Beach Ball: 4th of July Icon and CSE 168 Honorable Mention

Computer science grad student Oleg Bisker's final image from the Spring 2010 version of CSE 168 looks like a good kick off to the 4th of July weekend. Bisker created the image using C++ programming code...not a digital camera and Photoshop or Picasa. (Class Web site here.)

Oleg, can you give us any insights on this image? What was trickiest part? What aspects of the image are you most happy about? Any other thoughts?

Update: Oleg pointed me to the CSE 168 Spring 2010 competition Web site where he and the other participants had to provide info on the process that led them to their images.

Oleg wrote:

My inspiration for this project was the much loved San Diego beach. I wanted to do an outdoor scene with some water, sand and a geometrically simple but visually sophisticated beach ball.

Read the rest of the Bisker beach ball story here.

Candle Lights win Graphics Competition

If a picture is worth a 1,000 words, then the computer science corollary must be “a picture is worth a 1,000 lines of C++ code.”

That’s certainly the case for the computer science students at the University of California, San Diego who paint pictures with C++ computer programming code. Computer science professor Henrik Wann Jensen – winner of a 2004 Academy Award for his work on realistic, computer-generated human skin – taught the class: CSE 168: Rendering Algorithms.

For their final project, the Rendering Algorithms students pulled together what they’d learned about generating digital images from their own computer code and painted one final picture with C++.

The image above won the grand prize this year. Computer science master’s students Carlos Dominguez-Caballero and Holmes Futrell created the image. Congrats.

See first and second place and honorable mention images here.

See images from the final presentations here.

Read about how A Picture is Worth a 1,000 lines of C++ Code.

Union Tribune Headline: Stimulus funding flowing at UCSD

Today's San Diego Union Tribune includes a story by Gary Robbins about research funding at UC San Diego.

Federal stimulus money helped UCSD receive a record $1 billion in the past year for research, triggering a boom that’s expected to create more jobs and deepen scientists’ understanding of everything from sickle cell anemia to ocean currents.

The bit about understanding ocean currents refers, at least in part, to a project led by professor Jorge Cortes from the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE). Cortes and colleagues won NSF funding to figure out how to implement the controls systems that keep swarms of underwater ocean robots in the kinds of formations that will enable them to collect the data necessary to figure out what is going on with ocean currents in the area. (read full story here

This project is related to one led by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography here at UC San Diego.

In the news:
Robot Swarms on DC Airwaves
Robots on KPBS radio

cell phone user photo / computer science

Sometimes, you just need a photo of a person with a cell phone in a research setting...here, a computer science graduate from UC San Diego student handles two of the phones she is using in her research.

SleepServer in Technology Review

The SleepServer project is profiled in a Technology Review story by Duncan Graham-Rowe.

Check it out...this is a follow up to the SleepServer team's presentation last week at the 2010 USENIX Annual Technical Conference in Boston. Check out a short summary on the Jacobs School blog, and the full press release here.

When a colleague saw the Jacobs School retweet of the Technology Review tweet of the story, she wrote: "wish i could work while I slept!"

Video Interview with Biological Dynamics CEO Raj Krishnan

Embedded is a two minute video with Biological Dynamics CEO Raj Krishnan. Read about Biological Dynamics and Raj here

Von Liebig Center in New York Times

The Von Liebig Center here at the Jacobs School is highlighted in a great story in the New York Times with the headline "The Idea Incubator Goes to Campus" by Bob Tedeschi.

The story is about how universities are supporting the commercialization of the early-state inventions that stream out of universities every year.

From the New York Times story:

In the jargon of academia, the locations of such matchmaking are known as “proof-of-concept centers,” and they’re among a number of new approaches to commercializing university research in more efficient and purposeful ways — and to preventing good ideas from dying quietly. The first proof-of-concept center, the William J. von Liebig Center, was established in 2001 at the University of California, San Diego.

The story mentions by name Mushroom Networks and Biological Dynamics -- two of the 26 companies that the von Liebig Center has helped through seed funding, advisory services and entrepreneurship classes. Those startups have created more than 180 jobs and attracted more than $87 million in financing.

Mushroom Networks is a UC San Diego startup founded by electrical engineering professor Rene Cruz in 2004. Mushroom Networks provides innovative networking solutions. On their Web site Mushroom Networks writes, "Our products and services are focused on a range of networking solutions for Internet access for the broadband industry and networking solutions for the digital living room."

Biological Dynamics was founded in 2009 by then UC San Diego bioengineering Ph.D. student (now alumnus) Raj Krishnan. Biological Dynamics is developing early-stage cancer diagnostics that identify and separate secondary cancer biomarkers directly from blood, such as cell-free circulating high molecular weight DNA.

Watch a two minute video of Raj Krishnan talking about his startup and entrepreneurship at UC San Diego on the Jacobs School video portal. The video is embedded below. (Also, check out the Jacobs School of Engineering YouTube Channel.)

Update: This video is now linked from a comment on the New York Times story.