UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering

6/14/13

Tackling the Next Frontier in Single-Cell Sequencing

You’ve heard of Mini-Me. Now along comes the uncomical field of Mini-Metagenomics. Building on their earlier successes in developing computational tools to assemble the genomes of individual bacterial cells, researchers have developed a method for sequencing the DNA of a collection of bacteria simultaneously – effectively decoding the genome of rare, low-abundance bacteria found on a hospital restroom sink.
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Engineering Students Gear Up <br> to Compete in National UAV Challenge

6/14/13

Engineering Students Gear Up to Compete in National UAV Challenge

Their mission: make an unmanned autonomous vehicle, better known as a UAV, take off, fly over specific markers, find five to 11 targets and then land—all in half an hour. That is the challenge that a team of 25 students at UC San Diego is getting ready to tackle this week. They are taking part in the Student Unmanned Aerial Systems Competition June 20 to 23 at Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland. The winning team can take home as much as $15,000.
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6/13/13

Three Jacobs School Scholars Among 10 Distinguished Campus Teachers

Hyonny Kim from structural engineering and Richard Ord and Kevin Webb from computer science and engineering are among the 10 UC San Diego scholars recognized with teaching awards.
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6/11/13

Gordon Scholars Learn from Experience

Integrity. Honesty. Teamwork. And smartphones. These are a few of the essential leadership tools engineering students and young engineering professionals need to become successful entrepreneurs in the new economy, said Ronald Reedy, co-founder of Peregrine Semiconductor at a recent Gordon Engineering Leadership forum for students, staff and alumni of the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. Organized by the Gordon Engineering Leadership Center, the forum is one of many opportunities students have to learn from the experience of their predecessors.
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6/10/13

Positive Peer Pressure More Effective Than Cash Incentives, Study Finds

Appealing to people’s desire for a good reputation is more effective than cold, hard cash, researchers at Harvard, Yale, the Federal Trade Commission and the University of California, San Diego, found in a study published June 18 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Their findings could be applied to everything from increasing recycling rates, reducing energy usage to cutting carbon emissions.
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6/6/13

Metabolic Model of E. coli Integrated with Protein Structures Reveals How Bacterial Growth Responds to Temperature Change

Bioengineers at the University of California, San Diego have developed a computational model of 1,366 genes in E. colithat includes 3D protein structures and has enabled them to compute the temperature sensitivity of the bacterium’s proteins. The study, published June 7 in the journal Science, opens the door for engineers to create heat-tolerant microbial strains for production of commodity chemicals, therapeutic proteins and other industrial applications.
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6/6/13

$18.5 Million Alumni Gift Lifts UC San Diego's Computer Science and Engineering Dept. into New Era

An $18.5 million gift from a UC San Diego alumnus will set the computer science and engineering department on a new course into the future, funding new faculty endowed chairs, top-of-the-line teaching labs, support for graduate students, and expanded mentoring and tutoring programs for the next generation of undergraduates. The gift marks a milestone in UC San Diego’s history as it is the largest gift ever made to the university by one of its alumni.
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6/5/13

Firefighting Robot Paints 3D Thermal Imaging Picture for Rescuers

Engineers in the Coordinated Robotics Lab at the University of California, San Diego, have developed new image processing techniques for rapid exploration and characterization of structural fires by small Segway-like robotic vehicles. A sophisticated on-board software system takes the thermal data recorded by the robot’s small infrared camera and maps it onto a 3D scene constructed from the images taken by a pair of stereo RGB cameras.
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