Von Liebig and SleepServer in San Diego Business Journal

Monday was the third day of a three day weekend, and how many PCs in corporations, universities and other organizations were running on Monday even though the usual users were enjoying the holiday?

Monday was also the day the San Diego Business Journal ran a story describing the UC San Diego technology aimed at fixing these sorts of problems. SleepServer lets users put their enterprise PCs to sleep without the fear that they won't be able to access them remotely. The lightweight image of each sleeping PC can also run stripped down programs that enable the PC to work while it sleeps.

Check out the SleepServer story here on the SDBJ Web site.

Read the SleepServer press release from the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.

Learn more about SleepServer from Yuvraj Agarwal.

Yuvraj Agarwal photos on the Calit2 Flikr photostream. (Credit: UC San Diego / Erik Jepsen)

Technology Review ran a SleepServer story last week.

Update Thursday July 8: The La Jolla Light ran a SleepServer story "Research Report: PCs can work while they sleep."

Wireless Sensor Research in Technology Review

The wireless sensor research from electrical engineering PhD student Yu "Mike" Chi and bioengineering professor Gert Cauwenberghs is profiled today in a Technology Review story by Lauren Gravitz, "Biosensors Comfortable Enough to Wear 24-7."

The story provides some really interesting details about how this technology could be used to improve at-home monitoring for heart patients. The story also includes some tantalizing forward-looking projects that could help people who are paralyzed communicate via their thoughts recorded by sensors that pick up brain activity.

Check out the story.

Learn more about the research and the UC San Diego student business plan competition that Mike Chi won in spring 2010.

See related photos on the Jacobs School blog.

Photo caption: Yu Mike Chi, an electrical engineering PhD student at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering, demonstrates sensors how his sensors that do not not directly touch his skin pick up his heart beat.

Alley Project "Up Students Alley"

The "alley engineering" that UC San Diego seniors in the Urban Studies and Planning program performed on a Hillcrest is described in a recent story "Students turn alley into oasis" in the San Diego Union Tribune.

Hillcrest is very much a UCSD community, especially given that the shuttle between the UCSD Medical Center in Hillcrest and the La Jolla campus means people can go back and forth without using a car.

The students collaborated with the Hillcrest Business Association to research how to transform the urban element into a pedestrian-friendly area. They applied their findings to a Hillcrest alley between Fourth and Fifth avenues near Robinson Avenue by covering graffiti-stained walls with art and bougainvillea.

That’s not all.

Students also proposed replacing the concrete road with permeable pavement, which soaks up stagnant water. During a recent exhibition, they set up a coffee shop for passers-by. They also strung lights from fire escape to fire escape.

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.