Engineers explore the Guatemalan jungle

It's not every day that you get to explore the jungles of Guatemala as an undergraduate or graduate student. But that's exactly what students in the Engineers for Explorations program get to do every year.

They are led by computer science professor Ryan Kastner and Qualcomm Institute research scientist Albert Lin. Kastner and Lin in turn work with USC archeologist Tom Garrison, Edwin Roman-Ramirez of UT Austin and Jason Paterniti of the GEOS Foundation.

The goal of the yearly expeditions is using drones equipped with LIDAR to find new Maya archeological sites and help document existing sites. Researchers also hope to develop new technologies to speed up data gathering at archeological sites.

You can find out more about last year's expedition here.

Robotic Stingray Takes a Dip

It's called the Stingray. It's an autonomous underwater vehicle that can be loaded with a wide array of sensors to monitor the health of marine habitats. And it's being built by a team of undergraduate students and their graduate student adviser.

It's all part of Engineers for Exploration, a program that allows UC San Diego students to partner with the National Geographic Society, the Hubbs SeaWorld Research Institute and San Diego Zoo Global.

On a recent sunny afternoon, students took the Stingray out for a test drive at Canyonview Pool here on the UC San Diego campus. Jennifer Batryn, a student at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo who was visiting for the summer, got into the pool. Perry Naughton, the project's graduate student adviser, supervised the test.     

Here are some pictures of their outing.