Triton Tables With a View

Engineering graduate students and alumni who mingled during the Aug. 26 Triton Tables event here on campus enjoyed some spectacular sunset views from the 11th floor of Tioga Hall. They also enjoyed great conversations and great food.

The event is designed to give students and alumni an opportunity to meet and mingle, as well as get career advice. The Aug. 26 Triton Table was hosted by Sam Knight, who graduated from UC San Diego in 1973 with a bachelor's in what was then applied physics and information science. He currently serves as vice president, carrier and industry relations, at Location Smart and also serves on the Jacobs School's Alumni Council.

"I believe the evening was a hit," Knight wrote alumni participants after the event. "The students expressed a real appreciation for the breadth of experiences shared by you all."

The gorgeous sunset  was courtesy of the remnants of tropical storm Ivo, according to UT San Diego.

For more information on Triton Tables, or to host a Triton Table, contact Tatis Cervantes at ttcervantes@ucsd.edu

Jacobs School Student Writes From Beirut

We love to hear from our students who are traveling and working around the world this summer. So we were thrilled when we got an email from Hani Daou, an electrical engineering major, who is working as an intern in Beirut, Lebanon. More specifically, he is working for Multilane, a company that provides high-speed, high-value turnkey test solutions for the networking, semiconductor, signal integrity and datacom systems industries.

He writes:

My duties in this internship included understanding the functionality of various Multilane products, mainly Bit Error Rate Testers and Digital Sampling Oscilloscopes. Recently, I have been getting hands on in helping Multilane product development engineers in developing an Active Optical Cable testing solution, which is designed to carry out a variety of quality and signal integrity tests for Active Optical Cables. I have attached a picture taken of me working in the lab, observing eye measurements sampled by a Digital Sampling oscilloscope after passing through an AOC cable.

If you have a cool internship story, email us at  ipatrin AT ucsd DOT edu or post pictures and info on our Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/UCSDJacobs

Chancellor Khosla Visits TIP Team

From left: Graduate students Nick Morozovsky and Daniel Yang, TIP team members Kaylee Feigum, Parry Wilcox, Victor Balcer, Kevin Katz, Chancellor Pradeep K. Khosla and  graduate student Yuncong Chen.

Chancellor Pradeep K. Khosla visited Aug. 22 with students who are part of the Jacobs School's Team Internship Program and work at the Sorrento-Valley-based Brain Corporation. TIP brings together teams of students from different majors who get real-world engineering experiences at companies around the world. The Brain Corp. interns got to build a drone and experimented with various robot prototypes.

Brain Corporation is a pioneer in developing novel algorithms that model the functionality of the nervous system and can be applied to robotics, computer vision, motor control and autonomous navigation. The TIP team aren't the only Jacobs School employees at the company. It also employs part-time two Jacobs School graduate students, Daniel Yang and Nick Morozovsky, who are part of the research group of Thomas Bewley, a professor in mechanical and aerospace engineering. The group connected with Brain Corporation via Jacobs School alum Marius Buibas, who is a scientist at the company.

Bewley, Morozovsky and Yang are household names here at the Jacobs School. In Bewley's lab, Morozovsky designed SkySweeper, a robot for power line inspection, and Switchblade, an agile robot that can balance and climb stairs. Yang is the designer of a fire-fighting robot known as FFR. Both robots have received ample media coverage and FFR's technology was recognized at this year's Student Infrared Imaging Competition, bringing $10,000 home for the Bewley lab.

Alum Yoshi Kohno featured on NOVA Science Now

A--very belated--kudos for alum Yoshi Kohno, who appeared in an episode of NOVA Science NOW in October 2012. We found out about the show while talking to a NOVA crew during a test at the Englekirk Structural Engineering Center this past weekend.

Before joining the faculty at the University of Washington, Kohno was a graduate student in the research group of Mihir Ballare here at the Jacobs School. During his almost two-decade long academic career, he has hacked into cars, voting machines and even chips that expert runners insert into their shoes, among other exploits. The show retells his life since childhood when he was, of course, a computer wiz interested in cryptography.

"Thanks goodness that Yoshi is on our side," his wife, Taryn, says at one point during the show.

You can watch the show here (the segment on Kohno begins around 41:00).

You can also read about his work to hack into cars' electronic components in conjunction with Stefan Savage's research group  here at the Jacobs School in this New York Times story.

A couple of Jacobs School press releases about Kohno's work: on hacking into Diebold voting machines, which led to a testimony in front of Congress; and on a free software he helped develop to track lost or stolen laptops.

 In 2007, he landed on the MIT Technology Review's prestigious list of innovators under 35. 

Bringing the House Down

It took four tries, but engineers at the Englekirk Structural Engineering Center at UC San Diego finally brought down at four-story structure they had been testing since July on the world's largest outdoor shake table. Led by John van de Lindt, a professor of Colorado State University, they were trying to understand how to make structures with wood frames and first-floor garages better equipped to withstand earthquakes.

Results so far were positive, van de Lindt told UT San Diego:

"We learned that these buildings can deform quite a bit before they collapse; that's a positive. And the ground has to move a lot."

Saturday, Aug. 17, van de Lindt and colleagues had removed the various retrofits that they had been testing for about a month. Their goal was to see how far they would have to push the building before it collapsed. It turned out to be quite a bit.

Researchers used the Englekirk Center's shake table to simulate the 1992 Cape Mendocino earthquake, a 7.2 magnitude temblor, the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, a 6.9 shaker also known as the World Series earthquake, and finally the Superstition Hills earthquake, a 6.7 temblor that caused $3 million in damage in Imperial County in 1987. That's when the house fell down.

"The first floor just pancaked," van de Lindt told UT San Diego.

In addition to UT San Diego, the test was also covered by:

Gizmodo

10News, San Diego

CBS News 8, San Diego 

and other local TV stations. 

Learn more about the research project here. 

More info about the Englekirk Center here.

More pictures from Saturday's tests:

Brain-inspired Computer Architecture

Electrical engineering alumnus Dharmendra Modha is working on a brain-inspired computer architecture at IBM. It's part of the SyNAPSE project.

CNET covered the most recent update on this project which is "a new software ecosystem was built to program silicon chips whose architecture is directly inspired by the brain's size, function, and minimal use of power."

Keep up with Modha's research on his blog "Dharmendra S Modha's Cognitive Computing Blog".

Check out the 2009 Pulse story celebrating the fact that the IEEE selected Modha as one of seven top minds to discuss how emerging technologies have the potential to change the world.

Flying Over the Fallen Star

Some of you may have wondered why a small blimp was hovering over the Warren Mall last week. It turns out a group of Jacobs School undergraduates were testing an aerial camera platform, attached to the blimp, which is in fact a balloon (we're told).

The project is 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.
For their test flight, the undergraduates had redesigned the camera with new rigging and a new pivoting device called a gimbal. The set-up holds a DSLR camera. The balloon is also equipped with a GoPro video camera. In addition, students rewrote the code that helps the platform remain stable.

The test flight was a success and the students took some amazing pictures and video footage. They created a high resolution panoramic shot by stitching together individual pictures. They also have started working on 3D reconstructions from 2D photographs. The goal is to create photorealistic 3D models of the area the camera platform surveys, where a researcher could virtually "walk through."

In the past, the camera platform has been used to track whales off the San Diego Coast. Students are preparing to take to the sea again soon.

Related links:

Engineers for Exploration

Blog post: Balloon Test on Warren Mall

Photo Gallery: Balloon test

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