Calit2.Life : A day in the life of Calit2, every day.

The California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) has divisions, people and buildings at UC San Diego and UC Irvine. This website gives readers an inside look at the day-to-day, behind-the-scenes activities of the institute from the perspective of a cross-section of contributors from different parts of Calit2 on each campus.

Los Angeles Center for Digital Art presents "Homeland Insecurity"

By Trish Stone

This Thursday at the California Museum of Photography, Los Angeles Center for Digital Art (LACDA) presents 'Top 40' and "Homeland Insecurity: Recent American Video" featuring work by Calit2 Tour Director and Gallery Coordinator, Trish Stone. The reception and video screening, timed to coordinate with the Riverside Artswalk, will start at 6pm, July 2.

Each year LACDA director Rex Bruce puts out a call to contemporary artists in the field using computer-based tools as their primary medium. The quirky and illustrious works submitted to TOP 40 frequently represent the best of the merger between 2D design and photography.

Of the screening, curator Rex Bruce says, "This is work from the country that ...



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Digichotomy: Merging Real Life with the Digital

By Atom Leonhart

Digichotomy in action

Watch the Performance on YouTube!

An experiment with the concept of merging the Second Life universe with what we have come to accept as "Real Life."

Angela Black, Atom Leonhart, Garrett Sneen, Eric Ellorin, and Brett Stalbaum

Digichotomy is a mobile performance experimenting with the idea of connecting and merging the "real" world with virtual reality.

To perform Digichotomy, professional audio transmission equipment is worn by a mobile performer to broadcast the environmental sounds and voice chat conversations of Second Life into "Real Life," (known to the Second Life universe as "First Life"), and in turn broadcast the sounds and conversation of First Life back into Second Life. This ...

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Microwave Week Ends on a High Note

By Doug Ramsey

The recent joint annual meetings in Boston of the Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits conference (RFIC 2009) and the International Microwave Symposium (IMS 2009) had researchers and students from Calit2 and UC San Diego out in force -- 17 UCSDers were on hand (five of them at left). UC San Diego was also the only university showing off hardware at their exhibit booth, staffed by a team led by Calit2's Javier Rodriguez Molina. They demonstrated technologies including Calit2's Gizmo, CalMesh, CalRadio and much more.

Meanwhile, on the conference side, UCSD graduate students came home with bronze and silver medals for research papers presented at the two meetings. As we reported in our roundup ...

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Honorary Ph.D. for the 'Da Vinci Detective'

By Doug Ramsey

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On Monday, June 8, our own Maurizio Seracini, director of Calit2's Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology (CISA3), was in Canada to be honored at commencement ceremonies of McMaster University. They gave him an honorary Doctor of Letters degree, to add to his previous degrees in bioengineering (from UC San Diego, Class of '73) and electrical engineering (University of Padua). According to the Hamilton Spectator newspaper reporter covering the Calit2 scientist's address to the McMaster Convocation, Seracini "is a modern-day Renaissance man approaching problems in the same way Leonardo did five centuries ago."

Reporter Mark McNeil added that Seracini "urged ...

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Slapshock by Elle Mehrmand and Micha Cardenas in LA Thurs Night

By Micha Cardenas

Slapshock is a performance using a Freeduino and an Arduino to create a pain sharing device. The performance, by CRCA researcher Elle Mehrmand and Calit2 researcher and Experimental Game Lab member Micha Cardenas, is an exploration of symbiotic relationality through pain, in which each performer slaps themself in turn causing the other performer to receive a painful electric shock.

The devices were created by Mehrmand and Cardenas using a Freeduino, an Aruino, piezo sensors and Transdermal Electro Nerve Stimulation (TENS) units. Mehrmand and Cardenas soldered the components together and programmed the microcontrollers to detect a slap through the piezo sensor and activate the TENS units when ...

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Next Friday, June 12, Engineering Design Project Final Presentations

By Maureen Curran

FinalPresentations098.jpgNext week is finals for the students, which means that it's time again for the Final Presentations of the the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department's Engineering Group Design Projects course (ECE 191). There are six projects this quarter, half are sponsored by Calit2 UCSD. 

All are welcome to come to this interesting event.

ECE 191 Engineering Group Design Projects
Spring 2009 Final Presentations

Friday, June 12, 2009
Henry G. Booker Conference suite, rm 2512, EBU-I


Presentations will start at 7:00 p.m.
Refreshments will be served at 6:30 p.m.

ECE 191, Engineering Group Design Project, is an upper-division course that provides undergraduate students with hands-on experience ...













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Calit2 Congratulates Nominees for Exemplary Staff Employee of the Year Award

By Tiffany Fox

The UC San Diego division of Calit2 would like to extend a hearty congratulations to the institute's six nominees for UCSD's Exemplary Staff Employee of the Year Award. The nominees are:

  • Theresa Allen
  • Timothy Beach
  • Qian Liu
  • Sarah Prom
  • Cuong Vu
  • April Walsh

Thank you for all that you do to make Calit2 a wonderful place to work!



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Freephone Art Project Provides Deported People with a Phone Call

By Micha Cardenas

Check out this project by Calit2 researchers Micha Cardenas and Chris Head, CRCA researcher Elle Mehrmand and UCSD MFA grads Katherine Sweetman, Felipe Zuniga and UCSD Undergrad alumni Camilo Ontiveros.




FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The Freephone is an art project that aims to provide people just deported
from the US with a free phone call. To achieve this, a group of UCSD
Master of Fine Arts (MFA) students and graduates are coming together to
present the phone at the Lui Velazquez gallery in Tijuana, just a few feet
from the turnstiles where people who are deported are dropped off by the
border patrol. The project is by the artists Chris Head, Micha Cardenas,
Elle Mehrmand, Katherine Sweetman, ...










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Speaking the Language of Art and Science Yields Big Rewards for Engineering Prof

By Tiffany Fox

sunflowers.jpgIf driving a car required a theoretical understanding of thermodynamics, "very few of us would be automobile drivers," says Professor C. Richard Johnson, Jr. of Cornell University.

Likewise, if analyzing a painting required an art historian to have an advanced education in math and engineering, very few paintings would ever be analyzed. But that's the rub: High-tech analysis of these paintings does require math- and engineering-based solutions, and that's where most art historians (educated predominantly in the humanities) are at a loss.

But their loss is Johnson's gain. Johnson, a Stanford alumnus who received a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and a Ph.D. minor in art history, served as a "translator" ...



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GRAIN takes seed at UC San Diego

By Tiffany Fox

GRAIN_200.jpgA group of multi-disciplinary researchers affiliated with the UC San Diego division of Calit2 convened in Atkinson Hall yesterday for the launch of GRAIN, the Global Responsibility and Innovation Network.

The founders of GRAIN seek to connect academic institutions, non-governmental agencies and industry to generate projects and products that "are successful and sustainable -- culturally, economically and environmentally -- from idea to implementation."

"Were talking about the most multidisciplinary effort you could ever think of," said co-founder Garrett Smith, a bioengineering Ph.D. candidate. "We want to facilitate a way for the UCSD community to engage with industry and NGOs to design technologies ...



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StarCAVE Stars in Prize Winning Paper

By Doug Ramsey

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On April 25, one of the undergraduate students working on Calit2's StarCAVE took top honors in the 2009 IEEE Regional Student Paper Contest. UC San Diego electrical engineering junior Jordan Rhee won the competition for his paper on "Hot Spot Mitigation in the StarCAVE". Rhee -- who is President of the IEEE chapter at UCSD -- was competing against papers from the University of Nevada, University of New Mexico, University of Arizona, and the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. The contest was held as part of the IEEE Southwest Area Meeting. For his work, Rhee also took home a $500 prize. Rhee first had to beat out four other UC San Diego papers before he could represent ...

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The Month Ahead at Calit2

By Doug Ramsey

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The first full week of May will be particularly busy, with a wide variety of seminars and conferences for Calit2 participants, and the rest of May looks equally busy. Note that this week the public will get an opportunity to sit in on the final forum and conference declaration, at the end of an invitation-only conference on water issues and climate change facing California and the Himalayas. It's organized by UC San Diego and the University of Cambridge. Trinity College Cambridge Fellow, Lord Julian Hunt (pictured) and Calit2 Director Larry Smarr will be on the closing panel discussion on Wednesday, and Calit2 will be videotaping the two-hour session for later ...

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UCSD Grad Student, Researcher awarded Emerging Fields Grant from UCIRA

By Micha Cardenas

UCSD Graduate Student in Visual Arts Elle Mehrmand and Calit2 Artist/Researcher Micha Cardenas were recently awarded the Emerging Fields Award grant from the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts. Their proposed project is called "mixed relations" and it explores mixed reality performance with two performers in actual and virtual space producing live audio. The timeline for the project includes workshops in the fall of 2009 and performances in the spring of 2010.

Read more about the project here:

mixed relations by Elle Mehrmand and Micha Cardenas

"The partners do not precede their relating: all that is, is the fruit of becoming with."
-Donna Haraway, When Species Meet

mixed ...







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Project GreenLight Recognized for Sustainability Efforts

By Tiffany Fox

greenlight.jpg UC San Diego's Project GreenLight, which focuses on the development of metrics and technologies to help minimize the environmental impact of the IT industry, received a Sustainability Award from UC San Diego last week.

Calit2 and the university's Administrative Computing and Telecommunications (ACT) group have invested $600,000 in matching funds, in the project, and several research scientists from Calit2 are playing active roles. Receiving the award were (pictured) former Calit2 Chief Technology Officer Greg Hidley, Vice Chancellor Steve Relyea, Calit2 Director Larry Smarr, Research Scientist Tom DeFanti, Computer Science & Engineering Professor Ingolf Krueger and Richard Carson, Chair ...

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Violence, Technology and Public Intervention

By Micha Cardenas

Come out to the auditorium at Calit2 tomorrow for this important symposium, including Calit2 researcher Micha Cardenas, UCSD Faculty Brian Goldfarb and numerous other UC faculty. The symposium is being held in conjunction with Carlos Trilnick's artwork on anti-personell mines in the gallery@calit2.





Violence, Technology and Public Intervention: Two UCDARnet Panels

http://ucdarnet.org/

April 24, 2009
From Noon to 5pm

Sponsored by UCDARnet and gallery@calit2
CALIT2/Atkinson Hall Black Box Theater
Free and Open to the Public
A Reception after the panels
For Directions and information: http://gallery.calit2.net

Noon -Introduction - Brian Goldfarb

12:10 - Carlos Trilnick - Keynote

12:30 - Panel ...






















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Photo Gallery from San Diego Science Festival Expo Day Available

By Maureen Curran

tentScienceFestival_ 025mc.jpgA capacity crowd of more than 50,000 people flocked to Balboa Park on Saturday, April 4 for Expo Day, the grand finale of the month-long San Diego Science Festival. Festival organizers are calling the event "the largest one-day science gathering ever in the United States." There were 200+ exhibition booths sponsored by science and educational organizations, institutions and companies.

The Calit2 booth had demos of various visualization technologies, including the mobile touchscreen kiosk based on Calit2's Gizmo technology and the new California Traffic Report app for the iPhone, as well as other devices, software and systems developed at Calit2.

Calit2's presence in Balboa Park stretched well ...



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'Cosmic Tree of Life' on HIPerSpace Wall

By Doug Ramsey

CosmicTreeOfLife.jpg

The closest that artist Roger Ferragallo has come to displaying the full dimensions of his "Cosmic Tree of Life" digital painting was when he got the chance to display the latest version (2.0) of the art work on Calit2's HIPerSpace tiled display wall at UC San Diego recently. The digital painting measures 556 million pixels, and it was displayed on HIPerSpace's native 287 million pixelsl. If ever "Cosmic Tree of Life" is printed out in its current incarnation, the painting would measure 25 x 15 feet, so HIPerSpace permitted Ferragallo to see the full scope of his work on the tiled display system which measures 31.8 x 7.9 feet.

In a video posted on YouTube, Ferragallo talks about ...

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Project GreenLight To Receive Sustainability Award

By Tiffany Fox

The team behind UCSD's Project GreenLight -- a plan to connect scientists and their labs to more energy-efficient 'green' computer processing -- will receive recognition for their outstanding sustainability efforts at a ceremony next week.

The
Chancellor's Advisory Committee on Sustainability willi present the team with an award at 3:30 p.m. Tuesday April 22 (Earth Day) at the Student Services Complex multipurpose room.

Read more about Project GreenLight.

...





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Becoming Dragon at the New Media Lounge

By Micha Cardenas



Becoming Dragon
a Project Discussion by Micha Cardenas


Wednesday, April 15, 2009 @ 6PM
Refreshments will be served.

Teleport to the performance in-world:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Seventh%20Eye/144/39/235

New Media Lounge / Cal(IT)2,
UC San Diego, 9500 Gilman Dr., La Jolla, California 92093

The New Media Lounge is excited to bring MFA Candidate, Micha Cardenas for an exclusive motion capture demonstration in the Performative Computing Lab at the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA). Micha will be discussing her recent project Becoming Dragon, a 365 hour, (2 week long) performance in Second Life. The performance is believed to be the first of its kind in Second Life, ...













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Saturday, April 4, 2009 - SD Science Festival Expo Day

By Maureen Curran

SDScienceFestivallogo.pngMore than three dozen Calit2 researchers (PIs, faculty, staff, post-docs, graduate and undergraduate students) will be on-hand as the month-long San Diego Science Festival ends with a grand finale, Expo Day, tomorrow, Saturday, April, 4, 2009 at Balboa Park.

The Calit2 tent will provide demos of various visualization technologies, including a mobile touchscreen kiosk based on Calit2's Gizmo technology, the new California Traffic Report app for the iPhone, as well as other devices, software and systems developed at Calit2.

In addition to the Calit2 booth (which will be up near the fountain and the Reuben H. Fleet Museum), showcasing many of our developing technologies, researchers from Calit2's ...



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Talking Math

By Doug Ramsey

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Calit2's chief scientist Ron Graham will take part in a bit of history-making next week. That's because on April 8, Graham will give one of five plenary lectures at the 61st annual British Mathematical Colloquium. The history? It's the first time that the Colloquium has been held outside the United Kingdom. This year, the British are teaming with the Irish Mathematical Society to hold a joint meeting at the National University of Ireland's Galway campus.

As for Graham's talk, it's on "the combinatorics of solving linear equations." A major branch of modern combinatorics, usually called Ramsey theory, studies properties of structures which are preserved under partitions. Its guiding philosophy ...

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Becoming Dragon featured on the cover of San Diego Reader

By Micha Cardenas

bd-reader-cover.jpgPick up a copy of this week's San Diego Reader, the largest weekly publication in San Diego. Becoming Dragon, a project by myself and a number of other UCSD graduate and undergraduate students is featured on the cover. The project was supported by Calit2, CRCA and the UCSD Visual Arts department, which are all mentioned in the article. You can read the article online here as well. While I have my criticisms of the article, I appreciate that the author quoted me at length on the core issues of the performance.



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Calit2 Artists participate in Tijuana Art Initiative

By Micha Cardenas

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Calit2 affiliated artists Ricardo Dominguez and Micha Cardenas are both part of the Lui Velazquez gallery in Tijuana, which is opening their new space on Saturday, March 14th. Micha is part of the 3 person collective that curates the space including UCSD alumni Katherine Sweetman and Felipe Zuniga, while Ricardo makes up part of the recently formed advisory board. The initiative includes a number of other UCSD faculty, curators and scholars from the San Diego/Tijuana region. 

To celebrate the grand opening of their new location in Tijuana, Saturday night will also see the opening of a new exhibition entitled Intimate Simulations. The show explores the close relationship we have developed ...

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Come to the Group Design Projects Final Presentations

By Maureen Curran

W2008ECE191present.jpgThe quarter is just about over and the 19 students involved in six different group design projects at Calit2 are busy putting the finishing touches on their ECE 191 projects and preparing to make their final presentations next week, along with the rest of their class. All are welcome to come to the final presentations:

ECE 191 Engineering Group Design Project
Final Presentations
Friday, March 20, 2009
Henry G. Booker Conference suite, rm 2512, EBU-I

Refreshments will be served at 6:30 p.m.
Presentations will start at 7:00 p.m.


ECE 191, Engineering Group Design Project, is an upper-division class that provides undergraduate students with hands-on experience working in a team to design, build, demonstrate ...









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Calit2 UCSD Summer Scholarship Deadline Looming

By Maureen Curran

SSp_RChoi-1400.jpgThe application deadline for the Calit2 2009 Undergraduate Research Summer Scholarship Program at UCSD is quickly approaching. It is next Friday, March 13, 2009, at NOON.

Please note: Late applications will not be accepted.

Calit2 UCSD's Summer Scholars program pays undergraduates to work as full-time researchers for 10 weeks over the summer in faculty labs across the campus. Students must be registered during the Spring quarter (or be incoming students in the Fall). Students in all disciplines are encouraged to apply.

The scholarship is an opportunity for undergraduates to do real research work over the summer and make a contribution to the work of their faculty advisor's lab, or work on a project ...





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Composer in Residence Honored

By Doug Ramsey

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Calit2's composer in residence at UC San Diego, Pulitzer Prize winner Roger Reynolds, is getting a rare concert honor: On March 29, "Roger Reynolds and his Proteges" will echo through a concert hall in Toronto, Canada, as part of the New Music Concerts 2008-2009 season. The aforementioned proteges include composers David Felder of SUNY Buffalo, Israel's Chaya Czernowin, Juan Campoverde from Ecuador, and Brazilian Antonio Borges-Cunha. All of the proteges are well-known composers who earned their Ph.D.'s under Reynolds in the UC San Diego Music graduate program in Composition.

The concert by the New Music Concerts Ensemble (with David Swan on piano and Robert Aitken on flute ...

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UCSD Summer Scholarship Info Sessions - Thurs. & Friday

By Maureen Curran

There will be two information sessions about the UCSD division of Calit2's Summer Scholarship program which pays undergraduates to work as full-time researchers for the summer in faculty labs across the campus. The sessions take place today and tomorrow, Thursday, February 26 and Friday, February 27, both will be at 2p.m. in room 4004 of Atkinson Hall.

The scholarship is an opportunity for undergraduates to do real research work over the summer and make a contribution to the research of their faculty advisor's lab, or work on a project of their own, the kind of hands-on research that is usually reserved for graduate students and senior researchers. This is the ninth year of the highly successful ...

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Einstein Robot Gets Media Face Time

By Tiffany Fox

2_12_09_einstein_.jpgEinstein lives. Our story about the Machine Perception Lab's Einstein Robot, which was modeled after the theoretical physicist, is turning up all over the Web:

...



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'Becoming Dragon' Invades L.A. for CAA Conference

By Tiffany Fox

micha_t350.jpgUC San Diego graduate student Micha Cardenas, creator of the "Becoming Dragon" virtual reality performance in Second Life, will be presenting documentation of the project at 9:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 26. as part of the College Art Association's 97th annual conference at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

For the show -- titled "@" -- Cardenas created in Second Life an installation of objects that people had given her during her immersive performance. When users approach one of the objects, they replay conversations she had through text chat, making them appear as if they are recurring in the exhibition space in Second Life.

A reception will follow the event at 9:30 p.m., at SCI-Arc, 960 East Third ...



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Calit2 Artist Ricardo Dominguez Talks Sound, Science, Theory and Crisis

By Tiffany Fox

ricardo.jpgCalit2 aritist and Assistant Professor of Visual Arts Ricardo Dominguez has a busy month ahead of him, with appearances at two events in Los Angeles and Victoria, B.C.

  • As a contributor to the Sound + Science Symposium, Dominguez (pictured) will present "Sounding out the Matter Market" from noon to 1 p.m. Thursday, March 5 in the California NanoSystems Institute Auditorium at UC Los Angeles. The event is free and open to the public (parking at UCLA is $9 per day). The full symposium takes place from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., March 5-6.
  • Dominguez will also be giving the keynote address at this years Cultural, Social, and Political Thought gathering from 9:20 to 10:50 a.m. March 7 at the University of ...

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Mohan Trivedi to Deliver UC Lecture

By Doug Ramsey

Our colleague Mohan Trivedi, a professor of electrical and computer engineering in the Jacobs School and longtime participant in Calit2, has been singled out to deliver the annual Mel Webber Lecture. A lecturer is selected each year by the University of California's System-Wide Transportation Research Center (UCTC). It's the main event for all UC-wide Ph.D. students working on research in various transportation-related topics. Trivedi will give his talk on the evening of this Friday, Feb. 13, in Riverside, Calif., and the conference begins Feb. 12. The topic of Trivedi's keynote lecture: "Human-Centered, Holistic Systems for Safer and Smoother Traffic"; click here for the abstract

...

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Peer to Peer Traffic Notification System: UCI's Autonet

By Jerry Sheehan

"The International Journal of Vehicle Information and Communication systems recently published the research of four UC Irvine graduate students concerning a project capable of clearing Los Angeles Traffic. Tentatively dubbed "Autonet," a portmanteau of "automatic/automobile" and "Internet," the program is the brainchild of Trevor Harmon, James Marca, Pete Martini and Raymond Klefstad."

For more information see the full article in New University



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Group Design Projects Give Undergraduates Hands-on Experience

By Maureen Curran

191Fall08_HeartMonitor5.jpgThe ranks of undergraduate student researchers at the UCSD division swelled by 19 last week. Calit2 is sponsoring or cosponsoring six of the 13 Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department's group design course projects.

ECE 191, Engineering Group Design Project, is an upper-division class that provides undergraduate students with hands-on experience working in a team to design, build, demonstrate and document an open-ended engineering project. It is part of the design requirement for ECE undergraduates and is typically taken by seniors.

ECE 191 projects are funded and mentored by campus organizations and by corporate affiliates of the Jacobs School of Engineering. In addition to Calit2, ...



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R&D in the Proposed House Stimulus Package

By Jerry Sheehan

The American Association for the Advancement of Science has released their first analysis of the proposed House Stimulus package. They write "The draft stimulus appropriations bill contains $13.3 billion in R&D funding, $9.9 billion for the conduct of research and development and $3.4 billion for R&D facilities and large research equipment, mostly extramural. Adding in another $2.5 billion in non-R&D but science and technology-related funding brings total science and technology-related funding in the stimulus to nearly $16 billion. There is also additional money for higher education construction and other education spending of interest to academia"

More details can be found ...

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Grad Researcher to Present 'Becoming Dragon' Findings at SPIE Conference

By Tiffany Fox

11_25_08_micha_dragon.jpgMicha Cardenas, creator of the durational, immersive Second Life project known as "Becoming Dragon," will present her research findings at the SPIE Photonics West Conference in San Jose, Calif., Dec. 22.

Cardenas, a Calit2-affiliated graduate student with the Department of Visual Arts at UCSD, will present a lecture as part of a session titled "Evoking Environments through Artful Distinctiveness." The presentation is scheduled to begin at 11:10 a.m. in the San Jose Convention Center, and is one of about 20 conference lectures sponsored by SPIE, an international society advancing light-based research (SPIE was founded as the Society of Photographic Instrumentation Engineers).

Read more about ...



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CISA3's DAAHL Project Featured on Google's Student Blog

By Tiffany Fox

google.jpgThe Digital Archaeological Atlas of the Holy Land (DAAHL), a project spearheaded by Calit2's Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology (CISA3), got top billing on Google's Student Blog when it was featured as a daily post last month. Google recruited Arizona State University Affiliated Professor (and DAAHL collaborator) Steven Savage to write the entry, which encourages students to explore DAAHL's interactive, Google-app-based features to learn more about archaeological sites located in Israel, Palestine, Jordan, southern Lebanon, Syria and the Sinai Peninsula.

Savage, together with UCSD Professor of Archaeology/CISA3 Associate Director Tom Levy and San Diego SuperComputer ...

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Fan fiction article in new MIT Press/MacArthur Foundation journal

By Bill Tomlinson

Lauren Lewis (UCI undergraduate and 2008 Calit2 SURF-IT fellow), Rebecca Black (UCI Education professor and Lauren's SURF-IT mentor), and I just finished editing the proofs for an article titled, "Let Everyone Play: an Educational Perspective on Why Fan Fiction Is, or Should Be, Legal." This article will be appearing in the inaugural edition of the International Journal of Learning and Media (IJLM), going to press in 2009. IJLM is published quarterly by The MIT Press, in partnership with the Monterey Institute for Technology in Education, and with support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

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Calit2 Holiday Party/Battle of the Bands

By Tiffany Fox

IMG_0065.JPGNearly 100 Calit2 employees at UCSD turned out for the institute's holiday shindig last night. The catered event featured a White Elephant Gift Exchange, a raffle with valuable prizes from around the world and the epic main event: Guitar Hero World Tour Battle of the Bands. Miss it? You missed out, but be sure to check out the party pics (including some from the December birthday event/Guitar Hero Encore today).





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Calit2 and NeuroArchitecture

By Jerry Sheehan

081210-VirtualArch-2-hmed.standard.jpgGreat story today on MSNBC about the use of Calit2's StarCAVE and the emerging field of neuroarchitecture being built by Calit2 and the Swartz Center for Computational NeuroScience

From the story,
"Although the team is still analyzing the results, Edelstein said the experiment supported the concept that scientists could synchronously record the brainwaves of individuals moving within a real-time virtual reality environment and correlate their brain activity and travel patterns in that virtual world. A larger-scale study, she hopes, will expand on results and delve into the behavior of navigating people."
...



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Entrepreneurs Share Startup Experiences

By Anna Lynn Spitzer

UCI visualization experts Steve Jenks and Sung-Jin Kim were featured in Friday's Entrepreneur's Forum, sponsored by OCTANe@UCI and the Office of Technology Alliances. The program took the form of an interview, with OCTANe's Luis Vasquez posing the questions.

The focus of the lunchtime program was Hiperwall, Inc., the spinoff company led by Jeff Greenberg. Greenberg, president of Tech Coast Works, specializes in commercializing UCI research.

Jenks said as he and Kim demonstrated the HIPerWall display wall in the Calit2 Center of Gravity, visitors often expressed interest in purchasing the technology.

After the wall was featured several times on national and international news programs, ...

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'Becoming Dragon' Featured in CityBeat

By Tiffany Fox

logo.jpgSan Diego CityBeat picked up the story about Micha Cardenas and her "Becoming Dragon" performance for its current issue, placing particular emphasis on the potential psychological dangers of the project. Cardenas, a UCSD grad student in visual arts, will spend 365 consecutive hours totally immersed in the Second Life virtual world as a means of questioning the one-year requirement for "real-life experience" that transgender people must fulfill in order to receive gender confirmation surgery (Micha is currently undergoing hormone replacement therapy).

For more about the performance, check out Micha's daily blog, browse the "Becoming Dragon" project Web site or read an article on the Calit2 main ...

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Sheldon Brown on "These Days"

By Tiffany Fox

logo_kpbs.jpgSheldon Brown, Calit2's Artist in Residence and the director of UCSD's Center for Research and Computing in the Arts, will be featured on KPBS' "These Days" morning program at 9:40 a.m. Tuesday, Dec. 2. Brown will be speaking about his "Scalable City" project, an interactive, mixed-media installation that encourages viewers to steer through a replicating urban environment. The installation runs through Dec. 15 in UCSD's gallery@calit2.

Brown's "These Days" segment will be streaming live the day of the broadcast, and will be available for download following the show.

Also on Dec. 2, the gallery@calit2 will host a talk by the artist and readings by Geoff Ryman and Kim Stanley Robinson, two well-known ...



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Canon Donates Equipment, Views Research

By Anna Lynn Spitzer

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Three representatives from Canon, Inc. visited Calit2 at UCI this morning to see how the equipment the company donated to an institute-housed research project is being integrated.

The Canon Rebel camera and EF 17-40 mm lens were donated last month to benefit research conducted by Aditi Majumder, assistant professor of computer science. She is building scalable, reconfigurable and easily assembled multi-projector displays that utilize camera-based calibration techniques and algorithms to align images seamlessly and eliminate color variation.

Nabil Abujbara, senior manager and project coordinator; Hideo Mizoguchi, senior engineer; and Toru Maeda, senior engineer from ...

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Local Entrepreneurs Visit Calit2 UC San Diego

By Maureen Curran

TIE_PhilRiosDemo.jpgThe San Diego Chapter of The IndUS Entrepreneurs (TiE) held its monthly dinner meeting at Atkinson Hall last Wednesday, November 12. About 50 corporate executives, entrepreneurs, service providers and academic researchers attended. They were treated to a tour of Atkinson Hall and the facilities of Calit2 UC San Diego, in particular, they enjoyed viewing presentations of the many innovative projects in state-of-the-art visualization. These included viewing 4K video clips shown in the auditorium and 3-D images in the StarCAVE, a unique multi-user virtual-reality immersive environment.

Anil Kripalani, the president of the TiE San Diego chapter, opened the meeting, introducing Ramesh Rao, director ...

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BBC Covers Stefan Savage Study on Spam

By Jerry Sheehan

The BBC News recently covered the research done by Stefan Savage on Spammers conducted in 2008. Interestingly, Savage's findings indicate that spammers may be more responsive to economic impacts then previously thought.

As Savage notes, "The profit margin for spam may be meager enough that spammers must be sensitive to the details of how their campaigns are run and are economically susceptible to new defenses."

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Calit2 Tiled Display Walls Referenced in Chronicle of Higher Education

By Jerry Sheehan

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a summary article on the recent Educause conference that features a section on the use of scaled display walls for research and the recent talk given at the conference by Calit2 Director Larry Smarr.

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Digital Arts of CALIT2/CRCA Featured on ABC

By Michael Toillion

N Art Magazine, a new program on ABC in San Diego that documents the local arts scene, visited CALIT2 and the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts recently. For a program that is mostly familiar with traditional art forms, touring the digital art laboratories at CALIT2 and CRCA proved to be quite an experience for N Art Magazine. The final video (seen below) aired on Sunday, October 26th.



The video features Beatbox360, a 4K video art piece created by myself, Mike Toillion; Sanctuary, a percussion composition by Pulitzer prize-winning composer Roger Reynolds; and Scalable City, a 3D multimedia video game, to name just a few.
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Students Meet Face-to-Face with Facial Recognition/Identification Experts

By Tiffany Fox

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Computer Science and Engineering undergraduates from professor Gary Cottrell's cognitive modeling coursevisited the Machine Perception Lab at Calit2 Tuesday to get a hands-onintroduction to modern computer vision research.

Cottrell, who is the director of UCSD's Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center, has focused his research on building working models of cognitive processes and using them to explain psychological or neurological processes.His research has focused upon face processing, including face recognition, face identification,and facial expression recognition -- something the MP lab also specializes in.

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Imperial Valley News Covers Calit2 and SIO Cliff Erosion Research

By Jerry Sheehan

11-08Cliffs01cp2.jpgResearch conducted by Neal Driscoll of Scripps and Michael Olsen of Calit2 was discussed this Saturday in the Imperial Valley News. The goal of the research is to use leading edge information communication technology to measure and help understand the processes that cause cliff erosion. See Coastal Bluff Study Seeks to Understand Processes That Cause Cliff Failures

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metaViz - Analyzing Political Blogs

By Eric Baumer

The US election cycle is in its last week. Anticipating crowding at the polls, many have already cast their ballot through early voting. The rest of us will wait in line on Tuesday. However, while the political campaigns are drawing to a close, the analysis has just begun.

Over the summer, other members of the Social Code Group and I developed metaViz, a system that analyzes potential conceptual metaphors in political blogs (see the press release for details). The goal is to allow users, particularly those who read political blogs, to see large trends within a blog or across a blog, trends that might not be noticeable when looking at individual posts, and consider what these trends might mean. ...

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