"U Hack" and "Bog Love;" What happens when you train a neural network to write messages for Valentine's Day candy hearts

What happens when you train neural networks to write messages for candy hearts on Valentine's Day:

Here is Shane's original post:
 http://aiweirdness.com/ 
And here are links to the news coverage:
NPR
Popular Science
CNET
Bustle

For more on Shane's previous experiments on neural networks, read our story here:
When artificial intelligence is funny

Need a last-minute Halloween costume idea? This neural network has got you covered!

Need a last-minute costume idea for Halloween? How about a cyborg bat? Or a vampire shark? Or a magic sexy hamburger?
These are all costumes generated by a neural network trained by Jacobs School alumna Janelle Shane. Shane, who earned a Ph.D. in electrical engineering at UC San Diego in the lab of Professor Shaya Fainman, works with lasers by day. But her hobby is working with neural networks to create funny data sets.
For this project, she crowdsourced 4500 costume ideas from her blog readers and fed them to a neural network.
The network did not disappoint, generating costume suggestions such as vampire Big Bird, celery blue Frankenstein and strawberry shark.
Soon, Shane's readers were getting into the game and drawing the costumes the neural network suggested.
First up, strawberry shark:

And then: Bearley Quinn (courtesy of Twitter user @vonbees):

But Shane's readers weren't done. Soon they started making some of the costume suggestions a reality.
Twitter user Liz Walsh dressed up as the Dragon of Liberty:

Twitter user @HerbLovesTech and his wife dressed up as Professor Panda and Shark Princess:

And Shane? She took her inspiration from an entry in the costume data base. She will be Ruth Vader Ginsburg (that's a mash up of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Star Wars villain Darth Vader):

For more neural-network generated Halloween costumes, read Shane's blog post here. And read this news story by writer Rae Paoletta here and this Popular Mechanics story by writer Sophie Weiner.

Summer Engineering Institute Freshmen "Break Things Better"

During the 5-week Summer Engineering Institute, incoming electrical engineering majors from primarily fourth and fifth quintile high schools took ECE5: Making, Breaking and Hacking Stuff. The class is held in the EnVision Arts and Engineering Maker Studio and is part of the University of California San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering’s Experience Engineering Initiative, aimed at giving every engineering and computer science undergraduate student a hands-on or experiential engineering course or lab each and every year – starting freshman year. 

The course is normally offered during the school year and is 10 weeks long. Students participating in the Summer Engineering Institute completed the course in just 5 weeks by meeting twice as often, with the advantage of a much smaller class size.

The final project in the course required students to program a robot to recognize the difference between black and white so that it could follow a black line drawn on white paper.  Some of the teams incorporated other features from their previous projects while other teams tried new sensors.

“Our students are building things and breaking them down to make them better,” said Truong Nguyen, Chair of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. “That’s the goal of the hands-on curriculum – it’s open-ended so as to allow the students to discover how to make things better.”

“We adjusted the accuracy of tracking using sensors that tell the robot where it is in relation to the line,” said one student, whose robot veered off the track and spun in a circle.

Computer engineer recognized for his work in computational biology

A professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, San Diego, has received an honorable mention in the 2015 Doctoral Dissertation Award competition presented by the Association for Computing and Machinery.

Siavash Mirarab joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UC San Diego in 2015 after earning a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. His dissertation, “Novel Scalable Approaches for Multiple Sequence Alignment and Phylogenomic Reconstruction,” addresses the growing need to analyze large-scale biological sequence data efficiently and accurately.

To address this challenge, Mirarab introduces several methods: PASTA, a scalable and accurate algorithm that can align data sets up to one million sequences; statistical binning, a novel technique for reducing noise in estimation of evolutionary trees for individual parts of the genome; and ASTRAL, a new summary method that can run on 1,000 species in one day and has outstanding accuracy. These methods were essential in analyzing very large genomic datasets of birds and plants.

Mirarab’s research interests focus on accurate and scalable analysis of large-scale biological datasets. 

His work particularly focuses on evolutionary biology and computational methods that use genomic data to reconstruct the evolutionary past. He is interested in algorithmic developments that enable us to analyze very large datasets with high accuracy and with reasonable computational demands. These algorithms find application in various areas of computational biology, including multiple sequence alignment, metagenomics, and phylogenetic reconstruction from whole genomes.

Before receiving a Ph.D. at UT Austin, he earned a master’s degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, in 2008. He received his bacherlor’s degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Tehran University, Iran, in 2000. In between his studies, he has worked for various companies, including IBM and Cisco.  His Ph.D. research has been supported by a Howard Hughes Medical Institute international graduate student fellowship and by Canadian NSERG PGSD awards.

A Conversation with a Walt Disney Imagineer

A Conversation with Walt Disney Imagineer Jonathan Chew

Jonathan Chew, Blue Sky Program Manager at Walt Disney Imagineering, presented at this year’s ECE Day, hosted by the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department for its 50th anniversary. Chew detailing the relationship between imagination and engineering. Chew’s job as the Blue Sky Program Manager is to come up with the next big idea that then get incorporated into the Disney amusement parks. Check out this Q&A:

What is imagineering?

Imagineering is the blend of creative imagination and technical know-how. We work on all of the amazing theme parks and resorts around the world that are done by Disney.

Do you see a unifying trait in all Imagineers?

They’ve gotten to explore the world and have seen how things work, why things work, what makes things work. They ask the hard questions, such as “How can I improve this experience? What is fun for the guests who come to our parks everyday? How can I make that even better? How can I make that magical? How do I hide the technology so that the story shines through?” I tell people that they should be ‘T’-shaped. The big vertical bar of the ‘T’ is like your field of expertise. I am an electrical engineer, and that’s how I approach the world. The horizontal bar is sort of what makes imagineering imagineering - experience. Imagineers bring their experiences to the table during a brainstorm, during a design, during the project.

Do you have any advice for current engineering students?

Be more open-minded. It’s okay if you don’t find the solution right away. Talk to your teammates or be willing to listen to another person’s opinion. We all get into the zone where we’re like, “I’m just going to do this myself because I know how it’s done, I know the exact answer.”

Be open to accepting the thoughts and paradigms of all of those people around you, and also know what your strengths are. I am seeing it from a technical standpoint, and this is what’s important to keep in mind. But when you’re working on a team, you shouldn’t be stuck in your viewpoint.

Finally, think of yourself as creative. Sometimes, engineers don’t think they’re creative because they can’t draw or because they can’t sing or because they can’t dance, but creativity - I think the very definition of engineering is to build and to create - Arduino, Maker projects and just plain inventing. Create, create, create.

ECE Day 2016: Department Celebrates 50 Years

Electrical engineering students and industry professionals converged at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering on March 31, 2016 for ECE Day, hosted by the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department for its 50th anniversary. The day featured industry speakers, poster presentations featuring current research by ECE students and faculty, and Arduino workshops — even a jousting arena, lego competitions and a conversation with a Disney Imagineer!

Freshman computer engineer Elise Wong and senior electrical engineer Christopher Ellis of UC San Diego’s IEEE branch co-led the ECE Day planning committee, which included members of Tau Beta Pi (TBP), Etta Kappa Nu (HKN), the ECE Undergraduate Student Council. According Ellis, ECE Day was an idea that grew out of something else: “We originally wanted to invite industry to come in and tell students about the transition from school to the workforce.”

Logistical obstacles pushed the original event back, but Ellis says that the extra time allowed the planning team to make ECE Day a larger, more interactive event. Student organizations, including Divergent Engineering, Students for the Exploration and Development Space (SEDS), and Virtual Reality Club at UCSD (VR Club), showcased their current projects and encouraged interested students to join. In addition, Atmel Truck: Tech on Tour invited attendees into their trailer for an open house on Warren Mall.

Co-Founder of Qualcomm Irwin Jacobs gave a keynote speech regarding his life and career from academia to industry. Other speakers included Larry Stullich and David Pritchett, representatives of Northrop Grunman, and Slava Rokitski, who serves as Senior Manager of System Design at Cymer. Professor Mohan Trivedi and Assistant Professor Vikash Gilja of the ECE department also presented about their ongoing research projects.

Jacobs described how every student must decided whether or not they should attend graduate school, and specifically how he chose to apply to only a single school and fellowship, otherwise he would go directly into industry. “It hit home because I’m having the exact same thoughts,” Ellis said.

For the electrical engineers who attended, Ellis hopes they connected with potential opportunities to get involved, whether through student organizations or in faculty research. For future ECE Days, he wants to reach out more broadly to non-ECE majors and expose them to the exciting progress in the realm of electrical engineering.

“We want to get other students who are maybe bio majors or psychology majors to see what it’s like, to see what we’re doing, said Ellis.

Check out this post: A Conversation with A Walt Disney Imagineer

Former Walt Disney Imagineer brings flexible and surgical robotics to UC San Diego, joins Jacobs School faculty

A future in which robots can maneuver with high agility, dexterity and precision is not too far away. These flexible robots could one day assist with surgeries, navigate through tight, complex environments with ease, and be used to develop prosthetics that are capable of natural movement.

(A) Robotic systems such as the da Vinci surgical system have served as important platforms for device design and control algorithms for robot-assisted surgery. (B) New robot designs of flexible manipulators and arms provide means to control agile and dexterous motions for surgical catheters and endoscopes. (C) Actuators designed to mimic human muscle performance are designed for applications in prosthetics and animatronics. Image credit: M. Yip. 

The design and intelligent control of flexible and surgical robotics are the specialties of Michael Yip, one of the new faculty joining the Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. Yip received his Ph.D from the Department of Bioengineering at Stanford University. He will arrive in November as an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UC San Diego and will direct the new Advanced Robotics and Controls Laboratory (ARCLab). His research involves developing advanced algorithms that can control flexible robotics to move with high agility and dexterity. He also designs novel robotic systems that mimic the natural motion of animal and human bodies.

“Intelligent control of flexible robotics is a challenge that’s been plaguing the field. To make flexible robotics work effectively in places like the human body, we need to figure out how to control the robotics to crawl through constrained spaces and do manipulations without causing damage to their surroundings or to themselves,” said Yip.

This type of control is important in applications like robot-assisted surgery. For example, a surgeon could control a long, thin, flexible robotic device to snake its way through a patient’s body and perform surgery with high precision and safety. Use of these robotic devices could also offer less invasive surgical procedures.

Michael Yip, a new professor joining the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UC San Diego.

“Rather than dissecting the patient’s body, a surgeon could just make one or two small incisions on the body to insert these surgical robotic devices,” said Yip.

Controlling flexible robotics to maneuver through tight spaces — in a minimally invasive manner — is also useful in industrial applications including manufacturing, inspection and assembly. For example, flexible robotics could be used to inspect the wiring in an airplane wing or do repairs deep within a car engine without having to disassemble any major machinery.

Yip also works on making artificial muscles and actuators that can mimic biological muscle performance. Previously, he worked as a Walt Disney Imagineer within the Disney Research division, where he developed a technology for creating low-cost artificial muscles using conductive sewing thread. These synthetic muscles could contract and expand just like human muscles and were used to make life-like animatronic hands and arms. The artificial muscles were featured this summer in Popular Mechanics and Gizmodo.

Watch out for Yip in the upcoming UC San Diego Contextual Robotics Forum on Oct. 30. He will be presenting a poster and demonstration of his work at the Technology Showcase.

Register for the Contextual Robotics Forum here.