Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Raj Krishnan Voice of San Diego Series / Part 2

Part 2 of the ongoing series about Raj Krishnan is up on the Voice of San Diego site.  (Part 1 is here)

The story includes some info about two other Jacobs School alums: Roy Lefkowitz and Gene Hsiao.

Lefkowitz won the NanoEngineering best poster award at Research Expo 2010: "An Early Point-of-Care Shock Diagnostic: Clinically Relevant Detection of Protease Activity in Whole Blood."

Lefkowitz was also among the inagural class of Sieble Scholars in the Department of Bioengineering at UC San Diego.

The other former grad student in the story is Gene Hsiao, who we wrote about for his work related to insulin resistance published in PNAS in 2009.

Monday, October 4, 2010

From Grad Student to CEO!

Check out this event on Friday Oct 8 at Calit2:

From GSR to CTO: A Celebration and Contemplation on Information Theory and its Applications
Graduate student researchers (GSRs) from the Jacobs School of Engineering's Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department recently received significant recognition for their research achievements. Five were nominated for the prestigious Student Paper Award at the International Symposium on Information Theory, and two won a coveted Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship.
To celebrate these accomplishments, Calit2's Information Theory and Applications Center (ITA) asked the students to present their work, and invited three of the communications industry's leading innovators -- all of them Chief Technology Officers -- to share their views on the future of the information theory field, and to answer the questions: What does it take to transform great research into commercial success? And to go from GSR... to CTO?

The five GSR presenters will be:

- Hessam Mahdavifar, on Achieving the Secrecy Capacity of Wiretap Channels Using Polar Codes;
- Jayadev Acharya, on Reconstructing Strings from their Substring Compositions;
- Brian McFee, on Metric Learning for Information Retrieval;
- Nikhil Karamchandani, on Function Computation via Subspace Cooling; and
- Eitan Yaakobi, on Multiple Error-Correcting WOM-Codes.

The afternoon speakers will include Ramesh Rao, director of Calit2 at UC San Diego, who will talk about information theory in the context of Calit2's mission; and ECE chair Larry Larson, who will open the afternoon session.
Subsequently, three CTOs will engage in a panel discussion and Q&A session with the audience about their respective journeys from GSR to CTO, and their advice to graduate students:
- Roberto Padovani, Executive VP and CTO, Qualcomm, Inc. and Member, NAE;

- Arogyaswami Paulraj, CTO, Beceem, Inc., Member, NAE and Professor Emeritus, Stanford University; and

- Nambi Seshadri, CTO, Broadcom Inc

MORE INFORMATION:

Everyone is invited to attend, but food will be limited to participants who RSVP in advance to John Minan at jminan@ece.ucsd.edu. Space is limited, so please respond early.

Friday, October 1, 2010

VIDEO: As a Jacobs School Engineering Undergrad You Can...

As a Jacobs School undergrad you can:

* use a weather balloon to perform experiments in space

* publish papers in with world-renowned NanoEngineers

*build robotic cars

*have a ton of fun and enjoy the campus

*share the lab bench with bioengineering professors

*build software with NASA

...but don't take my word for it...watch the video and see for yourself.



short version...b/c sometimes 2:22 is all the time you have!

Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Technologies to Track Disasters


Bruce Bigelow has an interesting story in Xconomy about the sensors, wireless networks, wind-speed monitors and other technologies deployed in San Diego County to track and perhaps predict wildfires. Some of this work is being done here at UC San Diego (see below) and read the full story here at Xconomy.
"A more sophisticated wireless sensor network, such as the High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network developed by researchers at UC San Diego, serves as a model of the type of network that could provide even more data, including imagery, that could help in the prediction of and response to disasters, according to Hans-Werner Braun of the San Diego Supercomputer Center."

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

The Fall Quarter is Here: This Week @ UCSD is Back


http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/thisweek/2010/09/27_index.asp, the weekly email on what is happening (and what just happened) at UC San Diego is back. Yesterday marked the first issue of This Week.

Subscribe to This Week here.

One of the links is to a new book on the UC San Diego campus.

Monday, September 27, 2010

CleanTech San Diego and Long-Range Weather Prediction

Remember the San Diego Clean Tech Innovation and Commercialization Program that the von Liebig Center helped to run? Well, one of the projects selected (and funded at $50K) -- a novel scientific method for predicting extreme hot and cold weather events created at Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) at UC San Diego -- spun out of Scripps into EarthRisk Technologies. The latest issue of "Explorations" the e-magazine from SIO has a nice story about the project.

"Scripps climate scientist Alexander Gershunov, along with postdoctoral researcher Kristen Guirguis, developed the new approach, which uses past weather information to predict extreme temperature and precipitation events. The method offers forecasts for regions around the world with lead times up to 40 days. Existing techniques for predicting weather don't offer strong data beyond 15 days. "
The full story by Shannon Casey is here. More info on the Von Liebig Center is here.

Friday, September 24, 2010

Raj Krishnan / Biological Dynamics in Voice of San Diego Feature Story

Our old friend Raj Krishnan is featured in a Voice of San Diego story about his quest to cure cancer via the startup company (Biological Dynamics) that grew out of his bioengineering PhD research here at the Jacobs School of Engineering. Read the VoSD story by Claire Trageser here.



Below is the video interview we did with Krishnan in December 2009.