A European team, writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, indicates that stroke sufferers can still benefit from clot-busting medicine even if they receive it an hour or so beyond the current three-hour window after symptoms start. But writing in the same journal, UCSD Stroke Center director and Calit2 participant Pat Lyden (pictured at far left) cautions that patients should still seek treatment as soon as they first suspect a possible stroke. Meanwhile, an article about a Calit2-affiliated telemedicine study co-authored by Lyden, co-diretor Brett Meyer, Calit2's Ramesh and others, is now published in the September issue of the British medical journal, The Lancet. 

Titled ...

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Calit2 Summer Scholar Benjamin Lotan was in the right place at the right time Tuesday when San Diego 6 news correspondent Jenny Hamel stopped by UCSD to ask students about the new Google/T-Mobile phone. The scholars had finished presenting their summer research at a poster session in Atkinson Hall when the news crew turned up. Lucky for Ben (pictured, in a self-portrait), he was still around, and even managed to get a snippet of the digital film he created for his research project in the news clip.

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After Falko Kuester came up with the ingenious name for his tiled-display-on-steroids, dubbing it the HIPerSpace system, it was probably only a matter of time before it would become a window on U.S. space exploration. And that's what happened this week when two NASA engineers, in San Diego for a conference, opted to participate in a Mars Rover sortie while watching incoming images from the Rover and a NASA control room -- all displayed on Calit2's 286-million-pixel HIPerSpace display at UCSD. The NASA officials -- Michael Sims and Laurence Edwards -- joined Mars Rover Exploration Rover Mission Ops, via live video feeds from Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The feeds were displayed on the ...

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I'm live-blogging from Price Center East at UCSD, where the half-day opening symposium for the new Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny (CARTA) is taking place all afternoon (Calit2-affiliated professor Ajit Varki is co-director of the center, while Calit2 and SDSC will support CARTA with IT and telecom technologies). The symposium, "Anthropogeny: Defining the Agenda," features experts from all over the world, representing the many facets of anthropogeny, or the study of human origins.

Professor Tetsuro Matsuzawa, director of primate research at Kyoto University in Japan gave a particularly engaging presentation on primatology that featured a chimpanzee named Ayumu. Ayumu ...

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If you've ever wandered through a museum exhibition and wished you could have helped put it all together, you won't want to miss this opportunity from Calit2's Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology (CISA3).

CISA3 is inviting student volunteers to help install its forthcoming exhibition entitled 'Masters of Fire -- Hereditary Bronze Casters of South India', which will open at UCSD's Geisel Library on October 5, 2008. Julie Gay, an exhibition designer and preparator from the San Diego Museum of Man, will be installing the CISA3 exhibit from September 26 to 30 at the Geisel Library (and the exhibition itself runs through January 25). Ms. Gay, who has a distinguished ...

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Please join us in celebrating the achievements of the 2008 Calit2 Undergraduate Summer Scholars at UC San Diego. Their end-of-summer Poster Session will be held next Tuesday, right after the Calit2 Staff Meeting (2-3 p.m. in the auditorium).

Calit2 Summer Scholars Poster Session
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
3-5 p.m.
Atkinson Hall foyer

This event represents the culmination of 10-weeks of intensive research across many different disciplines by 30 undergraduate student scholars and is sure to draw a large and diverse crowd this year. If you plan to attend, please RSVP as soon as possible to Lovella Cacho, ldcacho@soe.ucsd.edu. For more information about the scholars and their research: Summer ...

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Today we "opened" the StarCAVE, and six local TV stations sent reporters and camera crews. We got a call from the Univision reporter Sandra Bermudez asking whether we could provide a Spanish-speaking expert to talk about the virtual-reality system, so that's her interviewing A/V "guru" Hector Bracho, for a report to air this evening on Channel 17. Hal Clement from the ABC affiliate Channel 10 was here, along with Kristina Lee from the new Fox5 affiliate, plus camera crews from KUSI (Channel 9), KNSD (Channel 7), the CW (Channel 6). The only no-show was KFMB Channel 8. Also on hand: San Diego Union-Tribune reporter Jonathan Sidener and a photographer, so look for an article in the paper tomorrow ...

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A seemingly routine fire drill that emptied the Calit2 Building and Bren Hall on the UCI campus yesterday was really a technology-integration exercise orchestrated by Calit2-affiliated researchers to test fledgling firefighter safety systems.

Researchers are calling the data communications systems SAFIRE (Situational Awareness for Firefighters); they are funded by a $1 million Fire Prevention and Safety grant from FEMA.

As alarms evacuated both buildings, researchers tracked the progress and safety of two pseudo-firefighters "searching" for a victim who had come into contact with toxic material. A UCI Police Department officer oversaw the drill.

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Roger Reynolds (pictured at left, with percussionist Steven Schick) composed most of "Sanctuary" before becoming Calit2's composer in residence at UC San Diego in July 2007. But as he was preparing for the work's world premiere in the I.M. Pei-designed East Wing of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., last November, he told me that his hope was to re-formulate "Sanctuary" as part of a series we informally dubbed "great music for great spaces". After the smashing success in Washington (when the Washington Post critic Stephen Brookes called it a "once-in-a-lifetime aural experience"), we discussed what might be a suitably 'great' venue for the work in San Diego. It didn't take ...

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In a breakthrough demonstration yesterday, as part of CENIC's CalREN-XD/HPR workshop [www.cenic.org/workshop/] held at Calit2 at UCSD, two research groups at UCI and UCSD momentarily created the world's largest virtual OptIPortal. Using two dedicated one gigabit per second optical links, provided by CENIC as part of the persistent Calit2 OptIPuter, the two HiPerSpace tiled walls at Calit2@UCSD and Calit2@UCI were united into a 124 tile HiPerVerse exceeding 1/2 billion pixels.This extension of the CGLX software system(http://vis.ucsd.edu/~cglx/), developed by Kai-Uwe Doerr and Falko Kuester at UCSD, sets the stage for linking together a number of the 33 sites around the world that are currently ...

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I was at a gathering in remembrance of Manny Farber at his studio in Leucadia yesterday. Manny passed away on August 17th at the age of 91. A tribute to Manny Farber, that Jean-Pierre Gorin, put together about two years ago, was the first content created at Calit2 in 4K. Manny's detailed paintings have always struck me as being especially evocative when displayed at high resolution on the big screen in Atkinson Hall. At a gathering yesterday at his studio and home, his many students, friends and friends of friends got a chance to remember his remarkable accomplishments through many conversations. One can gather a sense of the extraordinary life he lived by reading his obituaries that have appeared ...

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If you're traveling to the Big Apple sometime soon, be sure to stop in Times Square and look up at the giant MTV high-definition video screen on the east side of Broadway between 44th and 45th streets. Several times a day at the top of the hour, they are showing a 5-minute video clip taken from a re-enactment of a famous 1971 Cesar Chavez speech in Los Angeles, with Calit2 researcher and Visual Arts assistant professor Ricardo Dominguez in the "title" role. The re-enactment was part of a series produced by artist Mark Tribe for the Port Huron Project 4: We Are Also Responsible. And if you aren't headed for New York City, you can still watch the video on Blip.TV. Dominguez is also ...

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Interesting snippet on the impact of the Calit2 UCSD building on the local community. 

Country Day School Officials tip their hat to Calit2 as inspiration for the design approach for their new Visual Arts and Science Center. According to La Jolla Light:

"School officials said they took their inspiration for combining the arts and sciences from Jolla's long history of combining the two specialties in such examples as The Institute of Museum of Contemporary Arts and the Calit2@UCSD Building."

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Somewhere out there is a group of mathematicians so powerful, so uber-geeky, that they just might be able to predict human behavior using nothing but a bunch of bits and bytes.

In his newly released book "The Numerati," Business Week technology reporter Stephen Baker investigates a new breed of "entrepreneurial mathematicians" who are using the data we all leave in our wake -- while surfing the Internet, using a credit card, or talking on the phone -- to measure and analyze user experiences. The end goal: Total customization (hence the Amazon "recommendation" feature that led me to the book in the first place).

But that's not even the half of it. Baker predicts that soon, by harnessing ...

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Just got back from a day at the UCSD/LANL institute in Los Alamos where UCSD maintains a research facility onsite in Los Alamos. We have a number of projects ongoing with them including one on plume detection and structural health monitoring. The latter is hosted in Room 6210 in the Atkinson Hall. Drop by and take a look at the fun stuff David Mascarenas, Eric Flynn and his team are doing in the lab.

As a part of the SHM effort, we also do field demos -- Alamosa Canyon bridge near Truth-Or-Consequences in New Mexico. This year was the Rev 2 of the health monitoring demos with new hardware and multiple sensors. I am sure more reports will be forthcoming.

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I've been listening in on a few sessions of the Second Congress of the International Society for Cultural and Activity Research (ISCAR) this week, and one conclusion I've come to is that Lev Vygotsky -- who died of tuberculosis in 1934 -- still has a loyal worldwide following.

Even if you've never heard of the late Soviet psychologist, plenty of people at ISCAR know his work well, and their lectures this week have been peppered with references to Vygotsky's research in developmental psychology, the philosophy of science and methodology of psychological research, child development, education, the psychology of art, the study of learning disabilities and the interrelation between language and ...

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Recycling bins and motion-sensor lighting are all well and good, but a team of staff members from Calit2 at UCSD thinks the institute can take sustainability to the next level. Led by Government Program Developer Jerry Sheehan and Management Services Officer Yuki Marsden, employees at the institute's Atkinson Hall facility met last Friday to discuss how the building -- and the people in it -- can do more to 'go green.'

"We want to think about things we can do on a practical level that can have a greater focus," said Sheehan. "I propose that we should innovate now, before sustainability stops being voluntary and starts being compulsory."

At its initial brainstorming session, the team (which welcomes ...

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I chanced upon the Live* project at Sunlabs when reading through a presentation (Live_-HypervisorToGo.pdf ) by my son, Anand. While this is a remarkable work by a high-schooler, the vision behind the Live* is quite interesting: make software delivery and composition "as easy as in embedded systems." Well, perhaps easy is not the word that comes first to mind when thinking of embedded software, but shorting the installation path through firmware is an interesting way to look at SW on a stick. We do something similar in our Somniloquy effort, shown by the firmware added via gumstix in this picture. The contraption allows us to take over the network presence and identity of the laptop and allow ...

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I have been playing around with Chrome, Google's web browser since its release a week ago. Technically it is built on WebKit (same as safari and in android), but with an improved Javascript execution engine (garbage collection, JIT). One of the interesting features of chrome is "application windows": that is, you can specify application launch from the web browser.

This is advertised as an 'application shortcut'. But it really is more than that: it gives an insight into how Google is approaching OS, and sort of a rev 2 on google applications. Clearly, not all applications can be sourced by Google (nor does it likely want to), and there must be an 'offline' context to an application (saved in ...

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Peter Day, whose program "In Business" on BBC Radio has a wide following, spent time at Calit2 in San Diego recently. Now, his documentary "Bring in the Bandwidth" hit the airwaves last night in the UK, and will eventually play on BBC World Service as well... but you can already listen to his interview with Calit2 Director Larry Smarr (and eavesdrop on his tour of the StarCAVE at UCSD with Trish Stone) by downloading an .mp3 podcast of the program at http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio/worldbiz/worldbiz_20080904-2030a.mp3. Peter also mentions Larry and Trish in a preview on the BBC website, explaining how the story arose from his first interview with futurist George Gilder more than 20 ...

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The Electronic Language International Festival, known as FILE, has officially closed. During its twenty-six days of exhibition, FILE has attracted over 37,450 visitors to the FIESP/SESI center in Sao Paulo. This event also caught the attention of press organizations from all over the world, including Rollingstone, Yahoo and Brazil's own O Globo television network.

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