This is my first post. So let me share with you my recent experience with COSMOS program on embedded systems. We were very nervous when planning this course since it required quite a bit of EE and CS, and we were targeting it to high-schoolers. So we spent a month just going over the lab exercises -- initially created by a freshman student in CSE, Lynn Ngyen. Choon Kim picked these up, changed and added to create a polished set of six exercises.

Our thinking was that the students would do one exercise a week and then we will have a couple of challenge exercises for the selected few to show off as projects. The exercises were non-trivial: from generating PWM signals to drive LEDs, to sampling ...

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Some of the Calit2 UCSD Summer Scholars visited the San Diego Food Bank earlier this month. The outing was one of a slate of activities designed to help the scholars, who work not just in Atkinson Hall, but in labs across campus, get together and learn more about other students and their projects. They had a good time and learned some things as well.

"The Food Bank was a fun experience. It was different from the other social events," says Agatha Man, an ICAM major, "But nice that we're helping the community. The best part was the teamwork there."

Expressing the sentiments of all who participated, bioengineering major Sylvia Hon notes, "It was pretty interesting seeing what people donate, sometimes, ...

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Members of the Swedish Parliament's Committee on Transport and Communications spent the day at the Irvine division of Calit2 on Wednesday. One of 15 parliamentary committees in the "Riksdag," as the Parliament is called, the group is responsible for matters concerning road, rail, air and shipping transport, as well as postal services, electronic communications and IT policy. UCI was the committee's last stop on a 10-day California visit that also included UC Berkeley. The group, whose visit was arranged by UCI Extension, was led on a tour of the Calit2 Building by Stu Ross and saw several Calit2 demonstrations and presentations. Among them: the Carl Zeiss Center of Excellence, ...

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During my weeklong trip to Seattle, I was able to visit Professor Ginger Armbrust's research group at the University of Washington. Ginger is an expert on marine microbes, particularly diatoms. She was a member of the Vision '05 expedition headed by UW's John Delaney and has participated in uncompressed (1. 5 Gbps) HD video links with me as Supercomputing '07 and at Calit2 in February '08 (see image below). Ginger is a distinguished member of our Moore Foundation-funded CAMERA microbial metagenomics Scientific Advisory Board. She and her group have been pioneers in using OptIPortals to create new visual representations for microbial genomics and metagenomics. Here is a picture I took of her ...

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We at Calit2 were saddened to hear of the death last week of Manny Farber, an influential film critic, abstract painter and professor emeritus at UCSD. Farber died at his home in Leucadia at the age of 91.

A major force in American culture for more than 50 years, Farber wrote film criticism for The New Republic, The Nation and Time Magazine, among other publications. Farber also made a name for himself as a painter, joining the UCSD Visual Arts Department in 1970 and remaining an active member of the faculty until 1987. In 2006, Calit2 filmmaker-in-residence Jean-Pierre Gorin organized a five-hour tribute called "Manny Farber and All That Jazz" at Calit2's Atkinson Hall. Gorin had been a colleague ...

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"Origami optics" developed at UC San Diego may be what it takes to get cameras with zoom capabilities so slim that they fit into cell phones and other portable electronics. Electrical engineering Ph.D. student Eric Tremblay, one of the developers of the origami optics technology, presented his team's recent work at SIGGRAPH 08. The origami optics get their name from their ability to "fold up" incoming light so that the space required for light focusing -- the focal length -- is effectively reduced. The design "folds" the light entering the aperture by forcing it to bounce back and forth between mirrored surfaces within the optic. It is during this bouncing/folding that the light is focused, ...

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I'm at UMBC, where I'm giving at talk at a conference on the Frontiers
of Multicore Computing http://www.mc2.umbc.edu/frontiers.html on how we've been using new multicore CPU's from IBM and Intel in the creation of The Scalable City http://scalablecity.net/ project. Multicore computing has allowed this project to come to fruition, in a way that I counted on at the outset, but didn't actually realize the solution would come from this manner of complying with Moore's Law.

Other interesting talks here include discussions of the new Roadrunner supercomputer at Los Alamos, made with 1000's of Cell processors and Opteron's - the first Petaflop computer and what is in the way of making ...

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The Irvine division of Calit2 played host yesterday to faculty from Taiwan's National Chao Tung University, and two executives from the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office. The visitors toured several Calit2 labs, including the Zeiss Center of Excellence, the eMedia Studio, and the Interactive Animation, Telemedicine and Visualization Labs. They also met with several Calit2-affiliated faculty members to discuss potential collaborations centered on System-on-a-Chip (SoC) technologies in bio-electronics.

Taiwan is home to the National SoC Program, a $300-million partnership between private and public sectors, and NCTU is seeking opportunities to collaborate with U.S. universities on SoC projects ...

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Today ...

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"Network World," the premier provider of information and insight for network and IT executives, has published an article in both its print and online editions about research conducted by UCSD Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) Professor Amin Vahdat.

The article -- titled "Could 'fat-tree' switch setup be key to trimming data center costs?' -- discusses Vahdat's research findings, which he presented last week at the annual meeting of SIGCOMM, the Special Interest Group on Data Communications. In his paper, Vahdat and co-authors Mohammad Al-Fares and Alexander Loukissas (both UCSD grad students in CSE) explain how companies with large data centers can save money and enhance performance ...

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The kites were flying high, the burgers and dogs were sizzling and the sunshine seemed special-ordered at the Calit2-UCSD Staff Picnic, held yesterday afternoon at Mission Bay's De Anza Cove. More than 75 staff members turned out for the barbecue cook-out (provided by the Grove Cafe), which was followed by a hugely popular kite-flying contest, a prize raffle and pick-up games of volleyball and soccer.

"AV = Awesome!" took first place in the kite-flying contest, and winners Alex Matthews, Mike Toillion, Hector Bracho (pictured, with the winning entry), Adam Burruss and Emily Jankowski will celebrate their success with a pizza party sponsored by Calit2. Nano3 engineer Ryan Anderson won the grand ...

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This morning I attended the first Green to Gold-Monetizing the Clean Tech Phenomena for SoCal Tech Companies workshop hosted by AeA and CleanTech San Diego. 

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Jay Lickfett, lead software engineer for Calit2's ResCUE project and a principal designer of the project's Disaster Web Portal, has been recognized by the California Emergency Services Association with its Platinum Award. The award is presented to an individual for outstanding service in the emergency management field.

Lickfett was nominated for the award by Jacob Green, from the City of Ontario Police Department's Administrative Services Bureau. Green worked closely with Lickfett and the ResCUE team on the development of the Disaster Web Portal, and the City of Ontario was the first municipal agency to implement the software that allows emergency responders to provide the public with real-time information in a crisis.

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Amateur writers often compose stories based on characters in popular books, movies, anime, games and television shows. As a matter of fact, there are more than 1.5 million of these stories posted on Web site FanFiction.net, UCI assistant professor Rebecca Black told a lunchtime crowd gathered yesterday for another SURF-IT seminar at Calit2. Black is mentoring SURF-IT student Lauren Lewis; together they are developing a new site (fanfictionuniversity.com) that will also serve as a repository for fan-written fiction, but with an eye towards improving literacy and composition skills in contributors. Black and Lewis' site, which is currently under construction, will not only archive contributions, ...

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As we reported back in June, an Illinois startup company named its privately-built supercomputer "R Smarr" after Calit2 director Larry Smarr. [The "R" refers to the company, R Systems, which is the brainchild of co-founder Brian Kucic, who worked with Smarr when the latter was founding director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.] So on Friday, Larry visited his eponymously named supercomputer at R Systems in Champaign and attended a reception in his honor at the iCyt atrium in the University of Illinois Research Park.

Local media turned out to laud the startup and its muse. In the News-Gazette, reporter Don Dodson ...

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New curators at the San Diego Museum of Art visited Calit2 on Thursday to look at some of the cool capture and visualization technologies being developed for our Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology (CISA3). SDMA and CISA3 are partnering on a long-term project to develop digital clinical charts as a conservation tool for major works in SDMA's permanent collection, and the work will be part of a permanent exhibit scheduled to open next January in time for a meeting of the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) in San Diego. The visitors included John Marciari, Curator of Italian and Spanish Paintings and head of provenance research at SDMA, as well as ...

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A colleague passed on a recent presentation given by NSF Deputy Director Kathie Olsen on upcoming priorities for the National Science Foundation. A full copy of that presentation may be downloaded here:
NASULGC 8-08 Olsen, Kathie.pptm

The slides address updates on the FY08 budget and plans for FY09, implementation of the America Competes Act, discussion of the importance and evaluation of transformative research, and changes to the grant proposal guideline.

Did you know: 

• Grants will now be required to provide a brief summary (2-3 paragraphs) of project outcomes specifically for the public?
• NSF will issue a second report on cost sharing next year?
  
• Starting in January 2008 proposals ...

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On Tuesday August 12th, a group of Calit2 staff and researchers took a day long trip to LA to attend this year's SIGGRAPH, the International Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques. Last year Calit2 was lucky enough to host several SIGGRAPH activities and exhibits while the conference was being held in San Diego. Everyone in attendance at this year's show was impressed with the offerings in new media art exhibits, large commercial demos and displays, and of course the all important swag giveaways.

Several ...

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Computer science professors Sharad Mehrotra and Nalini Venkatasubramanian wanted relevant input as they build SAFIRE - the Situational Awareness for Firefighters tool. So yesterday, they hosted a contingent of firefighters for the day to gain first-hand insight. The group viewed plans for the information-and-control-panel prototype that researchers are developing with a $1 million FEMA grant, and provided their ideas for improving the technology based on their own experiences. An outgrowth of the $12.5 million ResCUE project, SAFIRE will provide firefighters with synchronized real-time information to help them make better-informed decisions in the field.

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The autonomous underwater vehicle known as the "Stingray" recently participated in this year's Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International competition and held up pretty well against its rivals. Building it, however, required a little bit of high-tech, a little bit of a low-tech and a whole lot of "black magic," says Gideon Prior, president of the UCSD-based iBotics engineering group that created the craft.

At one end of the spectrum are the Stingray's high-tech "guts." It's equipped with Voith-Schneider propellers, forward- and down-looking cameras, a high-intensity lighting apparatus, a piezoelectric film-based sonar system, inertial navigational sensors and custom-designed software. ...

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Coverage of Calit2 affiliated Derek Lomas by ABC of his announcement of efforts to create a $12 computer for the developing world at MIT's International Development Design Summit.

ABC News: Forget the '$100 Laptop' ... Try $12!

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All this week geoscientists are gathering in the SDSC/Calit2 Synthesis Center for a crash course in how to use IT and other cyber tools. Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and organized by the NSF-funded Geosciences Network (GEON), the Cyberinfrastructure Summer Institute for Geoscientists (CSIG) kicked off on Monday with an introduction by SDSC's Chaitan Baru, GEON principal investigator and frequent Calit2 collaborator. Click here to download his talk on "Enabling Discoveries in the Earth Sciences Through the Geosciences Network".

Another Calit2 participant, Deborah Kilb from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, focused on "Earthquake Data: Manipulation & ...

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We're a bit late on this story... but Visual Arts professor Ricardo Dominguez (in blue at left) had a unique experience in July, when he portrayed Cesar Chavez in a re-enactment of a landmark speech by the Chicano leader. It was the fourth event of the Port Huron Project, a series of re-enactments organized by artist Mark Tribe, part of Creative Time's 2008 public art initiative, "Democracy in America: The National Campaign". It was held in Exposition Park in South L.A., site of the original speech.

According to LosAngeles Times art critic Christopher Knight, "At the end of Dominguez's second performance of the Chavez speech, the crowd spontaneously erupted into a loud chant of "Si! Se puede! ...

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Ilkay Altintas, assistant director for the National Laboratory for Advanced Data Research (NLADR) and manager of Scientific Workflows Automation Technologies (SWAT) at UCSD's San Diego Supercomputer Center, presented a lecture and slide-show this week to undergraduates at Australia's Monash University, where seven UCSD students are currently enrolled as part of the Calit2-based Pacific Rim Experiences for Undergraduates (PRIME) program.

The lecture was titled "Accelerating Scientific Discovery Using Scientific Workflows and Kepler Scientific Workflow System" and was streamed live in high definition video from Calit2's HD Studio to Monash, where PRIME students are working this summer on diverse ...

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As part of its series examining what life might be like in 2020, CNN.com has run a story about Intelligent Tutoring Systems that features UCSD Machine Perception Lab researcher Jacob Whitehill's work to create a facial remote control.

Despite the benefits of having a robot in the classroom (infinite patience, for one), it seems not everyone is convinced. Writes one commentator: "LOL don't think so... at least not anytime near soon.... Think how fast kids would hack their teacher."

At any rate, it seems Calit2 has its finger on the pulse of the up-and-coming zeitgeist: CNN's series also looks at the future of telemedicine, virtual classrooms, energy solutions, and virtual worlds -- all well-established ...

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Larry Smarr, G.P. Li, and Shellie Nazarenus came by our lab today to check out a new project being made by two students in our group, Informatics PhD candidate Eric Baumer and Informatics undergraduate Jordan Sinclair. Here's a blurb about the project:

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The communications media are undergoing democratization. Rather than receiving news from large corporations, many individuals now use various forms of new media as their primary source of information. One such medium is political blogs (or weblogs), which contain political news and commentary, often with a very distinct personal voice and readily apparent political affiliation or ideology. As more members ...

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The National Biomedical Computation Resource's third annual Summer Institute continues Monday morning, August 11, with part two of the mini-symposium "Cyberinfrastructure for Biomedicine." It is open to UCSD researchers even if they are not enrolled in Summer Institute 2008. Registration is appreciated, but not required.

Monday, August 11, 2008
8:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.  -- open for check-in at 8 a.m.
Fung Auditorium, Powell-Focht Bioengineering Hall building

Five distinguished speakers will present on the state-of-the-art in computational modeling of heart diseases. The talks will be followed by a poster session from 12:30 p.m. to 2 p.m., presented by the graduate-student attendees of ...

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There's a great feature in the online version of Environmental Protection magazine, about the project under which UC San Diego undergraduates "have desigend, built and deployed a network of five weather-monitoring stations as a key step toward helping the university use ocean breezes to cool buildings, identify the sunniest rooftops to expand its solar-electric system, and use water more efficiently in irrigation and in other ways." As the article notes, the students are mentored by Calit2's Bill Hodgkiss and Doug Palmer as well as Jacobs School mechanical and engineering professors Jan Kleissl and Paul Linden. Linden also directs UCSD's Environment and Sustainability Initiative (ESI), ...

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Two faculty speakers detailed two more SURF-IT projects for a lunchtime crowd yesterday at Calit2 at UC Irvine.

Computer science professor Sharad Mehrotra explained his approach to retrieving and managing multimodal data streams in sentient, or smart, spaces. These spaces, which can cross physical boundaries, contain a variety of sensors: cameras, loop sensors, mesh routers, RFID tags, heat sensors and the like. Consequently, techniques are needed to annotate and synchronize these data streams, and support search and browsing capabilities.

The team, which includes SURF-IT students Zohrab Basmajian and Phong Pham, are building the required software layer. The SATware, as Mehrotra calls it, must leverage the space's infrastructure, provide a powerful programming environment, be adaptable to physical changes in the environment and support the implementation of privacy measures.

Although his primary interest lies in emergency management, Mehrotra said his students are exploring models from a "smart classroom" environment, which employs multiple information sources such as slides, audio, video and interactive applications to capture the essence of a lecture. "The goal is to leverage the existing infrastructure to deliver information that can lead to action," he said.

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Ola! I am reporting live from the Electronic Language International Festival (FILE 2008) in Sao Paulo, Brazil. On the 4th of August, Calit2 and the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA) made history by hosting the first official 4K Digital Cinema presentation in all of South America.

The show, entitled "Two Thousand and Eight Million Pixels," was attended by the Brazilian Secretary of New Media, artists, academics, and videophiles from all over the world. Journalists were in high concentration as well, and included television networks such as Globo, TeleCultura and Oy.

The show featured such works as Scalable City by CRCA Director and UCSD professor Sheldon Brown; Era ...

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Am at a meeting organized by the Radio and Television News Directors Foundation in association with the National Academies and the US Department of Homeland Security.

There is a great Family Disaster Plan and Survival Guide distributed at the meeting. You can download a PDF at http://www.sdcounty.ca.gov/oes/docs/FamilyDisasterPlan.pdf.

We are being walked through a hypothetical attack on North Island.

...............Starting hypothetical now..........................

Vague threats were relayed by DHS, warning calls to the UT, Coast Guard interdicts small vessel, too late for the blast, planes fall out of the sky. The media and the authorities seem to be talking to each other largely ...

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Our colleague Sheldon Brown, director of the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA), is at the FILE new-media art festival in Sao Paulo, Brazil, along with others from Calit2 and CRCA: Peter Otto, Todd Margolis and Mike Toillion. He says his Scalable City installation and festival of 14 4K films have been well-received. "For the first time, the interactive installation of Scalable City is seen side-by-side with its 4K film version, creating a more complete experience of its multiple media forms," writes Brown from the festival. "CRCA and Calit2 have worked with FIOLE to create the first 4K film screening in Brazil. Along with the Scalable City film, 4K fare such as Mike Toillion's ...

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A new project moved into an unusual location at the Calit2 Building at UCI today. A wind lidar, a box-like sensor that uses a laser beam to measure the vertical profile of the wind, was installed on the Calit2 rooftop this morning. By detecting particles in the air, the equipment measures 10 height profiles from 40 to 200 meters each second. The software can also produce 3D mapping of the wind, and since the rooftop location has an Internet connection, researchers can track their data from remote locations.

The project is gathering information as part of a larger atmospheric research project headed up by Carl A. Friehe, research professor in the UCI departments of mechanical engineering and ...

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Calit2 participant and Computer Science and Engineering professor Mihir Bellare got some great news today. A dozen years ago Bellare was one of the inventors of the Keyed-Hash Message Authentication Code (HMAC), a crypotology algorithm for use when message authentication is required. After a long process and a series of new proofs published by Bellare in 2006, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) proposed last year to make HMAC a standard for data communications security, and today it became effective -- with the publication of a notice in the Federal Register.

The story was picked up today by William Jackson, writing in Government Computer News ("New version ...

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Calit2 Advisory Board member Vint Cerf has an interesting perspective on how to best manage broadband networks on the Google Public Policy Blog.

As opposed to data volume caps, Cerf advocated transmission rates rates. He writes:

"At least one proposal has surfaced that would charge users by the byte after a certain amount of data has been transmitted during a given period. This is a kind of volume cap, which I do not find to be a very useful practice. Given an arbitrary amount of time, one can transfer arbitrarily large amounts of information. Rather than a volume cap, I suggest the introduction of transmission rate caps, which would allow users to purchase access to the Internet at a given ...

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I don't know if you saw the coverage of HIPerSpace or the GreenLight Project in US News and World Report online but it is well worth a read. The article is entitled "Now That's a Wide-Screen TV".

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Groups B and C of the Calit2 UCSD Undergraduate Summer Scholars Program are due up this week for their second round of presentations. The first presentations took place early in the summer and each was quite brief (two to three minutes). In this go-round, the presentation time is extended to approximately seven minutes per student because they have more to report, now that they are about half way through their hands-on research project.

You are all invited to come and hear about several of the interesting multidisciplinary projects these talented undergraduates are working on (Each session will have seven to eight students who will present on their individual projects.)

Group B Presentations:   ...

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Four artists affiliated with Calit2 at UC San Diego are in Sao Paulo, Brazil, this week for the Electronic Language International Festival (FILE), an annual gathering of innovators within the fields of art and technology, including digital art, games, documentary films, electronic music and -- for the first time in the festival's nine-year history -- digital 4K cinema.

Calit2's contributions fall under the latter category, with Sheldon Brown, Peter Otto, Todd Margolis and Mike Toillion presenting 30-minute lectures at the festival's Symposium this Friday (translated to Portuguese in real-time), followed by screenings of their work in the newly emerging medium.

Brown, director of Calit2's Center ...

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A group of 18 undergraduate participants in the Keck Graduate Institute's summer research program toured Calit2 and INRF at UCI on Friday afternoon. Founded in 1997, Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Sciences (KGI) is devoted solely to bioscience education and discovery. The institute, a member of the Claremont Colleges consortium, is hosting the undergraduates from around the country for a 10-week program funded by NSF's Research Experience for Undergraduates.

Assistant Director of Research Stu Ross showed the students the BION cleanrooms, the Zeiss Center of Excellence and the HIPerWall, and gave them a quick tutorial about research taking place in the Computational Biology ...

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I'm in Milwaukee, WI, for the Ecological Society of America Annual Meeting. I'm not an ecologist, but I'll be presenting to a group of them tomorrow. My research group has been collaborating on a project called "EcoRaft" with UCI Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Professor Lynn Carpenter and her students, with support from Calit2. The project was selected for presentation at the ESA meeting this year.

Here's the abstract, from http://eco.confex.com/eco/2008/techprogram/ P10884.HTM

"While sciences such as physics and chemistry lend themselves to compelling opportunities for interaction (explosions, reactions, objects in motion), restoration ecology is more challenging for children ...

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One of Calit2's first joint projects with the UCSD School of Medicine, in 2003, involved creation of a broadband video telemedicine system, STRokE DOC. It allowed a stroke specialist from UCSD, using a laptop and broadband connection, to evaluate possible stroke victims brought into one of several community ERs in remote areas of San Diego County. Evaluation is critical, because if stroke victims can be administered a clot-buster drug within the first few hours of an attack, it can minimize the damage. The project has resulted in several major studies, but the most far-reaching was published over the weekend by the British medical journal Lancet Neurology.

The net result: In a study of 222 ...

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I am not sure that we at Calit2 want to do our own cyberinfrastructure rap but leave it to CERN to once again push the boundaries of innovation. 

It should be noted that a number of physics researchers on campus are part of the LHC and Atlas efforts including Haifeng Pi and Frank Wurthwein.

...

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