Computer Science Student Wins Outstanding Graduate Student Leader Award

Sarah Esper, a graduate student in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, has won an Outstanding Graduate Student Leader award from the UC San Diego Graduate Student Association.

The award goes to an exceptional individual who has helped strengthen the graduate and professional student community at UC San Diego and improve the quality of the graduate and professional student experience. Esper will receive her award Tuesday, May 28 during a ceremony at The Loft.

She was the graduate student president for Women in Computing at UC San Diego during the 2011-12 academic year. On the research side of things, she and fellow graduate student Stephen Foster developed CodeSpells, a video game designed to teach children how to program in Java.

Congratulations, Sarah!

Wacky Triton 5K Promo Video

Check out the Triton 5K promo video...it's not the usual, garden-variety promo video.

And if you thinking about doing the run...or getting into running in general and havn't read Born to Run, it's a fascinating page turner that will make you look at running in a whole new way.

Find out more about the Triton 5K and register here. Registration closes May 31.

(Electronic) Mice Go Head to Head at the Jacobs School

What pitted a green giant against an anteater at the Jacobs School of Engineering May 12? Why the 2013 California Micromouse Competition, organized by the UC San Diego chapter of IEEE. The mice's programming  is geared toward solving a maze and finding its center—without getting a piece of cheese as a reward. The mice are completely autonomous and the goal is to get to the center of the maze as fast as possible. They typically use a microcontroller and infrared sensors reflecting off the walls to make their way through the maze. Some also use a wireless interface to transmit debugging data back to their team’s laptop. Most teams build the robots with off-the-shelf components. But some prefer to put together a custom circuit board, chassis and other parts. Many of the components students work on will be part of their future professional lives as engineers.
Sunday,  the Green Giants, UCLA's team, solved the maze in just 8.77 seconds. They were followed by the Anteaters, from UC Irvine, with 1 minute 5 seconds and by the Kansas State team with 3 minutes 47 seconds. Some pictures of the action below. 

Entrepreneur Challenge / Register Now to Attend our Business Plan Finals

Two Business Plan competitions run by The UC San Diego Entrepreneur Challenge are coming up soon. 

Register (at no charge) for these great events via the links below and get the pulse of the innovation scene here in San Diego.

May 31: BioTech/MedTech Finals 
June 7: Tech/Innovation Finals

5/17/21 UPDATE

The finalist companies are out:

BioTech/MedTech Finalists:
Electrozyme, Jacobs School of Engineering
Wolf Biosciences, Jacobs School of Engineering
ChemoTactics, Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences
DevaNano, Jacobs School of Engineering

Tech/Innovation Finalists:
GrollTex, Jacobs School of Engineering
OneLab, Biological Sciences
Lumawake, Rady School of Management
SaleShare, Rady School of Management

Biological Dynamics, Cognionics, ChemoTactics and Wolf Biosciences are just a few of the companies created by Jacobs School alumni who participated extensively in, and benefited from, events put on by the UC San Diego Entrepreneur Challenge. (What other companies should be added to this list? Send me suggestions at: dbkane AT ucsd DOT edu)

Side note: watch Raj Krishan from Biological Dynamics give a TEDx talk here.

Side note: Watch the Jacobs School students and alumni with winning pitches from the UC San Diego 

Entrepreneur Challenge “Elevator Pitch” competition from earlier this year.

UC San Diego Entrepreneur Challenge

The Entrepreneur Challenge is a UC San Diego student-run organization that promotes the commercialization of the research and innovation that occurs on the Torrey Pines Mesa, in San Diego.

The mission of the Entrepreneur Challenge is to foster community involvement and technological innovation by bringing multidisciplinary teams of engineers, scientists, and business-minded students together with local area entrepreneurs and professionals in order that they might shape the world of tomorrow by securing the health of San Diego’s economy today.

The Entrepreneur Challenge focuses on start-ups from the inception phase to the early seed-stage. Their goal is to give teams the confidence and resources necessary to launch a successful company that otherwise might not exist.

Alexander Vardy Named Jack Keil Wolf Chair in Electrical Engineering.

Electrical engineering Professor Alexander Vardy, a renowned researcher in information and coding theory, has been appointed as the first Jack Keil Wolf Endowed Chair in Electrical Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. The endowed chair was established in memory of Jack Keil Wolf, a longtime professor at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and a pioneer in information theory and its applications.


The chair has been endowed with funds raised in honor and memory of Wolf’s lifetime of professional achievements in research and teaching. More than 50 people, including colleagues, former students, friends and family contributed to the fund. Vardy said the scope of the contributors is a tribute to Wolf’s impact in the lives of so many.  

Professor Alexander Vardy, Jack Keil Wolf Chair in Electrical Engineering.

 “Being appointed to the Jack Keil Wolf Chair is such a tremendous honor. Jack Wolf was a shining light,” said Vardy. “For me, personally, he was a role model throughout my career; I know that this is a feeling I share with many people. It is with the greatest gratitude and humility that I would like to thank the donors to the Wolf Chair, large and small. Indeed, Jack was like a bright torch that lit the paths of countless people. I am extremely honored to have the opportunity of carrying forward a bit of that flame.”

That flame, at least on the research side of Wolf’s legacy, is important in the fields of information theory and coding theory. Information theory is a branch of applied mathematics and electrical engineering concerned with transmitting data from point A to point B without error. Whether that data is images taken by a spacecraft on Mars or photos taken on your smartphone, it is converted into a sequence of ones and zeros and bundled into packets to transmit down the line. Claude E. Shannon, who developed the field of information theory in the 1940s and 50s, posited that it was possible to achieve what he called “channel capacity” -- that is, perfect data transmission which is both reliable and efficient. This Holy Grail of capacity -- that you could transmit data without error while sacrificing the bare minimum in storage space or transmission time -- has driven the research of coding theorists, including Wolf and Vardy, for decades. 

Read our full story here. 

The Fastest Car in the Price Center Ballroom

Teams from across Southern California competed in IEEE's Viacar contest April 28 in the Price Center Ballroom on the UC San Diego campus. First place and second place went to two UCLA teams. UC San Diego's Initial V team placed in third. Students on the team were Victor Lee, Sebastian Sanchez, Kanza Khan, Komal Verma and Jenny Tu.

The goal of the competition is to design, build and race autonomous cars, which must follow a track marked by a one-inch white tape on a dark-colored carpet. Under the tape, there is a wire carrying a 100mA rms 75 kHz sinusoidal signal. The fastest cars travel at speeds of up to 10 feet per second. This year, the three fastest times were respectively 35, 38 and 38.3 seconds.

Some pictures of the event here, courtesy of IEEE:

Junkyard Derby, Rain or Shine

The big storm system that drenched most of San Diego County didn't stop 46 teams from taking part in this year's Junkyard Derby May 6 on Peterson Hill. This year's winners were team Premium Motion. Some pictures of the, sometimes rainy, fun below. Photos: TESC/Sam Sun