"The International Journal of Vehicle Information and Communication systems recently published the research of four UC Irvine graduate students concerning a project capable of clearing Los Angeles Traffic. Tentatively dubbed "Autonet," a portmanteau of "automatic/automobile" and "Internet," the program is the brainchild of Trevor Harmon, James Marca, Pete Martini and Raymond Klefstad."

For more information see the full article in New University

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The American Association for the Advancement of Science has released their first analysis of the proposed House Stimulus package. They write "The draft stimulus appropriations bill contains $13.3 billion in R&D funding, $9.9 billion for the conduct of research and development and $3.4 billion for R&D facilities and large research equipment, mostly extramural. Adding in another $2.5 billion in non-R&D but science and technology-related funding brings total science and technology-related funding in the stimulus to nearly $16 billion. There is also additional money for higher education construction and other education spending of interest to academia"

More details can be found ...

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Great story today on MSNBC about the use of Calit2's StarCAVE and the emerging field of neuroarchitecture being built by Calit2 and the Swartz Center for Computational NeuroScience. 

From the story,
"Although the team is still analyzing the results, Edelstein said the experiment supported the concept that scientists could synchronously record the brainwaves of individuals moving within a real-time virtual reality environment and correlate their brain activity and travel patterns in that virtual world. A larger-scale study, she hopes, will expand on results and delve into the behavior of navigating people."
...

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The BBC News recently covered the research done by Stefan Savage on Spammers conducted in 2008. Interestingly, Savage's findings indicate that spammers may be more responsive to economic impacts then previously thought.

As Savage notes, "The profit margin for spam may be meager enough that spammers must be sensitive to the details of how their campaigns are run and are economically susceptible to new defenses."

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The Chronicle of Higher Education has a summary article on the recent Educause conference that features a section on the use of scaled display walls for research and the recent talk given at the conference by Calit2 Director Larry Smarr.

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Research conducted by Neal Driscoll of Scripps and Michael Olsen of Calit2 was discussed this Saturday in the Imperial Valley News. The goal of the research is to use leading edge information communication technology to measure and help understand the processes that cause cliff erosion. See Coastal Bluff Study Seeks to Understand Processes That Cause Cliff Failures

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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 ...

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Calit2's StarCave is mentioned at about the 2 minute mark in this clip from G4Tv. http://www.g4tv.com/sv3/29322

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From PhysOrg.Com

Taking advantage of the statewide, fiber-based California Research & Education Network (CalREN) and campus fiber-optic connections in and out of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) building on the UC San Diego campus, the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) held a two-day workshop showcasing end-to-end advanced scientific applications enabled by CalREN's high-performance "experimental-developmental" (CalREN-XD) and "high performance & research" (CalREN-HPR) infrastructure.

"We brought together the community in order to educate researchers in a variety of disciplines about new cyberinfrastructure ...

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The elections are less then one month away but it still isn't too late to register to vote in California. Californians can register to vote up until October 20th.

If your a new voter and haven't yet registered I suggest that you pop online and head over to Rock the Vote. The Rock the Vote On-Line Registration Form is an editable form that you fill out, print, and send in to California's Secretary of the State. Remember, this MUST BE POSTMARKED BY OCTOBER 20th for you to vote in the upcoming Presidential election.

If you are a UCSD student you may also be interested in the Ultimate College Bowl. This site, sponsored by a variety of organizations, is running a competition ...

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

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

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

Did you know: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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Please be advised that a rather large snake has been seen slithering around the dirt berm area of parking lot 502 near where occupants cross Voight Drive to access this parking lot from Atkinson Hall. 

It appears from the description given from eye witnesses that the markings on the snake seems fit the description given for a California King.

But, until EH&S confirms the snakes species please be watchful while walking in this area. EH&S Pest Control Department has been contacted to hopefully re-home this guy to another location.

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Calit2 was visited on Monday by an Australian delegation including the Honorable Stephen Conroy Minister for Broadband, Communications, and the Digital Economy and Deputy Leader of the Australian Government in the Senate, Assistant Secretary Brenton Thomas from the Department of Broadband, Communications, and the Digital Economy , and Mr. Innes Willox Consul General for Australia-Los Angeles. 

The delegation met with UCSD Vice Chancellor for Research Art Ellis, Dean Peter Cowhey, Dean Frieder Seible, Institute Director Larry Smarr, Senior Researcher Tom DeFanti, and Manager for Government Programs Jerry Sheehan.

The purpose of the visit was to continue dialog under the auspices of the Australian ...

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I walked by the CISA3 Archaeology office on the fifth floor of Calit2 today and my eye was caught by work of Tom Levy's research team. The team is trying to find a way to get an accurate 3-D scan of a variety of archeological artifacts including pottery and the more challenging representation of metal objects.

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Robert Lee Hotz, science columnist of the Wall Street Journal, published an article on July 11, 2008 entitled, "The Search for the Hidden da Vinci" which talks about some of the exciting work being done in CISA3.

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The Daily Texan ran a story on July 3 entitled "Scientists Developing Robotic Teaching Tools" on the work of the Machine Perception Lab at UCSD/Calit2.

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20 years ago yesterday NSF sent out the following words to users of NSFnet, "The NSFnet Backbone has reached a state where we would like to more officially let operational traffic on"

Full story on NSFnet and the modern Internet in NetworkWorld.

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A quick update to my earlier post regarding the FY08 supplemental.

The AAAS reports:

"On June 26, the Senate approved the final version of the 2008 supplemental appropriations bill, which President Bush signed on June 30. As outlined in an analysis of the 2008 supplemental, the bill adds billions of dollars in defense development for 2008. The bill also provides $338 million in 2008 domestic science funding ($150 million for NIH, $62.5 million each for NSF, DOE Science, and NASA)."

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It is always very interesting to see how much buzz Calit2 is creating in the social attention sphere. A very popular tool being used by microbloggers is called Twitter. Twitter allows users to post short posts (>145 characters) about what they are doing. 

Anyone can do a quick keyword search on individuals or keywords posted in Twitter using a service called Summize Importantly, you can also save your searches as a real simple syndication feed. This allows you to just subscribe to a search that will let you get a quick view of how you, or your organization, is being described. 

If you are an RSS user (Google Reader is a great web based RSS reader), here is the ...

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The slides from my presentation today at the New Communication Channels for Biology Workshop are up on Slideshare.

Please post any comments or reactions you have to them.

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The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) reports that this week the Senate is scheduled to debate and likely give final approval to a $187 billion FY08 and FY09 supplemental appropriations bill. The bill contains $2.4 billion in R&D funding for the Department of Defense and $338 million for domestic science programs (NIH, NSF, NASA, DOE as primary recipients). Detailed appropriations analysis from the AAAS.

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Coverage of Optiputer from TeraGrid '08 Conference

"OptIPortals allow end users to choose the right amount of local storage, compute, and graphics capacity needed for their application," says Smarr. "In addition, the tiled walls let users visually analyze the complexity of supercomputing runs." The highest-resolution display system in the world, located in the Calit2 building on the UCSD campus, provides a screen resolution of over 250 million pixels.

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Calit2 hosted a visit yesterday by the Toronto not-for-profit, MaRS .

MaRS is an innovation center connecting science, technology and social entrepreneurs with business skills, networks and capital to stimulate innovation and accelerate the creation and growth of successful Canadian enterprises.

The visitors, led by Ross Wallace, Director of Strategic Partnerships for MaRS, were interested in learning more about Calit2's community building efforts and showed potential interest in adopting the Optiportal to foster global scientific collaboration.

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