Apply to the Student Travel Fund

Do you need money to travel to your next conference, hackathon or networking event? Apply to the Student Travel Fund! Originally made possible by generous donations from the 2013 graduating senior class in conjunction with the annual Ring Ceremony, the fund helps cover costs for undergraduate student travel to conferences and competitions.

Taylor used the funds to travel to a conference.

Yale University, where SplashCon was held

"I am on the TESC Outreach Committee and was given the opportunity with my co-lead to be in charge of Splash -  a one-day marathon of classes in a variety of subjects that is open to all students in grades 9-12 - this year," said Taylor. "Universities such as Yale, Harvard and MIT put it on. I applied to the student travel fund to attend SplashCon, a conference that teaches universities how to run the event. I gained so much valuable information! I will apply what I learned in the workshops, like marketing tips, how to create a timeline for the event, and how to utilize the website. I also look forward to applying what I learned from listening to the other students' experiences."

Ryan used the funds to travel to a workshop in Los Angeles.

"The American Society of Civil Engineers workshop in Los Angeles gave me an opportunity to network with professionals, and interact with other students from other schools," said Ryan. "I was able to learn more about general leadership within the Society of Civil Engineers, how to go about advancing my professional career, and how to better serve the community through interaction with professionals and lectures by accomplished engineers."


Interested? You're in luck! There's a workshop January 26, 2017 in the Qualcomm Room (EBU1/Jacobs Hall). During this workshop the STF Committee will share insights about the application process, best practices for travel, and recording trip experiences. Refreshments will be provided!

The von Liebig Center Concludes 3-Session Medical Device Technology Commercialization Workshop

The von Liebig Entrepreneurism Center recently concluded a highly successful, three-session workshop on the commercialization of medical devices on Oct. 17, 2015. In collaboration with the Institute of Engineering in Medicine and the School of Medicine Department of Anesthesiology, the von Liebig Center was able to offer a hands-on learning experience for faculty, graduate students and post-docs at UC San Diego. The program had over twenty teams apply and was able to provide twelve teams with one-to-one mentorship and guidance on how good ideas become products, how to assess stakeholder needs and market opportunities, and how to successfully fund their companies.

The workshop was divided into three sessions, each with a specific focus and separated by two weeks to allow time for development. The first session, held on Sept. 12, had a focus on regulations. Participants were asked to present their ideas to a panel of invited industry experts, who would review them and provide feedback.

Teams were asked to then conduct customer interviews and independently study the Center’s video lectures on customer discovery and the Business Model Canvas. Upon reflecting on the workshop, students found the independent study both helpful and efficient.

“[The content and homework were] great! If done, they were very helpful,” wrote an anonymous student. “[Steve] Blank’s videos were outstanding.”

On Sept. 26, the teams met for the second session focused on product design, and for the last session on Oct. 17, teams gave their final presentations and spoke of their next steps.

“Several teams will be supported and recommended to participate in I-Corps Phase II,” Lead facilitator Michael Krupp, PhD. said. “Eventually, they can compete at the national level of I-Corps for an opportunity to receive over $50,000 of funding.”

The success of this medical device technology commercialization workshop paves the way for the introduction of more three-day workshops at the von Liebig Entrepreneurism Center.

“This was our first time offering this type of workshop at von Liebig,” Dr. Krupp said. “This workshop was specific for medical devices, but we would definitely like to offer more workshops with a similar model for other topics as well.”

Dr. Krupp worked with Hal W. DeLong and Jay S. Kunin, PhD to facilitate the three-session medical device technology commercialization workshop. Krupp has over 20 years of experience in the Pharma industry, holding both business and product development roles. He is the founder of Neurgain Technologies, the CEO of Xfibra LLC and an advisor at the von Liebig Entrepreneurism Center.

DeLong is also a von Liebig advisor and the Executive Director of Proof of Concept Institute, Inc.. He has over 25 years of senior industry management experience in medical technology commercialization. Dr. Kunin is an executive and consultant for pharma, medical device, health IT and CRO companies, is the VP BioMed Track for Tech Coast Angels and an entrepreneurship mentor and instructor for the von Liebig I-Corps program. Dr. Kunin also served as the Executive Director of the UCSD Moxie Center for Student Entrepreneurship.

IBM partners with the Jacobs School to offer free workshops on IBM Bluemix/Watson

Representatives from IBM provided a free student and faculty workshop with the von Liebig Entrepreneurism Center at the Jacobs School of Engineering on Wednesday, Oct. 21, to introduce how IBM’s cloud Bluemix/Watson Platform can be utilized as a service. The first workshop taught researchers how to use IBM’s Watson product on the Bluemix platform for a host of cognitive computing applications, such as robotics, lasers, imaging and medical diagnostics.   

As part of IBM’s Academic Initiative Program, students and faculty at UC San Diego will be able to use this cloud platform for free. Recently, the von Liebig Center was named as an authorized incubator for the IBM Global Entrepreneur Program.The von Liebig Center plans to continue working with IBM in offering access to more workshops and providing additional support to those who are interested in pursuing commercialization of projects ideas with the use of the Bluemix platform.

At the first workshop, Armen Pishdotchian, Technical Enablement Specialist of IBM Watson Academic Practice, shared that one of the early tests of Watson was used for the Jeopardy game show with host Alex Trebek. He explained that Jeopardy was an easy application and the academic uses are much more advanced. UCSD Faculty expressed interest in using Watson for time series analysis in digital healthcare data, sensors and diagnostics, while students expressed interest in bioinformatics, sensors and robotics. During his introduction to cognitive computing, Dr. Ali Arsanjani, IBM Distinguished Engineer, said that we will eventually learn to trust robots like we have learned to trust our computers.  

The 4 L’s common to Cognitive Computing are: 1. Language (Watson has to know that a wise man is different from a wise guy.)  2. Levels (Potential responses are scored and ranked.) 3. Learning (Watson must be able to recognize patterns in complex data and images.) 4. Limbs (Watson must be capable of understanding robotics and the Internet of Things).

Watson works in 4 stages: 1. Question Analysis (similar to a keyword search). 2. Hypothesis Generation (candidate answers are listed).  3. Scoring (Linguists score the validity of each potential answer).  4. Ranking (Final merge based on the highest score.)  

Both speakers emphasized the versatility of Watson. Watson has been used to map personality traits with the type of work that people should be doing, as well as used to answer questions about insurance, mortgages or any other area of expertise. In the medical field, Watson was used to conduct research on amino acids for cancer treatment as well as a diagnostic tool for physicians to analyze Asperger’s or Down-Syndrome.

Matias Rico, Business Development Manager, IBM Academic Practice holds office hours at the von Liebig Center every other week on Mondays from 11:00 am to 3:00 pm

For more information, please contact Lori Deaton at the von Liebig Center (ldeaton@ucsd.edu).