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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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I'm in Milwaukee, WI, for the Ecological Society of America Annual Meeting. I'm not an ecologist, but I'll be presenting to a group of them tomorrow. My research group has been collaborating on a project called "EcoRaft" with UCI Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Professor Lynn Carpenter and her students, with support from Calit2. The project was selected for presentation at the ESA meeting this year.

Here's the abstract, from http://eco.confex.com/eco/2008/techprogram/ P10884.HTM

"While sciences such as physics and chemistry lend themselves to compelling opportunities for interaction (explosions, reactions, objects in motion), restoration ecology is more challenging for children ...

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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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The second bi-weekly SURF-IT (Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship in IT) symposium drew about 40 guests this week at Calit2@UC Irvine. Profs. Steve Jenks (electrical engineering and computer science) and Bill Tomlinson (informatics) discussed their research and the contributions their undergrad students are making.

Large-scale 3D objects also present challenges to HIPerWall, so the team is working on ways to coordinate drawing across multiple displays. Their approach: allow each of the 50 monitors to draw and display its own piece of the total object, thereby avoiding bottlenecks. For starters, the team is modifying OGRE, an open-source 3D rendering application.

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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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The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellows (SURF-IT) at the Irvine division of Calit2 got a no-holds-barred look into the research realm during a lunch seminar today. As they munched on sandwiches and potato salad, the students engaged in an interactive discussion with SURF-IT co-director Said Shokair, who is also director of UCI's Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program. Shokair enthusiastically expounded on the importance of research and the ways in which UROP - or as he calls it, the "Land of Opportunities" - can help the students achieve their goals. He also touched upon the dos and don'ts of grad school applications, and the ins and outs of proper research conduct.

"Now that you've filled ...

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

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

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

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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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