On Tuesday evening, Calit2 Director Larry Smarr was the keynote speaker at the 2009 Convocation, which welcomed thousands of transfer students and freshmen to the UC San Diego campus. In his talk, Smarr went out of his way to challenge the students to work on solving the big challenges facing humanity, including global climate change. Here's the full text of his speech:

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The San Diego Union-Tribune's technology writer Mike Lee picked up on the joint Calit2-Scripps Institution of Oceanography release about overcoming the final obstacle to start receiving roughly $32 million in stimulus funding for the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) Cyberinfrastructure project. The funding comes from NSF, via the semi-governmental Consortium for Ocean Leadership, and had been initially announced in 2007, before an overhaul of Ocean Leadership's predecessor organization -- and budget problems -- put the award on hold. The funding will allow the OOI Cyberinfrastructure project to staff up, primarily at Calit2 where the project is based, under the leadership ...

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Calit2 extends its deepest congratulations to UC San Diego Music Professor Roger Reynolds, who has been appointed University Professor by the University of California Board of Regents -- the highest honor that can be bestowed on UC faculty.

Reynolds, a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, is the first artist to be awarded the title and only the 36th UC faculty member since 1960 to be so honored. The designation is reserved for scholars of international distinction who are recognized and respected as teachers of exceptional ability.

Reynolds joined the UCSD Department of Music in 1969. He became founding director of the Center for Music Experiment (now called the Center for Research in Computing and ...

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

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

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

Reporter Mark McNeil added that Seracini "urged ...

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

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

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

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

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

Read more about the project here:

mixed relations by Elle Mehrmand and Micha Cardenas

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

mixed ...

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

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

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

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Our colleague John Orcutt alerted us to a major story we missed last week: Atkinson Hall-based Dorian Raymer (at left), who works for Orcutt on the Ocean Observatories Initiative, made international headlines when he and UCSD physics professor Douglas Smith won an Ig Nobel Prize for Physics. The ceremony took place last Thursday at Harvard, with Raymer in attendance. They were cited for "proving mathematically that heaps of string or hair or almost anything else will inevitably tangle themselves up in knots." This isn't the first big publicity for the study, which Raymer conducted as an undergraduate in Smith's lab. The work was featured by the BBC, and was also selected as one of ...

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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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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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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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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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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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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 ...

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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 ...

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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.

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Our fearless leader Larry Smarr is getting a new supercomputer named after him! The "R Smarr" supercomputer is the first offering of a startup company -- R Systems -- that is betting that there is plenty of business in the private sector for a supercomputer that will compete with large supercomputer centers such as the San Diego Supercomputer Center and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. (Larry was the founding director of NCSA prior to becoming the founding director of Calit2.) R Systems calls R Smarr "the most powerful supercomputer owned and operated by a private company in the U.S.", and it was ranked #44 on the latest TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers. News release.

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Several young faculty members affiliated with Calit2 on the UCSD campus are among the 20 recipients of the 2008 Hellman Faculty Fellows Awards, announced June 23. They include (pictured left to right): Morana Alac from Communication; Ricardo Dominguez (Visual Arts); and Curt Schurgers from Electrical and Computer Engineering. The 20 assistant professors will share in $360,000 in the 2008-'09 academic year. The awards are funded by Chris and Warren Hellman to "support the research and creative activities of promising assistant professors who show capacity for great distinction in their work" -- and to enhance their progress toward tenure.

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