E-BULLETIN
UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science
February 8, 2006

DEAN'S LETTER
Engineering is continuously changing. The UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science relies on an extensive network of corporate and government partners to implement these changes. As a result, our students are exposed to contemporary problems and cutting-edge solutions. Our strategic partners help our students bridge the gap from classroom to practical day-to-day applications.

I wish to thank all of our partners for their many contributions to the School of Engineering throughout the year. They play a vital role in our important mission of education, research, and service to society.

These partners foster and share in the school's advancement, help the school contribute to engineering knowledge, and enrich the world’s engineering workforce. We draw on their expertise in shaping our curriculum – ensuring that our students are well prepared to contribute when they graduate. Individuals from industry and government also share their time and experience on campus as adjunct faculty or guest lecturers.

Their support for our students takes many forms – from scholarships and fellowships that allow our students to reach their goals, to funding for student organizations and competitions that help showcase the students’ skills and creativity. Summer internships allow our engineering students to gain valuable career experience while still pursuing their degrees. Technology and engineering companies provide funding for new areas of research, driving new discoveries and developments. Our industrial affiliate partners provide departments and research centers with unrestricted funds to pursue new opportunities as they arise. Our collaborative programs with corporations also provide an important avenue to transition technology into the marketplace, where it impacts people’s daily lives.

Grants also make it possible for our students and faculty to work with high school students to foster interest in engineering and science careers, increasing the next generation of talented engineers available to industry.

Our efforts would not be nearly as effective without the assistance of our many partners and friends in industry and government. As you will read in this E-Bulletin, we all benefit from this collaboration – from the many grants and awards garnered by our students and faculty, to the development of new innovations that could potentially change the way we view online communications. If you would like to get involved, please be sure to visit our website for more information. The strong relationships we have built together will continue to be critical to our future as one of the very best engineering schools in the country.

Sincerely,

Vijay K. Dhir
Dean


FEATURE STORIES
UCLA Engineers Develop Revolutionary Software to Target Suspect Online Communications While Easing Privacy Concerns
The government’s ability to balance the privacy concerns of lawful U.S. citizens with effective monitoring of potential terrorists has proven an increasingly difficult task, particularly in recent months. But a landmark software development by UCLA Engineering professor Rafail Ostrovsky and graduate researcher William Skeith may ease some of these privacy concerns by making the tracking of terrorist communications over the Internet more efficient, and more targeted, than ever before. To read more, click here.


OTHER NEWS
UCLA Annual Research Colloquium Lecture Delivered by Engineering’s Chih-Ming Ho
Mechanical and aerospace engineering professor Chih-Ming Ho delivered the prestigious UCLA Science Faculty Annual Research Colloquium Series lecture on Thursday, Feb. 2, on the topic “Bio-nano World: In the Eye of an Engineer.” Ho holds the Ben Rich-Lockheed Martin Chair and also is Director of the Institute for Cell Mimetic Space Exploration, or CMISE. Designed to promote interdisciplinary research and to be of interest to a general audience, the Colloquium series is open to the public. For more information, click here.

Bioengineering Chair Carlo Montemagno Takes New Post
Carlo Montemagno, chair of UCLA Engineering’s Bioengineering Department, has accepted a new post as Dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio. Montemagno, who will assume his new position later this year, will lead a college with nearly 3,000 graduate and undergraduate students and 143 full-time faculty. Dean Vijay K. Dhir already has begun the process of choosing a new chair for the department. “I want to thank Carlo for his hard work with UCLA Engineering, and wish him every success in his new endeavor,” said Dhir.

Engineering Faculty Win Awards and Honors
Chemical and biomolecular engineering Professor James Liao has been awarded an “Honorary Epistar Chair Professorship” for 2006 by the College of Engineering at National Tsing Hua University in Hsin-chu, Taiwan. Liao also delivered a keynote address at “The Second International Conference on Biologically Inspired Approaches to Advanced Information Technology” at Osaka University, in Osaka, Japan, in January.

Computer science professor Judea Pearl has received a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation to pursue his project “Probabilistic networks for automated reasoning.”

UCLA Engineering’s Iota Gamma Chapter of Eta Kappa Nu, the electrical and computer engineering honor society, has been selected as a recipient of the Outstanding Chapter Award (OCA) for 2004-05. The OCA is a mark of significant distinction for a college chapter. The award will be presented to electrical engineering professor Yahya Rahmat-Samii on behalf of the chapter at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Heads Association Annual Meeting banquet in March.

The IEEE Signal Processing Society has awarded a 2005 Young Author Best Paper Award to co-authors Ali Sayed, electrical engineering chair, former PhD student W. Younis, and N. Al-Dhahir for the paper “Efficient Adaptive Receivers for Joint Equalization and Interface Cancellation in Multiuser Space-Time Block-Coded Systems.” The paper is based on Younis' dissertation work on exploiting space-time coding structure in order to develop efficient adaptive receivers for broadband MIMO communications.

Stefano Soatto and the UCLA Vision Lab are the recipients of a 2006 MURI Award titled “Learning to Recognize for Visual Surveillance” together with researchers at Caltech (Perona), Berkeley (Malik), MIT (Freeman), UIUC (Forsyth) and UCI (Welling). The project is funded for $5M over 5 years and will study visual recognition – the problem of determining the identity of objects and object categories from images. Soatto also has been awarded a grant from AFOSR, titled “Dynamic Vision for Control” to study vision as a sensor for control systems to interact with unknown, uncertain and dynamic environments.

A paper on the Illumimote system, a novel high-performance light sensor module for sensor networks in film production, has been awarded a Second place award at the Student Design Contest (System Category) jointly organized by the 2006 ACM Design Automation Conference and the 2006 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference. The paper was co-authored by Heemin Park, Jonathan Friedman and professsor Mani Srivastava from the Networked and Embedded Systems Lab in HSSEAS, and Pablo Gutierrez, Vids Samanta, and professor Jeff Burke from the UCLA Hypermedia Studio.


MEDIA WATCH: UCLA ENGINEERING IN THE NEWS
Los Angeles Daily News
Cancer in Our Own Backyard
Residents living within two miles of the Santa Susana Field Lab may have been exposed to toxic chemicals through air, water and soil contamination - and they have higher cancer rates than people in communities farther from the lab, researchers revealed Thursday in two landmark studies. Research led by professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering Yoram Cohen on rates of cancer among workers handling radiation and rocket-fuel chemicals is referenced and Cohen is quoted.

ABC 7 Five O’clock Evening News
A Future with Alternative Energy?
Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Chair Vasilios Manousiouthakis was interviewed about President Bush’s State of the Union Address and his focus on alternative energies on Wednesday, February 01, 2006.

Yahoo! News
WINMEC Plans RFID-Focused Wireless CIO Forum
Advanced real-world applications for radio frequency identification technology will be the focus of the CIO Impacts Forum at the University of California Los Angeles on February 7. The Wireless Internet for the Mobile Enterprise Consortium (WINMEC), directed by UCLA School of Engineering professor Rajit Gadh, will host the event.

Fox 11 Ten O'clock Evening News
New Software Balances Privacy with the Search for Terrorists [Link unavailable]
Computer science professor Rafail Ostrovsky interviewed on his landmark software work on January 24, 2006.

Photonics Today
PWest '06: Si Lasers on Horizon
Silicon lasers are coming, and there will be many exciting applications beyond what is now being pursued, said Bahram Jalali, a University of California-Los Angeles electrical engineering professor, at an optoelectronics plenary session at Photonics West 2006. Jalali told a standing-room-only crowd that silicon is an attractive prospect for lasers, and might even be the best material from which to make lasers, because of its high thermal conductivity and high optical damage threshold.

Technology News Daily (AZ)
Software to Target Suspicious Communications
The government's ability to balance the privacy concerns of lawful U.S. citizens with effective monitoring of potential terrorists has proven an increasingly difficult task, particularly in recent months. But a landmark software development by researchers at UCLA's Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science may ease some of these privacy concerns by making the tracking of terrorist communications over the Internet more efficient, and more targeted, than ever before.

Edilportale (Italy)
Pannelli Fotovoltaici: La Plastica Sostituisce Il Silicio
(Materials science and engineering professor Yang Yang and his work on plastic solar cells featured in Italy’s key engineering paper.)
Pannelli solari in plastica sostituiscono quelli in silicio consentendo un considerevole abbattimento dei costi. Si tratta di una ricerca nata nei laboratori dell’Ucla - la University of California di Los Angeles – dove i primi modelli realizzati hanno già garantito un rendimento energetico del 4.4% (dato certificato dalla NREL - National Renewable Energy Laboratory).