Three Electrical Engineering Teams at San Diego Dragon Boat Festival

Three student teams from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at UC San Diego participated in the 10th Annual San Diego Dragon Boat Festival last Saturday, May 3rd, in Tecolote Shores North, Mission Bay Park.  

Electrical engineering professor Charles Tu from the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering sponsored two ECE graduate student teams: Four Seas and Lighting the Way, and the IEEE Student Branch (undergrads) formed a UCSD IEEE team.  The team captains were Supanee Sukrittanon, Joseph Smalley, and Victor Lee, respectively.

A dragon boat seats 20 paddlers, and the Festival provided a drummer and a steer, who were from the UC San Diego Dragon Boat team.  There were 24 community or corporate teams, and the competition was by double elimination generating 46 heats. The race course was 200 meters long, and the race time was about one minute. 

While the graduate student teams both went 0-for-2, the IEEE undergraduates team won one race before succumbing to the double elimination tournament.  Despite the tough competition, as the photos below convey, everyone had a wonderful time, which, of course, is the purpose of the Festival.

Watch this Jacobs School alum have a conversation with a PR2

 How do you spend your weekend if you're a Ph.D. student in the robotics program at the University of Washington? Well, if you're Justin Huang, the former president of TESC here at the Jacobs School, you hook up a chatterbot made by Pandorabots to a speech recognizer and synthesis and have a conversation with a PR2, the iconic robot designed as an R&D platform by Willow Garage.
Make sure you crank the volume all the way up so you can hear the robot's answers.
A big thanks to Justin, who allowed us to post this video.
Below is a picture of Justin with his new friend.

This UC San Diego researcher has had a busy week

ABC US News | ABC Business News
It's been a busy week for Marni Bartlett, a researcher at the Institute for Neural Computation here at UC San Diego. She was at a conference in Orlando, Fla., when ABC News called with an interview request. Bartlett was happy to oblige and jumped into a taxi to head out to the network's local affiliate to shoot an on-camera interview.
You can watch the resulting segment here . 
What had very likely gotten the network's attention was a story about Bartlett's research in The New York Times' Science Section April 29. The story explains how Bartlett and colleagues in the Machine Perception Lab, which is housed at Calit2, have developed a software toolbox that is able to tell whether someone is faking pain better than human observers. You can read more about the research here.
Then you can figure out how good you are a spotting people who are faking pain by taking this New York Times quiz. 
Bartlett and colleagues are getting some of these technologies ready for commercialization through a start up they launched last year, Emotient.

Bioprinting an Italian TV Producer

Science journalist Barbara Bernardini, working on a story for Italy’s National TV RAI-1 news channel, was in Professor Shaochen Chen’s laboratory this week reporting on his groundbreaking work in the field of 3D bioprinting for medical applications. During her visit, graduate student Peter Chung snapped Bernardini’s image with a smartphone and then printed it into a hydrogel as shown in this microscopic image. Chen’s lab has already demonstrated the ability to print complex 3D microstructures, such as blood vessels, in mere seconds out of soft biocompatible hydrogels that contain living cells.  The whole process including taking the photo and preparing the sample took less than 10 minutes and the printing was complete in a mere second.  

Chen’s biofabrication technology, called dynamic optical projection stereolithography (DOPsL), can produce the micro- and nanoscale resolution required to print tissues that mimic nature’s fine-grained details, including blood vessels, which are essential for distributing nutrients and oxygen throughout the body. Without the ability to print vasculature, an engineered liver or kidney, for example, is useless in regenerative medicine. Current fabrication techniques, such as photolithography and micro-contact printing, are limited to generating simple geometries or 2D patterns. Stereolithography is best known for its ability to print large objects such as tools and car parts. With DOPsL, Chen’s team was able to achieve more complex geometries common in nature such as flowers, spirals and hemispheres.  Other current 3D fabrication techniques, such as two-photon photopolymerization, can take hours to fabricate a 3D part.

The biofabrication technique uses a computer projection system and precisely controlled micromirrors to shine light on a selected area of a solution containing photo-sensitive biopolymers and cells. This photo-induced solidification process forms one layer of solid structure at a time, but in a continuous fashion. The technology is part of a new biofabrication technology that Chen is developing under a four-year,$1.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (R01EB012597).

If you aren't getting rejected on a daily basis, your goals aren't ambitious enough

Imagine being able to try on clothes from around the world virtually via your webcam. That's the experience offered by Clothia, a website and iPad app designed by Elena Silenok, who earned her master's in computer science here at the Jacobs School back in 2006.
Silenok gave a tech talk about start-ups about the different options available to CS students after graduation April 24. The event was hosted by the Women in Computing group here at UC San Diego. Some of Silenok's advice:
"If you aren't getting rejected on a daily basis, your goals aren't ambitious enough."
 Silenok is now a guest lecturer at Columbia University and NYU, among others, as well as a contributing writer to Business Insider.
Clothia also allows users to browse their friends' closets, mix-n-match items to create outfits, get inspired by style icons and share their finds. She described her inspiration for the company in a 2012 story in The New York Times:

“I was like, ‘Oh, my God, my pink thing is not working,’ ” said Ms. Silenok, who was born in Kaliningrad, Russia, to a family of engineers and has a master’s in computer science from the University of California, San Diego. She decided to build a new wardrobe and wanted input from her friends. But e-mailing and instant messaging photos while slogging around stores was a chore. And she wanted to call up mental images of her entire closet at all times. “As a girl, you don’t think of just an item you buy,” Ms. Silenok said. “You think of an outfit.” She cited as inspiration the computer touch-screen that Cher Horowitz pressed to mix and match the contents of her closet in the 1995 film “Clueless.”

“That scene was only 17 seconds,” Ms. Silenok said. (She timed it.) “And people still remember the clothes closet. Women everywhere always wondered, Why don’t we have something like this?”

How engineers spend their weekends -- sometimes

It wouldn't be UC San Diego if you couldn't sneak out to the beach between classes and on the weekend. And that's exactly what the campus' chapter of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers did this month. Justin Opatkiewcz, a teaching professor in the Department of NanoEngineering, which now includes chemical engineering majors, joined in the fun. Pictures below (courtesy of AIChE)!

MiP goes to Los Angeles

LA-area UC San Diego alumni will get an exclusive look at MiP, the toy robot designed by toymaker WowWee and the UCSD Coordinate Robotics lab during an Inspiring Minds event May 13 at the Luxe Sunset Boulevard Hotel.
Tom Bewley, a professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, who heads the coordinated robotics lab, will be the featured speaker.
Below is his ambitious agenda:

What are the simplest robotic designs for overcoming various obstacles? How can advanced algorithms for coordinating robotic sensor vehicles help us better respond to environmental hazards?

Where did the radiation from Fukushima, the oil from Deepwater Horizon, and the ash from Eyjafjallajökull go? Where will a category 5 hurricane developing over the Gulf of Mexico make landfall? Robotic sensor vehicles, advanced control algorithms, and high-performance computing will help us to quickly and accurately answer such questions in the future; recent major advancements of such coordination algorithms will also be discussed.

How do you inspire K-12 students to take an interest in STEM? Make it fun! Attendees will also have a chance to meet MiP, the first of an engaging new line of consumer toys and educational curricula, developed in collaboration with WowWee Robotics, designed to do exactly that.

 More info about the event here.

More info on MiP here and here.