It was a real pleasure to have Jim Bottum, CIO of Clemson University, and three of his staff, Tracey Hare, Jill Gemmill, Carla Rathbone, visiting Calit2@UCSD for a few days. Jim was my Deputy Director at NCSA for fifteen years, then became CIO of Purdue University, before moving to Clemson a few years ago.At each of these universities, Jim and his crackerjack staff have pioneered new campus cyberinfrastructure. In January 2008 Jim was on the cover story of Storage Magazine, describing his petabyte rotating storage campus cache, an architectural innovation that UCSD is currently considering installing. Besides the Great Wall o' Pixels, we visited many labs in Calit2 yesterday.

Today we will visit ...

Continue Reading...

UCSD's Mohan Trivedi, head of the university's Computer Vision and Robotics Research Laboratory and a Calit2 expert on intelligent transportation and telematics, joined KPBS host Tom Fudge for this morning's episode of "These Days". Trivedi (pictured) oversees projects such as a robotic, sensor-based traffic-incident monitoring and response systems, and was on the air to discuss the logistics and ethics behind public surveillance systems. An archived audio file of the broadcast will be available later today for download.

Today's episode of the program was spurred in part by a UCSD Ethics Center's panel discussion titled "Surveillance and Sensors: Who's Watching Whom?," which will take place at ...

Continue Reading...

The Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature (RSCN) -- Jordan's leading nature conservancy agency -- recently wrote a letter of support for a Calit2 CISA3 project that will promote eco-tourism and sustainable development in the country's Feynan Region.

The agency is taking steps, in cooperation with CISA3 Associate Director and Professor of archaeology Tom Levy (pictured at center with grad students in Feynan) to nominate the Feynan area for World Heritage status and hopefully include it within the protected area of the Dana Natural Reserve. The reserve, according to RSCN Wild Jordan Director Chris Johnson, is Jordan's largest and most renowned protected area and the most visited eco-tourism ...

Continue Reading...

Please be advised that a rather large snake has been seen slithering around the dirt berm area of parking lot 502 near where occupants cross Voight Drive to access this parking lot from Atkinson Hall. 

It appears from the description given from eye witnesses that the markings on the snake seems fit the description given for a California King.

But, until EH&S confirms the snakes species please be watchful while walking in this area. EH&S Pest Control Department has been contacted to hopefully re-home this guy to another location.

Continue Reading...

"My obtuse little friend: If they had needed our help, they would have asked for it. You obviously have a lot to learn about human behavior."
-- C-3PO to R2-D2, "Star Wars: Attack of the Clones"

It's too bad poor R2 doesn't work for Calit2's Machine Perception (MP) Lab ... with all the work researchers have been doing in Intelligent Tutoring Systems, he'd be getting a full-on crash course in human behavior.

Researchers at the UCSD lab are hoping to improve educational robot tutors by studying the visual feedback that human students provide while learning -- be it through facial muscle movement, head positioning or other expressions of interest or confusion. The idea is to equip robot tutors with ...

Continue Reading...

Nicholas Carr has a nice article in The Atlantic on the effects of instantly available information on our minds. See http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google

Carr speculates that our attention span and our very ability to process information is being shaped, both positively and negatively, by easy access to tremendous amount of information on a variety of topics.

My own feeling is that the information is that the information on the Internet is both incredibly broad and incredibly deep, but it is in fact missing the middle layer. The Internet, with embodiments such as Wikipedia, has nice sound bites on a dizzying array of topics. The Internet is also incredibly deep, often ...

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

Every year CONNECT hosts the well-attended Most Innovative Product Awards, now in their 21st year. CONNECT calls it San Diego's "Oscars for local technology innovation." When the 2008 awards are handed out next Dec. 12, the crowd will be treated to an introductory video sampling the wisdom of local tech luminaries, which explains how a TV crew and producers from CONNECT ended up in front of the HIPerSpace wall last Thursday, interviewing Calit2 director Larry Smarr for his thoughts on "Generation Innovation" -- the catchphrase for this year's MIP Awards. And of course Larry obliged, delivering some of his lines while walking in front of the display wall for a "tracking shot" (click on right ...

Continue Reading...

Calit2 was visited on Monday by an Australian delegation including the Honorable Stephen Conroy Minister for Broadband, Communications, and the Digital Economy and Deputy Leader of the Australian Government in the Senate, Assistant Secretary Brenton Thomas from the Department of Broadband, Communications, and the Digital Economy , and Mr. Innes Willox Consul General for Australia-Los Angeles. 

The delegation met with UCSD Vice Chancellor for Research Art Ellis, Dean Peter Cowhey, Dean Frieder Seible, Institute Director Larry Smarr, Senior Researcher Tom DeFanti, and Manager for Government Programs Jerry Sheehan.

The purpose of the visit was to continue dialog under the auspices of the Australian ...

Continue Reading...

In the post web 2.0 world of news reporting, twitters might find jobs as "embedded twits" just like today's embedded reporters. Pearls of wisdom being cast about at the NET TECH meeting on Self Response to Emergencies at Stanford.

Continue Reading...

Fact #1: The IT industry consumes as much energy and has roughly the same carbon footprint as the airline industry.
Fact #2: Energy usage per compute server rack was 2 kilowatts in 2000, but will be fifteen times as much (30KW) in 2010.
Fact #3: To help improve the energy efficiency of computing, NSF has awarded $2 million over three years to Calit2's GreenLight project.
Tom DeFanti, director of visualization in the UCSD division of Calit2, is PI on the project. Together with the campus's Administrative Computing and Telecommunications (ACT) group, Calit2 will provide $600,000 in matching funds. One of the two Sun Modular Datacenters (see interior pictured above) deployed recently ...

Continue Reading...

Robert Friedman, a co-principal investigator on the Community Cyberinfrastructure for Advanced Marine Microbial Ecology Research and Analysis (CAMERA) project, was named recently to be Deputy Director of the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) La Jolla R&D facility. JCVI is Calit2's partner in the CAMERA marine metagenomics project. According to a JCVI news release: "In his new role, Dr. Friedman will oversee day to day operations of JCVI La Jolla, which currently has approximately 40 staff and scientists in 20,000 square feet of lab and office space who are engaged in synthetic, environmental and human genomic research. Plans are underway to build a new, carbon-neutral laboratory facility ...

Continue Reading...

CISA3 director Maurizio Seracini discovered 'Cerca Trova' on a painting in the Palazzo Vecchio: 'Seek and Ye Shall Find' is the closest translation in English, and 'Wer suchet, der findet?' turns out to be the German translation. I only know that because it's the sub-title of a profile of Seracini's research on Germany's Monsters & Critics entertainment site. Actually, it's a review of the 2006 British documentary on Seracini's work on two Leonardo da Vinci masterpieces, including the search for his long-lost "Battle of Anghiari" -- a major project now of CISA3. The documentary aired last weekend in continental Europe on the ARTE cable network. If you speak German, read all about ...

Continue Reading...

Students from across the state have converged at four UC campuses this month -- including UC San Diego and UC Irvine-- for the California State Summer School for Mathematics and Science program, better known as COSMOS. COSMOS is a four-week summer program geared toward motivated high-school students with a demonstrated interest and achievement in science and math.

UCSD Computer Science and Engineering Professor Rajesh Gupta dropped us a line to fill us in on what's been going on with the COSMOS cluster he is spearheading. Here's what he has to say:

Working with a team of Choon Kim, Rick Ord, Bridget Benson, Arash Arafee and Shirley Miranda (a high-school teacher by choice and one of our graduates), ...

Continue Reading...

My good friend Randy Pausch died this morning. He was a wonderful, fun, and inspiring person. From CMU: "Randy Pausch, the professor at Carnegie Mellon University who inspired countless students in the classroom and others worldwide through his highly acclaimed last lecture, has died of complications from pancreatic cancer. He was 47.

Also a Carnegie Mellon alumnus, Pausch co-founded the Entertainment Technology Center and led researchers who created Alice, a revolutionary way to teach computer programming. He was widely respected in academic circles for a unique interdisciplinary approach, bringing together artists, dramatists and designers to break new ground by working in collaboration with ...

Continue Reading...

Multitouch technology has spread rapidly in the research community and is starting to appear in consumer products like the Apple iPhone. In collaboration with other Calit2 researchers, my students and I are building a number of large multitouch tables. In our lab we are exploring a large projection desk for novel interaction with video. We are also collaborating on the design of a multitouch interface for the Calit2 HIPerSpace Wall. Both systems make use of Frustrated Total Internal Reflection (FTIR). We shine infrared LEDs into the edges of a large sheet of acrylic placed in front of a rear-projection display screen. IR light leaks out the back of the acrylic every place it is touched. ...

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

If you missed seeing the interactive installation of ATLAS in Silico at SIGGRAPH 2007 here at Calit2 in San Diego, you'll have to travel to Cleveland if you want to see its latest instantiation. The piece will be shown tomorrow, Saturday and Sunday at Cleveland's Ingenuity Fest, which calls it "a beautiful, interactive 3D experience that uses a participant's movement to trigger mesmerizing, life-size audiovisual effects inspired by the Global Ocean Survey". The GOS marine metagenomic data is housed in the CAMERA project servers on the first floor of Atkinson Hall. A team from the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA), including Todd Margolis, Iman Mostafavi and Joachim Gossman, ...

Continue Reading...

High-school students participating in the COSMOS math-and-science residential program this month at UCSD were visibly interested in this week's 53-minute lecture by Paul Linden on sustainability and climate change, now available for on-demand viewing [Windows Media player and broadband connection required]. The speaker (at left) wears many hats, most notably Director of the Calit2-based UCSD Environment and Sustainability Initiative (ESI), and Chair of the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering department of the Jacobs School. Calit2 is webcasting the weekly lecture series, which is one of the few chances when all ~150 students in the COSMOS program's seven 'clusters' get to participate ...

Continue Reading...

I walked by the CISA3 Archaeology office on the fifth floor of Calit2 today and my eye was caught by work of Tom Levy's research team. The team is trying to find a way to get an accurate 3-D scan of a variety of archeological artifacts including pottery and the more challenging representation of metal objects.

Continue Reading...

The second bi-weekly SURF-IT (Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship in IT) symposium drew about 40 guests this week at Calit2@UC Irvine. Profs. Steve Jenks (electrical engineering and computer science) and Bill Tomlinson (informatics) discussed their research and the contributions their undergrad students are making.

Large-scale 3D objects also present challenges to HIPerWall, so the team is working on ways to coordinate drawing across multiple displays. Their approach: allow each of the 50 monitors to draw and display its own piece of the total object, thereby avoiding bottlenecks. For starters, the team is modifying OGRE, an open-source 3D rendering application.

Continue Reading...

Loss of hearing is a common problem that can result from noise, aging, disease, and heredity. Approximately 28 million Americans have significant hearing loss, and of that group, almost six million are profoundly deaf. A primary form of communication within the United States deaf community is American Sign Language. ASL is not a visual form of English; it is a different language with its own unique grammatical and syntactical structure. Sources estimate that ASL is the fourth most commonly used language in the U.S. While ASL is widely used in the U.S., no one form of sign language is universal.

ASL interpreters play a central role in enabling face-to-face communication between many deaf and ...

Continue Reading...

A group of about 20 high school students paid a visit to the Machine Perception Laboratory at Calit2 today as part of UC San Diego's Academic Connection program -- a pre-college summer academic and residential experience targeted to highly motivated, high achieving, college-bound students entering grades 10-12.

The students -- all of whom chose to study robotics for the program's three-week course -- were led by Dan Rupert, a math and pre-engineering teacher at the Preuss School UCSD and leader of the school's "Midnight Mechanics" Robotics Club. On hand to show the students the bells and whistles at the MP Lab were co-directors Marni Stewart Bartlett, who demonstrated some of the lab's facial ...

Continue Reading...

For more than 25 years, noted Andean archaeologist Charles "Chip" Stanish, a professor of anthropology at UCLA and director of that university's Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, has been exploring the shores of Lake Titicaca in Peru and Bolivia for evidence of civilizations dating back 7,000 years. Chip (pictured, at right) recently invited Calit2's Tom Levy (pictured, at left), a UCSD anthropology professor and associate director of the Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology (CISA3), to examine ancient copper works discovered during archaeological surveys conducted by UCLA and the University of Chile in the Taracapa Valley in Chile's Atacama desert. The bi-national ...

Continue Reading...

Prime Minister Singh's remarks after securing the necessary votes on the "Vote of Confidence."

http://www.hindu.com/nic/pmspeech-confidencevote.pdf

Perhaps my most memorable celebrity moment was an opportunity to exchange a few pleasantries with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at a reception in Blair House. This was about two years ago when he was in DC to secure the US-India Nuclear agreement. Today his government proved it had the votes to ensure passage of the agreement in the Indian Parliament. It was a cliff hanger and the PM's comments are worth reading....

Lapsing back into my own reverie, we in Calit2 have been looking for ways to help pave the way for a high level engagement ...

Continue Reading...

Two of Calit2's visual arts faculty at UCSD are mounting a joint exhibition that opens Aug. 4 and will run through Oct. 3. It will take place in the gallery@ calit2 on the first floor of Atkinson Hall. Prof. Adriene Jenik will present version 2.6 of SPECFLIC (at left), her ongoing experiment in "distributed social cinema" that premiered its version 1.0 at the dedication of Calit2's building on the UCSD campus. Prof. Ricardo Dominguez is the ringleader of an art collective that calls itself *particle group*, which will be showing its interactive "Particles of Interest," highlighting the pervasive threat of nanoparticles to human health. News release. Website. Earlier ...

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

Last Wednesday I gave a lecture on interactive character design to students in the American Indian Summer Institute in Computer Sciences (AISICS). Through the AISICS program, twenty Native American high school students are living on campus at UCI for three weeks this summer to learn about computing. The goal of the program is to help introduce the students to computer programming and digital art; over the course of the three weeks, they will be making interactive graphical versions of stories from their communities and their own lives. AISICS is funded by the NSF Broadening Participation in Computing program. 

One of the interactive exercises we did during the Wednesday ...

Continue Reading...

Tom DeFanti and I just did a hard hat tour of the UCSD Scripps Institution of Oceanography's Robert Paine Scripps Forum for Science, Society, and the Environment (Scripps Seaside Forum). This fascinating new complex is under construction, but you can already begin to see the shape taking form.

SIO Director Tony Haymet had asked us to come down the hill from Calit2 and consult with long-time collaborator Graham Kent and the Forum project manager on whether Calit2 could help SIO design a tiled display wall OptIPortal in the complex. We think we have found a wall against which the OptIPortal can be mounted and, more challenging, a set of conduits in which to run fiber extended ...

Continue Reading...

I just finished a day and a half meeting with the Community Cyberinfrastructure for Advanced Marine Microbial Ecology Research and Analysis (CAMERA) microbial metagenomics Scientific Advisory Board, held at the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation headquarters in San Francisco. The SAB reviewed Calit2's ambitious plans to build a second-generation CAMERA cyberinfrastructure (CI), as well as to bring many more metagenomic data sets into the CAMERA servers. Mark Ellisman, who has recently been named the CAMERA Chief Technology Officer, was in attendance as the leader of the CI development team. Mark is the director of the NIH-fundedNational Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research at UCSD.

Continue Reading...

Happy birthday to those born in the month of July! Pictured from left to right are: Karen Riggs-Saberton (7/31), Rosalyn De La Cruz, Jeff Nagle (7/19), Jessica Mac (7/5), Adam Brust (7/11), Lynda Tran (7/4), Claudiu Farcas (7/31) and Alice Dignazio (7/8).

Also celebrating a birthday this month:
Samuel Doshier (7/2)
Paul Gilna (7/3)
Sean Michael Parks (7/4)
Mark Plummer (7/12)
John Wooley (7/27)

Continue Reading...

On July 16 and 17, the Center for Networked Systems held its semi- annual research review at UCSD. The Center brings together the CNS member companies, currently Cisco, Google, Hewlett Packard, Network Appliance, Qualcomm, and Sun Microsystems, with Center faculty and students. The review featured progress reports on ongoing CNS projects, proposals for new 2-year projects, and final reports on projects launched in 2006. There were lively discussions with the 30+ industrial visitors (some pictured at left) and 3 industrial talks from Google, Qualcomm, and Sun.

The next CNS research review will be held in January 2009. More information is available from the CNS website http://cns.ucsd.edu.
...

Continue Reading...

Click on arrow for video of Google HQs
Since Google Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf is on the Calit2 Advisory Board, and for lots of other reasons (future jobs?), we care what happens to Google. After the closing bell on Wall Street today, Google broke the bad news: net profits fell short of analyst expectations, by 11 cents per share. In after-hours trading, Google stock plunged 11%, so it will probably take a pounding when the markets open on Friday. That's even though profits jumped $100 million from a year ago, to $1.25 billion. More impressive: Google booked $5.37 billion in revenues in just three months, up 39% from a year ago. ...

Continue Reading...

On Monday, July 14, the CAMERA marine metagenomics project released a major upgrade to its Web site. The new CAMERA Web site is built upon the open-source Drupal content management system, and in addition to a new layout, this release has added:

• New Education content
• Events calendar (feel free to send event notices to camera-info@calit2.net) 
• New Forum system
  • Anonymous posting/replies. By default, all posts are anonmyous, but you can leave your name, which will be visible to the public. If you leave your email address, it will only be shown to the CAMERA admins.
  • Integrated forum searches. Searching the site now also returns forum content.
• Advanced BLAST - a more streamlined ...

Continue Reading...

Calit2's Advanced Network Sciences (ANS) group at UC San Diego, in collaboration with the Jacobs School's Electrical and Computer Engineering department, will bring five top scholars in network theory to UCSD. They'll be "in residence" the week of Aug. 18-22, some for the entire week, some just for two or three days. The speakers include Princeton's Bill Massey, USC's Amy Ward, Sean Meyn of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Nick Bambos of Stanford, and Caltech's Adam Wierman. Each will give two, 90-minute talks over two days, in addition to meeting with faculty and graduate students "to foster discussion and collaborations." The specific topic of each short course will be announced ...

Continue Reading...

Calit2's partner in the OptIPuter project -- University of Illinois at Chicago's Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) -- is getting ready to build the OmegaTable. It's a modular, multi-sensory touch tabletop for interactive, visual data exploration in 2D and autostereoscopic 3D (3D without special glasses). EVL recently landed a $450,000 Major Research Instrumentation grant from the National Science Foundation to develop the OmegaTable. It's the next generation of EVL tabletops, after the LambdaTable (pictured) that wowed visitors to the joint SDSC/Calit2/EVL booth at Supercomputing 07. Says EVL director and OptIPuter co-PI Jason Leigh: "These displays are the new microscopes and telescopes, ...

Continue Reading...

RFID (radio-frequency identification) tags are used to track products, identify animals and simplify inventory systems. The ID tags employ radio waves that can be read from a distance, and traditionally have been manufactured on silicon chips. They contain an integrated circuit for storing and processing information, and modulating and demodulating a radio-frequency signal, and an antenna for receiving and transmitting the signal. Now, a Korean researcher is developing a novel and inexpensive approach to manufacturing the tags by printing them on plastic films and paper.for less than a penny apiece.

Gyoujin Cho, a professor at Sunchon National University in Korea, previewed his approach at Calit2 ...

Continue Reading...

An educational video from the National Science Foundation (NSF) will feature UCSD post-doc researcher and Calit2-affiliate Jurgen Schulze in an effort to show young students that science can be cool.

A NSF video crew will be in Atkinson Hall Tuesday morning to take footage of Schulze (pictured) in the StarCAVE virtual reality system, where he will conduct research on a test subject as part of a virtual-reality experiment in navigation and "way-finding." The project, which is a multidisciplinary effort to study human neurological responses to built environments, is being conducted in collaboration with UCSD's Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience. (Read more about the Navigation/Way-Finding ...

Continue Reading...

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellows (SURF-IT) at the Irvine division of Calit2 got a no-holds-barred look into the research realm during a lunch seminar today. As they munched on sandwiches and potato salad, the students engaged in an interactive discussion with SURF-IT co-director Said Shokair, who is also director of UCI's Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program. Shokair enthusiastically expounded on the importance of research and the ways in which UROP - or as he calls it, the "Land of Opportunities" - can help the students achieve their goals. He also touched upon the dos and don'ts of grad school applications, and the ins and outs of proper research conduct.

"Now that you've filled ...

Continue Reading...

UC San Diego prides itself on having an aggressive "green" campus strategy. UC Irvine is home to the National Fuel Cell Research Center (NFCRC), which is looking at fuel cells to power everything from laptops to electric utilities, and operates the first 700-bar hydrogen fueling station in California (at left). The two campuses have a history of collaboration -- not least on Calit2 -- and Calit2 director Larry Smarr thinks the institute can play a pivotal role in developing and deploying two-campus activities that could help make Southern California a powerhouse in combatting climate change, reducing our carbon footprint, and building new industry on sustainable technologies. ...

Continue Reading...

As UC San Diego stem cell research director Larry Goldstein told a packed audience at Calit2 this morning,"talking to a bunch of high-school students who are interested in science is a lot easier than talking to a bunch of Congressmen. I know you're interested... and you're at least a few IQ points above most people in Washington!". Noting that "stem cells are cool," the School of Medicine professor was addressing more than 150 middle and high-school students participating in this summer's COSMOS 4-week residential science-and-math program at UCSD, as well as many of the Calit2 Summer Undergraduate Scholars. Goldstein's hour-long talk on "Developing the Medical Treatments ...

Continue Reading...

Frank Stietz, head of corporate research and technology at Carl Zeiss AG, toured Calit2's Atkinson Hall today as part of a one-day visit to UC San Diego (see a webcast of Stietz's presentation about Carl Zeiss).
Carl Zeiss, a German high-tech company best known for its optics, microscopes, and semiconductor equipment, collaborated with Calit2 at UC Irvine three years ago to create the ZEISS Center of Excellence for nanotechnology and biotechnology research and advanced materials development and innovation. Now Zeiss is looking into potential collaborations with the institute's UCSD division, possibly in the areas of 3-D data visualization and molecular imaging.

Stietz's UCSD tour included a stop ...

Continue Reading...

Calit2's Maurizio Seracini, director of the Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology (CISA3), was invited to give a lecture earlier this summer to participants in the UCSD Osher Lifelong Learning Institute program. Calit2 hosted the meeting, and UCSD-TV filmed the event, which is now airing at various times on the broadcast network (it premiered on June 16). The talk, "Rediscovering Leonardo", is also available on UC-TV's YouTube channel. Osher is part of UCSD Extension, and provides a wealth of opportunities for retirees and others age 50 or older. In his talk, Seracini noted the important role that donors are playing through "Friends of ...

Continue Reading...

Robert Lee Hotz, science columnist of the Wall Street Journal, published an article on July 11, 2008 entitled, "The Search for the Hidden da Vinci" which talks about some of the exciting work being done in CISA3.

Continue Reading...

It was first produced and aired by Britain's Channel 4 in 2006, but the documentary about CISA3 director Maurizio Seracini's work on two Leonardo da Vinci masterpieces aired again this evening in Europe on the ARTE TV channel. The 80-minute film tracks Seracini's multispectral scans of the "Adoration of the Magi" painting in the Uffizi Gallery, and the 30-year search for the "Battle of Anghiari", a mural by da Vinci that disappeared from the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence 450 years ago. Originally aired in English as "The Da Vinci Detective", the documentary is airing in France as "Léonard de Vinci: Chefs-d'oeuvre masqués" or "Leonardo da Vinci: Masked Masterpieces"....

Continue Reading...

When it comes to tomography, even the most powerful electron microscopes have limitations when taking snapshots of biological micro-structures. So to fine-tune the images, top scientists are refining the algorithms they use to process the raw data, in order to get a more accurate (and hence more useful) picture. That was the focus of "Tomography Day 2008" July 10 at Calit2" on the UCSD campus (attendees pictured at left). It was staged by two groups with facilties in Atkinson Hall -- Peter Arzberger's National Biomedical Computation Resource (NBCR) and Mark Ellisman's National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research (NCMIR). Rick Lawrence of NCMIR and ...

Continue Reading...

Join me in congratulating Arindam on being sworn in today as an American citizen! The swearing in ceremony took place this afternoon in Los Angles.

Arindam joined Calit2 initially as a student but now acts as the lead staff programmer for the Calit2 Research Intelligence site and tools.

Continue Reading...

Apple releases the updated iPhone today at 8am. From a device hardware standpoint the biggest changes are faster download speeds (finally 3g) and the addition of a gps unit. Initial reviews indicate that the new unit has substantially better battery life (when not exclusively using 3g data) and improvement in audio quality. But, it is not about the hardware.

Rather, the revolution this time is about the ability to download applications directly on the phone via iTunes. While the apple application model has had critics they have effectively created a powerful new channel for the development, validation, and distribution of cell phone applications. Stay tuned to see what happens ...

Continue Reading...

The second weekly COSMOS Discovery Lecture will bring UCSD stem cell research leader Larry Goldstein (left) to the Calit2 Auditorium. His talk: "Developing the Medical Treatments of Tomorrow Using Stem Cells". But unless you're one of the 150 middle and high-school students spending July at UCSD as part of the math and science residential camp, or the Calit2 Summer Undergraduate Scholars, you won't be guaranteed a seat for Goldstein's talk. So interested parties in San Diego or anywhere in the world are advised to watch his lecture on the Web, thanks to a live Calit2 webcast. Bookmark this URL -- http://calit2.net/webcast -- and tune in at 9am Pacific time on Tuesday, July 15. And if you ...

Continue Reading...

A number of international reporters have been inquiring about Calit2's HIPerSpace, unveiled this week in all its 286 million pixels of glory. Marc Chacksfield of Britain's TechRadar online service calls HIPerSpace the "highest-resolution display systems for scientific visualisation in the world." (If you look closely at the words below the photo on TechRadar, the caption reads: "Now that's a big TV.") The writer ends his article with some dry humor: "And what are they displaying on the, er, display. Well, it's certainly not re-runs of Hollyoaks, more footage from the National Geographic and the like." Ironically, and apparently unknown to Chacksfield, the very first group treated to ...

Continue Reading...

A visiting professor from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee compared the electromagnetic properties of carbon nanotubes and graphene mesostructures at Calit2@UCI this afternoon. George Hanson was invited to speak by electrical engineering and computer science professor Peter Burke, who synthesized the world's longest electrically conducting nanotubes in 2004. Burke told the audience he learned of Hanson's work when he developed the idea of nanotube antennas, and the two have since collaborated but had never met until today.

Hanson explained that single-walled carbon nanotubes are rolled-up sheets of graphene, a mono-atomic layer of graphite that resembles honeycomb. The graphene is easy ...

Continue Reading...

Sitting in on the undergraduate research presentations very well put together talks. Nice diverse collection of topics. I wish more of our researchers and program development folks were here. -------------------------- Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld

Continue Reading...

It's no exaggeration to say that Visual Arts graduate student Micha Cardenas will have to spend 30 days locked away in a single room to complete her MFA project. Cardenas, a researcher for the Center for Research in Computing an the Arts (CRCA) in Atkinson Hall, will be using a head-mounted display (HMD) and a Vicon motion-capture system to create long-durational performances of non-human characters in Second Life, an Internet-based virtual world imagined and created by its "residents."

Cardenas intends to fully immerse herself in Second Life for the month of November, waking and sleeping in the physical world (a single room at Calit2's Atkinson Hall) as the motion capture system tracks her ...

Continue Reading...

Calit2-San Diego Associate Director Bill Hodgkiss returned this week from 18 days at sea off the West coast of Kauai, where he and a team of 15 researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography studied the effects of fluctuations in the ocean environment on underwater acoustic communications.

Despite logging countless hours in the field as a Scripps faculty member, Hodgkiss says he still gets seasick in rough conditions (although the weather on this most recent trip proved to be fortuitously calm).

Hodgkiss offers the following advice to those who tend to go green around the gills while at sea:
1) Go out in nice weather. Of course, it helps if you're somewhere near Hawaii.
2) Go to sea in ...

Continue Reading...

CETF meeting this morning at USD. Speaking on behalf of Calit2 on our research in support of the California Broadband Task Force.
Mobility Enhanced with iPhone

Continue Reading...

Seven of the students participating in this summer's Pacific Rim Experiences for Undergraduates (PRIME) program, funded by NSF with Calit2 support, are spending their ten weeks at Monash University in Australia. And based on a news release from Monash about the UCSD interns, they're off to a great start (and don't seem to mind that it's winter in Melbourne, and they're missing summer in San Diego!). The students are doing e-science and grid engineering research in the university's Faculty of Information Technology, with professor David Abramson. All are working on projects that use Nimrod, a software tool developed at Monash that enables users to harness multiple, distributed computers ...

Continue Reading...

A group of California architects and UCSD scientists from various departments met at Calit2 on Monday, July 7, to hear a presentation and see a demonstration of the Calit2-sponsored Navigation/Way-Finding Project, a multidisciplinary effort that studies human neurological responses to built environments as a means for obtaining evidence that will improve architectural design.

In attendance were renowned architects from the San Diego, LA and Bay areas, as well as a representative from the SD City Planners Office and a design consultant. They experienced how monitoring brain activity informs architects and planners on the qualities of the best designs for optimal Way-Finding, to help people trying ...

Continue Reading...

Calit2 today announced that its HIPerSpace display system on the 2nd floor of Atkinson Hall takes top honors among high-resolution displays for scientific visualization. The lab of prof. Falko Kuester (pictured below in middle of front row) expanded the first HIPerSpace, making it 30 percent bigger in terms of total pixels. At nearly 287 million pixels, the HIPerSpace tiled wall boasts more than one active pixel for every U.S. citizen, based on the 2000 census.
The second-highest-res display, hyperwall-2, was installed recently at NASA Ames, with nearly 256 million pixels of screen resolution. Other runners-up in order are: Calit2's HIPerWall at UC Irvine (204.8 million pixels); Calit2's ...

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

Talk about getting students actively involved in what could otherwise be a dry academic lecture: At one point there were nearly 30 students on the Calit2 auditorium stage at UCSD this morning, as Jeanne Ferrante had them scrambling to categorize themselves on some basic principles used in parallel computing. The associate dean of the Jacobs School of Engineering was speaking to more than 150 middle and high-school students participating in this summer's COSMOS 4-week residential science-and-math program at UCSD, as well as many of the Calit2 Summer Undergraduate Scholars.
Helping as master of ceremonies was Ferrante's husband and CSE emeritus professor Larry Carter (pictured with Ferrante ...

Continue Reading...

Calit2 Principal Development Engineer Doug Palmer's idea for a "smart" Universal Power Adapter is striking a chord with the national news media. Coverage of the adapter, also known as uPower, turned up today on "The Blue Marble Blog" an online component of Mother Jones magazine. With a circulation of 230,000, Mother Jones is the most widely read progressive publication in the United States.

The story about uPower also appeared on PhysOrg.com, where it's generated 20 reader comments within a span of 24 hours. PhysOrg.com is a Web-based news site that specializes in the hard sciences. This year, Quantcast listed the site as a top 5000 site with 510,000 U.S. people visiting per month....

Continue Reading...

Calit2's Tom Levy (left) admits that "every real 'dirt' archaeologist fancies him or herself as an Indiana Jones-type character". A profile of Levy, "Raiders of the Lost Artifacts", is the spotlight article in the Summer 2008 issue of UCSD Social Sciences e-Connection. Levy holds the Norma Kershaw Endowed Chair in Archaeology of Ancient Israel and the Neighboring Lands, and is the current chair of UCSD's Judaic Studies Program. And as the article points out, Levy's interest in technology "extends to modern applications of digital technologies and media for archaeological research," which he is pioneering as associate director of Calit2's Center of Interdisiplinary Science for Art, Architecture ...

Continue Reading...

hway, and temporary housing and tents.
After several cloudy days, Saturday, July 5th, turned out to be a sunny day in Chengdu.
We headed out for a field trip to Ziping dam near Dujiangyan and to Yingxiu, near the southern epicenter.
The visit to the dam was special since it is not generally open to the public. Our hosts from Sichuan Univ obtained special permissions for us.
About 45mts outside of Chengdu, we started seeing visible damage to structures as we were driving down the hig
Dujiangyan is a typical, crowded town. We saw extensive damage (see the first photo) and large temporary housing complexes everywhere.

Ziping dam is relatively new (~7 years) and seems to have withstood about twice the forces that it was designed for (see ...

Continue Reading...

Two Calit2 academic affiliates at UC Irvine recently received a $1 million grant to develop technology that will enhance the safety of firefighters. The Fire Prevention and Safety grant was made by the Department of Homeland Security's Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to UCI professors of computer science Sharad Mehrotra and co-investigator Nalini Venkatasubramanian. They will collaborate with ImageCat, a Long Beach, Calif.-based disaster-response technology company to develop and build situational awareness technologies that provide firefighters with synchronized real-time information. The two-year project, known as SAFIRE (Situational Awareness for Firefighters), augments ongoing ...

Continue Reading...

An old acquaintance from my early days in broadcasting paid us a visit today. Peter Day (pictured), one of the top "presenters" at the BBC Radio 4 in London, who reports on business and technology, is doing a documentary on the future of bandwidth, asking the question: "Do we really need more pixels?" After a long interview with Larry Smarr, Peter got a good feel for super-high-definition conferencing on the 4K auditorium projection system, and was taken with the animation showing research network bandwidth across the world (courtesy of our OptIPuter partners at the University of Illinois). We also treated Peter to a "ride" in the StarCAVE, and he interviewed Kai Doerr in ...

Continue Reading...

Mobility Enhanced with iPhone

Continue Reading...

Just got back from spending a week at the National Institute of Technology at Trichi. Used to be the Regional Engineering College. Visit was related to being named a distinguished alumni. Spoke with or addressed students, staff, faculty, alumni but couldn't reschedule in time to meet with Chairman of the Board of Trustees.

Signs of growth all around. Faculty strength has doubled in the past 3 years or so. Set to increase by another 50%. New classroom complex inaugurated by President Kalam last year. 10 Gbps to all campus nodes and 1 Gbps to all desktops but only _6_ static IPs for the whole campus of about 6,000 students and they let me have one of those. No WLANS except in the guest ...

Continue Reading...

Architecture, music and technology will join forces in October with a film screening and music performance sponsored by the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences, Artpower! and Calit2.

As part of its "Architecture and Cinema" series, Artpower! will screen "My Architect," an Academy-Award nominated documentary about Salk Institute architect Louis Khan, Oct. 2 in the Calit2 auditorium

The screening comes in conjunction with a performance Oct. 11 of "Sanctuary," an experimental percussion-based work composed by Calit2 artist-in-residence Roger Reynolds. That performance -- held at the Salk Institute -- will mark the second time Reynold's composition will be performed (its debut was held last year ...

Continue Reading...

The Daily Texan ran a story on July 3 entitled "Scientists Developing Robotic Teaching Tools" on the work of the Machine Perception Lab at UCSD/Calit2.

Continue Reading...

Earlier this week CASB director Pavel Pevzner's undergraduate bioinformatics program made headlines for an important publication on an emerging field in bioinformatics called comparative proteogenomics. The program is funded by Pevzner with his fellowship grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and in a feature story on the HHMI website, Pevzner says the undergraduate program will take their experiment on experiments to the whole world. Called UBER-GRID--the Undergraduate Bioinformatics E-Research Grid--it will be a platform for worldwide, distributed bioinformatics research projects, Pevzner says. "We will put all our projects on the web and invite every student in the world to ...

Continue Reading...

The RedOrbit online news service picked up a report on a deal whereby Darkstrand, Inc. has purchased and will commercialize one-half of all capacity on the National LambdaRail (NLR), which covers multi-gigabit networks linking advanced research institutions across the U.S., including Calit2. The report quotes Calit2's visualization director at UCSD, Tom DeFanti (pictured), saying, "We've been very aware of the disconnection between what is possible in our NLR-networked visualization labs and what is available commercially. The inability to use applied technologies as they evolve and are proven is a critical obstacle for companies, especially those in the media space that need ...

Continue Reading...

I am in Chengdu, China this week with a small team of colleagues from UC, visiting folks at Sichuan University, to discuss how we can help in the aftermath of the recent earthquake. The visit here has been organized by Prof. Gretchen Kalonji, Director of International Strategy Development, UCOP.

I gave a presentation on July 2nd, emphasizing our work with American Red Cross during Hurricane Katrina and highlighting opportunities for creation of a post-earthquake information management system. The work we have done in projects like GEON and NEES is very relevant and can be directly leveraged here.
After the talk, I met with a group at Sichuan University who are responsible for collecting and maintaining ...

Continue Reading...

The July issue of Genome Research features a cool new paper that stakes a claim to the development of a new area of bioinformatics, called 'comparative proteogenomics', combining mass spectrometry and comparative genomics to analyze multiple genomes. Co-author Pavel Pevzner is a Jacobs School computer science professor and Director of Calit2's Center for Algorithmic and Systems Biology (CASB), and his Ph.D. student Nitin Gupta is the lead author. But the big news is that much of the research was handled by undergraduate students who are part of the Bioinformatics [Under]graduate Research Consortium in Comparative Proteogenomics, created by Pevzner, with funding from his 2006 Howard ...

Continue Reading...

Lily Cheng went to Beijing in 2006 as part of the NSF- and Calit2-funded Pacific Rim Experiences for Undergraduates (PRIME) summer research program in cyberinfrastructure. Since then, she has continued that research on avian influenza with Wilfred Li, Peter Arzberger and others, identifying more than two dozen promising and novel compounds to combat bird flu. In the Flash video above, Lily talks about her research, just published (with Cheng as first author) in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry. For more, read the news release "UC San Diego Researchers Identify Potential New Drug Candidates to Combat Bird Flu".

Continue Reading...

You need one for your mobile phone, one for your laptop, one for your iPod ... even one for your hedge trimmer. Plug them all in and not only do you have a mess of power cords, you've also got one hefty electricity bill.

External power adapters -- known to some as "wall warts" -- might be ubiquitous in today's gadget-crazed world, but that doesn't mean they're the best option for consumers. Calit2-San Diego Principal Development Engineer Doug Palmer hopes his idea for a "universal power adapter" will provide a much-needed alternative to wall warts. It would supply both power and communications to any consumer electronics device (or multiple devices at once), and when paired with a solar panel, ...

Continue Reading...

Calit2's CAMERA marine metagenomics project organized a two-day workshop June 26-27 to focus on "new communication channels in biology". Calit2 webcast the event, and more than 20 individual presentations are now available for on-demand viewing [Windows Media Player required]. Calit2'ers were well represented: Jerry Sheehan (left) did a "Calit2 Technology Overview", focusing on Web 2.0 tools; CAMERA executive director Paul Gilna (right) outlined the project's experience as "A Community-driven Cyberinfrastructure for Metagenomics"; a team of Phil Bourne's colleagues from SciVee laid out how the online video service is "Taking Scientific Communication into the 21st Century"; and John Wooley, ...

Continue Reading...

Most conferences at Calit2 tend to draw speakers primarily from the academic community at UC San Diego and beyond. But Calit2's Center for Algorithmic and Systems Biology (CASB) at UCSD is trying to reach out to the growing number of private companies that see the long-term potential in bioinformatics, systems biology and proteomics. Hence today's La Jolla Proteomics Conference, which drew a cross-section of industry participants and speakers. They focused on developments in mass spectrometry from the biological side as well as from the computational side, notably covering current techniques and open problems in proteomics.. The organizing committee included ...

Continue Reading...

 building groundbreaking on May 31, 2002. Note the then Chancellor's Dynes (UCSD) and Cicerone (UCI), along with long time private sector supporter Marco Thompson, standing behind us...

The directors of the four Gray Davis Institutes for Science and Innovation got an opportunity to have a conference call this morning with former Governor Davis. He has been interested in how research in the Cal-ISIs into Green Technologies can be harnessed for helping California transform its economy and lower its energy intensity and carbon footprint. The directors of the Institutes have been pulling together one-pagers on key projects which we hope will bring more attention to the innovations our faculty and campuses are pursuing in these critical areas. Quite an exciting phone call!

Below is a picture of Governor Davis and me at the Calit2@UCSD

Continue Reading...

I visited the Machine Perception Lab (MPL) today on the 2nd floor of Calit2@UCSD. They are the group that has the cool RUBI robot that talks to children. They demoed their frame by frame face recognition software that can tell if you are smiling or not, as well as other facial expressions. All this is read out on a series of graphs in realtime. It was amazing that I could just sit down in front of their computer and it instantly started analyzing my face with no training period required!

We also got to talk to a UCSD CSE grad student Jacob Whitehill, who was featured June 26 on the Calit2 Web site. His YouTube video has been getting a lot of hits.

Continue Reading...

20 years ago yesterday NSF sent out the following words to users of NSFnet, "The NSFnet Backbone has reached a state where we would like to more officially let operational traffic on"

Full story on NSFnet and the modern Internet in NetworkWorld.

Continue Reading...

One of the top TV anchors from Italy's largest broadcast network, RAI, spent half a day at Calit2 yesterday with his crew from Italy. Roberto Giacobbo interviewed CISA3 director Maurizio Seracini and associate director Falko Kuester, and shot HD video of some of the cool visualization tools -- the StarCAVE, HIPerSpace wall, 4K -- being used in the search for Leonardo da Vinci's long-lost mural, "The Battle of Anghiari". Giacobbo's video will be shown at the end of the project, in conjunction with the National Geographic Channel's documentary (for which RAI purchased Italian broadcast rights). Hover over image and click on the right arrow to watch a short clip of the interview with Seracini ...

Continue Reading...

A quick update to my earlier post regarding the FY08 supplemental.

The AAAS reports:

"On June 26, the Senate approved the final version of the 2008 supplemental appropriations bill, which President Bush signed on June 30. As outlined in an analysis of the 2008 supplemental, the bill adds billions of dollars in defense development for 2008. The bill also provides $338 million in 2008 domestic science funding ($150 million for NIH, $62.5 million each for NSF, DOE Science, and NASA)."

Continue Reading...