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E-BULLETIN
UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science
May 14, 2008
DEAN'S
LETTER
One of the school's biggest events is this month — the UCLA
Engineering 2008 Technology Forum, to be held May 27, at De
Neve Commons on the UCLA Campus. This annual program is our opportunity
to share some of the ground-breaking research being conducted
here at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied
Science. Faculty and PhD candidates from all seven of the school's
academic departments are scheduled to make presentations on their
work.
One of the forum’s highlights is our keynote
speaker and first L.M.K. Boelter Distinguished Lecturer: Raymond
L. Orbach, the Under Secretary for Science at the Department of
Energy. He will speak on “Transformational Research and
our Energy Future.” We look forward to hearing his insights
on the frontiers of energy research.
At the DOE, Dr. Orbach oversees the department’s
research and development programs and its 17 national laboratories.
He also serves as the department's Director of the Office of Science,
which has a $4 billion budget for advanced research in energy,
physics, biological and environmental sciences and computer science.
Before taking the post at the DOE, Dr. Orbach
was UC Riverside’s chancellor, serving from 1992 until 2002.
For many in the UCLA community, Dr. Orbach is
a familiar name. From the 1960s until leaving to lead UC Riverside,
Dr. Orbach was a faculty member of the UCLA Department of Physics,
leading research in theoretical and experimental physics. During
his last 10 years at UCLA, he also served as the provost of the
College of Letters and Science.
The 2008 Technology Forum will also feature an
industry awards ceremony, and a student poster competition, sponsored
by Yahoo! I hope many of you will be able to join us for this
special event.
Sincerely,
Vijay K. Dhir
Dean
FEATURE
STORIES
UCLA
Engineering receives $1.3 million for Need-Based Scholarships
The UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science
has received a $1.3 million endowment gift from an anonymous donor
to fund scholarships for financially needy undergraduates. In
an effort to double the number of scholarships the endowment will
provide, UCLA Engineering is leveraging the gift, asking other
donors to give $25,000 or more, to be matched by this fund. In
this way, the school will be able to provide 48 scholarships —
rather than just 24 — worth $50,000 each, beginning in fall
2009. Each scholarship will be named for the donor who matches
the challenge gift amount.
UCLA researcher, colleagues devise new method for protecting
private data
Companies and organizations
that keep sensitive personal information on millions of Americans
have become attractive targets for hackers in recent years, resulting
in billions of dollars in losses for U.S. businesses and misery
for countless consumers. But now Amit Sahai,
an associate professor of computer science at the UCLA Henry Samueli
School of Engineering and Applied Science, and his colleagues
have devised a new data-protection method they hope will put Internet
criminals out of business.
Researchers
at UCLA Engineering Discover a Theoretical Model to Predict Jamming
that Could Provide New Avenues in Materials Innovation and Medicine
Researchers at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and
Applied Science have come up with a theoretical model to predict
when granular materials become jammed. This advancement not only
broadens fundamental knowledge, it also provides new avenues to
a number of practical areas that ranges from materials innovation
to medicine. The study was published in Nature Physics on May
1 and is also available on the journal's web site. The study's
authors are: Pirouz Kavehpour, assistant professor
of mechanical and aerospace engineering; graduate student Kevin
Lu; and Emily Brodsky, an associate professor of earth
and planetary sciences at UC Santa Cruz.
OTHER NEWS
Computer science professor Judea Pearl
will receive an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from
Chapman University in Orange, California. Pearl will also serve
as Chapman's keynote speaker at the university's undergraduate
commencement ceremony on May 17.
Electrical engineering professor Frank
Chang has been awarded the 2008 Pan Wen-Yuen Award, considered
the most prestigious technical award in Taiwan. Chang was honored
for his “fundamental contributions to the heterojunction
bipolar transistor (HBT) device and integrated circuits development
for wireless communications.” Pan, was the Chief Technical
Officer of RCA Lab in the 1970s and was integral in the development
of Taiwan’s worldwide-leading industry in semiconductor
manufacturing. The award honors an individual researcher and/or
technical leader who has made a significant impact to world-wide
semiconductor or microelectronic technologies.
Yi Tang, assistant professor
of chemical and biomolecular engineering, has been awarded a Camille
Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award. Given by the Camille & Henry
Dreyfus Foundation, this awards program supports talented young
faculty in the chemical sciences who demonstrate leadership in
research and education.
The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) has awarded
the 2008 Bergles-Rohsenow Young Investigator Award in Heat Transfer
to Laurent Pilon, assistant professor of mechanical
and aerospace engineering. Pilon was recognized for "significant
contributions to heat, mass and radiation transfer in foams, nanocomposite
materials and biological systems." He will receive the award
at the ASME International Mechanical Engineering Congress &
Exposition, to be held in Boston in fall.
The Society for Industrial Microbiology (SIM) has selected James
Liao, Chancellor's Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular
Engineering, to receive its 2008 Charles Thom Award. The award
recognizes "individuals who have made one or more outstanding
research contributions in industrial microbiology and/or biotechnology.
These contributions should be of exceptional merit, reflecting
an independence of thought and originality that adds appreciably
to scientific knowledge."
ASME has selected Vijay K. Dhir, dean and professor
of mechanical and aerospace engineering, to receive the 2008 Robert
Henry Thurston Lecture Award. He was recognized for "seminal
and path-breaking contributions to science and engineering of
phase-change heat and mass transfer with boiling and multiple
flows, which have had a long-lasting and significant impact on
a diverse set of critical applications." The award will be
presented at the 2008 ASME International Mechanical Engineering
Congress and Exposition, to be held this fall in Boston.
A joint computer science/electrical
engineering paper authored by professors Frank Chang,
Jason Cong and Glenn Reinman,
visiting professor Eran Socher and
graduate students Adam Kaplan, Mishali Naik,
and Rocco Tam received the best paper award from
the 14th International Symposium on High Performance Computer
Architecture (HPCA, held in Salt Lake City in February). This
year's symposium received 161 papers, accepted 31, and gave only
one best paper award. This paper, "CMP Network-on-Chip Overlaid
With Multi-Band RF-Interconnect," explores the use of multi-band
RF interconnect with signal propagation at the speed of light
to provide shortcuts in a many-core network-on-chip (NOC) mesh
topology.
Todd Millstein,
assistant professor of computer science, along with colleagues
from USC, received a best paper at the award 2008 International
Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IP track),
held in St. Louis in February. Their paper was titled "Deriving
State Machines from TinyOS Programs using Symbolic Execution."
Two UCLA Engineering students
are among 18 seniors selected for the UCLA Alumni Association
2008 Distinguished Senior Awards. They are: Drew Kirkpatrick,
civil and environmental engineering, and Edward Pham,
bioengineering.
For the third year in a row, UCLA Engineering's chapter of Eta
Kappa Nu (HKN), the electrical and computer engineering
honor society, was selected as an outstanding chapter by the national
organization.
MEDIA
WATCH: UCLA ENGINEERING IN THE NEWS
Scientific
American
Rainforest Climate Change Sensor Station Goes Wi-Fi. UCLA
researchers are setting up a wireless data collection, dissemination
and analysis system in Costa Rica's La Selva rainforest
For more than half a century, the La Selva Biological Station
in Costa Rica has provided researchers with the data needed to
study everything from local amphibian and reptile populations
to global warming. To meet a growing demand for La Selva's treasure
trove of biological and environmental data, the main facilities
are getting a $785,000 high-tech makeover that includes wireless
access to measurement systems that collect and transmit data and
provide a dynamic 3-D analysis of the rainforest canopy. The Center
for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS) at the University
of California, Los Angeles, plans to develop and expand its mobile
sensor platforms and sensor arrays as well as the information
technology and infrastructure used to store and share the collected
information.
EE Times
Future
of chip design revealed at ISPD
Advances in the design and fabrication of semiconductors
were unveiled here this week at the International Symposium on
Physical Design (ISPD, April 13-16, 2008, Portland, Ore.). As
the premier forum for sharing leading-edge results in chip-design
methodologies, the ISPD also identifies future research trends
years before they become commercialized. (Ultra-high-speed on-chip
interconnects using radio frequency (RF) transmission lines presented
by computer science professor and chair Jason Cong and
electrical engineering professor Frank Chang
featured).
Scientific
American
News Bytes of the Week -- Was the Red Baron Just Lucky?
Manfred Albrecht Freiherr von Richthofen, better known as the
Red Baron, was the most feared German flying ace of World War
I. He racked up 80 official air combat victories—the biggest
winning streak on either side—before being shot down on
April 21, 1918, over northern France. We're inclined to interpret
the Baron's record as proof that he was the best of the best.
But a study published in the Journal of Mathematical Sociology
claims that much of Richthofen's success could be chalked up to
plain old luck. (the study's authors are electrical engineering
professor Vwani Roychowdhury and research engineer
Mikhail Simkin.)
Chicago
Tribune
Out of thin air Engineers float 178-year-old
idea for the latest in hybrid technology
The concept sounds elegantly simple. Compress air
and store it in onboard tanks, releasing the air to operate the
engine's pistons. Use an onboard heat source to produce and store
more air and capture braking energy into tanks, to augment engine
power. Attempts at such never made it beyond prototyping, with
funding scarce and technical hurdles significant. Today's hybrid
air-engine developers, such as Tsu-Chin Tsao,
an engineering professor at UCLA, focus on air/electric hybrids
that switch from a compressor to a motor and back.
CALENDAR
May 16
Materials
Science and Engineering Seminar
"Synthesis and Novel Properties of Si/Ge Nanowires"
S. Tom Picraux, Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies, Los Alamos
National Laboratory
10:30 a.m., 2101 Engineering V
May 17
UCLA Day
UCLA
Engineering Alumni Celebration
5 p.m., Engineering IV Patio
May 19
Electrical
Engineering Seminar, Physical and Wave Electronics
"Nanophotonics Hardware for Quantum Information Science and
Applications"
Oskar Painter, Caltech
1 p.m., 54-134 Engineering IV
May 22
Mechanical
and Aerospace Engineering Research Seminar
"Mechanical Manipulation and Characterization of Biological
Cells – A MEMS and Microrobotics Approach" Yu Sun,
University of Toronto
4:30 p.m., 47-124, Engineering IV
May 23
Ken
Nobe Lecture in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
"Metabolic Engineering: Enabling technology for
the biological production of Fuels and Chemicals" Gregory
Stephanopoulos, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
1:30 p.m., main lecture hall, CNSI Building
May 27
UCLA
Engineering Technology Forum
8 a.m. to 6 p.m.
De Neve Commons, UCLA campus
June 2
Electrical
Engineering Seminar, Physical and Wave Electronics
"Gallium Nitride Electronics and Optoelectronics"
Umesh Mishra, UC Santa Barbara
1 p.m., 54-134 Engineering IV
June 14
UCLA
Engineering Commencement
12:30 p.m.
Pauley Pavilion, UCLA campus
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