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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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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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!...

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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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The closest that artist Roger Ferragallo has come to displaying the full dimensions of his "Cosmic Tree of Life" digital painting was when he got the chance to display the latest version (2.0) of the art work on Calit2's HIPerSpace tiled display wall at UC San Diego recently. The digital painting measures 556 million pixels, and it was displayed on HIPerSpace's native 287 million pixelsl. If ever "Cosmic Tree of Life" is printed out in its current incarnation, the painting would measure 25 x 15 feet, so HIPerSpace permitted Ferragallo to see the full scope of his work on the tiled display system which measures 31.8 x 7.9 feet.

In a video posted on YouTube, Ferragallo talks about ...

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Einstein lives. Our story about the Machine Perception Lab's Einstein Robot, which was modeled after the theoretical physicist, is turning up all over the Web:

• 'Einstein Robot Feels For You," NBC New York
  
• 'UC San Diego Scientists Create 'Emotionally Intelligent' Einstein Robot, MSNBC
• 'Einstein Robot Smiles With You,' Sci Tech News
  
• 'It's All Relative: Einstein Robot Has Emotional Intelligence, Imperial Valley News
• 'Robots 'Emotions' Are Relative,' The La Jolla Light
• 'Researchers Develop Smirking, Speaking Einstein Robot,' UCSD Guardian
  

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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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The Digital Archaeological Atlas of the Holy Land (DAAHL), a project spearheaded by Calit2's Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology (CISA3), got top billing on Google's Student Blog when it was featured as a daily post last month. Google recruited Arizona State University Affiliated Professor (and DAAHL collaborator) Steven Savage to write the entry, which encourages students to explore DAAHL's interactive, Google-app-based features to learn more about archaeological sites located in Israel, Palestine, Jordan, southern Lebanon, Syria and the Sinai Peninsula.

Savage, together with UCSD Professor of Archaeology/CISA3 Associate Director Tom Levy and San Diego SuperComputer ...

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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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San Diego CityBeat picked up the story about Micha Cardenas and her "Becoming Dragon" performance for its current issue, placing particular emphasis on the potential psychological dangers of the project. Cardenas, a UCSD grad student in visual arts, will spend 365 consecutive hours totally immersed in the Second Life virtual world as a means of questioning the one-year requirement for "real-life experience" that transgender people must fulfill in order to receive gender confirmation surgery (Micha is currently undergoing hormone replacement therapy).

For more about the performance, check out Micha's daily blog, browse the "Becoming Dragon" project Web site or read an article on the Calit2 main ...

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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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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.
...

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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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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 ...

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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 ...

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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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"Origami optics" developed at UC San Diego may be what it takes to get cameras with zoom capabilities so slim that they fit into cell phones and other portable electronics. Electrical engineering Ph.D. student Eric Tremblay, one of the developers of the origami optics technology, presented his team's recent work at SIGGRAPH 08. The origami optics get their name from their ability to "fold up" incoming light so that the space required for light focusing -- the focal length -- is effectively reduced. The design "folds" the light entering the aperture by forcing it to bounce back and forth between mirrored surfaces within the optic. It is during this bouncing/folding that the light is focused, ...

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As we reported back in June, an Illinois startup company named its privately-built supercomputer "R Smarr" after Calit2 director Larry Smarr. [The "R" refers to the company, R Systems, which is the brainchild of co-founder Brian Kucic, who worked with Smarr when the latter was founding director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.] So on Friday, Larry visited his eponymously named supercomputer at R Systems in Champaign and attended a reception in his honor at the iCyt atrium in the University of Illinois Research Park.

Local media turned out to laud the startup and its muse. In the News-Gazette, reporter Don Dodson ...

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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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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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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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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 ...

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