend taking 199 [Independent Study for Undergraduates] to any engineering student to get your feet wet.

Abstract below:

A GRAPHICAL INTERFACE FOR VISUAL DISCOVERY OF PATTERNS IN DATA


Caleb D. Sotelo, Department of Computer Science & Engineering, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA.
A typical challenge in data mining is the discovery of patterns that are actually interesting to the user, as opposed to patterns that are coincidental or already well-known. A solution to this problem is to create a system that allows the user to fluidly explore the rule space and facilitates discovery by users of significant patterns. One such system was proposed and implemented by Lei Zhang and others [1] for Motorola Inc., but to our knowledge no similar system exists as open source software. Rapidminer is a widely-used, highly functional, and robust open source data mining environment written in Java. We are developing a graphical interface extension to Rapidminer that will allow for intuitive and user-friendly pattern exploration, inspired by the Motorola system. Future work will add novel interactive capabilities.
REFERENCES
[1] Zhang, L., Liu, B., Benkler, J., Zhou C. “Finding actionable knowledge via automated comparison.” IEEE ICDE, 2009.

Removing fog from video

Sunny San Diego has a foggy marine-layer side that never gets mentioned on national tv. The only way to get rid of the marine layer on some days is to drive east until it eventually disappears. When you have fog on your video, driving towards Julian is not an option...but that is where research from the video processing lab in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering comes in.

Kris Gibson gave me a quick description of his de-hazing for video at the poster session at the Center for Wireless Communications (CWC) recent Research Review (PDF of agenda).

Single Sensor in Your Camera? Your next camera might benefit from this kind of research...

Future single-sensor cameras will surely be better at sampling all the light bands (red, green, blue) even through there is just one sensor. Ankit Jain is an electrical engineering graduate student at UC San Diego who is working on this issue.

Watch him give you a snapshot of the issue, in less than two minutes!

Ankit talked to me at last week's poster session for the Center for Wireless Communications (CWC) research review. I also talked to Cynthia Taylor "Will Starbucks Serve Servers? aka Thin-Client Computing with your Skinny Latte?"

and
Video Stabilization with Haleh Azartash

Mini-Robots on KPBS Radio

The ocean robots that Jorge Cortes is designing control systems for wound up on KPBS radio yesterday. This attention comes on the heels of a pair of NSF grants...one to the mechanical and aerospace engineers developing the control systems, and one to the Scripps Insititution of Oceanography researchers who are developing the drifting robots.

The thing to remember about these robots is that they can't really move forward or backward. They can move up and down, but to move horizontally, they are at the mercy of the ocean currents...kind of like the current in Finding Nemo.

Photo credit: Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.