The deadline for submitting an application for a 2010 Calit2 Summer Undergraduate Research Scholarship is this Friday, March 5, by NOON. UCSD undergrads in all majors are encouraged to apply. 

This will be the tenth year of the highly successful program; more than 225 UCSD undergraduates from dozens of majors have been Calit2 Summer Scholars. Many have successfully used their experience as summer scholars as springboards to graduate school as well as positions in industry.

The scholarship program pays undergraduates a $3,000 scholarship to work as paid, full-time student researchers for a 10-week period during the summer in faculty labs across the campus. The students make a contribution ...

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Next week, CRCA and b.a.n.g. lab researchers Elle Mehrmand and Micha Cardenas are heading out to Durham, North Carolina to do a performance and artist talk at Duke University. They will also be meeting with the Experiencing Virtual Worlds interdisciplinary research group at Duke to discuss some of their recent writing.

technesexual
a mixed reality performance
1/25 @ 6pm, SoundSense Studio, CIEMAS

Erotic Mixed Reality Performance
an artist talk
1/27 @ 4pm, Nasher Museum Auditorium

Sponsored by:
The Experiencing Virtual Worlds Working Group
Information Science + Information Studies
Art, Art History and Visual Studies
Women's Studies

...

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

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

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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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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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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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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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UC San Diego undergrad Michael Nekrasov spent nine weeks this summer as a Pacific Rim Undergraduate Experiences (PRIME) student in Taiwan. He worked on a project of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Calit2, engineering a system that will allow researchers to monitor coral reefs in real time ("Coral Reef Observing through Data Capture, Data Streaming, and Automation").

His project involved integrating cameras into environmental observing systems, as well as using fluorescence to detect coral health, particularly focusing on coral larvae. One of the major goals for the project was to use the system for the automated counting of coral larvae as they are released (a process which takes ...

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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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If you missed the poster session last week, or if you made it and want to know more, copies of the 2009 Calit2 Summer Scholars' Posters are now available on the Summer Scholars website.

Poster session winner for best poster, Robert Turner, is in photo here. Turner is just beginning his sophomore year as a computer science and engineering (CSE) major this month. He worked with faculty advisor Beth Simon of CSE on his project entitled, "Integrating the Ubiquitous Presenter to receive information from the web, iPhones and iClickers."

The posters are the culmination of 10-weeks of intensive research by 24 undergraduates majoring in 15 different fields who worked with faculty advisors from across ...

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

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

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On Tuesday evening, Calit2 Director Larry Smarr was the keynote speaker at the 2009 Convocation, which welcomed thousands of transfer students and freshmen to the UC San Diego campus. In his talk, Smarr went out of his way to challenge the students to work on solving the big challenges facing humanity, including global climate change. Here's the full text of his speech:

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Please join us in celebrating the hard work of the 2009 Calit2 Undergraduate Summer Scholars. Their end-of-summer Poster Session will be held next Tuesday.

This event is the culmination of 10-weeks of intensive research by 24 undergraduates majoring in 15 different fields who worked with faculty advisors from across campus as full-time researchers this summer. This is the ninth year of the highly successful program; more than 225 UC San Diego undergraduates have been Calit2 summer scholars.

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UC San Diego political science Professor James Fowler, an affiliate of Calit2, will make an appearance at Warwick's Bookstore, 7812 Girard Avenue in La Jolla at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 8 to discuss and sign his new book, "Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives."

Fowler's research (conducted with colleague Nicholas Christakis of the Harvard School of Public Health) has repeatedly made front-page news nationwide. The authors' new book explains why emotions are contagious, how health behaviors spread, why the rich get richer and even how we find and choose our partners.

Read more about Fowler's research. 

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b.a.n.g. lab researcher Micha Cardenas will be presenting at the Mobile HCI conference in Bonn, Germany tomorrow morning at the Community Practices and Locative Media Workshop. She will be presenting a paper on the Transborder Immigrant Tool. The pdf of that paper is here and it was co-written by Cardenas, Ricardo Dominguez, Amy Sara Carroll and Brett Stalbaum of the Electronic Disturbance Theater.

Here's the summary:

The Transborder Immigrant Tool: Violence, Solidarity and Hope in Post-NAFTA Circuits of Bodies Electr(on)/ic

Micha Cardenas, Amy Sara Carroll, Ricardo Dominguez, Brett Stalbaum
EDT, Calit2, B.A.N.G. Lab, UCSD/Michigan

This polyvocal, collectively authored paper describes ...

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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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b.a.n.g. lab researchers at Calit2 have been very busy and have a handful of upcoming and recent exhibitions! Follow these links to find out more!

Transborder Immigrant Tool tool at ISEA 2009

The Transborder Immigrant Tool will be exhibited in 'Space is the Place' exhibition at the Gallery of the National College of Art & Design in Dublin, as part of the program of ISEA 2009 which takes place in Belfast and Dublin Ireland this year. The exhibition will run from the 27th August - 1st September 2009. The exhibition includes a number of video poems written by Amy Sara Carroll and designed by Calit2 researchers Ricardo Dominguez, Micha Cardenas, and CRCA researcher Elle Mehrmand. The voice ...

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Calit2 extends its deepest congratulations to UC San Diego Music Professor Roger Reynolds, who has been appointed University Professor by the University of California Board of Regents -- the highest honor that can be bestowed on UC faculty.

Reynolds, a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, is the first artist to be awarded the title and only the 36th UC faculty member since 1960 to be so honored. The designation is reserved for scholars of international distinction who are recognized and respected as teachers of exceptional ability.

Reynolds joined the UCSD Department of Music in 1969. He became founding director of the Center for Music Experiment (now called the Center for Research in Computing and ...

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The 24 UC San Diego undergraduates who are Calit2 Summer Research Scholars are about half way through their summer of full-time research. They will be making their midsummer presentations this week and next.

Everyone is invited to attend and learn about the many interesting multidisciplinary projects that these talented undergraduates are working on.

Group A Presentations: Tuesday, Aug. 4, 2 p.m.

Group B Presentations: Thursday, Aug. 6, 10 a.m.

Group C Presentations: Tuesday, Aug. 11, 2 p.m.

Group D Presentations: Thursday, Aug. 13, 10 a.m.

Location for all presentations: Atkinson Hall, Room 4004

Each session will last approximately an hour, with six students giving a 5-8 minute ...

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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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b.a.n.g. lab researcher Micha Cardenas will be presenting a workshop at this year's Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics (HEMI) Summer Encuentro in Bogota, Colombia. The title of her workshop is "New Hacktivism: From Electronic Civil Disobedience to Mixed Reality Performance". The outline for the workshop is below. The Encuentro's theme is "Staging Citizenship". From the description of the Encuentro: "Our 7th Encuentro invites interested participants to investigate "cultural rights" and their complex relationship to citizenship in both historical and contemporary contexts. We understand cultural rights as a juridical figure, a technology of power and an articulation that brings ...

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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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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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The recent joint annual meetings in Boston of the Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits conference (RFIC 2009) and the International Microwave Symposium (IMS 2009) had researchers and students from Calit2 and UC San Diego out in force -- 17 UCSDers were on hand (five of them at left). UC San Diego was also the only university showing off hardware at their exhibit booth, staffed by a team led by Calit2's Javier Rodriguez Molina. They demonstrated technologies including Calit2's Gizmo, CalMesh, CalRadio and much more.

Meanwhile, on the conference side, UCSD graduate students came home with bronze and silver medals for research papers presented at the two meetings. As we reported in our roundup ...

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

All are welcome to come to this interesting event.

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

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The UC San Diego division of Calit2 would like to extend a hearty congratulations to the institute's six nominees for UCSD's Exemplary Staff Employee of the Year Award. The nominees are:

• Theresa Allen
• Timothy Beach
• Qian Liu
• Sarah Prom
• Cuong Vu
• April Walsh

Thank you for all that you do to make Calit2 a wonderful place to work!

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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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On April 25, one of the undergraduate students working on Calit2's StarCAVE took top honors in the 2009 IEEE Regional Student Paper Contest. UC San Diego electrical engineering junior Jordan Rhee won the competition for his paper on "Hot Spot Mitigation in the StarCAVE". Rhee -- who is President of the IEEE chapter at UCSD -- was competing against papers from the University of Nevada, University of New Mexico, University of Arizona, and the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. The contest was held as part of the IEEE Southwest Area Meeting. For his work, Rhee also took home a $500 prize. Rhee first had to beat out four other UC San Diego papers before he could represent ...

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

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UCSD Graduate Student in Visual Arts Elle Mehrmand and Calit2 Artist/Researcher Micha Cardenas were recently awarded the Emerging Fields Award grant from the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts. Their proposed project is called "mixed relations" and it explores mixed reality performance with two performers in actual and virtual space producing live audio. The timeline for the project includes workshops in the fall of 2009 and performances in the spring of 2010.

Read more about the project here:

mixed relations by Elle Mehrmand and Micha Cardenas

"The partners do not precede their relating: all that is, is the fruit of becoming with."
-Donna Haraway, When Species Meet

mixed ...

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Come out to the auditorium at Calit2 tomorrow for this important symposium, including Calit2 researcher Micha Cardenas, UCSD Faculty Brian Goldfarb and numerous other UC faculty. The symposium is being held in conjunction with Carlos Trilnick's artwork on anti-personell mines in the gallery@calit2.





Violence, Technology and Public Intervention: Two UCDARnet Panels

http://ucdarnet.org/

April 24, 2009
From Noon to 5pm

Sponsored by UCDARnet and gallery@calit2
CALIT2/Atkinson Hall Black Box Theater
Free and Open to the Public
A Reception after the panels
For Directions and information: http://gallery.calit2.net

Noon -Introduction - Brian Goldfarb

12:10 - Carlos Trilnick - Keynote

12:30 - Panel ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Calit2's chief scientist Ron Graham will take part in a bit of history-making next week. That's because on April 8, Graham will give one of five plenary lectures at the 61st annual British Mathematical Colloquium. The history? It's the first time that the Colloquium has been held outside the United Kingdom. This year, the British are teaming with the Irish Mathematical Society to hold a joint meeting at the National University of Ireland's Galway campus.

As for Graham's talk, it's on "the combinatorics of solving linear equations." A major branch of modern combinatorics, usually called Ramsey theory, studies properties of structures which are preserved under partitions. Its guiding philosophy ...

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

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The application deadline for the Calit2 2009 Undergraduate Research Summer Scholarship Program at UCSD is quickly approaching. It is next Friday, March 13, 2009, at NOON.

Please note: Late applications will not be accepted.

Calit2 UCSD's Summer Scholars program pays undergraduates to work as full-time researchers for 10 weeks over the summer in faculty labs across the campus. Students must be registered during the Spring quarter (or be incoming students in the Fall). Students in all disciplines are encouraged to apply.

The scholarship is an opportunity for undergraduates to do real research work over the summer and make a contribution to the work of their faculty advisor's lab, or work on a project ...

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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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There will be two information sessions about the UCSD division of Calit2's Summer Scholarship program which pays undergraduates to work as full-time researchers for the summer in faculty labs across the campus. The sessions take place today and tomorrow, Thursday, February 26 and Friday, February 27, both will be at 2p.m. in room 4004 of Atkinson Hall.

The scholarship is an opportunity for undergraduates to do real research work over the summer and make a contribution to the research of their faculty advisor's lab, or work on a project of their own, the kind of hands-on research that is usually reserved for graduate students and senior researchers. This is the ninth year of the highly successful ...

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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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Our colleague Mohan Trivedi, a professor of electrical and computer engineering in the Jacobs School and longtime participant in Calit2, has been singled out to deliver the annual Mel Webber Lecture. A lecturer is selected each year by the University of California's System-Wide Transportation Research Center (UCTC). It's the main event for all UC-wide Ph.D. students working on research in various transportation-related topics. Trivedi will give his talk on the evening of this Friday, Feb. 13, in Riverside, Calif., and the conference begins Feb. 12. The topic of Trivedi's keynote lecture: "Human-Centered, Holistic Systems for Safer and Smoother Traffic"; click here for the abstract. 

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

More details can be found ...

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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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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 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 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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Computer Science and Engineering undergraduates from professor Gary Cottrell's cognitive modeling courseMachine Perception Lab at Calit2 Tuesday to get a hands-onCottrell, who is the director of UCSD's Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center, has focused his research on building working models of cognitive processes and using them to explain psychological or neurological processes.His research has focused upon face processing, including face recognition, face identification,and facial expression recognition -- something the MP lab also specializes in.

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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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Sabine McNeill was visiting Calit2 UCSD on the day of the Calit2 Summer Scholars poster representations and reception. She is from England and had come by way of Calit2 Irvine, where she attended the 'Everyday Digital Money' workshop and met David Goldberg, cofounder of HASTAC, who suggested she visit Calit2 UCSD.

During the poster session, videos were being made of each student discussing their summer's work with their poster. One of these students was Andrea Tan, who did an environmental engineering project entitled: "Weather Data Management System."

When Calit2 tour director Trish Stone brought McNeill through the short hallway on their way to the StarCAVE, they crossed paths with the filming ...

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

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

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

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On his three-month sabbatical, Calit2 director Larry Smarr is Down Under, barnstorming Australia's major research universities to talk up why today's scientists need more optical networking and visualization facilities. Writing in The Australian newspaper, Andrew Trounson notes that "Smarr is visiting Australia on behalf of the Australian American Leadership Dialogue to exhort vice-chancellors and government to invest in, and adapt to using, the expanding bandwidth capacity to ensure Australian researchers continue to compete." The feature article is extensive, and highlights Smarr's belief that a social and cultural transformation is needed among researchers and universities, in order to take ...

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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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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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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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After Falko Kuester came up with the ingenious name for his tiled-display-on-steroids, dubbing it the HIPerSpace system, it was probably only a matter of time before it would become a window on U.S. space exploration. And that's what happened this week when two NASA engineers, in San Diego for a conference, opted to participate in a Mars Rover sortie while watching incoming images from the Rover and a NASA control room -- all displayed on Calit2's 286-million-pixel HIPerSpace display at UCSD. The NASA officials -- Michael Sims and Laurence Edwards -- joined Mars Rover Exploration Rover Mission Ops, via live video feeds from Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The feeds were displayed on the ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

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Recycling bins and motion-sensor lighting are all well and good, but a team of staff members from Calit2 at UCSD thinks the institute can take sustainability to the next level. Led by Government Program Developer Jerry Sheehan and Management Services Officer Yuki Marsden, employees at the institute's Atkinson Hall facility met last Friday to discuss how the building -- and the people in it -- can do more to 'go green.'

"We want to think about things we can do on a practical level that can have a greater focus," said Sheehan. "I propose that we should innovate now, before sustainability stops being voluntary and starts being compulsory."

At its initial brainstorming session, the team (which welcomes ...

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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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This is my first post. So let me share with you my recent experience with COSMOS program on embedded systems. We were very nervous when planning this course since it required quite a bit of EE and CS, and we were targeting it to high-schoolers. So we spent a month just going over the lab exercises -- initially created by a freshman student in CSE, Lynn Ngyen. Choon Kim picked these up, changed and added to create a polished set of six exercises.

Our thinking was that the students would do one exercise a week and then we will have a couple of challenge exercises for the selected few to show off as projects. The exercises were non-trivial: from generating PWM signals to drive LEDs, to sampling ...

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Some of the Calit2 UCSD Summer Scholars visited the San Diego Food Bank earlier this month. The outing was one of a slate of activities designed to help the scholars, who work not just in Atkinson Hall, but in labs across campus, get together and learn more about other students and their projects. They had a good time and learned some things as well.

"The Food Bank was a fun experience. It was different from the other social events," says Agatha Man, an ICAM major, "But nice that we're helping the community. The best part was the teamwork there."

Expressing the sentiments of all who participated, bioengineering major Sylvia Hon notes, "It was pretty interesting seeing what people donate, sometimes, ...

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We at Calit2 were saddened to hear of the death last week of Manny Farber, an influential film critic, abstract painter and professor emeritus at UCSD. Farber died at his home in Leucadia at the age of 91.

A major force in American culture for more than 50 years, Farber wrote film criticism for The New Republic, The Nation and Time Magazine, among other publications. Farber also made a name for himself as a painter, joining the UCSD Visual Arts Department in 1970 and remaining an active member of the faculty until 1987. In 2006, Calit2 filmmaker-in-residence Jean-Pierre Gorin organized a five-hour tribute called "Manny Farber and All That Jazz" at Calit2's Atkinson Hall. Gorin had been a colleague ...

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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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I'm at UMBC, where I'm giving at talk at a conference on the Frontiers
of Multicore Computing http://www.mc2.umbc.edu/frontiers.html on how we've been using new multicore CPU's from IBM and Intel in the creation of The Scalable City http://scalablecity.net/ project. Multicore computing has allowed this project to come to fruition, in a way that I counted on at the outset, but didn't actually realize the solution would come from this manner of complying with Moore's Law.

Other interesting talks here include discussions of the new Roadrunner supercomputer at Los Alamos, made with 1000's of Cell processors and Opteron's - the first Petaflop computer and what is in the way of making ...

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Today ...

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

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

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

Several ...

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

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

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

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

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We're a bit late on this story... but Visual Arts professor Ricardo Dominguez (in blue at left) had a unique experience in July, when he portrayed Cesar Chavez in a re-enactment of a landmark speech by the Chicano leader. It was the fourth event of the Port Huron Project, a series of re-enactments organized by artist Mark Tribe, part of Creative Time's 2008 public art initiative, "Democracy in America: The National Campaign". It was held in Exposition Park in South L.A., site of the original speech.

According to LosAngeles Times art critic Christopher Knight, "At the end of Dominguez's second performance of the Chavez speech, the crowd spontaneously erupted into a loud chant of "Si! Se puede! ...

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Ilkay Altintas, assistant director for the National Laboratory for Advanced Data Research (NLADR) and manager of Scientific Workflows Automation Technologies (SWAT) at UCSD's San Diego Supercomputer Center, presented a lecture and slide-show this week to undergraduates at Australia's Monash University, where seven UCSD students are currently enrolled as part of the Calit2-based Pacific Rim Experiences for Undergraduates (PRIME) program.

The lecture was titled "Accelerating Scientific Discovery Using Scientific Workflows and Kepler Scientific Workflow System" and was streamed live in high definition video from Calit2's HD Studio to Monash, where PRIME students are working this summer on diverse ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Our colleague Sheldon Brown, director of the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA), is at the FILE new-media art festival in Sao Paulo, Brazil, along with others from Calit2 and CRCA: Peter Otto, Todd Margolis and Mike Toillion. He says his Scalable City installation and festival of 14 4K films have been well-received. "For the first time, the interactive installation of Scalable City is seen side-by-side with its 4K film version, creating a more complete experience of its multiple media forms," writes Brown from the festival. "CRCA and Calit2 have worked with FIOLE to create the first 4K film screening in Brazil. Along with the Scalable City film, 4K fare such as Mike Toillion's ...

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

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

Group B Presentations:   ...

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Four artists affiliated with Calit2 at UC San Diego are in Sao Paulo, Brazil, this week for the Electronic Language International Festival (FILE), an annual gathering of innovators within the fields of art and technology, including digital art, games, documentary films, electronic music and -- for the first time in the festival's nine-year history -- digital 4K cinema.

Calit2's contributions fall under the latter category, with Sheldon Brown, Peter Otto, Todd Margolis and Mike Toillion presenting 30-minute lectures at the festival's Symposium this Friday (translated to Portuguese in real-time), followed by screenings of their work in the newly emerging medium.

Brown, director of Calit2's Center ...

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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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It was a real pleasure to have Jim Bottum, CIO of Clemson University, and three of his staff, Tracey Hare, Jill Gemmill, Carla Rathbone, visiting Calit2@UCSD for a few days. Jim was my Deputy Director at NCSA for fifteen years, then became CIO of Purdue University, before moving to Clemson a few years ago.At each of these universities, Jim and his crackerjack staff have pioneered new campus cyberinfrastructure. In January 2008 Jim was on the cover story of Storage Magazine, describing his petabyte rotating storage campus cache, an architectural innovation that UCSD is currently considering installing. Besides the Great Wall o' Pixels, we visited many labs in Calit2 yesterday.

Today we will visit ...

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

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

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

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Every year CONNECT hosts the well-attended Most Innovative Product Awards, now in their 21st year. CONNECT calls it San Diego's "Oscars for local technology innovation." When the 2008 awards are handed out next Dec. 12, the crowd will be treated to an introductory video sampling the wisdom of local tech luminaries, which explains how a TV crew and producers from CONNECT ended up in front of the HIPerSpace wall last Thursday, interviewing Calit2 director Larry Smarr for his thoughts on "Generation Innovation" -- the catchphrase for this year's MIP Awards. And of course Larry obliged, delivering some of his lines while walking in front of the display wall for a "tracking shot" (click on right ...

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

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

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

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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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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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Students from across the state have converged at four UC campuses this month -- including UC San Diego and UC Irvine-- for the California State Summer School for Mathematics and Science program, better known as COSMOS. COSMOS is a four-week summer program geared toward motivated high-school students with a demonstrated interest and achievement in science and math.

UCSD Computer Science and Engineering Professor Rajesh Gupta dropped us a line to fill us in on what's been going on with the COSMOS cluster he is spearheading. Here's what he has to say:

Working with a team of Choon Kim, Rick Ord, Bridget Benson, Arash Arafee and Shirley Miranda (a high-school teacher by choice and one of our graduates), ...

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My good friend Randy Pausch died this morning. He was a wonderful, fun, and inspiring person. From CMU: "Randy Pausch, the professor at Carnegie Mellon University who inspired countless students in the classroom and others worldwide through his highly acclaimed last lecture, has died of complications from pancreatic cancer. He was 47.

Also a Carnegie Mellon alumnus, Pausch co-founded the Entertainment Technology Center and led researchers who created Alice, a revolutionary way to teach computer programming. He was widely respected in academic circles for a unique interdisciplinary approach, bringing together artists, dramatists and designers to break new ground by working in collaboration with ...

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Multitouch technology has spread rapidly in the research community and is starting to appear in consumer products like the Apple iPhone. In collaboration with other Calit2 researchers, my students and I are building a number of large multitouch tables. In our lab we are exploring a large projection desk for novel interaction with video. We are also collaborating on the design of a multitouch interface for the Calit2 HIPerSpace Wall. Both systems make use of Frustrated Total Internal Reflection (FTIR). We shine infrared LEDs into the edges of a large sheet of acrylic placed in front of a rear-projection display screen. IR light leaks out the back of the acrylic every place it is touched. ...

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If you missed seeing the interactive installation of ATLAS in Silico at SIGGRAPH 2007 here at Calit2 in San Diego, you'll have to travel to Cleveland if you want to see its latest instantiation. The piece will be shown tomorrow, Saturday and Sunday at Cleveland's Ingenuity Fest, which calls it "a beautiful, interactive 3D experience that uses a participant's movement to trigger mesmerizing, life-size audiovisual effects inspired by the Global Ocean Survey". The GOS marine metagenomic data is housed in the CAMERA project servers on the first floor of Atkinson Hall. A team from the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA), including Todd Margolis, Iman Mostafavi and Joachim Gossman, ...

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High-school students participating in the COSMOS math-and-science residential program this month at UCSD were visibly interested in this week's 53-minute lecture by Paul Linden on sustainability and climate change, now available for on-demand viewing [Windows Media player and broadband connection required]. The speaker (at left) wears many hats, most notably Director of the Calit2-based UCSD Environment and Sustainability Initiative (ESI), and Chair of the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering department of the Jacobs School. Calit2 is webcasting the weekly lecture series, which is one of the few chances when all ~150 students in the COSMOS program's seven 'clusters' get to participate ...

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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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A group of about 20 high school students paid a visit to the Machine Perception Laboratory at Calit2 today as part of UC San Diego's Academic Connection program -- a pre-college summer academic and residential experience targeted to highly motivated, high achieving, college-bound students entering grades 10-12.

The students -- all of whom chose to study robotics for the program's three-week course -- were led by Dan Rupert, a math and pre-engineering teacher at the Preuss School UCSD and leader of the school's "Midnight Mechanics" Robotics Club. On hand to show the students the bells and whistles at the MP Lab were co-directors Marni Stewart Bartlett, who demonstrated some of the lab's facial ...

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

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

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

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

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Two of Calit2's visual arts faculty at UCSD are mounting a joint exhibition that opens Aug. 4 and will run through Oct. 3. It will take place in the gallery@ calit2 on the first floor of Atkinson Hall. Prof. Adriene Jenik will present version 2.6 of SPECFLIC (at left), her ongoing experiment in "distributed social cinema" that premiered its version 1.0 at the dedication of Calit2's building on the UCSD campus. Prof. Ricardo Dominguez is the ringleader of an art collective that calls itself *particle group*, which will be showing its interactive "Particles of Interest," highlighting the pervasive threat of nanoparticles to human health. News release. Website. Earlier ...

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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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Happy birthday to those born in the month of July! Pictured from left to right are: Karen Riggs-Saberton (7/31), Rosalyn De La Cruz, Jeff Nagle (7/19), Jessica Mac (7/5), Adam Brust (7/11), Lynda Tran (7/4), Claudiu Farcas (7/31) and Alice Dignazio (7/8).

Also celebrating a birthday this month:
Samuel Doshier (7/2)
Paul Gilna (7/3)
Sean Michael Parks (7/4)
Mark Plummer (7/12)
John Wooley (7/27)

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On July 16 and 17, the Center for Networked Systems held its semi- annual research review at UCSD. The Center brings together the CNS member companies, currently Cisco, Google, Hewlett Packard, Network Appliance, Qualcomm, and Sun Microsystems, with Center faculty and students. The review featured progress reports on ongoing CNS projects, proposals for new 2-year projects, and final reports on projects launched in 2006. There were lively discussions with the 30+ industrial visitors (some pictured at left) and 3 industrial talks from Google, Qualcomm, and Sun.

The next CNS research review will be held in January 2009. More information is available from the CNS website http://cns.ucsd.edu.
...

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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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Calit2's Advanced Network Sciences (ANS) group at UC San Diego, in collaboration with the Jacobs School's Electrical and Computer Engineering department, will bring five top scholars in network theory to UCSD. They'll be "in residence" the week of Aug. 18-22, some for the entire week, some just for two or three days. The speakers include Princeton's Bill Massey, USC's Amy Ward, Sean Meyn of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Nick Bambos of Stanford, and Caltech's Adam Wierman. Each will give two, 90-minute talks over two days, in addition to meeting with faculty and graduate students "to foster discussion and collaborations." The specific topic of each short course will be announced ...

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Calit2's partner in the OptIPuter project -- University of Illinois at Chicago's Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) -- is getting ready to build the OmegaTable. It's a modular, multi-sensory touch tabletop for interactive, visual data exploration in 2D and autostereoscopic 3D (3D without special glasses). EVL recently landed a $450,000 Major Research Instrumentation grant from the National Science Foundation to develop the OmegaTable. It's the next generation of EVL tabletops, after the LambdaTable (pictured) that wowed visitors to the joint SDSC/Calit2/EVL booth at Supercomputing 07. Says EVL director and OptIPuter co-PI Jason Leigh: "These displays are the new microscopes and telescopes, ...

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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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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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As UC San Diego stem cell research director Larry Goldstein told a packed audience at Calit2 this morning,"talking to a bunch of high-school students who are interested in science is a lot easier than talking to a bunch of Congressmen. I know you're interested... and you're at least a few IQ points above most people in Washington!". Noting that "stem cells are cool," the School of Medicine professor was addressing more than 150 middle and high-school students participating in this summer's COSMOS 4-week residential science-and-math program at UCSD, as well as many of the Calit2 Summer Undergraduate Scholars. Goldstein's hour-long talk on "Developing the Medical Treatments ...

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

Stietz's UCSD tour included a stop ...

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

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

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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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When it comes to tomography, even the most powerful electron microscopes have limitations when taking snapshots of biological micro-structures. So to fine-tune the images, top scientists are refining the algorithms they use to process the raw data, in order to get a more accurate (and hence more useful) picture. That was the focus of "Tomography Day 2008" July 10 at Calit2" on the UCSD campus (attendees pictured at left). It was staged by two groups with facilties in Atkinson Hall -- Peter Arzberger's National Biomedical Computation Resource (NBCR) and Mark Ellisman's National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research (NCMIR). Rick Lawrence of NCMIR and ...

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The second weekly COSMOS Discovery Lecture will bring UCSD stem cell research leader Larry Goldstein (left) to the Calit2 Auditorium. His talk: "Developing the Medical Treatments of Tomorrow Using Stem Cells". But unless you're one of the 150 middle and high-school students spending July at UCSD as part of the math and science residential camp, or the Calit2 Summer Undergraduate Scholars, you won't be guaranteed a seat for Goldstein's talk. So interested parties in San Diego or anywhere in the world are advised to watch his lecture on the Web, thanks to a live Calit2 webcast. Bookmark this URL -- http://calit2.net/webcast -- and tune in at 9am Pacific time on Tuesday, July 15. And if you ...

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A 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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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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Talk about getting students actively involved in what could otherwise be a dry academic lecture: At one point there were nearly 30 students on the Calit2 auditorium stage at UCSD this morning, as Jeanne Ferrante had them scrambling to categorize themselves on some basic principles used in parallel computing. The associate dean of the Jacobs School of Engineering was speaking to more than 150 middle and high-school students participating in this summer's COSMOS 4-week residential science-and-math program at UCSD, as well as many of the Calit2 Summer Undergraduate Scholars.
Helping as master of ceremonies was Ferrante's husband and CSE emeritus professor Larry Carter (pictured with Ferrante ...

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

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

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

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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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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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You need one for your mobile phone, one for your laptop, one for your iPod ... even one for your hedge trimmer. Plug them all in and not only do you have a mess of power cords, you've also got one hefty electricity bill.

External power adapters -- known to some as "wall warts" -- might be ubiquitous in today's gadget-crazed world, but that doesn't mean they're the best option for consumers. Calit2-San Diego Principal Development Engineer Doug Palmer hopes his idea for a "universal power adapter" will provide a much-needed alternative to wall warts. It would supply both power and communications to any consumer electronics device (or multiple devices at once), and when paired with a solar panel, ...

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Calit2's CAMERA marine metagenomics project organized a two-day workshop June 26-27 to focus on "new communication channels in biology". Calit2 webcast the event, and more than 20 individual presentations are now available for on-demand viewing [Windows Media Player required]. Calit2'ers were well represented: Jerry Sheehan (left) did a "Calit2 Technology Overview", focusing on Web 2.0 tools; CAMERA executive director Paul Gilna (right) outlined the project's experience as "A Community-driven Cyberinfrastructure for Metagenomics"; a team of Phil Bourne's colleagues from SciVee laid out how the online video service is "Taking Scientific Communication into the 21st Century"; and John Wooley, ...

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

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

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

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

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

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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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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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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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Several young faculty members affiliated with Calit2 on the UCSD campus are among the 20 recipients of the 2008 Hellman Faculty Fellows Awards, announced June 23. They include (pictured left to right): Morana Alac from Communication; Ricardo Dominguez (Visual Arts); and Curt Schurgers from Electrical and Computer Engineering. The 20 assistant professors will share in $360,000 in the 2008-'09 academic year. The awards are funded by Chris and Warren Hellman to "support the research and creative activities of promising assistant professors who show capacity for great distinction in their work" -- and to enhance their progress toward tenure.

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UCSD's Biomedical Library hosted a free "Extreme Googling" workshop today that featured some Google Scholar tips Calit2 researchers should find especially helpful:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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