Final Push: Studying for Finals Week

It's finals week here on campus, at the Jacobs School, that means one thing: students are getting together at the many study sessions offered by organizations such as Eta Kappa Nu, WIC@UCSD, TESC and more. The IDEA Study Lab also is offering tutoring sessions. Tuesday, we went by the study lab and by the Henry Booker Room at Jacobs Hall, where ETA Kappa Nu was putting on a Study Inn with free snacks, to capture all the hard work and studying taking place this week.

Widened and Refreshed Jacobs School Website

On Friday, we launched a widened and refreshed version of the Jacobs School of Engineering website. We are still working out the kinks, fixing pages and making content changes. Have a look around and let me know if you see anything that needs attention:  dbkane AT ucsd DOT edu

Thanks!

Daniel

Donate a Toy for Children in Need by Dec. 12

Members of the Jacobs School community have two more days to donate a toy for children in need--and be entered in a raffle to win a $100 AMEX gift card. 

The drive benefits:

• the UC San Diego Medical Center burn unit
• the UC San Diego Infant CAre Center
• the UC San Diego Bannister Family House
• the UC San Diego Mother, Child and Adolescent Care
• the San Diego Union Rescue Mission

New, unwrapped toys can be dropped off at the following locations: 

• Deans’s Office Jacobs Hall, 7th Floor Reception
• Bioengineering PFBH, Admin Ste, 1st Floor, outside Rm 138
• CSE EBU 3B, Outside Rm 2264
• ECE JACOBS HALL, Pod 2800
• IDEA Center JACOBS HALL, 1st Floor Lobby
• MAE EBU 2, 1st Floor Reception Area, Rm 153a
• NanoEng SME 241F
• Structural Eng SME 340A/B - Student Affairs Lobby

You will receive a ticket for the raffle when you drop off your donation. 

Click here for more information.

Engineers Turned Chocolatiers in the Spotlight in Forbes

Michael and Richard Antonorsi, two engineering alumni who parleyed their degrees for jobs in the technology industry and later crated Chuao, a gourmet brand of chocolate, are profiled in the BrandVoice section of Forbes' website: http://onforb.es/QrbEBh The brothers earned degrees in bioengineering and computer science in the mid-1980s here at UC San Diego.

The Forbes story calls Chuao "a national player in the super-premium chocolate-bar market." The chocolate bars, with exotic flavors such as maple bacon, are now sold at about 2,500 locations around the country, including major retailers like Whole Foods. If you're on the UC San Diego campus, you can also find them at several locations, including the Sunshine Store in the Price Center.

To learn more about the brother's journey to chocolate fame, read this story in This Week @ UC San Diego. 

Two Jacobs School Computer Scientists Named to Inaugural AMS Fellows Class

Ron Graham and Fan Chung Graham, two professors in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Jacobs School, have been named to the inaugural class of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society. The program recognizes members who have made outstanding contributions to the creation, exposition, advancement, communication and utilization of mathematics.

Both are experts in combinatorics and theoretical computer science. Ron Graham is past president of the American Mathematical Society (1993-94) and the Mathematical Association of America (2003-04). He is also the co-author of "Magical Mathematics: The Mathematical Ideas that Animate Great Magic Tricks." The book has received the 2013 Euler Prize. Fan Chung Graham holds the Paul Edros Chair in Comninatorics at the Jacobs School.

Civil Engineering Magazine Puts New Engineering Building in the Spotlight

Civil Engineering magazine interviewed Jacobs School Dean Frieder Seible at length for a feature on the school's new Structural and Materials Engineering building in its November issue. The building is home to the departments of structural engineering and nanoengineering, as well as to researchers from the medical devices group at the Institute of Engineering in Medicine, and to visual artists.
The article details the building's features, including a performing arts space, a conference center, 60-foot long bridge and solar panels that can generate 140 kW of energy. It also details the building's contents, including labs, art studios and a massive robotics mill.
“We are putting four seemingly disparate disciplines together here, and it is just great  to think about what the outcome could be ten, fifteen, twenty years from now,” Seible told the magazine. “We have had great interactions with our colleagues from the visual arts. It is absolutely marvelous to see what already in a very short period of time the catalysts can be when you bring these different disciplines together and you have these shared spaces in the new building.”
The November issue of the magazine is not online yet, but here is the publication's URL: http://civil-engineering.asce.org/

The Secret Lives of Paintings Revealed

Maurizio Seracini, an adjunct professor of structural engineering at the Jacobs School, and well-known "Da Vinci detective," spoke at TEDGlobal 2012 in Edinburgh this summer about "The Secret Lives of Paintings." His talk is finally available via streaming video on the TED website. The video comes with an interesting blog post, titled "That unicorn is really a lap dog: The secret details in 4 classic paintings revealed."
Seracini leads several projects in Italy for the Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology, also known as CISE3, and located on the San Diego campus of Calit2. One of the project's goals is to find the long-lost da Vinci masterpiece, the Battle of Anghiari.