Zahn Prize Competition Rewards Student Teams

This year, the Moxie Center for Student Entrepreneurship was able to double the total amount of cash prizes for student teams at its annual Zahn Prize Competition. The competition was held at The Basement, our newest entrepreneurial space, and the Moxie Center awarded a total of $20,000 in cash prizes to young campus innovators:

• Ganesh Elie of Slithr, electronic longboards

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ganesh-elie-29945279

• Josh Cohen of Tranio
• Eric Suen of Aqua Design Innovations, Inc. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kevinzl/ecoqube-c-your-window-to-nature
• Joy Sampoonachot and John Chou of Cocoon Cam

http://www.cocooncam.com/technology

• Deepak Atyam and Alex Finch of Tri-D Dynamics.

http://www.space.com/23107-3d-printed-rocket-engine-student-video.html

UC San Diego team takes 4th place in regional programming competition

A team of UC San Diego computer science students tied with seven other campuses for first place in the 2015 ACM Southern California Regional Programming Contest on Nov. 14.

The tie was finally resolved based on the time it took to solve problems, with the UC San Diego team landing in fourth place, after Caltech, USC and UCLA. Fourth-ranked UC San Diego Team "Phuket" comprised of Juliati Alafate, Chicheng  Zhang and Lifan Wu.

Hat tip to graduate student coaches Igors Stepanovs and Yuliang Li, as well as faculty coach Michael Taylor.

In all, UC San Diego fielded four teams during the competition. The other three teams placed 14th, 15th and 19th out of 89 teams that took place in the competition. Members of the other three teams were:

Karan Wadhera
Jason Wu
Timothy Wang

Archana Radhakrishna
Darshan Patil
Ujjwal Gulecha

Huayin Zhou
Galen Krulce
Huajie Wu

Yeyao Tao
Junxi Li
Zhiwei Jia
Sung Rim Huh

More info:
Team website:  http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/groups/UCSDProgramContest/
For final standings, go to:  http://socalcontest.org/history/2015/details-2015.shtml

Jacobs School engineering demos at the first San Diego Maker Faire

Engineers for Exploration will demo some of their tech at the first-ever San Diego Maker Faire this weekend.

Jacobs School engineers are out in force at this weekend's first-ever San Diego Maker Faire. The event, which takes place Oct. 3 and 4 in Balboa Park will bring together tinkerers, techies, hobbyists of all stripes, educators, artists, crafters--and more.

The event is organized by the City of San Diego, The Balboa Park Cultural Partnership, the San Diego Makers Guild and Tijuana Innovadora.

UC San Diego contributions to the event include:

-  UCSD Robotics will demo the MiP balancing robot at the Robotics Zone
- Engineers for Exploration will demo an automated camera trap, high-tech birds' nest finders and LiDAR scanning, also at the Robotics Zone
- The Qualcomm Institute's high-tech OptIPortable display walls will visualize a mock dig site at the Family Zone
- QI researchers will display several drones at the Drone Zone.

In addition, Jacobs School professors Thomas Bewley (robotics), Steve Swanson (comptuer science) and Falko Kuester (structural engineering) plan to give talks during the event, along with research scientist Curt Schurgers and Ph.D. student James Strawson.

The Global TIES program will be taking over the Jacobs School Instagram feed during the event (@UCSanDiegoengineering).

More about UC San Diego events at the Maker Faire here.

More Maker Faire info at http://sdmakerfaire.org/

Other Jacobs School-affiliated exhibitors include:

. IEEE UCSD

 SEDS@UCSD

 The Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers at UCSD

 Divergent Engineering of UCSD

Triton 3D

 Triton Rocket Club

UC San Diego Autonomous Airplane Team

Global TIES 

Plasymd Co-Founders Turned Academia.edu Employees Recruiting at UC San Diego Career Fair

Adnan Akil (center) and Kevin Wu (right) 

UC San Diego alumni Adnan Akil and Kevin Wu staffed the academia.edu booth yesterday at the UC San Diego Science and Technology Job and Internship fair. They were busy recruiting software engineers to Academia.edu which describes itself as a platform for academics to share research papers. Akil and Wu landed at Academia.edu by way of a startup they co-founded: a peer-review platform called Plasmyd.

Almost a year ago to the day, the announcement came out that academia.edu acquired Plasmyd. At the time, Akil told pandodaily, “[Academia.edu has] built the largest online community of scientists while we’ve been working on building the next generation tools of peer review,” said Plasmyd’s co-founder Adnan Akil.

Headlines from media reports of the acquisition paint a picture:

CNET Academia.edu acquires Plasmyd to let peers review papers

Venture Beat Academia.edu acquires Plasmyd to bring peer review into the 21st century

Pandodaily: Academia.edu acquires Plasmyd to prove itself to the academy

Akil, a Jacobs Scholar, was a bioengineering major at UC San Diego and went on to UC Irvine for graduate studies in stem cell biology. Wu studied bioinformatics at UC San Diego.

About a year before the acquisition, Tech Crunch wrote this story: Meet Plasmyd, A Search Engine/Discussion Platform Just For Scientists

Engineers for Exploration at UC San Diego / Learn How to Get Involved on Oct 9

Engineers for Exploration is one of the many great opportunities at the fingertips of engineering students at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego. Just peruse their list of technology platforms and you will get an idea of the exciting opportunities (see below).

Find out about the opportunities in person and hear about some of their exciting past adventures.

When? Thursday, Oct. 9 from 4:30-5:30pm in the Calit2 Auditorium, Atkinson Hall.

Where? Calit2 Auditorium, Atkinson Hall (Qualcomm Institute). All majors welcome.


Aerial Camera Platform

Airborne Radio Collar Tracker

Condor Video Camera

CoralCam

Intelligent Camera Trap

Quadcopter

Stereo Diving Rig

Stingray AUV

Terrestrial Vehicl

This was the fun at Bioengineering Day 2014

Renowned neuroscientist Terry Sejnowski delivered the keynote address at this year's Bioengineering Day, on the morning of Saturday, April 12, at the Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine.
He was followed by a distinguished roster of speakers in the afternoon, including Dr. Doris Taylor, the director of regenerative medicine research at the Texas Heart Institute, Dr. Gerardo Toledo, senior director of microbial discovery at Synthetic Genomics and Kabir Kasargod, director of business development at Qualcomm life.
Graduate and undergraduate students also presented posters on a wide variety of topics, including traction forces that regulate early fate decisions in embryonic stem cells;  smart matrices as dynamic scaffolds for stem cell differentiation; and designer gene circuits for basic science, engineering and medicines, among many, many others.
The day's events also included a networking reception, a quiz bowl and awards.
More pictures of the fun below.