Meet the Engineers of Tomorrow: Michael Frank and Steven Naleway

Research Expo is this Thursday, April 16. So far in our Meet the Engineers of Tomorrow series, we’ve introduced you to two of the engineering graduate students that are presenting a poster at this year’s event: Oscar Beijbom, with a poster titled “Automated annotation of coral reef survey images” and Vineet Pandey who’s poster is titled, “Connecting stories and learning objectives increases participant motivation in online discussions”.

In this, our final post leading up to Research Expo 2015, Michael Frank and Steven Naleway describe the wonders that lie at the intersection of biology and design.

Michael Frank

“When I first started in Joanna McKittrick’s lab, I was really interested in materials science,” said Michael Frank, materials science and engineering PhD student at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. “But she kept saying to me, ‘When are you going to pick your animal?’.”

Everyone in the McKittrick lab has to have an animal – meaning they should each be studying and analyzing the structure and mechanical behavior of natural biological materials like shells, bones, teeth and tusks for design applications.

“Professor McKittrick often collaborates with Scripps Institution of Oceanography,” said Frank. “We had the opportunity to participate in a research cruise. It was there that I met Kirk Sato, who studies sea urchins – I finally had my animal.”

According to Frank, sea urchins are fascinating because of their versatile mouthparts – an apparatus termed Aristotle’s Lantern – which allows them to persist at different depths.

“Aristotle is known for his philosophy, but many people don’t know that he also wrote several books about the natural sciences,” said Frank. “In one of these, he described the mouth parts of a sea urchin as ‘a horn lantern with the panes of horn left out’.”

It actually looks more like “The Claw” from Toy Story. Urchins have conquered most sea habitats because their mouthparts allow them to be incredibly precise when taking in food, much like a claw is able to grab an item out of a vending machine.

“The idea for my bioinspired design project came to me one night during a local news broadcast,” said Frank. “It was an update on NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover, and I noticed two things: first, that the apparatus used to collect samples from the surface of Mars is a shovel and second, that the rover was having some issues surveying the planet to collect samples because the wheels were punctured by sharp rocks. If we could create many smaller rovers that could collect samples in a manner similar to the way urchins take in food, it would enable a much more efficient and precise sampling method.”

Frank and his colleagues outsourced the prototyping of their design to a team of students in the MAE 156 capstone design course for seniors. He and his colleagues then attached the bioinspired sampler to a rover for testing on the beach and again with Mars simulant provided by professor of structural engineering Yu Qiao’s group.

Frank hopes to be able to see NASA adopt the design. He says that the Rady School of Business at UC San Diego has opened his eyes to startups and entrepreneurship, and he’d like to see it through.

“The apparatus is very efficient because it opens as it extends and closes as it returns,” said Steven Naleway, also a materials science and engineering PhD candidate at the Jacobs School of Engineering. “That’s one motion instead of two. NASA could really increase the efficiency with which the Mars Rover collects samples by incorporating the design.”

While Naleway is an author on the poster (titled “Microstructure and bioinspired application of Aristotle’s Lantern: Urchins from the Sea to Mars”), he has his own bioinspired research – box fish armor.

Steven Naleway

“Most fish decide to articulate their scales, but the box fish doesn’t,” said Naleway. “Why is that? Instead of articulation, which allows for complete coverage of the body by eliminating interfaces, the boxfish employs a complex interdigitating suture pattern in between its scales (known as scutes). I am interested in the mechanical advantages these sutures provide.”

In addition to their work on Aristotle’s Lantern, Frank and Naleway will both present posters at Research Expo on freeze casting – a physical process using the directional freezing of water to make porous scaffolds similar to the spongy layer of bone and a number of other biological materials. Naleway will present a poster titled “Easing the fabrication of bioinspired composites through the use of clathrate hydrates in freeze casting” and Frank will present on “Magnetic freeze casting: porous scaffolds bio-inspired by bone”.

Don’t miss these great posters – there’s still time to register for Research Expo at www.jacobsschool.edu/re

Building a Race Car: UC San Diego Student Engineers in Action

Student filmmaker will tell the story in documentary

In 1997, a group of engineering students from the University of California, San Diego heard about the Formula SAE competition – a student design competition organized by SAE International (formerly Society of Automotive Engineers). The idea behind the competition is that a fictional manufacturing company has contracted a design team to develop a small formula-style race car, which will be evaluated for its potential as a production item.

Intrigued by the challenge, the student group gathered in a garage and put their textbook knowledge to work. With the completion of a race car built from scratch, Triton Racing was born.

TR-14, the 2014 Triton Racing car

Triton Racing is UC San Diego’s Formula SAE team, and it continues to produce cutting-edge race cars for the annual Formula SAE competition, held this year at Lincoln Airpark in Lincoln, Nebraska June 17-20, 2015.

The competition tests the ability of the students to apply their engineering knowledge and encompasses all aspects of the automotive industry including research, design, manufacturing, testing, developing, marketing, management and finances.

The student-led group at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering grows in numbers and knowledge each year.

Nathaniel Goldberg, a sophomore mechanical engineering student and Director of Public Relations for the team, felt that the process of taking a car from production to competition should be documented on film. He and his teammates are making that happen.

“In a conversation with some of the other guys last year, we realized that we have a story to tell,” said Goldberg. ”We want to share that story with as many people as possible, so we decided to make a documentary.”

With the production of the 2015 car already underway, Goldberg is bringing in filmmaker and UC San Diego student Keita Funakawa to begin work on what he hopes will be an invaluable documentary.

“This year’s car is going to be highly competitive, which is one reason we want to film the process leading up to competition.” said Goldberg.

Want to know why? Check out the unique design of the 2015 car, TR-15, on the Jacobs School website!

Jacobs School Ph.D. student recognized for outreach and service

Yawo Ezunkpe is one of six UC San Diego Ph.D. students to be accepted into the Bouchet Graduate Honor Society for 2014-2015. Named for the first African-American doctoral recipient in the United States, Edward Alexander Bouchet, the society seeks to develop a national network of preeminent scholars who exemplify academic excellence and foster environments that support students who are traditionally underrepresented in academia. UC San Diego was the first university on the West Coast to establish a chapter of the national organization.

Ezunkpe’s research interests include fluid mechanics and applied and computational mathematics. His dissertation focuses on stochastic analysis of fluid flows in domains whose rough surfaces are modeled as random fields. His work addresses some of the unresolved theoretical and practical questions concerning differential equations defined on random domains. It has significant impact on biological flows and could be extended to other areas where surface roughness affects fluid flows, such as environmental engineering and nanoscale devices.

Click here for a list of all of this year's UC San Diego honorees

6 Entrepreneurism & Leadership Programs Teams Advanced to USD Social Innovation Challenge Semi-Finals

Last month, 17 UC San Diego teams advanced to the semi-finals of the Social Innovation Challenge hosted by the University of San Diego Center for Peace and Commerce. We are proud to announce that six out of those 17 teams hail from the Jacobs School of Engineering’s Entrepreneurism and Leadership programs. Bystanders to Upstanders, CaroSoul, Fiji Kindergarten Project, One Village Philippines, VivaScope and Wastelights await the announcement of the teams to compete in the final round at the end of this week.

The Social Innovation Challenge aims to promote, guide and support student-driven ideas to launch or contribute to social enterprises, leveraging the university’s Center for Peace and Commerce as the initiative’s catalyst and mentor. The first USD Social Innovation Challenge was held in 2011 and had 16 submitted projects. This year, the SIC received project submissions from 100 student teams, and since their first challenge in 2011, the SIC has awarded over $150,000 in cash prizes to student projects that present novel, sustainable and effective solutions for social problems. The teams that make it to the third, final round will pitch their ideas in front of a live panel of experts.

Bystanders to Upstanders developed an application that aims to effectively engage people in communities and promote volunteer work through the power of social media and game design. In their Social Innovation project, the team wrote: “the ultimate goal is to lead our users toward a more socially conscious lifestyle.” Their application hopes to localize, personalize and gamify community service, allowing “local volunteer event planners who do not have the means necessary to raise awareness for their cause [by making] events with [their] platform and reach[ing] out to a larger community than they would be able to access by themselves.” Bystanders to Upstanders is a team at Mystartupxx, a UC San Diego accelerator supported by the von Liebig Entpreneurism Center and Rady School of Management to promote female entrepreneurship.

Another Mystartupxx team, CaroSoul is a sustainable wetsuit company with a focus on decreasing landfill neoprene wetsuit waste and creating quality women’s wetsuits. Founder and CEO Caroline McCandless is a Masters student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in the Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation and has been surfing since she was seven years old. Her inspiration and drive for the project is drawn from her experience and love for the natural world, as a surfer and San Diego environmentalist. McCandless explained that “Neoprene is petroleum based synthetic material that is difficult to breakdown… when it goes into landfills, it says in landfills.” CaroSoul has established a wetsuit recycling campaign with six drop-off locations in San Diego and hopes to expand its operations.

Global TIES: Fiji Kindergarten Project works to create a kindergarten center in Taveuni, Fiji out of recycled shipping containers. Project lead Cathy Yu compares the costs a sustainable center versus a traditional one, explaining that “through the use of sustainable engineering, we are able to create a kindergarten center with a composting toilet, potable sink and rainwater harvesting catchment for less than $10,000, while a normal brick and mortar kindergarten center would cost an upwards of $25,000 electricity.” Yu reflected on how the Global Teams in Engineering Service program brought their team members together, stating that without the program, the group would not have been able to connect with their client in Fiji and mobilize students from all over the university to put their education to use through a tangible project.

One Village Philippines’s project is their solar powered street lamp, a vehicle for ending poverty in Philippine communities. The team has designed the street lamp to be affordable, sustainable and reproducible for the low-income communities in the Philippines that they serve. Project lead Minh Dao told us that the team work aims to provide an environmentally-friendly and affordable lighting system to low-income communities and foster entrepreneurship within the Philippines. One Village Philippines has had on-going projects with the Global TIES program for four years now, and Dao said "we were motivated to compete in the USD Social Innovation Challenge and other social innovation competitions alike by our TIES faculty advisor, Dr. Mandy Bratton and Undergraduate Advisor, Caitlyn Smith."

VivaScope is working towards expanding the availability of viral load testing in the developing world by providing a novel system that will dramatically reduce costs for tests. VivaScope’s project tackles the costs that prevent millions of people from receiving the care that they need. Project lead Kirk Hutchison explained that VivaScope reduces costs significantly from $10,000 per machine and $20 per test to $1000 per device and $5 per test. VivaScope is a partnership between Global TIES and Engineering World Health, a UC San Diego student organization. “We are all working on this project because we truly believe in the importance of our goals and our ability to make a positive difference in the world through the application of our engineering skills,” said Hutchison.

The Wastelights team aims to eliminate waste by converting it into a source of energy—making sewage into electricity and kitchen waste into biofuel and biochar. Wastelights, led by Joyce Sunday, hopes to create three different types of systems: small, medium and large for portable, home and power grid units. The team has already created a basic prototype and is supported by the Moxie Center for Student Entrepreneurship and the von Liebig Entrepreneurism Center. Wastelights has also completed the NSF I-Corps Program.

Congratulations to our teams on their accomplishments! We are so proud of their social innovation projects and we wish them luck in advancing to the finals!

Divergent Engineering Wants You to Dive In

Divergent Engineering (divE) is a self-funded UC San Diego student organization with a mission to provide a supportive environment for engineers and scientists and an opportunity to explore different facets of engineering and challenge their creativity.

Students who are ready to dive into engineering projects are encouraged to meet the members of Divergent Engineering at their Spring Quarter Pitch Day on Wednesday, April 8. All students and faculty are invited to attend and hear divE’s team members pitch both their new and current projects at the CMRR Wolf Auditorium from 1pm to 4pm.

"We’re a student-run engineering incubator that aims to provide an encouraging community for students to work together, tinker, challenge, and engineer. Our core values lie at the openness to learn, the drive for innovation, the courage to fail, the friendships that are formed, the willingness to lift others, and most importantly, having fun! We want to nurture these values and allow the students to translate them over to their leadership, communication, and engineering through our workshop and our team environment."

Founded in summer 2014, Divergent Engineering began as an Arduino microcontroller workshop for six students before eventually becoming an incubator and community for students of all majors to pitch ideas and work on projects, as well as a self-funded UC San Diego student organization.
“For our very first workshop, we bought the [microcontroller] parts, got together at Geisel in study room 2 and we programmed and worked,” said Phuong Truong, one of the three Divergent Engineering presidents. After the first Arduino workshop, the six students were then able to teach other students from a local community college about microcontroller programming. In a single month, they produced a working data logger, persistence of a vision wand, a Skittle sorter and a wall-avoiding robot. Divergent Engineering founders and organization presidents Karcher Morris, Alex Phan and Phuong Truong explain that it was the success of the first workshop and the passion of this first group of students that served as their proof of concept– that an interdisciplinary group of students interested in engineering projects would not only be special, but very powerful. “Our projects are a mixture of a variety of fields, they allow students to be creative, appreciate the other majors and have a real opportunity to be a real engineer,” said Phan. “When you’re in your Structural Engineering classes, you forget that in real life, you’re going not just going to be working with other Structural engineers. You’re going to be working with a Bioengineer, Computer Engineer...” explained Truong. “[Divergent Engineering]’s about being exposed to a bigger picture, earlier on."

All students interested in Divergent Engineering are asked to participate in a quarter-long microcontroller workshop where they will have the opportunity to gain a variety of new skills, to be challenged as individuals and to connect with students of similar interests, but in other majors. After completing the workshop, students have the flexibility to either join a divE team or pursue other projects, such as joining a lab or starting their own business. “We’re constantly trying to expose our members to new challenges, new projects and new people,” said Truong. “We’re an open community and we try to expose students to resources by encouraging them to talk to their professors and finding those hidden gems on campus.” The organization that began with six students, now has had over 60 interested applicants and over 30 members that represent every department of the Jacobs School of Engineering. Divergent Engineering has approximately 20 interdisciplinary engineering projects that vary from a glove-remote controlled car to 3D printer made of recycled parts. The organization has grown tremendously in last few months, to which the founders credit their dedicated team members as well as the Electrical and Computer Engineering department, the Gordon Engineering Leadership Center and the von Liebig Entrepreneurism Center for guidance and support. “As a self-funded team, we know that it’s the passion of the students that continue to make this work. We have an extremely strong group of members,” said Truong. “They know that their membership fees go toward buying supplies for the workshop and the workshops fund projects. They value their education and want to contribute.” In the beginning of Winter Quarter, Divergent Engineering had 12 students participate in the workshop and new members who joined different projects. Morris, Phan and Truong knew they wanted to continue offering the workshop to more students and looked for resources on campus. “The donation from the von Liebig Entrepreneurism Center could not have come at a better time,” Phan explained. “von Liebig allowed us to be ambitious and to pick up new members."

Divergent Engineering highly encourages student involvement from all disciplines and emphasizes that it’s never too early or too late to join. As UC San Diego Mechanical Engineering graduate students, Morris and Phan reflected on their undergraduate experience at UC San Diego and explained that in most major curricula, hands-on work comes in the form of a senior design project in the later years of an undergraduate student’s studies. Morris, Truong and Phan believe that Divergent Engineering is able to provide more hands-on experience as an undergraduate and can help spread out ideas for a senior design project. “If you’re an incoming Engineering student and you’re curious about what other kinds of engineering there is out there, then it’s perfect. The workshop is for figuring out: what do I want to do?” Morris said. “You’ll have milestones, but also an open-ended project. You’ll be able to connect with older students further along in their majors and gain exposure to different disciplines.” For graduating seniors, Divergent Engineering can help knock out a long-time item in their bucket list. “Last quarter, two new seniors in Chemical Engineering approached me about wanting to do an environmental project. They had their pitch ready a week before [last quarter’s] Pitch Day,” explained Truong. “We were happy to see that they reached out to campus resources like TGIF: The Green Initiative Fund and Rodger’s Garden. They asked TGIF for $300 to fund their pitch. They ended up receiving $7600.”

Find more information on Divergent Engineering on their website: divergentengineering.weebly.com

Meet the Engineers of Tomorrow: Vineet Pandey and Yasmine Kotturi

We’re gearing up for Research Expo 2015 on Thursday, April 16 here at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. As part of that, we’re introducing you to a few of the graduate students you’ll meet there beforehand.

In this second post of our “Meet the Engineers of Tomorrow” series (see Meet the Engineers of Tomorrow : Oscar Beijbom), we’ll hear from computer science PhD student Vineet Pandey and research assistant Yasmine Kotturi from the Design Lab at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.

The two are collaborating with Stanford University PhD student Chinmay Kulkarni on a project for UC San Diego professor of cognitive science and computer science and engineering Scott Klemmer and Stanford University professor of computer science Michael Bernstein.

I asked Pandey and Kotturi to tell me a bit about themselves and their research interests.

“My first year here at UC San Diego I studied systems and architecture, but I soon became very interested in the role technology can play in simplifying our lives on a large scale,” said Pandey. “For example, education has typically been an elitist commodity so to speak, since only a few people have access to it. With online education, we can provide people access to educational resources that they normally wouldn’t have. My research focuses on understanding how much we can achieve with online education and how we can work around its limitations.”

I wanted to know if he had attended Research Expo in 2014, and what he was most excited for this year.

“This is my first time at Research Expo,” said Pandey. “I’m looking forward to meeting others that are using technology to solve societal problems. Secondly, since I’m in my second year and still finding a direction, I am interested in learning about problems and techniques pursued by researchers in other areas. Finally, I am interested in getting feedback on my poster.”

“I received my bachelors in cognitive science from UC San Diego and began working with Scott Klemmer as a research assistant about a year ago,” said Kotturi in turn. “I’ve been really interested in online learning and getting a sense of the benefits it can provide to people around the world who have access to the Internet. That in turn has led me to want to have more technical skills to contribute to the field. In the Fall, I will be starting my master’s degree in computer science at UC San Diego.”

I was impressed. Both Pandey and Kotturi were just starting out. What have you accomplished so far, I asked.

“Prior to my arrival Chinmay Kulkarni had built a platform called talkabout, where students can video-chat with classmates about course material,” said Pandey. “We saw a lot of great things come out of it; students had more empathy for one another and test scores went up. With Chinmay and professor Bernstein (also at Stanford), we figured it would be interesting to know which objectives could be met using video-based discussion groups.”

“Talkabout aims to create social learning and peer collaboration within a massive online class,” Kotturi explained. “I’ve been focused on the implementation, development and design of this system and trying to understand the role it plays in the online learning ecosystem.”

When asked to describe the research they are presenting at Research Expo, Kotturi described something called the “Think-Pair-Share” format. It’s a commonly used format in classroom education to encourage peer collaboration. During the think stage, students are given time to think about a solution to a problem individually, and then they work in pairs to solve the problem before sharing it with the rest of the class.

“We piloted the video-based Think-Pair-Share format in a philanthropy Massive Open Online Class (MOOC),” said Kotturi. “It didn’t work so well.”

Why not?, I asked.

“We expected the students to take an interest in the discussion questions that we created for them, which were problem-solving questions,” said Pandey. “As it turned out, they were much more interested in sharing experiences.”

“Right,” said Kotturi. “We needed to hear why the students didn’t like this more structured format and adapt the video-based discussions accordingly. The second time we tried it, we centered the discussion questions around the final project that each student had to turn in at the end of the study.”

“We learned that the students placed a high level of importance on getting feedback on ideas from one another,” said Pandey. “At the end of the course, I received requests from a few of the participants asking to be put in touch with the others so that they could continue the discussions on their own.”

The student researchers also noticed that when one student wasn’t speaking up on her own during the “Share” stage, her peer from the “Pair” stage encouraged her. The team feels as though the video-based discussion groups help to create an equal distribution of idea-sharing.

“My hope is that online educators will take note that video-based discussion groups are a useful medium to meet learning objectives which are difficult to achieve with current video-delivery and forums,” said Pandey.

Kotturi agreed. “Online education has the power to bring peers with numerous worldviews together,” she said. “Adding video-based discussion platforms that facilitate peer learning to these curriculums can achieve objectives like transfer of concepts, better collaboration and faster cognition while preserving the benefits of a global conversation, such as empathy and perspective-sharing.’”

You can see more of Scott Klemmer’s projects here.

Vineet Pandey will present a poster at Research Expo 2015 titled, “Connecting stories and learning objectives increases participant motivation in online discussions”.

Want to see more? Visit http://www.jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/re/ to see the posters and program and to register.

Lovely digital creatures on display at Research Expo April 16

A relative of this cute digital white rabbit will be part of one of the many posters on display April 16 at Research Expo at the Price Center. The picture is a--very rough--draft for the work of computer science Ph.D. student Chiwei Tseng, who works with Professors Ravi Ramamoorthi and Henrik W. Jensen. The work also is part of the Jacobs School's new Center for Visual Computing.
Here's the abstract for Tseng's poster, which is titled "A generic light scattering model for rendering photorealistic animal fur fibers:"

Rendering photorealistic animal fur is of practical importance in many computer graphics productions. In the past, the visual appearances of specific fiber types have been studied, and various light scattering models derived from cylindrical geometry have been proposed. These models, however, lack either physical accuracy or versatility to produce the wide range of specular and diffusive material properties observed on animal fur fibers in the wild. We propose an anatomically based light scattering model for arbitrary animal fur fibers, represented by two coaxial cylinder volumes. We show that our model preserves high fidelity to actual animal fur and can simulate a large array of visual appearances by qualitatively matching synthetic optical microscopy images and far-field scattering profiles with measured data. Through reconstructing the light paths for formerly unexplainable scattering lobes observed on 10 animal fur fiber types, we reveal how the subsurface structures of a fur fiber can bring about decisive effects to its visual appearance.

More info about Research Expo at: http://www.jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/re/