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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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.

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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 ...

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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 ...

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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 ...

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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 ...

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Irvine staffers, students and affiliates said good luck - but not goodbye - to long-time Calit2 presence Chris Davison today. Chris and his family are returning to their roots in Indiana, where he will be telecommuting part-time as he continues his work on the ResponSphere project. ResponSphere, a project ResCUE component that has its own NSF funding, is the testing ground for all the technology being developed to assist first-responders in crisis situations. Chris, ResponSphere technical manager, along with the project's students, has created mobile cameras with 802.11 interfaces, miniature sensor-equipped cars and other gadgets, while turning a large part of the UCI campus into a living test bed. ...

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