Next week, CRCA and b.a.n.g. lab researchers Elle Mehrmand and Micha Cardenas are heading out to Durham, North Carolina to do a performance and artist talk at Duke University. They will also be meeting with the Experiencing Virtual Worlds interdisciplinary research group at Duke to discuss some of their recent writing.



technesexual
a mixed reality performance
1/25 @ 6pm, SoundSense Studio, CIEMAS

Erotic Mixed Reality Performance
an artist talk
1/27 @ 4pm, Nasher Museum Auditorium

Sponsored by:
The Experiencing Virtual Worlds Working Group
Information Science + Information Studies
Art, Art History and Visual Studies
Women's Studies

...

Continue Reading...

The Transborder Immigrant Tool was the subject of a whirlwind of media attention in the past week. The project has been developed by the Electronic Disturbance Theater, consisting of artists Ricardo Dominguez, Brett Stalbaum, Amy Sara Carroll and Micha Cardenas. The media coverage included television, radio and print stories including the Associated Press, BBC World, NBC, Fox, and the UCSD Guardian. While the actual stories are too many to list here, the following is a list of some of the major articles. Many media outlets improperly reported it as an Iphone app, others attempted to discredit the project saying it is illegal, and some interviewed Enrique Morones of the Border Angels, one of ...

Continue Reading...

As noted in a news release from Calit2 this morning, Calit2's Larry Smarr, Tom DeFanti and Jerry Sheehan (with CANARIE's Bill St. Arnaud) have co-authored the lead article in the November-December issue of EDUCAUSE Review. It's an overview of the challenge facing universities in the age of 'global climatic disruption,' and provides a roadmap for campuses to help pave the way for a greener future. The article is accompanied by a backgrounder that EDUCAUSE is offering as a Web Exclusive, focused on the scientific basis for concern about continued carbon emissions into the atmosphere -- and how carbon regulation will impact universities financially.

The article was published in time for the ...

Continue Reading...

Vice magazine wrote a long article this month about Calit2 PI Ricardo Dominguez and the b.a.n.g. lab. The article covers numerous Border Disturbance Art projects, including the Freephone, but focuses on the Transborder Immigrant Tool.

FOLLOW THE GPS, ESE:THE TRANSBORDER IMMIGRANT TOOL HELPS MEXICANS CROSS OVER SAFELY



Also, b.a.n.g. lab researcher Micha Cardenas/Azdel Slade published a new article on Realityshifting on Augmentology.com last week. It includes a short machinima she produced as well as other videos and links. Check it out and leave a comment with your thoughts!

Reality Shifting - Part 1: Rezzing...

Continue Reading...

Join the UCSD Sustainability Solutions Institute and the Campus Water Collaborative Wednesday, Nov. 18 for their second technical seminar, "Inexpensive Desalination: Harnessing Natural Forces."

The hour-long seminar begins at 4 p.m. in Atkinson Hall Room 4004 and features Michael Motherway, President of DXV Water Technologies. The agenda includes a 25-minute presentation, followed by an open discussion with question and answer opportunities. Refreshments will be served.

Seating is limited so please RSVP to msession@ucsd.edu.
 
SSI encourages faculty, researchers, ...

Continue Reading...

Calit2 artist/researchers working with the b.a.n.g. lab have had a number of reviews and articles published about their work this month. The new article Micha Cardenas co-authored with Felipe Zuniga entitled "IO NON HO NIENTE DA DIRE (I HAVE NOTHING TO SAY)" is in the current issue Digimag, an italian new media magazine. Since its only in Italian, you can find english text here. The article discusses the Emergency - Emergent Agency / Emergencia - Agencia Emergente project, which Ricardo Dominguez was also a part of, for the Dialogos y Interrogantes portion of the Proyecto Civico exhibition at CECUT in Tijuana.

Gabriel Menotti wrote a really interesting review of Artivistic TURN*ON for Furtherfield.org ...

Continue Reading...

UC San Diego political science Professor James Fowler, an affiliate of Calit2, will make an appearance at Warwick's Bookstore, 7812 Girard Avenue in La Jolla at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 8 to discuss and sign his new book, "Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives."

Fowler's research (conducted with colleague Nicholas Christakis of the Harvard School of Public Health) has repeatedly made front-page news nationwide. The authors' new book explains why emotions are contagious, how health behaviors spread, why the rich get richer and even how we find and choose our partners.

Read more about Fowler's research. 

Continue Reading...

b.a.n.g. lab researcher Micha Cardenas will be presenting at the Mobile HCI conference in Bonn, Germany tomorrow morning at the Community Practices and Locative Media Workshop. She will be presenting a paper on the Transborder Immigrant Tool. The pdf of that paper is here and it was co-written by Cardenas, Ricardo Dominguez, Amy Sara Carroll and Brett Stalbaum of the Electronic Disturbance Theater.

Here's the summary:

The Transborder Immigrant Tool: Violence, Solidarity and Hope in Post-NAFTA Circuits of Bodies Electr(on)/ic

Micha Cardenas, Amy Sara Carroll, Ricardo Dominguez, Brett Stalbaum
EDT, Calit2, B.A.N.G. Lab, UCSD/Michigan

This polyvocal, collectively authored paper describes ...

Continue Reading...

b.a.n.g. lab researchers at Calit2 have been very busy and have a handful of upcoming and recent exhibitions! Follow these links to find out more!

Transborder Immigrant Tool tool at ISEA 2009

The Transborder Immigrant Tool will be exhibited in 'Space is the Place' exhibition at the Gallery of the National College of Art & Design in Dublin, as part of the program of ISEA 2009 which takes place in Belfast and Dublin Ireland this year. The exhibition will run from the 27th August - 1st September 2009. The exhibition includes a number of video poems written by Amy Sara Carroll and designed by Calit2 researchers Ricardo Dominguez, Micha Cardenas, and CRCA researcher Elle Mehrmand. The voice ...

Continue Reading...

This week a new Assistant Project Scientist named Derek Lyons is joining our research group. Derek and I worked together at MIT in the summer of 2001 on the AlphaWolf project. Since then, Derek has been busy, finishing up an M.Sc. at Oxford as part of his Rhodes Scholarship, going back to MIT for an S.M. at the Media Lab, doing his dissertation at Yale in Cognitive Psychology, and spending a year at Reed College (his undergraduate alma mater) as a Visiting Assistant Professor. For the next two years, we'll be working on an NSF-funded project titled "Narrative-Centered Computing for Childhood Environmental Computing." It's great to have him in the group!...

Continue Reading...

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 ...

Continue Reading...

On Thursday, July 30 Calit2 and the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA) were part of the first super-high-bandwidth 4K feature film premiere streaming on three continents. The film by Brazilian director Beto Souza, "Enquanto a Noite nao Chega" (While the Night Doesn't Come), made its debut to a packed theater at the Electronic Language International Festival (FILE 10) world festival in Brazil. Simultaneously, the film (actually, 4K is a video format) was streamed in real time over high-speed optical networks to the Calit2 Auditorium in Atkinson Hall at UC San Diego, and to Keio University's Design Media lab in Yokohama, Japan.

With only ...

Continue Reading...

b.a.n.g. lab researcher Micha Cardenas will be presenting a workshop at this year's Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics (HEMI) Summer Encuentro in Bogota, Colombia. The title of her workshop is "New Hacktivism: From Electronic Civil Disobedience to Mixed Reality Performance". The outline for the workshop is below. The Encuentro's theme is "Staging Citizenship". From the description of the Encuentro: "Our 7th Encuentro invites interested participants to investigate "cultural rights" and their complex relationship to citizenship in both historical and contemporary contexts. We understand cultural rights as a juridical figure, a technology of power and an articulation that brings ...

Continue Reading...

Those lucky enough to be in Geyserville, Calif., this weekend will have the unique opportunity to hear "Tower Sounds: Ancient Voices and Electronics," the work of Calit2-affiliated composer and UCSD Assistant Theatre Professor Shahrokh Yadegari. The composition will be performed in Ann Hamilton's Tower, a one-of-a-kind venue (complete with double helix staircase) that is rarely open to the public.

Yadegari's ground-breaking multi-channel sound piece and composition begins at 1 p.m. Saturday, July 11 and will feature performances by:

• Siamak Shajarian, vocals
• Kate St-Pierre, vocals
• Keyavash Nourai, violin
• Dmitri Mahlis, oud
• Satnam Ramgotra, tabla and percussion

Continue Reading...

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 ...

Continue Reading...

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 ...

Continue Reading...

A group of multi-disciplinary researchers affiliated with the UC San Diego division of Calit2 convened in Atkinson Hall yesterday for the launch of GRAIN, the Global Responsibility and Innovation Network.

The founders of GRAIN seek to connect academic institutions, non-governmental agencies and industry to generate projects and products that "are successful and sustainable -- culturally, economically and environmentally -- from idea to implementation."

"Were talking about the most multidisciplinary effort you could ever think of," said co-founder Garrett Smith, a bioengineering Ph.D. candidate. "We want to facilitate a way for the UCSD community to engage with industry and NGOs to design technologies ...

Continue Reading...

Come out to the auditorium at Calit2 tomorrow for this important symposium, including Calit2 researcher Micha Cardenas, UCSD Faculty Brian Goldfarb and numerous other UC faculty. The symposium is being held in conjunction with Carlos Trilnick's artwork on anti-personell mines in the gallery@calit2.





Violence, Technology and Public Intervention: Two UCDARnet Panels

http://ucdarnet.org/

April 24, 2009
From Noon to 5pm

Sponsored by UCDARnet and gallery@calit2
CALIT2/Atkinson Hall Black Box Theater
Free and Open to the Public
A Reception after the panels
For Directions and information: http://gallery.calit2.net

Noon -Introduction - Brian Goldfarb

12:10 - Carlos Trilnick - Keynote

12:30 - Panel ...

Continue Reading...

Calit2's chief scientist Ron Graham will take part in a bit of history-making next week. That's because on April 8, Graham will give one of five plenary lectures at the 61st annual British Mathematical Colloquium. The history? It's the first time that the Colloquium has been held outside the United Kingdom. This year, the British are teaming with the Irish Mathematical Society to hold a joint meeting at the National University of Ireland's Galway campus.

As for Graham's talk, it's on "the combinatorics of solving linear equations." A major branch of modern combinatorics, usually called Ramsey theory, studies properties of structures which are preserved under partitions. Its guiding philosophy ...

Continue Reading...

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 ...

Continue Reading...

Calit2 aritist and Assistant Professor of Visual Arts Ricardo Dominguez has a busy month ahead of him, with appearances at two events in Los Angeles and Victoria, B.C.

• As a contributor to the Sound + Science Symposium, Dominguez (pictured) will present "Sounding out the Matter Market" from noon to 1 p.m. Thursday, March 5 in the California NanoSystems Institute Auditorium at UC Los Angeles. The event is free and open to the public (parking at UCLA is $9 per day). The full symposium takes place from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., March 5-6.
  
• Dominguez will also be giving the keynote address at this years Cultural, Social, and Political Thought gathering from 9:20 to 10:50 a.m. March 7 at the University of ...

Continue Reading...

Lauren Lewis (UCI undergraduate and 2008 Calit2 SURF-IT fellow), Rebecca Black (UCI Education professor and Lauren's SURF-IT mentor), and I just finished editing the proofs for an article titled, "Let Everyone Play: an Educational Perspective on Why Fan Fiction Is, or Should Be, Legal." This article will be appearing in the inaugural edition of the International Journal of Learning and Media (IJLM), going to press in 2009. IJLM is published quarterly by The MIT Press, in partnership with the Monterey Institute for Technology in Education, and with support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Continue Reading...

Sheldon Brown, Calit2's Artist in Residence and the director of UCSD's Center for Research and Computing in the Arts, will be featured on KPBS' "These Days" morning program at 9:40 a.m. Tuesday, Dec. 2. Brown will be speaking about his "Scalable City" project, an interactive, mixed-media installation that encourages viewers to steer through a replicating urban environment. The installation runs through Dec. 15 in UCSD's gallery@calit2.

Brown's "These Days" segment will be streaming live the day of the broadcast, and will be available for download following the show.

Also on Dec. 2, the gallery@calit2 will host a talk by the artist and readings by Geoff Ryman and Kim Stanley Robinson, two well-known ...

Continue Reading...

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 ...

Continue Reading...

N Art Magazine, a new program on ABC in San Diego that documents the local arts scene, visited CALIT2 and the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts recently. For a program that is mostly familiar with traditional art forms, touring the digital art laboratories at CALIT2 and CRCA proved to be quite an experience for N Art Magazine. The final video (seen below) aired on Sunday, October 26th.



The video features Beatbox360, a 4K video art piece created by myself, Mike Toillion; Sanctuary, a percussion composition by Pulitzer prize-winning composer Roger Reynolds; and Scalable City, a 3D multimedia video game, to name just a few.
...

Continue Reading...

Computer Science and Engineering undergraduates from professor Gary Cottrell's cognitive modeling courseMachine Perception Lab at Calit2 Tuesday to get a hands-onCottrell, who is the director of UCSD's Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center, has focused his research on building working models of cognitive processes and using them to explain psychological or neurological processes.His research has focused upon face processing, including face recognition, face identification,and facial expression recognition -- something the MP lab also specializes in.

Continue Reading...

I had the honor of attending the Canada-California Strategic Innovation Partnership (CCSIP) in Montreal, Canada as a representative for Calit2. Other Calit2 representatives at the event included Sheldon Brown and Petter Otto.

My participation was as a Co-Chair with Bill St Arnaud of CANARIE of a working group examining how information communication technology (ICT) can be used to address issues of global change. Our panel was highly attended with about 45 individuals in attendance. At the end of the Summitt, UC Vice President for Research Steve Beckwith announced that the UC and Canada would be releasing a new request for proposals to continue the CCSIP work worth approximately ...

Continue Reading...

Last week my students and I had a journal article accepted to the MIT Press journal "PRESENCE: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments." The article is titled "Richly Connected Systems and Multi-Device Worlds," and will come out early next year sometime. The paper describes a conceptual framework for building multi-device systems, and uses my group's EcoRaft project (which was made possible by a grant from Calit2) as a primary example. The framework is based on the creation of multiple channels of real and apparent connectivity among devices: for example, multiple kinds of data networking, cross-device graphics and sound, and embodied mobile agents that inhabit the multi-device ...

Continue Reading...

Nathaniel Kahn, director of the film "My Architect," paid a visit to Calit2's Atkinson Hall last week for an "Architecture+Cinema" event sponsored by Artpower! at UC San Diego. Following a screening of Kahn's elegiac documentary, Kahn discussed his creative approach and his somewhat strained relationship with his father, the famed architect Louis Kahn (pictured here with Nathaniel as a young boy). The elder Kahn is the subject of his son's feature-length documentary and served as both Nathaniel's muse and the source of a mystery the director has yet to solve.

Joining Kahn for the discussion were Kyong Park, associate professor of Visual Arts at UCSD, as well as architectural engineer Victor ...

Continue Reading...

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 ...

Continue Reading...

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 ...

Continue Reading...

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 ...

Continue Reading...

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 ...

Continue Reading...

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 ...

Continue Reading...

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 ...

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

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 ...

Continue Reading...

"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 ...

Continue Reading...

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 ...

Continue Reading...

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 ...

Continue Reading...

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! ...

Continue Reading...

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 ...

Continue Reading...

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:

------------------------
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 ...

Continue Reading...

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), ...

Continue Reading...

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 ...

Continue Reading...

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 ...

Continue Reading...

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 ...

Continue Reading...

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 ...

Continue Reading...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Not long ago Larry Smarr was interviewed on one of the popular podcast programs of This Week in Tech (with the rather unfortunately named acronym, TWiT.TV). Now, one of the shows hosted by Leo Laporte and Randal Schwartz, FLOSS Weekly, is featuring two of the brains behind the Rocks cluster middleware. OptIPuter co-PI Philip Papadopoulos and colleague Greg Bruno, developers of Rocks, are interviewed on the show about Rocks, clusters and the Ada language. Click here to download an .mp3 file of the hour-long show. Length: 1:00:44

Continue Reading...

This week NASA unveiled its second-generation "hyperwall-2", claiming that it's "the world's highest resolution scientific visualization and data exploration environment." Well sorry, that honor goes to the upgraded HIPerSpace wall built at Calit2 on the UCSD campus by prof. Falko Kuester and his team. NASA arrived at its claim because its Hyperwall is bigger than the earlier version of HIPerSpace (220 million pixels of screen resolution). NASA's 128-screen tiled display boasts 250 million pixels. But the new HIPerSpace wall -- which is already operating but won't be formally announced until next week -- can display just over 290 million pixel graphics. The Calit2 system uses fewer ...

Continue Reading...

Archaeologist and UCSD lecturer Adolpho Muniz -- an affiliate of CISA3 at Calit2 -- is headed off to Tamil Nadu, India, this Sunday to complete ethnographic research for CISA3. The center is spearheading an effort to document and study the "lost wax" bronze-casting technique used among artisans in the village of Swamimalai.

Muniz's research is part of the Traditional Indian Technologies Project led by CISA Associate Director Tom Levy. The project is aimed at using digital technologies to create a new way of researching, recording, analyzing and partnering with traditional craftspeople in India to conserve their traditions and help artisans market their works.

Read the full article about Muniz's ...

Continue Reading...

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.

Continue Reading...

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.

Continue Reading...

UCSD's Biomedical Library hosted a free "Extreme Googling" workshop today that featured some Google Scholar tips Calit2 researchers should find especially helpful:

Continue Reading...

They might not have come away with the prize for best project at the ECE 191 final presentations Friday, but UC San Diego students Alvin Shieh and Bunreth Nhong -- two members of a Calit2-sponsored research group - said they feel honored just to have worked with their mentor, Nandan Das.

Das (pictured above, center) is a Calit2-affiliated researcher who coached a total of seven students during the 10-week Engineering Group Design Project course. Das took time out of his busy schedule as a system engineer at ViaSat to work with two teams of students on projects to implement Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) for digital communication systems. Shieh and Nhong, along with fellow student Chang ...

Continue Reading...