Alexander Vardy Named Jack Keil Wolf Chair in Electrical Engineering.

Electrical engineering Professor Alexander Vardy, a renowned researcher in information and coding theory, has been appointed as the first Jack Keil Wolf Endowed Chair in Electrical Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. The endowed chair was established in memory of Jack Keil Wolf, a longtime professor at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and a pioneer in information theory and its applications.


The chair has been endowed with funds raised in honor and memory of Wolf’s lifetime of professional achievements in research and teaching. More than 50 people, including colleagues, former students, friends and family contributed to the fund. Vardy said the scope of the contributors is a tribute to Wolf’s impact in the lives of so many.  

Professor Alexander Vardy, Jack Keil Wolf Chair in Electrical Engineering.

 “Being appointed to the Jack Keil Wolf Chair is such a tremendous honor. Jack Wolf was a shining light,” said Vardy. “For me, personally, he was a role model throughout my career; I know that this is a feeling I share with many people. It is with the greatest gratitude and humility that I would like to thank the donors to the Wolf Chair, large and small. Indeed, Jack was like a bright torch that lit the paths of countless people. I am extremely honored to have the opportunity of carrying forward a bit of that flame.”

That flame, at least on the research side of Wolf’s legacy, is important in the fields of information theory and coding theory. Information theory is a branch of applied mathematics and electrical engineering concerned with transmitting data from point A to point B without error. Whether that data is images taken by a spacecraft on Mars or photos taken on your smartphone, it is converted into a sequence of ones and zeros and bundled into packets to transmit down the line. Claude E. Shannon, who developed the field of information theory in the 1940s and 50s, posited that it was possible to achieve what he called “channel capacity” -- that is, perfect data transmission which is both reliable and efficient. This Holy Grail of capacity -- that you could transmit data without error while sacrificing the bare minimum in storage space or transmission time -- has driven the research of coding theorists, including Wolf and Vardy, for decades. 

Read our full story here. 

The Fastest Car in the Price Center Ballroom

Teams from across Southern California competed in IEEE's Viacar contest April 28 in the Price Center Ballroom on the UC San Diego campus. First place and second place went to two UCLA teams. UC San Diego's Initial V team placed in third. Students on the team were Victor Lee, Sebastian Sanchez, Kanza Khan, Komal Verma and Jenny Tu.

The goal of the competition is to design, build and race autonomous cars, which must follow a track marked by a one-inch white tape on a dark-colored carpet. Under the tape, there is a wire carrying a 100mA rms 75 kHz sinusoidal signal. The fastest cars travel at speeds of up to 10 feet per second. This year, the three fastest times were respectively 35, 38 and 38.3 seconds.

Some pictures of the event here, courtesy of IEEE:

Junkyard Derby, Rain or Shine

The big storm system that drenched most of San Diego County didn't stop 46 teams from taking part in this year's Junkyard Derby May 6 on Peterson Hill. This year's winners were team Premium Motion. Some pictures of the, sometimes rainy, fun below. Photos: TESC/Sam Sun

Postcards from the FRONTIERS OF SCIENCE

Postcards from the FRONTIERS OF SCIENCE...that's the name of a new blog from Janelle Shane, an electrical engineering graduate student here at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. Janelle is part of the Ultrafast and Nanoscale Optics research group in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department.

The text on her blog banner reads:

"The edge of the unknown can be a strange and beautiful place. This land, the frontier of science, is the domain of the hardy brand of explorer known as the graduate student. Life here on the frontier is sometimes bizzare.

...and yes, we have lasers."

Caption for the first image:

Dramatic patterns of light and dark chase each other across the landscape.  Jagged monoliths reach for the sky, while canyons, mesas, and mountains range on toward the horizon.  

The mountains are made of solid laser material, and the plains are made of solid glass.  And it’s all microscopic, the tallest feature less than a hundredth as high as a human hair is wide.

None of this is supposed to be here. (Check out her blog for the rest of the story.)

Jacobs School in the Spotlight on the Yahoo On Campus Blog

The Jacobs School of Engineering was in the spotlight on Yahoo's academic relations blog yoncampus.com twice in April.
The blog highlighted a visit where researchers from Yahoo! Labs met with various Jacobs School faculty members, including Gert Lanckriet, Lawrence Saul, Todd Coleman, Sanjoy Dasgupta and Yoav Freund. Read the post here.
A little earlier this month, Achint Thomas, a Yahoo! Labs researcher who worked on anti-abuse science, detailed his experience as a judge at Research Expo. Before the event, he met with CSE Prof. Ryan Kastner and Jason Oberg, one of Kastner's students, to talk about their novel work on theoretical assurances for hardware and system-level security. Read the post here. 

Faculty Startups Nominated for Innovation Awards

Mushroom Networks and app2you.comm, two local startups founded by UC San Diego Jacobs School engineering faculty, have been nominated for the San Diego Business Journal’s Innovation Awards 2013. According to the San Diego Business Journal, the awards honor “people and organizations that continue to stretch boundaries and to recognize those individuals and companies who demonstrate how the innovative spirit drives economic value.”

Rene Cruz, a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Cahit Akin, a former researcher in the UC San Diego division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), founded Mushroom Networks to provide faster and more reliable internet connections for mission critical applications.

App2you.com enables anyone to create custom web applications without having to do any programming. It was founded by Computer Science and Engineering professor YannisPapakonstantinou.

ECE Professor Rene Cruz (second from left) shared his experience going through the commercialization process at a 10th anniversary celebration for the von Liebig Entrepreneurism Center. Cruz founded Mushroom Networks, which, along with app2you.com, has been nominated for the San Diego Business Journal's 2013 Innovation Awards.

Both companies received pre-seed funding and support from the Jacobs School’s von Liebig Entrepreneurism Center. Cruz was one of four faculty inventors to share his experience with the commercialization process at a dinner last year held in honor of the von Liebig Center’s 10^th anniversary. The center was founded in 2002 to help faculty and students transfer their inventions to the marketplace. Cruz said the full impact of learning how to build a company and being able to share that with students is something that can only be “measured on a 100-year timescale.”

WIC Hosts First Girl's Day Out Outreach Event

The Women in Computing student organization at UC San Diego, better known as WIC@UCSD, hosted its first Girl's Day out outreach event April 20 at the Jacobs School of Engineering.
The goal was to attract more high school girls to the fields of computer science and engineering and information technology. Girls took lab tours, developed an Android app and listened to women who work in industry and academia. More info on the event here.
Some photo highlights from the event below: