Our Top 10 Most-Read Stories of the Year

The end of the year means web statistics report time. Here are our top 10 most-read stories between Jan. 1 and Dec. 20, 2013. Enjoy!

1. UC San Diego Computer Scientists Develop First-person Player Video Game that Teaches How to Program in Java 
2. Keys Can be Copied From Afar, Jacobs School Computer Scientists Show 
3. New miniaturized wide-angle lens one-tenth of the size of a regular lens, captures pictures in high-resolution 
4. UCSD Structural Engineers Honored for Contributions to New Bay Bridge 
5. Telescopic Contact Lens Could Improve Eyesight for the Visually Impaired 
6. Small, Portable Sensors Allow Users to Monitor Exposure to Pollution on Their Smart Phones 
7. Tough, Light and Strong: Lessons From Nature Could Lead to the Creation of New Materials, Science Study Says
8. SkySweeper Robot Makes Inspecting Power Lines Simple and Inexpensive 
9. Firefighting Robot Paints 3D Thermal Imaging Picture for Rescuers 
10. Seahorse'sArmor Gives Engineers Insight Into Robotics Designs

Jacobs School Research Helped Bring Gollum to the Silver Screen

Are you going to see The Desolation of Smaug? (Or have you seen it already?) Well, that eerie, blueish glow on Gollum's skin is courtesy of algorithms developed by Jacobs School Prof. Henrik Wann Jensen. (Jensen did the work while a research associate at Stanford). Jensen's research earned him an Academy Award back in 2004.
Joe Letteri, the co-creator of the character and an Oscar winner, explains in a Nature article:

Digital characters also have to appear realistic in their surroundings, whether that is a photographed environment or a complete digital creation such as the jungles of Pandora. So we looked to understand how light and materials interact in nature. One of the best examples of this interaction is subsurface scattering. We first developed a technique to replicate this mechanism of light transport to create the translucency of Gollum's skin, leveraging pioneering research by computer-graphics specialist Henrik Wann Jensen and his colleagues at Stanford University in California (see go.nature.com/lyzuh2). The thick skin of a dinosaur can be simulated by bouncing light off the exterior. But human skin is softer and more translucent, so light enters and bounces around dozens of times before exiting. These properties, which are easily observed by putting your hand in front of a bright light, are crucial to a realistic portrayal.

Alumni from Jensen's lab here at the Jacobs School have gone on to work for Google, Disney and other animation companies.

 A list of some ground-breaking projects below:

Computer Simulations Shed Light on the Physics of Rainbows

Nice Threads! Computer scientists develop new model to simulate cloth on a computer with unprecedented accuracy

It's all about the hair

Render smoke without being a computation hog

Computer graphics spills from milk to medicine

Vote for MiP!

MiP, a robot designed by the UCSD Coordinated Robotics Lab and toymaker WowWee is up for a Last Gadget Standing Award and you can help it win!
You can vote here: http://lastgadgetstanding.com/voting/
And watch a fun video preview for the robot here:  http://bit.ly/1cbQx0K
MiP balances on two wheels and is fully interactive with its surroundings. It responds to gesture commands and can be linked via Bluetooth to smart phones and other devices. It can dance to your iTunes playlists and play simple games with your kids. 
Oh, and it can hold a tray with objects on it (including another MiP).

Pulse Magazine from the Jacobs School of Engineering

Pulse magazine: Winter 2013 / 2014 is printed!

If you're a Jacobs School of Engineering alum (or from a department that eventually became part of the Jacobs School, of course), we hope that you're on the mailing list to receive the paper-version of Pulse. If you an alumnus but not on the mailing list, please contact Daniel Kane at: dbkane AT ucsd DOT edu

And if you're an alumnus, but would like to keep up to date with the Jacobs School of Engineering through Pulse, email Daniel Kane at:

dbkane AT ucsd DOT edu

http://issuu.com/jacobs_school_of_engineering/docs/pulse_fall_2013_final_pdf

Video: Robot balancing on top of another robot!

What's more fun that a robot balancing on its own? A robot balancing on its own on top of another robot balancing on its own. Meet Stunt MiP and Switchblade, two robots designed in the Coordinated Robotics Lab here at the Jacobs School of Engineering.


Graduate students and postdocs from the lab demoed their robots at the Mini San Diego Maker Faire Saturday, Dec. 7, at the Del Mar Fairgrounds. 
Switchblade has made headlines before. It is a threaded vehicle (like a tank, but much smaller). It can pop wheelies and will ultimately be able to climb stairs while carrying an impressive array of sensors. It's already equipped with a real-time video camera. StuntMiP is a newcomer, a robot that can balance like a Segway on two wheels. The small robot made its debut as a kit that students assembled themselves during a controls class taught by Prof. Tom Bewley, who leads the Coordinated Robotics Lab.
It's been a busy week for Bewley. On Dec. 5, he welcomed senior executives and engineers from Cymer, Texas Instruments, National Instruments, ATA Engineering, WowWee and Brain Corporation during the last session of the newly revamped Embedded Control and Robotics course, MAE 143c, which he taught this fall quarter. The event was essential an industry recognition night for all these companies.

Congrats ECE Prof Sujit Dey / IEEE Fellow

Electrical engineering professor Sujit Dey

Congratulations to electrical engineering professor Sujit Dey, who is one of 62 IEEE Computer Society members and associates to be elevated to IEEE Fellow status in 2014 "for contributions to the design and testing of low-power systems and system-on-chips."

Dey leads the Mobile Systems Design Lab in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. He is faculty director of the von Liebig Entrepreneurism Center. The team in his lab is currently doing R&D in a field that could be the focus of future commercialization efforts: cloud-based mobile gaming.

Dey is also a longtime participant in the UC San Diego Division of Calit2, now known as the Qualcomm Institute. 

The IEEE Fellow honor recognizes unusual distinction in the profession. Dey was a co-PI (with PI Ramesh Rao) on the Ericsson- and UC Discovery Grant-funded Adaptive Systems project launched in 2002, prior to founding Ortiva Wireless in 2004. Ortiva was subsequently acquired by Israel-based Allot Communications in early 2012. 

Dey was awarded a proof-of-concept grant from the von Liebig Center in 2004 to create a prototype that became the core technology to launch Ortiva Wireless, which enables proactive management of mobile video and rich media content delivery. Dey said the von Liebig Center helped him get the funding he needed to hire students, develop an advanced prototype that could be presented to potential customers and investors, and to offer valuable advice in the business development and technology transfer process.

Nanosponge Vaccine Resarch from Liangfang Zhang in NanoEngineering

It has certainly been an exciting year for Liangfang Zhang and the other researchers in his Nanomaterials & Nanomedicine Laboratory over in NanoEngineering here at UC San Diego.

They published two "nanosponge" papers in Nature Nanotechnology (nanosponges as toxin grabbers, and nanosponges as experimental vaccines) Zhang was named one of Technology Review's 35 Innovators Under 35, and graduate student Ronnie Fang won top poster at Research Expo 2013. (And no doubt, this is the very abridged version.)

It will be very exciting to see how the nanosponge technology develops over the next year. Will any clinical studies get started? Will other researchers around the world publish exciting results based on the nanosponge platform?

This story in Chemistry World offers a couple of different perspectives on the research: "Caged toxin for safer, better bacterial vaccines" by Simon Hadlington, a science writer in the UK.

Bradley Fikes' story in UT San Diego spells out the mechanics of how the nanosponges are used to trigger immune-system protection from MRSA toxins.

Below is a video that describes the nanosponge for toxin removal paper.

UPDATED: Rocket Club Blasts Off

About 100 people turned out on RIMAC field at 8:30 a.m. this Saturday Dec. 7 to watch the Triton Rocket Club, a pre-professional student organization, run static fire tests of seven student-designed rocket engines.
Of those, 50 were club members who were there with their rocket engines.
Six teams with colorful names such as the Ultimizer and the Imperfectionists, were made up of new members or freshmen. Another team consists of returning students. That team used Ammonium percholarate composite propellant, also known as APCP--the same fuel used in space shuttle boosters. Their goal is to be the first university to reach space with a rocket for which every single component is designed by students. During the static fire tests, that engine produced almost 240 lbs of thrust.
The Triton Rocket Club, founded in fall quarter 2011 at UC San Diego, aims to help students interested in rocketry get practical and technical experience. Another goal is to help students get internships.
Learn more about the club here: http://tritonrocket.ucsd.edu/
Here's a short video recapping Saturday's tests:

Here's a fun video recapping their activities during the 2012-13 academic year:

Never too early to hack like a champion

The Women in Computing group at UC San Diego hosted a beginner's programming competition Saturday, Nov. 23 in the CSE Building. The contest was designed specifically for undergraduates who haven't yet taken upper division courses.
Students could work in teams of two or by themselves. They had to answer a series of questions coded in JAVA--and got free pizza.
Here are some pictures of the fun.

Science Magazine Live Video Chat on Thursday with Bioengineer Todd Coleman

UC San Diego bioengineering professor Todd Coleman is participating in a live chat on the Science Magazine website this Thursday Nov 14 at 12 noon / 3 PM Eastern.

The topic: Controlling Machines with our Minds

The Science live chat burb:

Neurotechnology is changing the way we live. Advances in robotics and neural prosthetics, including computer systems that interface directly with the human brain, give patients with paralysis, lost limbs, or neurological disease new ways to move and communicate. But with these revolutionary technologies come translational challenges: Scientists are still working to make neural prosthetics reliable, safe, and affordable. As electronics get smaller and robots get smarter, what will the future hold for the patients who rely on this technology? And from remote warfare to remote surgery, how are people without disabilities likely to use these neurotechnologies in the coming years?

Todd Coleman / UC San Diego bioengineering professor

Jacobs School Shake Table Featured on NOVA Nov. 6

The shake table at the Englekirk Structural Engineering Center was in the spotlight Nov. 6 on "Making Stuff Safer," a PBS/NOVA show hosted by David Pogue.
One of the show's segments documents how researchers used the facility, which is the largest outdoor shake table in the world, to test so-called wood frame soft-story buildings. The structures, dating back to the 1920s and 1930s, typically have first-floor garages and apartments on the upper floors. There are tens of thousands of these types of buildings throughout California, especially in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the United States.
Engineers used the table to test various seismic retrofits in a 44,000-square-foot building built specifically for the occasion. John Van de Lindt, the principal investigator on the project, secured a $1.24 million grant from the National Science Foundation for the research. His team from Colorado State University is working with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Cal-Poly Pomona, Western Michigan University and Clemson University. Numerous industry partners, including Simpson Strong-Tie and the Forest Products Laboratory, as well as several other government entities are also collaborating on the tests.
More on "Making Stuff Safer" here.
More on the research here.

iPassStore / UC San Diego students create a discount card for your phone

Do you like discounts on stuff you buy at UC San Diego?

A chemical engineer and a computer science undergrad from the Jacobs School think you do. They built a virtual discount card for UC San Diego called Triton Pass. It’s free. 

Triton Pass is on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/TritonPass

Triton Pass is part of a larger projects the students are working on, called iPassStore. Find out more at: https://ipassstore.com/ They already have almost 3,000 Likes on their Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/iPassStore

Ford Wang, the chemical engineering student from UC San Diego, told us the following:

“Students can save the virtual card into their smartphones and simply show it at participating stores to receive 10% off. Currently we have Subway, Yogurt World, Bombay Coast, Cafe Roma etc., and more restaurants are coming soon.”

Ford says they will soon be expanding to other universities.

The iPassStore founders have gotten help on their business from the Moxie Center for Student Entrepreneurship here at the Jacobs School. Ford said the Moxie Center experience helped a lot in terms of setting up a business model and providing free work space. The Moxie Center is having an open house on Weds Oct 30, if you’ve got a business or invention idea that needs a boost. 

http://www.jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/news/news_events/index.sfe?id=2283&categoryID=16)

Dexin Qi, also a co-founder, is a computer science major. The team also has four UC San Diego interns who are just ramping up now. Check out the team page here: https://ipassstore.com/index.php

Flashcard App from Computer Science Undergraduate

Scanning my Facebook feed a few minutes ago, I noticed that UC San Diego computer science undergraduate Daniel Brim posted a note to the Computer Science and Engineering Facebook group mentioning that he recently created a new flashcard app called SimpleCard. (It's available for iOS for 99 cents. It doesn't look like there is an Android version at this point.)

'Rack-on-Chip’ Design Proposed to Meet Traffic Demands of Global Cloud Computing

In its Global Data Cloud Index released Oct. 15, Cisco forecasts that global cloud traffic will grow 4.5-fold, a 35 percent combined annual growth rate, by 2017. Today’s data centers in which rows of servers sprawl over hundreds of thousands of square feet already consume some 30 billion watts of electricity, The New York Times reported last year. 

And this is all the more reason to rethink data center design and size so they require a lot less power and space, said two University of California, San Diego researchers in the Oct. 11 issue of the journalScience. 

Cloud computing is the fastest growing segment of data center traffic, approximating 1.2 zettabytes of annual traffic in 2012, according to Cisco’s annual report.  Meanwhile, overall global data center traffic will grow threefold to 7.7 zettabytes by 2017. Cisco provides a little social math to illustrate just how much data traffic we’re talking about.  

“A zettabyte is one billion terabytes. For context, 7.7 zettabytes is the equivalent to: 

• 107 trillion hours of streaming music -- about 1.5 years of continuous music streaming for the world’s population in 2017.

• 19 trillion hours of business web conferencing -- about 14 hours of daily web conferencing for the world’s workforce in 2017.

• 8 trillion hours of online high-definition (HD) video streaming -- about 2.5 hours of daily streamed HD video for the world’s population in 2017.”

Graduate student Qing Gu at work in the Fainman lab in the ECE dept. at UC San Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering. 

In their commentary, electrical engineer Yeshaiahu (Shaya) Fainman and computer scientist George Porter proposed replacing the racks and racks of servers in today’s data centers into a single chip. “These ‘rack-on-chips’ will be networked, internally and externally, with both optical circuit switching to support large flows of data and electronic packet switching to support high-priority data flows,” Fainman and Porter write. 

Fainman is professor and chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Porter is a research scientist in the Center for Networked Systems at UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. 

Their proposed solution will require several significant technology advances. The most significant are how to network all the individual processors on a single chip as well as how to network multiple rack-on-chips to each other, said Porter. “To handle Big Data processing and data-intensive applications, you've got to have an enormous amount of network bandwidth, and we're developing new technologies to deliver that bandwidth cheaper, with less power and heat, and in a smaller form-factor than existing approaches,” Porter said. Fainman’s lab has been developing several aspects of the dense integration of electronics and photonics and nanophotonic technology required to achieve this vision in collaboration with several other universities as part of the Center for Integrated Access Networks. Fainman’s lab last year built thesmallest no-waste laser to date, a significant step needed to enable future computer chips with optical communications. Their breakthrough was reported in the journal Nature. 

Motherboard reported on Fainman and Porter’s idea for “nanoservers” this week: 

“But the meat and potatoes of Yeshaiahu Fainman and George Porter’s server-rack-on-a-chip vision is really about taking the existing framework for a server rack and recreating it at the nano-level. They say that miniaturizing all server components so that several servers can fit onto a computer chip would increase processing speed. Making circuit systems to support all these mini-components using advanced lithography is already feasible, but scientists have yet to realize nano-transceivers and circuit-switchers—the key components that transmit data. And while silicon chips are increasing being used to transmit data-carrying light waves in fiber optic networks, efficiently generating light on a silicon chip is still early in its development. The researchers offer some solutions, like including light generating nanolasers in the chip design.”

CSE Colloquium and Distinguished Lecture Series Presents: Myths about MOOCs and Software Engineering Education

Who: David Patterson, UC Berkeley

When: Monday, October 21, 2013 / 11:00am-12:00pm

Where: Computer Science building (EBU3B) Room CSE 1202

This talk explains how the confluence of cloud computing and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have allowed us greatly to improve both the effectiveness and the reach of UC Berkeley's undergraduate software engineering course.

The first part of the talk is motivated by Industry's long-standing complaint that academia ignores vital software topics, leaving students unprepared upon graduation. Traditional approaches to software development are neither supported by tools that students could readily use, nor appropriate for projects whose scope matched a college course. Hence, instructors traditionally lecture about software engineering topics, while students continue to build software more or less the way they always had, in practice relegating software engineering to little more than a project course. This sad but stable state of affairs is frustrating to instructors, boring to students, and disappointing to industry.

Happily, cloud computing and the shift in the software industry towards software as a service has led to highly-productive tools and techniques that are a much better match to the classroom than earlier software development methods. That is, not only has the future of software been revolutionized, it has changed in a way that makes it easier to teach.   UC Berkeley’s revised Software Engineering course leverages this productivity to allow students to both enhance a legacy application and to develop a new app that matches requirements of non-technical customers. By experiencing the whole software life cycle repeatedly within a single college course, students actually use the skills that industry has long encouraged and learn to appreciate them.  The course is now rewarding for faculty, popular with students, and praised by industry.

The second part of the talk is about our experience using MOOCs to teach Software Engineering. While the media's spotlight on MOOCs continues unabated, a recent opinion piece expresses grave concerns about their role ("Will MOOCs Destroy Academia?", Moshe Vardi, CACM 55(11), Nov. 2012). I will try to bust a few MOOC myths by presenting provocative, if anecdotal, evidence that appropriate use of MOOC technology can improve on-campus pedagogy, increase student throughput while raising course quality, and even reinvigorate faculty teaching. I'll also explain the role of MOOCs in enabling half-dozen universities to replicate and build upon our work via Small Private Online Courses (SPOCs) from EdX and our electronic textbook.

I conclude that the 21st century textbook may prove to be a hybrid of SPOCs and Ebooks.

Biography: David Patterson is the Pardee Professor of Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley, which he joined after graduating from UCLA in 1977. Dave's research style is to identify critical questions for the IT industry and gather inter-disciplinary groups of faculty and graduate students to answer them. The answer is typically embodied in demonstration systems, and these demonstration systems are later mirrored in commercial products. In addition to research impact, these projects train leaders of our field. The best known projects were Reduced Instruction Set Computers (RISC), Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID), and Networks of Workstations (NOW), each of which helped lead to billion dollar industries.

A measure of the success of projects is the list of awards won by Patterson and as his teammates: the C & C Prize, the IEEE von Neumann Medal, the IEEE Johnson Storage Award, the SIGMOD Test of Time award, the ACM-IEEE Eckert-Mauchly Award, and the Katayanagi Prize. He was also elected to both AAAS societies, the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, the Silicon Valley Engineering Hall of Fame, and to be a Fellow of the Computer History Museum. The full list includes about 35 awards for research, teaching, and service.

In his spare time he coauthored six books, including two with John Hennessy, who is President of Stanford University. Patterson also served as Chair of the Computer Science Division at UC Berkeley, Chair of the Computing Research Association, and President of ACM.

For more information, please contact the Chair's Office at (858) 822-5198 or cse-cc@eng.ucsd.edu.

Jacobs School computer science professor recognized at celebration of women in computing

Computer science student Simona Rosenberg sporting Google Glass, with Megan Smith, the VP of Google[x].

They rubbed shoulders (and got their picture taken) with the likes of  the senior vice president of knowledge at Google, Alan Eustace, and Megan J. Smith, vice president of Google[x], the company's division that develops leading edge products, including Google Glass. 

A large group of UC San Diego students and alumni attended the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Oct. 2 to 5 in Minneapolis. In fact, UC San Diego was in the top 10 schools for the number of students registered for the event.

Many of them were there to cheer on Christine Alvarado, a computer science professor at the Jacobs School, who received an award for her innovative teaching practices to attract girls and women to math, computing and engineering. Alvarado received a $5000 prize from the Anita Borg Institute. The prize and award are named for A. Richard Newton, the former dean of the College of Engineering at UC Berkeley.

Christine Alvarado, a computer science professor at the Jacobs School, receives the A. Richard Newton Education Award at the Grace Hopper Celebration.

Alvarado received the award for spearheading the implementation of practices that changed the culture within the department of computer science at Harvey Mudd College, where she taught before joining UC San Diego. The practices led to a dramatic increase in the number of women studying and pursuing careers in computer science. More than 40 percent of Harvey Mudd computer science students are women--the highest percentage in the nation, according to the Anita Borg Institute. 

Thank you for WIC@UCSD for sharing their pictures of the event!

From left: Meera Ramakrishnan, Google senior VP of knowledge Alan Eustace and Huang Li. The two Jacobs School students are officers in the WIC@UCSD student organization.

Students from WIC@UCSD at the Grace Hopper Celebration.

Jacobs School students and alums at the Grace Hopper Celebration.

Engineers on the Green Photos are on Facebook

Photos from the Engineers on the Green event from Sept 30 at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering are on the Jacobs School Facebook page.

Audio Conversation and Video on Si/GE Nanowires with Prof Shadi Dayeh

Lithium-ion batteries are by no means perfect. One approach to improving their performance is to look at the lithiation process at the nanoscale, and to develop new battery architectures that make use of nanotechnologies such as nanowires.

Below is a recording of a conversation with Electrical engineering professor Shadi Dayeh from the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering in which we talk about some recent research in this area.

   

New Students to the Jacobs School: WELCOME!...Work Hard / Get Involved / Have Fun

NanoEngineering professor Darren Lipomi speaking at the Jacobs School community welcome.

Welcome incoming students to the Jacobs School of Engineering. Everyone here at the Jacobs School is thrilled that you are here. CONGRATULATIONS on making it this far! 

This "photo of the week" (which includes NanoEngineering professor Darren Lipomi) and the other photos in this post are from a casual community welcome at the Jacobs School hosted by the UC San Diego chapters of the National Society of Black Engineering (NSBE), the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE) and the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) and the IDEA Student Center. 

Now…get ready to work hard! Earning an engineering degree is a lot of work. But it can also be a lot of fun. One of your challenges is to seek out the fun and joy in the work. Get to know other engineering students. Make friends with people in your classes. (Everything is a little bit easier when you’re part of a community of students who are facing similar challenges.)

Thanks to electrical engineering professor Tara Javidi for welcoming students and providing insights.

Take advantage of the many resources available to you. The IDEA Student Center is a great resource, and also a great clearinghouse for finding other resources. USE THE RESOURCES AVAILABLE, GET HELP WHEN YOU NEED IT. But also, don’t get discouraged. Engineering is supposed to be hard. The curriculum is supposed to challenge you. What’s important is that you are learning the material, mastering it so that you can apply it in future classes. 

Get involved in the Jacobs School community. Thereis a lot to do outside the classroom that will help you succeed in the classroom and later on, in your first job and subsequent jobs. Get yourself into a lab and do research with a professor. Get involved in engineering student organizations, engineering team projects, and engineering outreach programs. Do summer internships. Do the Team Internship Program and Global TIES. Get involved with the Triton EngineeringStudent Council (TESC). (Have other links we should add here? Let me know: dbkane AT ucsd DOT edu )

Bear on the first day of Class / Fall Quarter 2013

Bear on the first day of Class / Fall Quarter 2013. Bear seems a little bit extra happy today, now that classes have started up again.

Upcoming talk: Probing cell metabolism using isotope tracers and metabolic flux analysis

Bioengineering professor Christian Metallo will be speaking next month at the Scripps Research Institute. His talk: “Probing cell metabolism using isotope tracers and metabolic flux analysis”. 

More info below.

The CENTER FOR METABOLOMICS AND MASS SPECTROMETRY presents: SAN DIEGO MASS ANALYSIS NETWORK (SANDMAN)

Thursday, October 17th from 5-7PM

The Scripps Research Institute Auditorium

A reception will follow the presentations.  All are welcome.

Eric C. Peters, Ph.D.

Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation

“The Increasing Role of MS-based Analyses in Research-Stage Biotherapeutic Construct Optimization”

Christian Metallo, Ph.D.
Dept of Bioengineering, UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering

“Probing cell metabolism using isotope tracers and metabolic flux analysis”

Host: Gary Siuzdak

Contact: Adam Schuyler (schuyler@scripps.edu)

  

For more information: http://sandman.scripps.edu/