Please join us as two dozen UCSD undergraduates showcase their summer research findings at a poster session and reception on Wednesday, September 21, 2011, 3-5 p.m., in the Calit2 Lobby, Atkinson Hall. This year's Calit2 Summer Scholars are from 16 different majors, working with faculty advisors across the campus.

We hope to see you there! Please pass this invitation on to interested colleagues and/or post invitation your group.

For more information on this year's scholars and projects, go to: http://ucsdstudents.calit2.net/studentlist.php

Please address questions and RSVP to Amy Nguyen, a1nguyen@ucsd.edu.

Stories on this year's scholars:
Undergrads Spending the Summer as Full-time Researchers

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The party is in your hands (or rather, at your feet) with Calit2 Media Specialist Mike Toillion's "[Crowd] Control," an immersive, interactive audio/visual installation that will take over the UCSD Visual Arts Facility Performance Space from noon to 7 p.m. tomorrow, March 11. 

Toillion, who is also a graduate student in UCSD's Visual Arts program, describes "[Crowd] Control" as "turning an electronic music party inside-out."

"There is no DJ providing sound, no VJ providing visuals," he adds. "The audience is responsible for their experience."

 

The installation features a dance floor equipped with six force-sensitive pressure pads. Each pad acts as a toggle to switch for one instrument ...

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The twenty-five UCSD undergraduates who participated in the 2010 Calit2 Summer Undergraduate Research Scholars program are ready to showcase the results of their work -- everyone is invited! 

Wednesday, September 22
2-3 p.m. Short Presentations by five Summer Scholars during the Calit2 General Staff Meeting
3-5 p.m. Poster Session
Location: Calit2 Auditorium and First Floor Lobby, Atkinson Hall, UC San Diego

Five of the Calit2 Scholars will make short presentations during the next Calit2 General Staff Meeting on September 22 at 2pm, followed by a Poster Session at which all of the summer scholars will talk about and show their work. In addition, the poster ...

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In a recent article for San Diego CityBeat, film reviewer Anders Wright praises Calit2's 4K theater in UCSD's Atkinson Hall, calling it 'gorgeous.' He also plugs the upcoming screening of "Old Money" by local filmmaker Jay Drose, which takes place in the Calit2 theater at 8 p.m. Friday, June 18.

We have one correction to the story, though: The 4K Theater is not the new kid on the cinematic block -- the theater will be five years old in October.


...

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If you're a UCSD undergrad (or know one) who is interested in working as a researcher in a laboratory at one of 13 host institutions across the Pacific Rim and India this summer, read on. The Pacific Rim Undergraduate Experiences (PRIME) program is holding an information session tomorrow.

PRIME is a unique program which provides undergraduates with hands-on, full-time research experiences lasting nine weeks in internationally collaborative settings. Against the backdrop of living abroad in another culture, the ...

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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 ...

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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, ...

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When Facebook's VP of Technology, Jeff Rothschild, delivered a lecture at Calit2 Oct. 8 at the invitation of the Center for Networked Systems (CNS), he divulged some key statistics that made news in high-tech publications that follow the data center industry. Rothschild's talk was webcast live by Calit2 and the archived version of "High Performance at Massive Scale" is now available for on-demand viewing [Windows Media player and broadband connection required]. As the blog High Scalability reports, Rothschild divulged that "Facebook handles 30K+ machines, 300 million active users, 20 billion photos, and 25TB per day of logging data."

Then in the Oct. 13 issue of Data Center Knowledge, Rich ...

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CRCA researchers Micha Cardenas and Elle Mehrmand will be doing a performance entitled Technesexual that uses DIY biometric sensors that were made by hand to create live audio which will be heard in real space and virtual space at the same time. It is a Mixed Reality performance exploring relationality between people and between people and technology.

Cardenas and Mehrmand will be performing Technesexual in Tijuana at Entijuanarte on Oct 4th, in San Francisco at Arse Elektronika on Oct 2nd and in Montreal at Artivistic. They will also be doing a 3 day workshop in Montreal from Oct 15-17th, sharing the technology used for the performance with workshop participants including DIY electronics, ...

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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 ...

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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

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Fact: For every five hours of cable news, less than a minute is devoted to science.

Fact: 46 percent of Americans believe that God, not evolution, created life on earth.

Fact: The number of newspapers with science sections has shrunk from 95 to 33 since 1989.

If you're noticing a trend here, you wouldn't be the first. In their new book, "Unscientific America," journalist and best-selling author Chris Mooney, along with scientist Sheril Kirshenbaum, explain how corporate interests, a weak education system, science-phobic politicians, and hyperspecialized scientists have created a huge disconnect between the scientific community and American culture.

But it's not all doom and gloom: The authors ...

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Next week is finals for the students, which means that it's time again for the Final Presentations of the the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department's Engineering Group Design Projects course (ECE 191). There are six projects this quarter, half are sponsored by Calit2 UCSD. 

All are welcome to come to this interesting event.

ECE 191, Engineering Group Design Project, is an upper-division course that provides undergraduate students with hands-on experience ...

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If driving a car required a theoretical understanding of thermodynamics, "very few of us would be automobile drivers," says Professor C. Richard Johnson, Jr. of Cornell University.

Likewise, if analyzing a painting required an art historian to have an advanced education in math and engineering, very few paintings would ever be analyzed. But that's the rub: High-tech analysis of these paintings does require math- and engineering-based solutions, and that's where most art historians (educated predominantly in the humanities) are at a loss.

But their loss is Johnson's gain. Johnson, a Stanford alumnus who received a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and a Ph.D. minor in art history, served as a "translator" ...

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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 ...

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The first full week of May will be particularly busy, with a wide variety of seminars and conferences for Calit2 participants, and the rest of May looks equally busy. Note that this week the public will get an opportunity to sit in on the final forum and conference declaration, at the end of an invitation-only conference on water issues and climate change facing California and the Himalayas. It's organized by UC San Diego and the University of Cambridge. Trinity College Cambridge Fellow, Lord Julian Hunt (pictured) and Calit2 Director Larry Smarr will be on the closing panel discussion on Wednesday, and Calit2 will be videotaping the two-hour session for later ...

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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 ...

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A capacity crowd of more than 50,000 people flocked to Balboa Park on Saturday, April 4 for Expo Day, the grand finale of the month-long San Diego Science Festival. Festival organizers are calling the event "the largest one-day science gathering ever in the United States." There were 200+ exhibition booths sponsored by science and educational organizations, institutions and companies.

The Calit2 booth had demos of various visualization technologies, including the mobile touchscreen kiosk based on Calit2's Gizmo technology and the new California Traffic Report app for the iPhone, as well as other devices, software and systems developed at Calit2.

Calit2's presence in Balboa Park stretched well ...

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More than three dozen Calit2 researchers (PIs, faculty, staff, post-docs, graduate and undergraduate students) will be on-hand as the month-long San Diego Science Festival ends with a grand finale, Expo Day, tomorrow, Saturday, April, 4, 2009 at Balboa Park.

The Calit2 tent will provide demos of various visualization technologies, including a mobile touchscreen kiosk based on Calit2's Gizmo technology, the new California Traffic Report app for the iPhone, as well as other devices, software and systems developed at Calit2.

In addition to the Calit2 booth (which will be up near the fountain and the Reuben H. Fleet Museum), showcasing many of our developing technologies, researchers from Calit2's ...

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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 ...

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The quarter is just about over and the 19 students involved in six different group design projects at Calit2 are busy putting the finishing touches on their ECE 191 projects and preparing to make their final presentations next week, along with the rest of their class. All are welcome to come to the final presentations:

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UC San Diego graduate student Micha Cardenas, creator of the "Becoming Dragon" virtual reality performance in Second Life, will be presenting documentation of the project at 9:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 26. as part of the College Art Association's 97th annual conference at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

For the show -- titled "@" -- Cardenas created in Second Life an installation of objects that people had given her during her immersive performance. When users approach one of the objects, they replay conversations she had through text chat, making them appear as if they are recurring in the exhibition space in Second Life.

A reception will follow the event at 9:30 p.m., at SCI-Arc, 960 East Third ...

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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 ...

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Micha Cardenas, creator of the durational, immersive Second Life project known as "Becoming Dragon," will present her research findings at the SPIE Photonics West Conference in San Jose, Calif., Dec. 22.

Cardenas, a Calit2-affiliated graduate student with the Department of Visual Arts at UCSD, will present a lecture as part of a session titled "Evoking Environments through Artful Distinctiveness." The presentation is scheduled to begin at 11:10 a.m. in the San Jose Convention Center, and is one of about 20 conference lectures sponsored by SPIE, an international society advancing light-based research (SPIE was founded as the Society of Photographic Instrumentation Engineers).

Read more about ...

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Nearly 100 Calit2 employees at UCSD turned out for the institute's holiday shindig last night. The catered event featured a White Elephant Gift Exchange, a raffle with valuable prizes from around the world and the epic main event: Guitar Hero World Tour Battle of the Bands. Miss it? You missed out, but be sure to check out the party pics (including some from the December birthday event/Guitar Hero Encore today).

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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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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 ...

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The San Diego Chapter of The IndUS Entrepreneurs (TiE) held its monthly dinner meeting at Atkinson Hall last Wednesday, November 12. About 50 corporate executives, entrepreneurs, service providers and academic researchers attended. They were treated to a tour of Atkinson Hall and the facilities of Calit2 UC San Diego, in particular, they enjoyed viewing presentations of the many innovative projects in state-of-the-art visualization. These included viewing 4K video clips shown in the auditorium and 3-D images in the StarCAVE, a unique multi-user virtual-reality immersive environment.

Anil Kripalani, the president of the TiE San Diego chapter, opened the meeting, introducing Ramesh Rao, director ...

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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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The Month Ahead: What's Happening at Calit2... in San Diego and Irvine

Technology and the arts are the focus of two major events this week at Calit2. A new exhibit opens in the gallery@calit2 at UC San Diego... and performers in the Calit2 Building at UC Irvine will participate in a networked performance with an artist and a musician at UC San Diego, in what they're calling an "inter-arts telematics performance". Here's what's coming up at Calit2 on the two campuses...

Monday-Tuesday, October 20-21 UCSD
Biomedical Informatics Research Network All-Hands Meeting
Speaker: Mark Ellisman, UC San Diego and Director, BIRN-CC et. al.
The all-hands meeting is open ...

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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 ...

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Here are some of the events on the calendar at Calit2, or co-sponsored by Calit2, on the two campuses:

The Month Ahead: What's Happening at Calit2... in San Diego and Irvine

With summer over and students back on campus, we resume our weekly digest of what's coming up in the UC Irvine and UC San Diego divisions of Calit2. These are events taking place in our buildings on the two campuses, or activities co-sponsored or organized by Calit2 entities. This week at UCSD, we kick off the second year of Calit2's well-attended, interdisciplinary Behavioral, Social and Computer Sciences Seminar Series, and the UCSD division will co-present the West Coast premiere of "Sanctuary" ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

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The kites were flying high, the burgers and dogs were sizzling and the sunshine seemed special-ordered at the Calit2-UCSD Staff Picnic, held yesterday afternoon at Mission Bay's De Anza Cove. More than 75 staff members turned out for the barbecue cook-out (provided by the Grove Cafe), which was followed by a hugely popular kite-flying contest, a prize raffle and pick-up games of volleyball and soccer.

"AV = Awesome!" took first place in the kite-flying contest, and winners Alex Matthews, Mike Toillion, Hector Bracho (pictured, with the winning entry), Adam Burruss and Emily Jankowski will celebrate their success with a pizza party sponsored by Calit2. Nano3 engineer Ryan Anderson won the grand ...

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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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On Tuesday August 12th, a group of Calit2 staff and researchers took a day long trip to LA to attend this year's SIGGRAPH, the International Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques. Last year Calit2 was lucky enough to host several SIGGRAPH activities and exhibits while the conference was being held in San Diego. Everyone in attendance at this year's show was impressed with the offerings in new media art exhibits, large commercial demos and displays, and of course the all important swag giveaways.

Several ...

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The autonomous underwater vehicle known as the "Stingray" recently participated in this year's Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International competition and held up pretty well against its rivals. Building it, however, required a little bit of high-tech, a little bit of a low-tech and a whole lot of "black magic," says Gideon Prior, president of the UCSD-based iBotics engineering group that created the craft.

At one end of the spectrum are the Stingray's high-tech "guts." It's equipped with Voith-Schneider propellers, forward- and down-looking cameras, a high-intensity lighting apparatus, a piezoelectric film-based sonar system, inertial navigational sensors and custom-designed software. ...

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All this week geoscientists are gathering in the SDSC/Calit2 Synthesis Center for a crash course in how to use IT and other cyber tools. Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and organized by the NSF-funded Geosciences Network (GEON), the Cyberinfrastructure Summer Institute for Geoscientists (CSIG) kicked off on Monday with an introduction by SDSC's Chaitan Baru, GEON principal investigator and frequent Calit2 collaborator. Click here to download his talk on "Enabling Discoveries in the Earth Sciences Through the Geosciences Network".

Another Calit2 participant, Deborah Kilb from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, focused on "Earthquake Data: Manipulation & ...

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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! ...

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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 ...

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The National Biomedical Computation Resource's third annual Summer Institute continues Monday morning, August 11, with part two of the mini-symposium "Cyberinfrastructure for Biomedicine." It is open to UCSD researchers even if they are not enrolled in Summer Institute 2008. Registration is appreciated, but not required.

Monday, August 11, 2008
8:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.  -- open for check-in at 8 a.m.
Fung Auditorium, Powell-Focht Bioengineering Hall building

Five distinguished speakers will present on the state-of-the-art in computational modeling of heart diseases. The talks will be followed by a poster session from 12:30 p.m. to 2 p.m., presented by the graduate-student attendees of ...

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Ola! I am reporting live from the Electronic Language International Festival (FILE 2008) in Sao Paulo, Brazil. On the 4th of August, Calit2 and the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA) made history by hosting the first official 4K Digital Cinema presentation in all of South America.

The show, entitled "Two Thousand and Eight Million Pixels," was attended by the Brazilian Secretary of New Media, artists, academics, and videophiles from all over the world. Journalists were in high concentration as well, and included television networks such as Globo, TeleCultura and Oy.

The show featured such works as Scalable City by CRCA Director and UCSD professor Sheldon Brown; Era ...

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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 ...

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Groups B and C of the Calit2 UCSD Undergraduate Summer Scholars Program are due up this week for their second round of presentations. The first presentations took place early in the summer and each was quite brief (two to three minutes). In this go-round, the presentation time is extended to approximately seven minutes per student because they have more to report, now that they are about half way through their hands-on research project.

You are all invited to come and hear about several of the interesting multidisciplinary projects these talented undergraduates are working on (Each session will have seven to eight students who will present on their individual projects.)

Group B Presentations:   ...

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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 ...

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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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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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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), ...

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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, ...

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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 ...

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Prime Minister Singh's remarks after securing the necessary votes on the "Vote of Confidence."

http://www.hindu.com/nic/pmspeech-confidencevote.pdf

Perhaps my most memorable celebrity moment was an opportunity to exchange a few pleasantries with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at a reception in Blair House. This was about two years ago when he was in DC to secure the US-India Nuclear agreement. Today his government proved it had the votes to ensure passage of the agreement in the Indian Parliament. It was a cliff hanger and the PM's comments are worth reading....

Lapsing back into my own reverie, we in Calit2 have been looking for ways to help pave the way for a high level engagement ...

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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 ...

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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.

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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.
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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 ...

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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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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 ...

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Frank Stietz, head of corporate research and technology at Carl Zeiss AG, toured Calit2's Atkinson Hall today as part of a one-day visit to UC San Diego (see a webcast of Stietz's presentation about Carl Zeiss).
Carl Zeiss, a German high-tech company best known for its optics, microscopes, and semiconductor equipment, collaborated with Calit2 at UC Irvine three years ago to create the ZEISS Center of Excellence for nanotechnology and biotechnology research and advanced materials development and innovation. Now Zeiss is looking into potential collaborations with the institute's UCSD division, possibly in the areas of 3-D data visualization and molecular imaging.

Stietz's UCSD tour included a stop ...

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Calit2's Maurizio Seracini, director of the Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology (CISA3), was invited to give a lecture earlier this summer to participants in the UCSD Osher Lifelong Learning Institute program. Calit2 hosted the meeting, and UCSD-TV filmed the event, which is now airing at various times on the broadcast network (it premiered on June 16). The talk, "Rediscovering Leonardo", is also available on UC-TV's YouTube channel. Osher is part of UCSD Extension, and provides a wealth of opportunities for retirees and others age 50 or older. In his talk, Seracini noted the important role that donors are playing through "Friends of ...

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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 ...

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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 ...

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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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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 ...

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A group of California architects and UCSD scientists from various departments met at Calit2 on Monday, July 7, to hear a presentation and see a demonstration of the Calit2-sponsored Navigation/Way-Finding Project, a multidisciplinary effort that studies human neurological responses to built environments as a means for obtaining evidence that will improve architectural design.

In attendance were renowned architects from the San Diego, LA and Bay areas, as well as a representative from the SD City Planners Office and a design consultant. They experienced how monitoring brain activity informs architects and planners on the qualities of the best designs for optimal Way-Finding, to help people trying ...

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Talk about getting students actively involved in what could otherwise be a dry academic lecture: At one point there were nearly 30 students on the Calit2 auditorium stage at UCSD this morning, as Jeanne Ferrante had them scrambling to categorize themselves on some basic principles used in parallel computing. The associate dean of the Jacobs School of Engineering was speaking to 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.
Helping as master of ceremonies was Ferrante's husband and CSE emeritus professor Larry Carter (pictured with Ferrante ...

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Architecture, music and technology will join forces in October with a film screening and music performance sponsored by the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences, Artpower! and Calit2.

As part of its "Architecture and Cinema" series, Artpower! will screen "My Architect," an Academy-Award nominated documentary about Salk Institute architect Louis Khan, Oct. 2 in the Calit2 auditorium

The screening comes in conjunction with a performance Oct. 11 of "Sanctuary," an experimental percussion-based work composed by Calit2 artist-in-residence Roger Reynolds. That performance -- held at the Salk Institute -- will mark the second time Reynold's composition will be performed (its debut was held last year ...

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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, ...

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Most conferences at Calit2 tend to draw speakers primarily from the academic community at UC San Diego and beyond. But Calit2's Center for Algorithmic and Systems Biology (CASB) at UCSD is trying to reach out to the growing number of private companies that see the long-term potential in bioinformatics, systems biology and proteomics. Hence today's La Jolla Proteomics Conference, which drew a cross-section of industry participants and speakers. They focused on developments in mass spectrometry from the biological side as well as from the computational side, notably covering current techniques and open problems in proteomics.. The organizing committee included ...

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 building groundbreaking on May 31, 2002. Note the then Chancellor's Dynes (UCSD) and Cicerone (UCI), along with long time private sector supporter Marco Thompson, standing behind us...

The directors of the four Gray Davis Institutes for Science and Innovation got an opportunity to have a conference call this morning with former Governor Davis. He has been interested in how research in the Cal-ISIs into Green Technologies can be harnessed for helping California transform its economy and lower its energy intensity and carbon footprint. The directors of the Institutes have been pulling together one-pagers on key projects which we hope will bring more attention to the innovations our faculty and campuses are pursuing in these critical areas. Quite an exciting phone call!

Below is a picture of Governor Davis and me at the Calit2@UCSD

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If you missed the "Softwhere 2008" Software Studies workshop held at Calit2 last month, here's your chance to catch up on the public pecha kucha sessions. Videos of the six-minute presentations -- which addressed everything from cultural analytics to interface design -- are available for download on the Software Studies Initiative site in both Quicktime and on YouTube.

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The CAMERA project is hosting a two-day meeting where scientists are talking about how to communicate biology and other disciplines in a world of open source, YouTube, wikis and such. Today's topics: scientific discovery and dissemination; data sharing and re-use; the impact of Web 2.0 tools on biology; and "the future of science", the keynote this evening by Canada's Michael Nielsen. Attendees gathered around the "Bear" sculpture in front of Atkinson Hall for a 'class photo'. [Click on image to download high-res version.] The workshop continues on Friday, with talks by CAMERA executive director Paul Gilna, SciVee creator and UCSD professor Phil Bourne; and more.

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Here are four good reasons to think about investing in a hands-free mobile device:

1. You have to. As of July 1, all California drivers are required to use a hands-free mobile device while at the wheel.

2. You can participate in a mobile malware study being conducted by Calit2 researchers at UCSD.

3. You can try before you buy. The UCSD Bookstore Computer Center will host Plantronics, makers of Bluetooth, this Thursday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. The company will be on hand to display and demo the devices.

4. Consider the alternative (pictured).

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I am off to attend the three day Australian-American Leadership Dialogue (AALD) annual meeting in Washington DC. The first day of the meeting is devoted to the Young Leadership Dialogue [YLD]. The photo above is of me with Amanda Johnson, Co-Chair of the YLD, and Phil Scanlan, founder of the AALD. Calit2ers will recognize both as virtually appearing the UCSD auditorium as participants in our AALD-driven telepresence sessions, critical first steps in creating our persistent global OptiPlanet Collaboratory.

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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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Jeff's the VP of Marketing and Business Development at the Canadian company Mechdyne. Fun fact: Mechdyne has a motto printed on its business cards that could work just as well for Calit2: "Enabling Discovery". Pictured: Jeff (far right) with colleagues in the Calit2 Auditorium, watching an interactive demo by Maurizio Seracini (far left) on the 4K display.

One of the newest members of the Calit2-incubated CineGrid digital cinema consortium, Jeff Brum, took a tour of the institute's cool virtual-reality facilities at UCSD today.

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National Geographic Society, with its magazine and TV network, are partnering with Calit2's CISA3 project in Florence to find the long-lost "Battle of Anghiari" mural by Leonardo da Vinci. Leading that project: Maurizio Seracini, recently named a National Geographic Fellow. And this June 16-18, a delegation from the Society led by Mission Programs EVP Terry Garcia (pictured) are in San Diego to explore other potential collaboration with Calit2 researchers. On Tuesday, June 17 at 2:30pm, the UCSD community is invited to attend a lecture by Garcia and participate in a discussion afterwards about the use of cutting-edge technology in modern exploration. [Photo by Omar Mohsen, Business Today - Egypt] ...

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Larry Smarr keynoted at TeraGrid '08 this week in Las Vegas, urging scientists to deploy OptIPortal systems in their labs to visualize in real time as their data are run through remote supercomputers connected via the TeraGrid. Lots of excitement... read the news release... or download Larry's presentation.

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