Xconomy's Google Street View Story is Interesting

The Google Street View story in Xconomy includes a Q&A with Luc Vincent from Google who has been involved with Street View from the start. This story ties into the "Pedestrian Remover" for Street View created by UC San Diego computer science graduate student Arturo Flores and computer science professor Serge Belongie.

Mechanical Engineering Major / Water Polo Player named Athete of the Week

Mechanical engineering major Bryce Madsen is a UC San Diego Athlete of the Week this week. He is a senior driver on the Men's Water Polo team.

As a Junior in 2009, Madsen finished second on the team with 37 goals scored and added 20 assists. He scored three goals in an exciting 14-13 overtime win over Redlands in the first-round of the WWPA Championship tournament. He also scored two goals in an 8-7 upset win over Concordia at the Northern California tournament.


Learn more about Madsen on the UC San Diego Athletics Web site.

Keep up with UC San Diego Athletes of the Week Winners here.

Listen Up: A Story on How Beaked Whales Hear

Structural Engineers Develop Simulation to Better Understand the Effects of Sound on Marine Life

Below are the first two paragraphs from the story in the San Diego Union Tribune.

A team of researchers with San Diego ties has simulated the effects of sounds in whales' heads using computer software to model how marine mammals hear.

The preliminary results are important in helping academic scientists and the U.S. Navy determine if sounds such as sonar harm whales and dolphins, said Petr Krysl, a structural engineering professor at University of California San Diego and one of the researchers on the ongoing project.

Check out the full story in the San Diego Union Tribune by Lilly Leung.

The press release from the Jacobs School is here.

Bridge Columns To Be Tested on Jacobs School Shake Table

A 24-foot tall bridge column will undergo a series of simulated earthquake tests up to a 7.0 magnitude, conducted by UC San Diego structural engineers, beginning on Sept. 20. The bridge column is modeled after those designed by CALTRANS over the last 15 years. It will be the first time engineers will test a full scale bridge column of this kind on an earthquake simulator.  The engineers will test the seismic vulnerability of these bridge columns and to provide additional data for improving future designs.

Check out the live cam: http://nees.ucsd.edu/video/

Electrical Engineering (ECE) News and Events

For the latest news, events and goings on from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), check out the ECE home page: http://www.ece.ucsd.edu/

UC San Diego Engineering mentioned in Union Tribune look-back story on 9-11-2001

The San Diego Union Tribune story, "How the 9/11 attacks changed life in San Diego: Aftereffects of terrorist attacks include longer waits at the border, tighter security for travelers and military growth" mentions research being done here at the Jacobs School of Engineering.

YY Zhou / More Reliable Computing

Calit2's Tiffany Fox wrote a nice profile on Yuanyuan (YY) Zhou, a computer science professor here at the Jacobs School of Engineering.

“People always ask why their systems fail, and the computer industry is starting to pay attention to this reliability issue,” explains Zhou, who joined the UCSD Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) in the Jacobs School of Engineering in the summer of 2009. “Fundamentally, my research is about making computer systems less vulnerable to attacks so they crash less. When Windows crashes, it’s more of an inconvenience, but when an e-commerce site crashes it can really be a problem.”


Zhou is the first holder of the Qualcomm Endowed Chair in Mobile Computing. The chair is one of four established in the Jacobs School of Engineering through Qualcomm’s original $15 million commitment to the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2). Read the story on the Calit2 news site.

Check out a few more great photos of computer sicnece professor YY Zhou taken by Erik Jepsen on the Calit2 Flickr site.