12.02.13

Adventures in Ubiquitous Computing  

This week teams of students taking CSE 118, Applications in Ubiquitous Computing, will be presenting their finished apps to lecturer and research scientist Nadir Weibel (at left) and his teaching assistant Eric Seidel. Each group did a quarter-long Microsoft Kinect project, and a week-long Google Glass project. Then next week on Dec. 10 from 3-5pm, the students' 10 Kinect and Google Glass applications will be on display in the main lobby of the CSE Building. Passers-by will be invited to test the apps, which were designed to reflect a theme running through CSE 118 this quarter: Augmented Reality. The department will offer snacks and refreshments during the demonstrations just outside of CSE 1202.

Weibel is a research scientist and lecturer in CSE and a research health science specialist at the VA San Diego Health System. He works on human-centered computing at the intersection of computer science, cognitive science, communication, health and social sciences. While he has been at UC San Diego since 2009, Weibel joined the CSE faculty as a lecturer and research scientist in 2013.

The 50 students taking CSE 118 were broken into 10 groups, and each team of five students was given access to a Kinect for the whole quarter. "We went over the SDK and how to use the different features," says Weibel, referring to the Software Development Kit. "There was no guideline in terms of the kind of apps to be developed, but there was continuous coaching and discussion during the quarter on the appropriateness of the proposed idea." Health apps prevailed, such as "Ubicook", a Kinect app (at right) for the "chef inside of all of us, enabling people everywhere to make sense of the supplies they have on hand. Ubicook solves the manual input process of locating recipes by scanning and identifying food items and automatically querying recipe sites to save time and money."

For the Google Glass project, there was only funding for two of the systems, so students rotated, and every week, one of the groups would stop working on the Kinect for a "week-long Glass hackathon," says Weibel. For the Glass project, teams were encouraged to focus on an healthcare application. Click here to watch some of the Google Glass project videos.

U.S. Patent Issued to CSE Professor and Former Postdoctoral Scholar 

CSE Prof. Andrew Kahng  (far left) and former CSE postdoctoral scholar Hailong Yao are named on one of only two patents awarded by the U.S. Patent Office in the first half of 2013 to researchers in the Jacobs School of Engineering. That's according to the UC San Diego Technology Transfer Office. The patent filed through the campus protects the intellectual property developed by Kahng and Yao for "layout decomposition for double patterning lithography" (U.S. Patent # 8,402,396). The invention, first submitted in 2010, provides systems and methods for layout decomposition to produce exposure layouts that can be used to perform double patterning lithography (DPL). Yao spent two years in Kahng's lab. Then in 2009, he returned to China to become an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Technology at Beijing's Tsinghua University, where he had earned his Ph.D. in 2007. "In my postdoctoral research, I focused on the areas of design for manufacturing, delay and leakage optimization, etc.," said Yao. DPL layout composition was also the topic of a joint 2010 paper Kahng, Yao and other colleagues published in IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems. The paper focused on process nodes of 45 nanometers or below. Yao's current research group in Beijing focuses on the area of VLSI physical design, including topics of floor-planning, placement, routing, clock tree synthesis and routing, timing analysis and optimization.

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CSE Prof. Scott Klemmer on Peer Assessment in Online Education
 

Is it possible to teach classes with creative, open-ended projects on a massive scale? Difficult, but not impossible, according to CSE Prof. Scott Klemmer. Massive online courses benefit from the 'wisdom of the crowd,' he says, which can actually enhance a crucial element of creative coursework: peer assessment. The challenge, according to Klemmer, speaking at a lecture organized by the Qualcomm Institute's Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) Initiative, is that students must know what 'good' means, which can be difficult when they are sitting behind computer screens scattered all over the world. But the path is smoother now that Klemmer and colleagues have developed a set of best practices enshrined in what he calls the Seven Habits for Highly Effective Peer Assessment, which have been used in more than 100 massive open online courses (MOOCs). Klemmer's research is informed by his own collaboration with Coursera in 2012 to launch the first massive-scale class -- a design course - with self and peer assessment.Read news release about peer assessment.

MIT Enterprise Forum to Be Moderated by CSE's Smarr

CSE Prof. Larry Smarr will moderate a discussion on "The Quantified Self Movement," the title of an upcoming MIT Enterprise Forum organized by the Forum's San Diego chapter.  The January 15 event will take place from 5pm to 8:30pm in the UCSD Medical Education and Telemedicine Building on the UC San Diego campus. Smarr - the founding director of Calit2 and "defacto evangelist" of the quantified-self movement - is the "poster man for the medical strategy of the future," according to a 2012 article in the MIT Technology Review. As promoted by the MIT Enterprise Forum, the session and "lively panel discussion" will attempt to answer certain questions: What is the Quantified Self movement and why are fitness buffs, techno geeks and patients with chronic conditions obsessively monitoring their various personal metrics?  Is this trend the beginning of a major shift in how we look at our health?  What is the distinction between digital health and self-monitoring? Why are global sports clothing companies investing in this technology? According to organizers, attendees will also learn about the "growing availability of inexpensive monitoring devices, personal genetic profiles, and the increasing sophistication of software apps and social networks which promise to fuel the self-tracking revolution around personal health and fitness."  Click here to register and attend the Forum.

UPDATE: Kickstarter Campaign Succeeds

Thanks to a last-minute surge in donations, a CSE-related Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign that ended on November 24 succeeded in raising the modest $2,500 needed to put finishing touches to an app to be used by visitors to the Japanese Friendship Garden in Balboa Park. Some 37 donors put the app over the top. The app was developed primarily by CSE senior Jesus Rios during a summer abroad in Osaka, Japan, with the Calit2-based Pacific Rim Experiences for Undergraduates (PRIME) program. Rios will now be funded to finish the app for deployment in January, along with the PlaceSticker Wi-Fi, solar-powered sensor devices that will interact with the app to engage visitors whenever they arrive near one of ten locations in the Garden. Users will be asked to solve haiku riddles at each location, to win a coupon reward. Read the original news release. 

A Chance CSE Encounter in Paris

CSE Prof. Gary Cottrell is finishing up the quarter on sabbatical in Dijon, France. That's where his coincidentally-named colleague, Bob French, is a research director in the National Center for Science Research at the University of Burgundy. Among his excursions: Tuebingen, Germany, for the Bernstein Conference on Computational Neuroscience, and frequent trips to Paris. After one such trip - to see Fleetwood Mac in concert, no less - Cottrell reported a chance encounter that seems hard to fathom from 10,000 miles away. He was at the train station getting ready to return to Dijon when he thought he caught a friendly face in the crowd. Sure enough, it turned out to be former CSE staffer Angella Jivkov-Metz (pictured at right with Cottrell in Dijon). She worked in the department before moving to Florence in 2012. Now she's married to her UCSD "sweetheart" and they live in Paris. Cottrell gave Jivkov-Metz a guided tour of Dijon.

December 4 - 11am - Room 1202, CSE Building

UCSD SEW mathematics professor and CSE instructor Mia Minnes talks about "Helping Students See 'The Big Picture'." She will talk about teaching CSE20/21, and about several outreach and mentorship projects she has helped lead, including undergraduate research, TA training, and the potentially transformative Summer Program for Incoming Students (SPIS).

December 5 - 5-6pm - Calit2 Room 4004, Atkinson Hall

UC Berkeley School of Information professor Marti Hearst delivers the final lecture in the Design at Large fall series organized by CSE Prof. Scott Klemmer. She recently completed her first book on "Search User Interfaces", and other interests include information visualization, natural language processing, and empirical analysis of social media. 

Also coming up next week, on Dec. 9, a CSE Distinguished Lecture featuring Michael Fellows of Australia's Charles Darwin University. And looking ahead, mark your calendar for CSE Day 2014 on Jan. 23.

San Francisco, CA... Dec. 2-4: CSE Prof. Larry Smarr is in San Francisco untilWednesday at a UCSF Institute for Computational Health Sciences meeting. He will present on "Quantifying the Time Progression of a Human Autoimmune Disease Using Genome Sequencing and Supercomputers." The following weekDec. 9-13, he heads to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida for a NASA Advisory Council meeting, as well as a meeting of the council's Information Technology Infrastructure Committee, which Smarr chairs.

Toronto, Canada... Dec. 7-8: CSE Research Scientist and Lecturer Nadir Weibel flies to Toronto for a meeting of the program committee of the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (CHI). CHI will take place next spring April 26 through May 1, also in Toronto.

Santa Barbara, CA... Dec. 9-12, George Porter will attend the ACM 9th International Conference on Emerging Networking Experiments and Technologies (CoNEXT).  He has two papers in a session called "Trains, Lanes and Autobalancing." With grad student Rishi Kapoor and CSE professors Geoff Voelker and Alex Snoeren, one paper is called "Bullet Trains: A Study of NIC Burst Behavior at Microsecond Timescales." The second paper, "FasTrak: Enabling Express Lanes in Multi-Tenant Data Centers," is co-authored with grad student Radhika Niranjan Mysore and CSE Prof. Amin Vahdat (now on leave at Google). 

Have a notice about upcoming travel to conferences, etc., for the Faculty GPS column in our weekly CSE Newsletter? Be sure to let us know! Email Doug Ramsey at dramsey@ucsd.edu.