E-BULLETIN
UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science
October 12, 2005

DEAN'S LETTER

As a significant part of the School’s 60th anniversary, on November 4 we will honor the remarkable accomplishments of alumni, faculty, and students at our annual UCLA Engineering Awards Dinner. The dinner, and other events we hold during the year to mark our successes, are a very important celebration of the strong ties that exist between the School, our alumni, and the greater community.

These events symbolize the culture I want to foster at our School – one that engenders a sense of partnership, of achievement, and of celebration with respect to our many endeavors in research, education, and service.

As a public institution, our School has a responsibility to raise awareness about important issues. We strive to provide an environment that is open to the discussion of complex ideas and to build strong connections with our friends and neighbors in Los Angeles and beyond.

As you will read in this month’s E-Bulletin, the School is actively fostering these partnerships with university, industry, and government colleagues through forums such as those held by the Wireless Internet for Mobile Enterprise Consortium, and with research conducted for the DARPA Grand Challenge, a high-stakes autonomous vehicle race. We strengthen these ties by hosting lectures on topics that impact California and the world, and by seeking educational alliances aimed at retaining qualified engineering students from traditionally underrepresented communities, among many other efforts.

On October 28, the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS) will hold its Third Annual Research Review. CENS, an NSF Science and Technology Center, is developing embedded networked sensing systems and applying this revolutionary technology to critical scientific and social applications. An interdisciplinary venture, CENS involves hundreds of faculty, engineers, graduate student researchers, and undergraduate students from multiple disciplines at six higher education institutions, including UCLA.

It is through these kinds of endeavors and the outstanding work of our alumni, students, faculty and staff that the School continues to achieve its success. I encourage you to take part in the numerous opportunities for engagement with the School and its friends throughout the year.

Sincerely,

Vijay K. Dhir
Dean

FEATURE STORIES
Vehicles That Drive Themselves? Pushing Autonomous Control to the Limit
A group of vehicles traveling under their own steam crossed the desert last weekend in a high-stakes government race worth $2 million. Among them was the team from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science – a talented group that started out with a desire to win and a jackpot garnered by one of its members on the hit TV game show “Jeopardy.” To read more, click here.

Master of Science in Engineering Online Program Just a Click Away
Beginning in fall 2006, the School's new degree program will enable engineers and computer scientists to specialize in-depth and update their knowledge without needing to quit their jobs and become full-time students. To read about plans for the program and how you can help shape the curriculum, click here.

UCLA Engineering Partners with Cal State LA and Community Colleges on Retention Efforts
The School of Engineering plans to double the number of qualified students from traditionally underrepresented communities receiving degrees in engineering and physical science in the next five years. Through a $1.8 million grant from the National Science Foundation, UCLA and partner schools will expand current retention programs to increase the number of graduates in these fields. To read the full story, click here.

OTHER NEWS
Eli Yablonovitch to Deliver 99th Faculty Lecture
Electrical engineering professor Eli Yablonovitch has been chosen to deliver the prestigious biannual UCLA Faculty Research Lecture on "The End of the Semiconductor Roadmap: The Collision of Physics, Economics, and Sociology,” on Tuesday, October 25, at 3 p.m. in the Schoenberg Auditorium. The lecture, which honors the university’s most distinguished scholars in science, the arts, humanities and social disciplines, is open to the public free of charge, followed by a reception at the Faculty Center. Known among his peers as the “father of photonic crystals,” Yablonovitch is credited with having established the entirely new field of quantum optics. For more information, click here.

Radio Frequency Identification Technology Forum to Be Hosted by Engineering’s WINMEC
Led by mechanical and aerospace professor Rajit Gadh, UCLA Engineering is exploring the use of radio frequency identification technology (RFID) in a variety of innovative applications. Gadh also is the director of WINMEC (Wireless Internet for Mobile Enterprise Consortium), a UCLA-based university, industry, and government collaboration with the objective to advance technological and business research and educate its members on state-of-the art in wireless and mobile industries. The organization, which holds regular consortia, will host an RFID Industry Forum on campus October 26 to discuss where the technology stands today with respect to actual usage, successes and failures, how RFID projects are justified, and how RFID is actually being implemented. For more details, visit http://www.winmec.ucla.edu or http://www.wireless.ucla.edu/rfid/2005/.

Exploring Future Water Independence for California
As part of the School’s ongoing celebration of its 60th Anniversary, chemical engineering professor and director of the UCLA WaTeR Center Yoram Cohen shared his insights on reverse osmosis desalination and future water independence for the Golden State, while professor emeritus Julius “Bud” Glater touched on the history of desalination at UCLA. To read about the event, click here.

Engineering Faculty Win Awards and Honors
Materials science and engineering professor Alan Ardell has been selected to receive the Albert Sauveur Achievement Award for 2005. He is being honored "for pioneering experimental and theoretical research on the roles of elasticity and volume fraction in the kinetics of coarsening and microstructures of dispersed phases in two and three dimensional systems." The award, established in 1934, recognizes pioneering materials science and engineering achievements that have stimulated work along similar lines to such an extent that a marked advance has been made in materials knowledge.

Mechanical and Aerospace professor Vijay Gupta has just been elected a fellow of ASME. The Fellow grade of membership to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers recognizes exceptional engineering achievements and contributions to the engineering profession.

Mechanical and Aerospace department chair Thomas Hahn has been elected President of the International Committee on Composite Materials (ICCM) for a two-year term. ICCM is an international, non-governmental, not-for-profit, scientific and engineering organization dedicated to composite materials.

Associate dean and electrical engineering professor Greg Pottie and electrical engineering professor William Kaiser have recently published a new book on sensor networks. Entitled Principles of Embedded Networked Systems Design, the textbook is aimed at supporting senior undergraduate design classes and introductory graduate classes, as well as supporting working engineers who want to become familiar with sensor networks.

Materials science professor King-Ning Tu has been honored with the 2005 Applied Materials Lecture Award at National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan. For more information, visit the website at http://www.mat.ncku.edu.tw/.

Latest UCLA Engineer Available Online
The Fall 2005 issue of UCLA Engineer is now available online. Click here to read about the work of our faculty and students, alumni activities, and more – or look for your copy in the mail soon.

MEDIA WATCH: UCLA ENGINEERING IN THE NEWS
Los Angeles Daily News
Air tests planned at Santa Susana lab
Air-quality regulators planned to sample the air around the Santa Susana Field Lab for contamination that may have been released when the Topanga Fire roared through the hilltop lab. "I would be more concerned about the chemicals created by the fire, then the fire mobilizing chemicals at the site," said Yoram Cohen, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has studied contamination at the field lab.

UCLA Today
UCLA Team Preps for $2M Race Across Desert
In the rugged Mojave Desert east of Palmdale, a 3/4-ton pickup truck dodges creosote bushes and boulders as it lumbers along a trail made muddy by a summer cloudburst. “Golem 2,” as the truck is called, is UCLA’s entry in the DARPA Grand Challenge ’05, a robotic-vehicle race set for Oct. 8 in southwest Nevada.

The Wall Street Journal
Cellular Firms Cook Up Microwave Plan [Link unavailable]
In the congested highway for wireless voice and data traffic, companies are turning to microwave. The growing number of mobile-phone customers and services begs an upgrade of the wireless infrastructure to handle the higher-capacity demand. Among the most vulnerable areas is in wireless backhaul, or the line between the cellular tower and the central office, which is typically connected via decades-old copper lines beneath the ground. In the September 22 article, UCLA mechanical and aerospace engineering professor Rajit Gadh says "WiMax is coming up in a big way, but there are still some impediments to WiMax in terms of deployment."

KNX 1070 AM News Radio
Rebuilding New Orleans [Link unavailable]
Civil and environmental engineering professor Jonathan Stewart was interviewed live on air on September 13 about rebuilding New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation.

Time Magazine
Rebuilding A Dream: How do you put back a city and a region so devastated? The same way? Differently?
The first step in rebuilding New Orleans will be simply to draw off the water that covers 80% of the city. Most pumps around the levees are submerged and inoperable, explains Jonathan Stewart, a professor of civil engineering at UCLA who has been tracking the situation civil and environmental engineering.

Cleveland Plain Dealer
In the Near Term, Levee System is the Only Choice
For now, engineers say, water- ringed cities like New Orleans will have to rely on the timeworn technology of earthen embankments, pumps and canals in an attempt to stave off floodwaters. "There's no magic bullet," said Jonathan Stewart, a civil and environmental engineering professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. "As long as we're dealing with low-lying areas, you can't get away from levees."

Laser Focus World
CIPS Highlights MIT Photonics Research [Link unavailable]
At its 2005 annual meeting, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for Integrated Photonic Systems (MIT CIPS; May 19-20, Cambridge, MA) once again brought together researchers from around the world with the MIT photonics community. Eli Yablonovitch, professor of engineering at the University of California Los Angeles and a pioneering photonic-crystal (PC) researcher, discussed upcoming applications of PCs. Because on-chip optical communication would reduce the required energy per bit, PCs may have great use in communications within a computer.

Scientific American
Making Light of Silicon
Scientists have long sought to build lasers from silicon. Such an advance would enable engineers to incorporate both electronic and optical devices onto cheap silicon chips. Silicon lasers could lead to affordable light-based systems that harness photons instead of electrons to shuttle huge amounts of data swiftly—at multigigabit-per-second rates. Electrical engineering professor Bahram Jalali’s group at the University of California at Los Angeles has recently reported success in making silicon emit continuous laser light.

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