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

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

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



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

Reality Shifting - Part 1: Rezzing...

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

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

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It's the calculator that "thinks" only if you think, too -- and now it's available online.

QAMA(TM), or Quick Approximate Mental Arithmetic, is a new kind of calculator designed and developed by Ilan Samson, an "inventor-in-residence" at the University of California, San Diego's California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2).

Having prototyped and tested a hand-held version of the calculator at UC San Diego and San Diego's High Tech High School, Samson has now launched an online version of the device that allows users to perform any calculation, from simple arithmetic to complex calculations involving scientific functions. But here's the twist: The result is shown ...

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

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There are basically two models of mobile software distribution: access controlled such as iphone and symbian and community rated such as android.

Given the popularity of iphone, developers have sought to bypass Apple control -- also needed for such things as background processing beyond Apple's sandbox for communications transport -- via Jailbreaking. Electronic Frontier Foundation, EFF, the ACLU of software developers, had filed exemption request to jailbreaking from DMCA to enable applications obtained from sources other than Apple Appstore.

http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/dmca_2009/RM2008-08.phoneunlocking.exhibits.pdf

Last week, Apple strongly came out against jailbreaking and the ...

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

Reporter Mark McNeil added that Seracini "urged ...

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Pick up a copy of this week's San Diego Reader, the largest weekly publication in San Diego. Becoming Dragon, a project by myself and a number of other UCSD graduate and undergraduate students is featured on the cover. The project was supported by Calit2, CRCA and the UCSD Visual Arts department, which are all mentioned in the article. You can read the article online here as well. While I have my criticisms of the article, I appreciate that the author quoted me at length on the core issues of the performance.

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

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

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

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A European team, writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, indicates that stroke sufferers can still benefit from clot-busting medicine even if they receive it an hour or so beyond the current three-hour window after symptoms start. But writing in the same journal, UCSD Stroke Center director and Calit2 participant Pat Lyden (pictured at far left) cautions that patients should still seek treatment as soon as they first suspect a possible stroke. Meanwhile, an article about a Calit2-affiliated telemedicine study co-authored by Lyden, co-diretor Brett Meyer, Calit2's Ramesh and others, is now published in the September issue of the British medical journal, The Lancet. 

Titled ...

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Calit2 Summer Scholar Benjamin Lotan was in the right place at the right time Tuesday when San Diego 6 news correspondent Jenny Hamel stopped by UCSD to ask students about the new Google/T-Mobile phone. The scholars had finished presenting their summer research at a poster session in Atkinson Hall when the news crew turned up. Lucky for Ben (pictured, in a self-portrait), he was still around, and even managed to get a snippet of the digital film he created for his research project in the news clip.

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Today we "opened" the StarCAVE, and six local TV stations sent reporters and camera crews. We got a call from the Univision reporter Sandra Bermudez asking whether we could provide a Spanish-speaking expert to talk about the virtual-reality system, so that's her interviewing A/V "guru" Hector Bracho, for a report to air this evening on Channel 17. Hal Clement from the ABC affiliate Channel 10 was here, along with Kristina Lee from the new Fox5 affiliate, plus camera crews from KUSI (Channel 9), KNSD (Channel 7), the CW (Channel 6). The only no-show was KFMB Channel 8. Also on hand: San Diego Union-Tribune reporter Jonathan Sidener and a photographer, so look for an article in the paper tomorrow ...

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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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I have been playing around with Chrome, Google's web browser since its release a week ago. Technically it is built on WebKit (same as safari and in android), but with an improved Javascript execution engine (garbage collection, JIT). One of the interesting features of chrome is "application windows": that is, you can specify application launch from the web browser.

This is advertised as an 'application shortcut'. But it really is more than that: it gives an insight into how Google is approaching OS, and sort of a rev 2 on google applications. Clearly, not all applications can be sourced by Google (nor does it likely want to), and there must be an 'offline' context to an application (saved in ...

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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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"Network World," the premier provider of information and insight for network and IT executives, has published an article in both its print and online editions about research conducted by UCSD Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) Professor Amin Vahdat.

The article -- titled "Could 'fat-tree' switch setup be key to trimming data center costs?' -- discusses Vahdat's research findings, which he presented last week at the annual meeting of SIGCOMM, the Special Interest Group on Data Communications. In his paper, Vahdat and co-authors Mohammad Al-Fares and Alexander Loukissas (both UCSD grad students in CSE) explain how companies with large data centers can save money and enhance performance ...

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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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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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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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As part of its series examining what life might be like in 2020, CNN.com has run a story about Intelligent Tutoring Systems that features UCSD Machine Perception Lab researcher Jacob Whitehill's work to create a facial remote control.

Despite the benefits of having a robot in the classroom (infinite patience, for one), it seems not everyone is convinced. Writes one commentator: "LOL don't think so... at least not anytime near soon.... Think how fast kids would hack their teacher."

At any rate, it seems Calit2 has its finger on the pulse of the up-and-coming zeitgeist: CNN's series also looks at the future of telemedicine, virtual classrooms, energy solutions, and virtual worlds -- all well-established ...

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There's a great feature in the online version of Environmental Protection magazine, about the project under which UC San Diego undergraduates "have desigend, built and deployed a network of five weather-monitoring stations as a key step toward helping the university use ocean breezes to cool buildings, identify the sunniest rooftops to expand its solar-electric system, and use water more efficiently in irrigation and in other ways." As the article notes, the students are mentored by Calit2's Bill Hodgkiss and Doug Palmer as well as Jacobs School mechanical and engineering professors Jan Kleissl and Paul Linden. Linden also directs UCSD's Environment and Sustainability Initiative (ESI), ...

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Calit2 participant and Computer Science and Engineering professor Mihir Bellare got some great news today. A dozen years ago Bellare was one of the inventors of the Keyed-Hash Message Authentication Code (HMAC), a crypotology algorithm for use when message authentication is required. After a long process and a series of new proofs published by Bellare in 2006, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) proposed last year to make HMAC a standard for data communications security, and today it became effective -- with the publication of a notice in the Federal Register.

The story was picked up today by William Jackson, writing in Government Computer News ("New version ...

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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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UCSD's Mohan Trivedi, head of the university's Computer Vision and Robotics Research Laboratory and a Calit2 expert on intelligent transportation and telematics, joined KPBS host Tom Fudge for this morning's episode of "These Days". Trivedi (pictured) oversees projects such as a robotic, sensor-based traffic-incident monitoring and response systems, and was on the air to discuss the logistics and ethics behind public surveillance systems. An archived audio file of the broadcast will be available later today for download.

Today's episode of the program was spurred in part by a UCSD Ethics Center's panel discussion titled "Surveillance and Sensors: Who's Watching Whom?," which will take place at ...

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Robert Friedman, a co-principal investigator on the Community Cyberinfrastructure for Advanced Marine Microbial Ecology Research and Analysis (CAMERA) project, was named recently to be Deputy Director of the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) La Jolla R&D facility. JCVI is Calit2's partner in the CAMERA marine metagenomics project. According to a JCVI news release: "In his new role, Dr. Friedman will oversee day to day operations of JCVI La Jolla, which currently has approximately 40 staff and scientists in 20,000 square feet of lab and office space who are engaged in synthetic, environmental and human genomic research. Plans are underway to build a new, carbon-neutral laboratory facility ...

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CISA3 director Maurizio Seracini discovered 'Cerca Trova' on a painting in the Palazzo Vecchio: 'Seek and Ye Shall Find' is the closest translation in English, and 'Wer suchet, der findet?' turns out to be the German translation. I only know that because it's the sub-title of a profile of Seracini's research on Germany's Monsters & Critics entertainment site. Actually, it's a review of the 2006 British documentary on Seracini's work on two Leonardo da Vinci masterpieces, including the search for his long-lost "Battle of Anghiari" -- a major project now of CISA3. The documentary aired last weekend in continental Europe on the ARTE cable network. If you speak German, read all about ...

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An educational video from the National Science Foundation (NSF) will feature UCSD post-doc researcher and Calit2-affiliate Jurgen Schulze in an effort to show young students that science can be cool.

A NSF video crew will be in Atkinson Hall Tuesday morning to take footage of Schulze (pictured) in the StarCAVE virtual reality system, where he will conduct research on a test subject as part of a virtual-reality experiment in navigation and "way-finding." The project, which is a multidisciplinary effort to study human neurological responses to built environments, is being conducted in collaboration with UCSD's Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience. (Read more about the Navigation/Way-Finding ...

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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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It was first produced and aired by Britain's Channel 4 in 2006, but the documentary about CISA3 director Maurizio Seracini's work on two Leonardo da Vinci masterpieces aired again this evening in Europe on the ARTE TV channel. The 80-minute film tracks Seracini's multispectral scans of the "Adoration of the Magi" painting in the Uffizi Gallery, and the 30-year search for the "Battle of Anghiari", a mural by da Vinci that disappeared from the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence 450 years ago. Originally aired in English as "The Da Vinci Detective", the documentary is airing in France as "Léonard de Vinci: Chefs-d'oeuvre masqués" or "Leonardo da Vinci: Masked Masterpieces"....

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A number of international reporters have been inquiring about Calit2's HIPerSpace, unveiled this week in all its 286 million pixels of glory. Marc Chacksfield of Britain's TechRadar online service calls HIPerSpace the "highest-resolution display systems for scientific visualisation in the world." (If you look closely at the words below the photo on TechRadar, the caption reads: "Now that's a big TV.") The writer ends his article with some dry humor: "And what are they displaying on the, er, display. Well, it's certainly not re-runs of Hollyoaks, more footage from the National Geographic and the like." Ironically, and apparently unknown to Chacksfield, the very first group treated to ...

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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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Calit2 Principal Development Engineer Doug Palmer's idea for a "smart" Universal Power Adapter is striking a chord with the national news media. Coverage of the adapter, also known as uPower, turned up today on "The Blue Marble Blog" an online component of Mother Jones magazine. With a circulation of 230,000, Mother Jones is the most widely read progressive publication in the United States.

The story about uPower also appeared on PhysOrg.com, where it's generated 20 reader comments within a span of 24 hours. PhysOrg.com is a Web-based news site that specializes in the hard sciences. This year, Quantcast listed the site as a top 5000 site with 510,000 U.S. people visiting per month....

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Calit2's Tom Levy (left) admits that "every real 'dirt' archaeologist fancies him or herself as an Indiana Jones-type character". A profile of Levy, "Raiders of the Lost Artifacts", is the spotlight article in the Summer 2008 issue of UCSD Social Sciences e-Connection. Levy holds the Norma Kershaw Endowed Chair in Archaeology of Ancient Israel and the Neighboring Lands, and is the current chair of UCSD's Judaic Studies Program. And as the article points out, Levy's interest in technology "extends to modern applications of digital technologies and media for archaeological research," which he is pioneering as associate director of Calit2's Center of Interdisiplinary Science for Art, Architecture ...

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An old acquaintance from my early days in broadcasting paid us a visit today. Peter Day (pictured), one of the top "presenters" at the BBC Radio 4 in London, who reports on business and technology, is doing a documentary on the future of bandwidth, asking the question: "Do we really need more pixels?" After a long interview with Larry Smarr, Peter got a good feel for super-high-definition conferencing on the 4K auditorium projection system, and was taken with the animation showing research network bandwidth across the world (courtesy of our OptIPuter partners at the University of Illinois). We also treated Peter to a "ride" in the StarCAVE, and he interviewed Kai Doerr in ...

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Earlier this week CASB director Pavel Pevzner's undergraduate bioinformatics program made headlines for an important publication on an emerging field in bioinformatics called comparative proteogenomics. The program is funded by Pevzner with his fellowship grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and in a feature story on the HHMI website, Pevzner says the undergraduate program will take their experiment on experiments to the whole world. Called UBER-GRID--the Undergraduate Bioinformatics E-Research Grid--it will be a platform for worldwide, distributed bioinformatics research projects, Pevzner says. "We will put all our projects on the web and invite every student in the world to ...

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The RedOrbit online news service picked up a report on a deal whereby Darkstrand, Inc. has purchased and will commercialize one-half of all capacity on the National LambdaRail (NLR), which covers multi-gigabit networks linking advanced research institutions across the U.S., including Calit2. The report quotes Calit2's visualization director at UCSD, Tom DeFanti (pictured), saying, "We've been very aware of the disconnection between what is possible in our NLR-networked visualization labs and what is available commercially. The inability to use applied technologies as they evolve and are proven is a critical obstacle for companies, especially those in the media space that need ...

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One of the top TV anchors from Italy's largest broadcast network, RAI, spent half a day at Calit2 yesterday with his crew from Italy. Roberto Giacobbo interviewed CISA3 director Maurizio Seracini and associate director Falko Kuester, and shot HD video of some of the cool visualization tools -- the StarCAVE, HIPerSpace wall, 4K -- being used in the search for Leonardo da Vinci's long-lost mural, "The Battle of Anghiari". Giacobbo's video will be shown at the end of the project, in conjunction with the National Geographic Channel's documentary (for which RAI purchased Italian broadcast rights). Hover over image and click on the right arrow to watch a short clip of the interview with Seracini ...

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

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

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BBC's Radio 4 Science at Nine program "Leading Edge" just ran a feature story by Molly Bentley on the RUBI robot developed by Javier Movellan and his Machine Perception Lab on the 2nd floor of Atkinson Hall. RUBI has been around for a while, but the new project -- part of the Calit2-based Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center -- is testing to see if RUBI can teach a foreign language to pre-schoolers. The test language: Finnish, because it is unlikely that the children would have heard it. Click here to listen [the RUBI segment begins roughly 15 minutes into the 30-minute program]. No conclusions from the research yet, but it was clear that at least one tyke was picking up Finnish words in ...

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Read more about the project or watch a video that shows the technology in action. (Says Whitehill in the video: "In the current day and age of using Botox to improve one's facial ...

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

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At his lecture at the San Diego division of Calit2 last week, National Geographic's EVP for Mission Programs Terry Garcia told the story of the seven mountain gorillas who were murdered in cold blood last year in Virunga, a National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Photojournalist Brent Stirton (pictured) will discuss the murders and the controversy behind them on today's episode of Fresh Air, streaming live on KPBS at 1 p.m. and available for download following the show.

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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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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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