Dean's Letter • Feature Stories • Media Watch • Archive

DEAN'S LETTER
Andrew Carnegie noted, “teamwork is …the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results,” and I believe this is even more true of collaborations across traditional disciplines. As people with different backgrounds and knowledge come together, they bring new perspectives and solutions to bear on advancing technology.

Our willingness to partner with researchers across the campus has long been a hallmark of the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science. From our early collaborations with medicine on artificial limbs and biotechnology, and the sciences to more recent partnerships with education, the arts and the School of Theater, Film and Television, we are eager to collaborate with our colleagues in other fields.

The selection of Vinton G. Cerf MS ’70, PhD ’72 and his colleague Robert E. Kahn as recipients of the 2005 Turing Award – considered the “Nobel Prize of Computing” – for their early, critical work on TCP/IP protocols also reflects the value of a team-based approach. I hope you will read more about their partnership and impact on the Internet in the story below.

I also am pleased to announce that mechanical and aerospace engineering professor Jason Speyer has been elected this year to the National Academy of Engineering in recognition of his pioneering work on navigation and control. We are incredibly proud of all of our distinguished faculty and alumni.

Sincerely,

Vijay K. Dhir
Dean


FEATURE STORIES
UCLA School of Engineering Alum Chosen for Prestigious Turing Award
UCLA School of Engineering alumnus Vinton G. Cerf has been named a winner of the prestigious 2004 A.M. Turing Award, widely considered to be the computing field’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize. The award, presented annually by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), also is being given to Robert E. Kahn. Cerf and Kahn were chosen for their pioneering work on the design and implementation of the Internet’s basic communications protocols.
http://www.engineer.ucla.edu/news/2005/turing.html

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Professor Elected to National Academy of Engineering
Professor Jason Speyer, mechanical and aerospace engineering, has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering for “the development and application of advanced techniques for optimal navigation and control of a wide range of aerospace vehicles.”
http://www.engineer.ucla.edu/news/2005/speyernae.html

Keck Foundation Grant to Fund Vision Research
A team of researchers at UCLA received a $670,000 grant from the W. M. Keck Foundation to establish the W. M. Keck Foundation Laboratory for Vision and Image Science, an interdisciplinary effort between the departments of Statistics, Psychology and Computer Science.
http://www.engineer.ucla.edu/news/2005/visionlab.html

UCLA Engineers Collaborate on Unique Sensor System for Film Production
A team of computer science and electrical engineering researchers in the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science are partnering with students in UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television (TFT) on a sensor system for film production as part of the Advanced Technology for Cinematography (ATC) project.
http://www.engineer.ucla.edu/news/2005/atc.html

Chemical Engineering Professor Gives Keynote Address
Chemical engineering professor Yoram Cohen was an invited international keynote speaker at the Australian Water Association’s Membranes and Desalination Conference in Adelaide, speaking on “High Recovery Membrane Desalination and Concentrate Issues in California.” Cohen was awarded two grants from the California Department of Water Resources and the Desalination Coalition to develop improved methods of increasing the efficiency of membrane desalination of brackish groundwater and agricultural drainage water from the San Joaquin Valley. For more about Cohen’s research, please visit http://www.chemeng.ucla.edu/YCohen/index.html.

2005 UCLA Engineering Awards – Friday, April 1 Nomination Deadline
Nominations for the 2005 UCLA Engineering awards, which recognize the extraordinary achievements of our alumni, faculty and students, are due by Friday, April 1. (Self-nominations are welcomed.) The 2005 award recipients will be honored at an awards dinner on Friday, November 4.

To learn more about the awards categories or to submit a nomination, please visit http://www.engineer.ucla.edu/alumni/awarddesc.html or http://www.engineer.ucla.edu/alumni/nominationform.html.


MEDIA WATCH: UCLA ENGINEERING IN THE NEWS
Materials: The Next Generation
When today’s chemistry graduate students go out into the world, they're as likely to rub shoulders with physicists and engineers as they are with their own peers - particularly if they’re called on to use their organic or inorganic synthetic skills to create materials or nanodevices. What better way to prepare future materials scientists than to immerse them in a real materials lab environment? To that end, a group of University of California, Los Angeles professors have developed the Materials Creation Training Program (MCTP), a two-year interdisciplinary program to supplement a student’s regular graduate work.
http://pubs.acs.org/cen/education/83/8302education.html

IC Floor Planning Moves Ahead
A new approach to IC floor planning is said to reduce wire length while running orders of magnitude faster than previous solutions. If it can be applied successfully on a commercial level, the Patoma algorithm developed at the University of California at Los Angeles could help usher in a new generation of IC design-planning and placement tools.
http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=59100114

Remembering Israel’s First Computer
When young Princeton engineer Jerry Estrin arrived in Haifa on a slow immigrant boat in late 1953 to build the Middle East’s first computer, he faced just two problems. There were no parts or tools, from vacuum tubes to soldering irons, available in Israel, and there was no staff, trained or otherwise.
http://www.cjnews.com/viewarticle.asp?id=4960&s=1

Microbots Grow Own Muscles from Cells
Nanotech researchers have built tiny self-assembling machines that even grow their own muscles from cells taken from living animals. Besides just blurring the line between organism and machine, the first of these nano-bio-bots may signal a breakthrough in how to mass produce bio-machines: The hybrid devices were grown on silicon chips using the same principles and some of the same technology employed to make integrated circuits.
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20050131/musclebot.html

---
Read more UCLA Engineering news at http://www.engineer.ucla.edu.

The E-Bulletin is produced by the Office of External Affairs in the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science.

If you have comments or a story you think our subscribers would like to read, tell the E-Bulletin about it at media@ea.ucla.edu.


View past e-Bulletins: