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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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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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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A number of classrooms at UC San Diego have received a new addition -- just in time for the 2009-2010 academic year.

LED digital signs have been installed in five classrooms in UCSD's Center Hall, with 13 more expected to be installed throughout campus in the coming months. Initially, the signs will display the time and, at the top of the hour, information about the course itself, including the professor's name and the course title. ("That gets asked about a million times a day on the first day of class," says the project's lead, Calit2 Principal Development Engineer Doug Palmer.)

But eventually, the signs will be used to alert students during emergency situations, such as during a fire or in ...

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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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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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Watch the Performance on YouTube!

An experiment with the concept of merging the Second Life universe with what we have come to accept as "Real Life."

Angela Black, Atom Leonhart, Garrett Sneen, Eric Ellorin, and Brett Stalbaum

Digichotomy is a mobile performance experimenting with the idea of connecting and merging the "real" world with virtual reality.

To perform Digichotomy, professional audio transmission equipment is worn by a mobile performer to broadcast the environmental sounds and voice chat conversations of Second Life into "Real Life," (known to the Second Life universe as "First Life"), and in turn broadcast the sounds and conversation of First Life back into Second Life. This ...

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Check out this project by Calit2 researchers Micha Cardenas and Chris Head, CRCA researcher Elle Mehrmand and UCSD MFA grads Katherine Sweetman, Felipe Zuniga and UCSD Undergrad alumni Camilo Ontiveros.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The Freephone is an art project that aims to provide people just deported
from the US with a free phone call. To achieve this, a group of UCSD
Master of Fine Arts (MFA) students and graduates are coming together to
present the phone at the Lui Velazquez gallery in Tijuana, just a few feet
from the turnstiles where people who are deported are dropped off by the
border patrol. The project is by the artists Chris Head, Micha Cardenas,
Elle Mehrmand, Katherine Sweetman, ...

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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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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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Becoming Dragon
a Project Discussion by Micha Cardenas

Wednesday, April 15, 2009 @ 6PM
Refreshments will be served.

Teleport to the performance in-world:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Seventh%20Eye/144/39/235

New Media Lounge / Cal(IT)2,
UC San Diego, 9500 Gilman Dr., La Jolla, California 92093

The New Media Lounge is excited to bring MFA Candidate, Micha Cardenas for an exclusive motion capture demonstration in the Performative Computing Lab at the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA). Micha will be discussing her recent project Becoming Dragon, a 365 hour, (2 week long) performance in Second Life. The performance is believed to be the first of its kind in Second Life, ...

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

For more information see the full article in New University

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The ranks of undergraduate student researchers at the UCSD division swelled by 19 last week. Calit2 is sponsoring or cosponsoring six of the 13 Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department's group design course projects.

ECE 191, Engineering Group Design Project, is an upper-division class that provides undergraduate students with hands-on experience working in a team to design, build, demonstrate and document an open-ended engineering project. It is part of the design requirement for ECE undergraduates and is typically taken by seniors.

ECE 191 projects are funded and mentored by campus organizations and by corporate affiliates of the Jacobs School of Engineering. In addition to Calit2, ...

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

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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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Three representatives from Canon, Inc. visited Calit2 at UCI this morning to see how the equipment the company donated to an institute-housed research project is being integrated.

The Canon Rebel camera and EF 17-40 mm lens were donated last month to benefit research conducted by Aditi Majumder, assistant professor of computer science. She is building scalable, reconfigurable and easily assembled multi-projector displays that utilize camera-based calibration techniques and algorithms to align images seamlessly and eliminate color variation.

Nabil Abujbara, senior manager and project coordinator; Hideo Mizoguchi, senior engineer; and Toru Maeda, senior engineer from ...

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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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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 US election cycle is in its last week. Anticipating crowding at the polls, many have already cast their ballot through early voting. The rest of us will wait in line on Tuesday. However, while the political campaigns are drawing to a close, the analysis has just begun.

Over the summer, other members of the Social Code Group and I developed metaViz, a system that analyzes potential conceptual metaphors in political blogs (see the press release for details). The goal is to allow users, particularly those who read political blogs, to see large trends within a blog or across a blog, trends that might not be noticeable when looking at individual posts, and consider what these trends might mean. ...

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

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If you've ever wandered through a museum exhibition and wished you could have helped put it all together, you won't want to miss this opportunity from Calit2's Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology (CISA3).

CISA3 is inviting student volunteers to help install its forthcoming exhibition entitled 'Masters of Fire -- Hereditary Bronze Casters of South India', which will open at UCSD's Geisel Library on October 5, 2008. Julie Gay, an exhibition designer and preparator from the San Diego Museum of Man, will be installing the CISA3 exhibit from September 26 to 30 at the Geisel Library (and the exhibition itself runs through January 25). Ms. Gay, who has a distinguished ...

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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 chanced upon the Live* project at Sunlabs when reading through a presentation (Live_-HypervisorToGo.pdf ) by my son, Anand. While this is a remarkable work by a high-schooler, the vision behind the Live* is quite interesting: make software delivery and composition "as easy as in embedded systems." Well, perhaps easy is not the word that comes first to mind when thinking of embedded software, but shorting the installation path through firmware is an interesting way to look at SW on a stick. We do something similar in our Somniloquy effort, shown by the firmware added via gumstix in this picture. The contraption allows us to take over the network presence and identity of the laptop and allow ...

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New curators at the San Diego Museum of Art visited Calit2 on Thursday to look at some of the cool capture and visualization technologies being developed for our Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology (CISA3). SDMA and CISA3 are partnering on a long-term project to develop digital clinical charts as a conservation tool for major works in SDMA's permanent collection, and the work will be part of a permanent exhibit scheduled to open next January in time for a meeting of the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) in San Diego. The visitors included John Marciari, Curator of Italian and Spanish Paintings and head of provenance research at SDMA, as well as ...

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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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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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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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Larry Smarr, G.P. Li, and Shellie Nazarenus came by our lab today to check out a new project being made by two students in our group, Informatics PhD candidate Eric Baumer and Informatics undergraduate Jordan Sinclair. Here's a blurb about the project:

------------------------
The communications media are undergoing democratization. Rather than receiving news from large corporations, many individuals now use various forms of new media as their primary source of information. One such medium is political blogs (or weblogs), which contain political news and commentary, often with a very distinct personal voice and readily apparent political affiliation or ideology. As more members ...

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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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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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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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Fact #1: The IT industry consumes as much energy and has roughly the same carbon footprint as the airline industry.
Fact #2: Energy usage per compute server rack was 2 kilowatts in 2000, but will be fifteen times as much (30KW) in 2010.
Fact #3: To help improve the energy efficiency of computing, NSF has awarded $2 million over three years to Calit2's GreenLight project.
Tom DeFanti, director of visualization in the UCSD division of Calit2, is PI on the project. Together with the campus's Administrative Computing and Telecommunications (ACT) group, Calit2 will provide $600,000 in matching funds. One of the two Sun Modular Datacenters (see interior pictured above) deployed recently ...

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

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Loss of hearing is a common problem that can result from noise, aging, disease, and heredity. Approximately 28 million Americans have significant hearing loss, and of that group, almost six million are profoundly deaf. A primary form of communication within the United States deaf community is American Sign Language. ASL is not a visual form of English; it is a different language with its own unique grammatical and syntactical structure. Sources estimate that ASL is the fourth most commonly used language in the U.S. While ASL is widely used in the U.S., no one form of sign language is universal.

ASL interpreters play a central role in enabling face-to-face communication between many deaf and ...

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For more than 25 years, noted Andean archaeologist Charles "Chip" Stanish, a professor of anthropology at UCLA and director of that university's Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, has been exploring the shores of Lake Titicaca in Peru and Bolivia for evidence of civilizations dating back 7,000 years. Chip (pictured, at right) recently invited Calit2's Tom Levy (pictured, at left), a UCSD anthropology professor and associate director of the Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology (CISA3), to examine ancient copper works discovered during archaeological surveys conducted by UCLA and the University of Chile in the Taracapa Valley in Chile's Atacama desert. The bi-national ...

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Last Wednesday I gave a lecture on interactive character design to students in the American Indian Summer Institute in Computer Sciences (AISICS). Through the AISICS program, twenty Native American high school students are living on campus at UCI for three weeks this summer to learn about computing. The goal of the program is to help introduce the students to computer programming and digital art; over the course of the three weeks, they will be making interactive graphical versions of stories from their communities and their own lives. AISICS is funded by the NSF Broadening Participation in Computing program. 

One of the interactive exercises we did during the Wednesday ...

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Tom DeFanti and I just did a hard hat tour of the UCSD Scripps Institution of Oceanography's Robert Paine Scripps Forum for Science, Society, and the Environment (Scripps Seaside Forum). This fascinating new complex is under construction, but you can already begin to see the shape taking form.

SIO Director Tony Haymet had asked us to come down the hill from Calit2 and consult with long-time collaborator Graham Kent and the Forum project manager on whether Calit2 could help SIO design a tiled display wall OptIPortal in the complex. We think we have found a wall against which the OptIPortal can be mounted and, more challenging, a set of conduits in which to run fiber extended ...

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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 Monday, July 14, the CAMERA marine metagenomics project released a major upgrade to its Web site. The new CAMERA Web site is built upon the open-source Drupal content management system, and in addition to a new layout, this release has added:

• New Education content
• Events calendar (feel free to send event notices to camera-info@calit2.net) 
• New Forum system
  • Anonymous posting/replies. By default, all posts are anonmyous, but you can leave your name, which will be visible to the public. If you leave your email address, it will only be shown to the CAMERA admins.
  • Integrated forum searches. Searching the site now also returns forum content.
• Advanced BLAST - a more streamlined ...

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UC San Diego prides itself on having an aggressive "green" campus strategy. UC Irvine is home to the National Fuel Cell Research Center (NFCRC), which is looking at fuel cells to power everything from laptops to electric utilities, and operates the first 700-bar hydrogen fueling station in California (at left). The two campuses have a history of collaboration -- not least on Calit2 -- and Calit2 director Larry Smarr thinks the institute can play a pivotal role in developing and deploying two-campus activities that could help make Southern California a powerhouse in combatting climate change, reducing our carbon footprint, and building new industry on sustainable technologies. ...

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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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It's no exaggeration to say that Visual Arts graduate student Micha Cardenas will have to spend 30 days locked away in a single room to complete her MFA project. Cardenas, a researcher for the Center for Research in Computing an the Arts (CRCA) in Atkinson Hall, will be using a head-mounted display (HMD) and a Vicon motion-capture system to create long-durational performances of non-human characters in Second Life, an Internet-based virtual world imagined and created by its "residents."

Cardenas intends to fully immerse herself in Second Life for the month of November, waking and sleeping in the physical world (a single room at Calit2's Atkinson Hall) as the motion capture system tracks her ...

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Calit2-San Diego Associate Director Bill Hodgkiss returned this week from 18 days at sea off the West coast of Kauai, where he and a team of 15 researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography studied the effects of fluctuations in the ocean environment on underwater acoustic communications.

Despite logging countless hours in the field as a Scripps faculty member, Hodgkiss says he still gets seasick in rough conditions (although the weather on this most recent trip proved to be fortuitously calm).

Hodgkiss offers the following advice to those who tend to go green around the gills while at sea:
1) Go out in nice weather. Of course, it helps if you're somewhere near Hawaii.
2) Go to sea in ...

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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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Calit2 today announced that its HIPerSpace display system on the 2nd floor of Atkinson Hall takes top honors among high-resolution displays for scientific visualization. The lab of prof. Falko Kuester (pictured below in middle of front row) expanded the first HIPerSpace, making it 30 percent bigger in terms of total pixels. At nearly 287 million pixels, the HIPerSpace tiled wall boasts more than one active pixel for every U.S. citizen, based on the 2000 census.
The second-highest-res display, hyperwall-2, was installed recently at NASA Ames, with nearly 256 million pixels of screen resolution. Other runners-up in order are: Calit2's HIPerWall at UC Irvine (204.8 million pixels); Calit2's ...

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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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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 July issue of Genome Research features a cool new paper that stakes a claim to the development of a new area of bioinformatics, called 'comparative proteogenomics', combining mass spectrometry and comparative genomics to analyze multiple genomes. Co-author Pavel Pevzner is a Jacobs School computer science professor and Director of Calit2's Center for Algorithmic and Systems Biology (CASB), and his Ph.D. student Nitin Gupta is the lead author. But the big news is that much of the research was handled by undergraduate students who are part of the Bioinformatics [Under]graduate Research Consortium in Comparative Proteogenomics, created by Pevzner, with funding from his 2006 Howard ...

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Lily Cheng went to Beijing in 2006 as part of the NSF- and Calit2-funded Pacific Rim Experiences for Undergraduates (PRIME) summer research program in cyberinfrastructure. Since then, she has continued that research on avian influenza with Wilfred Li, Peter Arzberger and others, identifying more than two dozen promising and novel compounds to combat bird flu. In the Flash video above, Lily talks about her research, just published (with Cheng as first author) in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry. For more, read the news release "UC San Diego Researchers Identify Potential New Drug Candidates to Combat Bird Flu".

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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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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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It was a strange site on the UCSD campus today, when an interdisciplinary collection of researchers got together to eat some beans -- cooked on a new type of solar cooker, designed primarily for use in developing countries. It's the brainchild of Ida Lunde Jorgensen who is collaborating with Lasse Lorentzen, a Danish researcher who is working at Calit2 in the lab of Ricardo Dominguez. Lasse and Ida have formed the collective project Innovative Reflections where they are working on re-inventing the solar cooker as their first project inventing a more sustainable product, process and business. Members of Calit2's India Initiative, including manager Srinivas Sukumar, participated in the demo. Pictured ...

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

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

Read the full article about Muniz's ...

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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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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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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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Here's your chance to participate in "hands-on" genetic research without even needing a lab coat.

The National Geographic Society's "Genographic Project" is a five-year, worldwide effort to chart new knowledge about the human species and where we all came from. Terry Garcia, executive vice president of Mission Programs for the Society, spoke about the program in a lecture he delivered at the Calit2 auditorium earlier this week. He said the general public can participate in the study by purchasing a DNA swab kit from the project's Web site. The results will reveal the migration paths your ancestors followed thousands of years ago, and the proceeds from the kit further field research ...

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

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

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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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