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Hottest Posters
From enhanced music search engines to interactive virtual reality, novel stem cell breakthroughs, bomb detection technology and "eyes-free" text messaging, Jacobs School of Engineering graduate students are working on technologies that will improve our lives and general health.
More than 240 of these engineering students will present their revolutionary work during the Jacobs School of Engineering's Research Expo on February 19. Below is a sneak peak of a handful of them.
A Music Search Engine with Ears (or How to Tag Millions of Songs)
Computer Vision Meets a Parking Lot
Keeping the Heart Healthy Via Stem Cells
Interactive Virtual Realty
With their immersive 3-D capabilities, virtual-reality environments (VEs) provide the kind of intense visual experience that two-dimensional digital televisions could never to live up to. But digital TVs outperform VEs in one important way: They can play high-resolution video in real-time without a hitch, while VEs have trouble rendering the data-heavy video clips at a constant frame rate.
University of California, San Diego grad student Han Suk Kim is trying to narrow that performance gap so that VEs can one day be used for high-resolution video conferencing, video surveillance or even in virtual movie theaters. Kim, a computer science and engineering Ph.D. student at the Jacobs School of Engineering, has developed an efficient "mipmap" algorithm that "shrinks" high-resolution video content so that it can be played interactively in VEs. He has also created several optimization solutions for sustaining a stable video playback frame rate, even when the video is projected onto non-rectangular VE screens. Kim will showcase his work during a student poster session at the Jacobs School of Engineering's Research Expo. Read the full story here.
Poster #80: HIGH RESOLUTION VIDEO PLAYBACK IN IMMERSIVE VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS
Primary Student: Han Suk Kim
Faculty Advisor: Larry Smarr | Jurgen P. Schulze
Department: Computer Science & Engineering
Research Institute Affiliation:
California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2)
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Diagnosing Cancer Early
Jacobs School researchers have discovered how to detect the "large" pieces of DNA in a person's blood that often signal that a person has cancer. Because this large or "high molecular weight" DNA appears in human blood before tumors can be detected, the new DNA detection technique could lead to new cancer screening tools that catch cancer early, which greatly increases treatment success rates and often reduces the severity of treatment side effects. Bioengineering graduate student Rajaram Krishnan will present this work at UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering's Research Expo.
The core technology behind this potential cancer diagnosis breakthrough is called high conductance dielectrophoresis (HC-DEP). With HC-DEP, when you apply an electric field to a sample sitting on a special chip, different components of the sample separate out on different parts of the chip. Last year, the team—led by bioengineering graduate student Krishnan from Professor Michael J. Heller's NanoEngineering lab—published a key technical breakthrough in the journal Electrophoresis. They showed that unlike conventional DEP, HC-DEP can be used to separate the components that make up blood samples and other high ionic strength samples. Now, the team's new work demonstrates that unlabeled high molecular weight DNA nanoparticles can be separated and detected in whole blood samples using this technique.
The implications of this work may reach well beyond new cancer diagnostic tools. The researchers say a similar approach can be used to separate different kinds of stem cells. The overall goal for the research is to create a new generation of "seamless" sample-to-answer diagnostic systems; where a complex sample is run through the device, and the specific analytes are rapidly concentrated onto microscopic locations and subsequently detected. Such HC-DEP systems will allow complex clinical and biological samples such as blood, plasma and serum to be rapidly and directly analyzed for a variety of important disease related-biomarkers.
To make this vision a reality, the group is forming a startup company called Biological Dynamics. Their approach is to fabricate novel HC-DEP devices for research and diagnostic applications.
Poster #195: NOVEL DIELECTROPHORETIC DEVICE FOR CANCER CELL, STEM CELL AND DNA BIOMARKER ISOLATION AND DETECTION
Primary Student: Rajaram Krishnan
Faculty Advisor: Michael Heller | Sadik Esener
Department: NanoEngineering
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A Music Search Engine with Ears (or How to Tag Millions of Songs)
Imagine a search engine that actually "listens" to songs and associates each song with relevant words or "semantic tags." A Jacobs School of Engineering team is working on such a system and computer science graduate student Luke Barrington will present the team's latest findings at Research Expo, a UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering research event. Using a Gaussian mixture model (GMM), the system analyzes the audio features of a novel song and annotates it with relevant words or tags. By automatically associating music content with relevant tags, semantic search for music is now possible. Semantics also improves the music search engine's ability to identify similar music and to give users music recommendations. The team has also developed an online, collaborative, social music game that collects reliable, human tags for songs to train the music search engine. With this game, the team plans to grow the vocabulary to understand new musical terms. They are also using the data to begin to comprehend the role of personal preference, demographics and social connections in determining musical opinions.
Poster #106: HOW TO TAG MILLIONS OF SONGS
Primary Student: Luke Barrington
Faculty Advisor(s):
Gert Lanckriet |
Garrison W. Cottrell
Department: Electrical & Computer Engineering
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"Eyes-Free" Text Messaging
Move over "hands free" cell phone calls…and make room for "eyes-free" text messages.
At Research Expo, a team of computer science graduate students from UC San Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering will present their work toward a text messaging system that converts words to vibrations that buzz in the message recipient's phone. The vibrations capture some of the linguistic properties of the actual word such as rhythm, intonation and vocal stress. The graduate students hope that recipients will be able to identify each word just by feeling the vibration.
Computer science graduate student Kevin Li is the mastermind behind the project which is called "Vibe Messaging." Li hopes it will lead to "an eyes-free messaging backchannel" for times when you need to be able to receive messages even through you can not read text messages or talk on your phone.
As a proof of concept, the computer scientists converted five common text message phrases into vibrations: "Hello, Goodbye, I miss you, Where are you? and Are you there?" Each string of vibrations conveys some linguistic properties of the word or phrase so that each text message is identifiable by just feeling the vibration. The team also wrote the necessary software which must run on the phone of both the sender and the receiver. The vibration instructions dictate exactly when and for how long the phone's vibration motor should turn on and off in order to create the pattern of vibrations that resembles the word.
Poster #51: VIBE MESSAGING: AUGMENTING COMPUTER MEDIATED COMMUNICATION WITH A VIBROTACTILE ENCODING OF SPEECH
Primary Student: Elizabeth S. Bales
Faculty Advisor(s): William Griswold
Department: Computer Science & Engineering
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Computer Vision Meets a Parking Lot
Looking for parking in a notoriously busy and chronically full parking lot is no fun. With computer vision tools, computer science graduate student Catherine Wah is leading an effort to build an automated system that monitors a UC San Diego parking lot and identifies free parking spaces. This system will include multiple pan-tilt-zoom cameras mounted on the roof of the Calit2 building, Atkinson Hall. It will ultimately be integrated with a status dissemination tool, where drivers will be able to query the parking lot status via SMS. Wah and her collaborators, including UC San Diego undergraduate researchers, are still in the early stages of the project. They are currently working on the algorithms capable of identifying open spaces, even if those open spots are almost completely blocked from the camera views by other vehicles.
Poster #35: PARKING SPACE VACANCY MONITORING
Primary Student: Catherine L. Wah
Faculty Advisor(s): Serge Belongie
Department: Computer Science & Engineering
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Fire Control
UC San Diego engineering graduate student Michael Gollner and his team of researchers are heating things up over their breakthrough fire control research. The group is studying the behavior of fire in warehouses, which contain highly flammable materials such as plastic products stored in cardboard packaging. The purpose of this research is to help aid the classification of commodities stored inside warehouses, in an effort to update codes and standards for the installation of fire sprinklers in such buildings. "The goal is to study what is controlling the flammability of anything that is used in warehouses – whether it is a box of DVD players or plastic cups – and what is the controlling parameter that is making the fire more dangerous or less dangerous," Gollner explained. "This is a scientific approach that has rarely been used in the fire community."
Gollner and his team conducted their experiments in a fire lab in which they insulated the sides of a simulated warehouse commodity and tracked the fire moving inside the commodity using temperature measurement devices called thermocouples.
"By finding the controlling processes in a small laboratory-scale fire, we can aid in commodity placement and design of current and future warehouses preventing catastrophic fires in the future," Gollner said.
Poster #191: A FUNDAMENTAL APPROACH TOWARDS FIRE HAZARD CLASSIFICATION
Primary Student: Michael John Gollner
Faculty Advisor(s): Forman A. Williams
Department: Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering
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Bomb Detection Technology
Hidden roadside explosives are a growing threat for U.S. military forces abroad. Engineering faculty and students at the Jacobs School are working with statistical pattern recognition and image processing to possibly improve the detectability of specific objects including roadside explosives. The team, led by Structural Engineering professor Francesco Lanza di Scalea and grad student Arun Manohar, is working on an imagery-based surveillance technique which uses visible and infrared images, analyzed by statistical pattern recognition algorithms to detect and classify suspicious objects such as camouflaged bombs placed at roadside and in airports. The research topic is that of multispectral surveillance, which involves detecting objects and monitoring different wavelengths of radiation from an object going from visible to ultraviolet and infrared lights and combining all of those different radiation wavelengths to identify an object. According to the Defense Department, improvised explosive devices account for 50 percent of all daily attacks in Iraq. Of the three types of IEDs (roadside bombs, vehicle-born bombs and suicide bombs), roadside bombs are responsible for the most casualties. The most common IED camouflages in Iraq include shoe boxes, milk cartons, cigarette cartons, plastic bags and garbage cans.
As part of his research, Manohar is collecting both visible and infrared signatures of an object and then analyze the images and extract certain features like shape, texture and material type. The third step will use statistical pattern recognition to determine whether an anomalous object is harmless or not.
The goal of the project is to advance fundamental knowledge in new technologies for sensors and sensor networks, and in the use of sensor data in control and decision making, particularly in relation to the prediction and detection of explosives and related threats.
Poster #226: MULTI SPECTRAL IMAGERY FOR THE DETECTION OF ROADSIDE EXPLOSIVES
Primary Student: Arun Manohar
Faculty Advisor(s): Francesco Lanza di Scalea
Department: Structural Engineering
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Keeping the Heart Healthy Via Stem Cells
Researchers in the promising field of regenerative medicine continue to work on methods of restoring the structure and function of damaged tissues and organs. They are also working to create solutions for organs that become permanently damaged, with the ultimate goal of finding a way to cure previously untreatable injuries and diseases.
Karen Wei, a bioengineering graduate student at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering, is helping fuel the field of regenerative medicine through her work with stem cells.
During her poster presentation at Research Expo, Wei will display results from her research on using human embryonic stem cells to create cardiac constructs that can replenish injured heart tissue.
Wei is currently developing a tool to isolate the relationship between endothelial cells and cardiomyocytes from human embryonic stem cell cultures. In doing this, she has introduced a genetic construct into the stem cells that encodes an antibiotic resistance that is cell type specific. By exposing cultures to an antibiotic that is usually toxic for unmodified cells, Wei and her research group can isolate the cells they are interested in, such as endothelial cells and cardiomyocytes. The ultimate goal of Wei's research is to understand the necessary signals that influence cardiomyocyte differentiation of human embryonic stem cells.
"In order to restore function of damaged myocardium, the tissue engineer's dream is to transplant either cells or 3D constructs that will be able to populate damaged regions of the heart, integrate with host tissue, and functionally resemble healthy heart tissue," Wei explained. "However, it is absolutely necessary to really understand this process of stem cell specification and differentiation before we can create safe, effective cell therapies for the clinic. It is also important to understand the proliferation, survival, and organization because of their implications for clinical therapies."
Poster #16: A GENETIC SELECTION-BASED COCULTURE METHOD EXPLORING THE EFFECTS OF
ENDOTHELIAL-CARDIOMYOCYTE INTERACTIONS ON THE CARDIOMYOGENESIS OF HUMAN EMBRYONIC STEM CELLS
Primary Student: Karen April Wei
Faculty Advisor(s): Andrew McCulloch | Mark Mercola
Department: Bioengineering
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Earthquake Safe Houses
Engineers at the University of California at San Diego recently put a single-story house to the test via a series of strong simulated earthquake shakes. The first jolt to the wood-stud structure with brick veneer measured a 6.6 magnitude, with the final one coming in at 7.2.
Wood stud frames with masonry veneer are commonly used for residential construction and also for commercial buildings throughout the United States. The goal of the tests is to improve the seismic performance of these types of structures and to provide design recommendations for new masonry buildings, including concrete masonry shear walls, concrete masonry walls with clay masonry veneer, and wood-stud frames with clay masonry veneer. Hussein Okail, a UC San Diego structural engineering postdoc, will present the findings from these tests during a student poster presentation at the Jacobs School of Engineering's Research Expo. Read the full story here.
Poster #234: PERFORMANCE-BASED DESIGN OF MASONRY AND MASONRY VENEER
Primary Student:Hussein O. Okail
Faculty Advisor(s): P. Benson Shing
Department: Structural Engineering
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Nifty Nanotubes
Engineers at the University of California at San Diego have come up with a way to help accelerate bone growth through the use of nanotubes and stem cells. This new finding could lead to quicker and better recovery, for example, for patients who undergo orthopedic surgery.
In recent years, stem cells have become a hot topic of investigation with studies suggesting revolutionary medical benefits due to their ability to be converted into selected types of newly generated cells. During their research, the group of UC San Diego bioengineers and material science experts used a nano-bio technology method of placing mesenchymal stem cells on top of very thin titanium oxide nanotubes in order to control the conversion paths, called differentiation, into osteoblasts or bone building cells. Mesenchymal stem cells, which are different from embryonic stem cells, can be extracted and directly supplied from a patient's own bone marrow. Karla Brammer, a Jacobs School materials science graduate student, will also present these findings in a poster session during the Jacobs School of Engineering's Research Expo. Read the full story here.
Poster #157: STEM CELL FATE DICTATED SOLELY BY ALTERED NANOTUBE DIMENSION
Primary Student: Karla Sue Brammer
Faculty Advisor(s): Sungho Jin
Department: Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering
Research Institute Affiliation: Graduate Program in Materials Science and Engineering
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