How Robots Can Help Combat COVID-19: Science Robotics Editorial
Can robots be effective tools in combating the COVID-19 pandemic? A group of leaders in the field of robotics, including Henrik Christensen, director of UC San Diego’s Contextual Robotics Institute, say yes, and outline a number of examples in an editorial in the March 25 issue of Science Robotics. They say robots can be used for clinical care such as telemedicine and decontamination; logistics such as delivery and handling of contaminated waste; and reconnaissance such as monitoring compliance with voluntary quarantines.
“Already, we have seen robots being deployed for disinfection, delivering medications and food, measuring vital signs, and assisting border controls,” the researchers write.
Christensen, who is a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego, particularly highlighted the role that robots can play in disinfection, cleaning and telepresence.
In addition to a number of other robotics experts from international and U.S. universities, co-authors include Marcia McNutt, president of the National Research Council and president of the National Academy of Sciences, who is an alumna of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.
“For disease prevention, robot-controlled noncontact ultraviolet (UV) surface disinfection has already been used because COVID-19 spreads not only from person to person via close contact respiratory droplet transfer but also via contaminated surfaces,” the researchers write.
“Opportunities lie in intelligent navigation and detection of high-risk, high-touch areas, combined with other preventative measures,” the researchers add. “New generations of large, small, micro-, and swarm robots that are able to continuously work and clean (i.e., not only removing dust but also truly sanitizing/sterilizing all surfaces) could be developed.”
In terms of telepresence, “the deployment of social robots can present unique opportunities for continued social interactions and adherence to treatment regimes without fear of spreading more disease,” researchers write. “However, this is a challenging area of development because social interactions require building and maintaining complex models of people, including their knowledge, beliefs, emotions, as well as the context and environment of interaction.”
“COVID-19 may become the tipping point of how future organizations operate,” researchers add. “Rather than cancelling large international exhibitions and conferences, new forms of gathering—virtual rather than in-person attendance—may increase. Virtual attendees may become accustomed to remote engagement via a variety of local robotic avatars and controls.”
“Overall, the impact of COVID-19 may drive sustained research in robotics to address risks of infectious diseases,” researchers go on. “Without a sustainable approach to research, history will repeat itself, and robots will not be ready for the next incident.”
Engineering Creative Solutions During the COVID-19 Pandemic
In the face of COVID-19, many caregivers, engineers and gifted amateurs are stepping up to find ways to support healthcare workers.
To help guide some of these efforts, Michael Barrow, a Ph.D. candidate with Professor RyanKastner’s research group in the Computer Science and Engineering Department (CSE) at UC San Diego, is leading an effort to boost critical care management during these uncertain times. Barrow is working closely with Shanglei Liu, MD, a general surgeon at Mayo Clinic and the project’s clinical primary investigator.
The team is also exploring how clinicians can address the potential need to simultaneously ventilate many patients. In addition to CSE and Mayo Clinic, collaborators at MIT, Scuola Superiore Sant’ Anna Pisa in Italy and several private companies have joined the project.
Technology to Multiply Expertise
Barrow and his collaborators are primarily focused on helping critical care specialists provide the best possible care, even when resources are stretched thin.
“We can’t 3D-print doctors and nurses,” Barrow said, “however, we can increase their patient care capabilities through 21st century telecommunications.”
The group is developing a telemedicine platform, called TV CV19, designed to enhance hospital-wide communications in a crisis and help medical specialists care for more patients. Clinicians with the most acute care experience can focus on the sickest patients while having a telecommunications conduit to advise their colleagues. This way, technology can multiply expertise. Acute care specialists can’t possibly monitor all patients, but their knowledge can easily be shared with other clinicians.
“It creates an efficient network of communication for clinicians,” said Barrow. “At the top, you have the experts, whose attention is going to be focused on complex decisions for the sickest patients. The platform gives them the ability to selectively allocate their attention where it’s needed most. This empowers front line practitioners of all backgrounds with the real-time expertise on how to care for their critically ill patients. It also reduces exposure to infected individuals to prevent the spread of COVID.”
The goal is to quickly provide key decision-making information, such as vital signs, lung compliance and even a live video feed of patients. With this platform, specialists can view alerts and respond in real time, providing specific tasks for bedside clinicians.
“This way, we can have others monitor the patients who are more or less stable,” said Barrow. “They still need to be ventilated, but their condition isn’t changing. This frees up decision-makers to look at the cases where patients really need their expertise right now.”
Evaluating DIY Ventilators
Clinicians may also be forced to grapple with a ventilator shortage as the numbers of patients who need care surge. Some companies are shifting production, from cars for example, to meet the need. But in the short term, open source ventilator-building instructions have appeared on the internet.
Barrow and colleagues analyzed some of these designs and found them wanting. The most common flaw is the lack of precise controls, difficulty adapting to local materials, lengthy building times and overly complex designs. These flaws would make it difficult to use these devices with real patients.
Ventilator control is particularly important. As a patient’s lungs stiffen from coronavirus infection, ventilator pressure must be adjusted to avoid additional damage. The team has developed an experimental universal control system—built with a mobile phone and other off-the-shelf components—which will allow operators to adjust these ventilators and protect patients.
“Right now, we are adapting our universal controller software to support as many makeshift ventilator designs as we can,” Barrow said. “We are also working with our clinical collaborators to improve the usability of our case management interface.”
From there, the group will work to ensure regulatory compliance before potentially delivering their research into the hands of healthcare providers.
New Rapid Response Platform Connects Clinicians with Resources and Answers to COVID-19 Questions
With the help of hundreds of students and community volunteers, UCSD faculty have developed an online portal to give clinicians, researchers and others responding to COVID-19 a simple way to ask questions about the disease and receive rapid responses.
Everything about the COVID-19 pandemic is new: the virus’s transmission to humans, the stay-at-home orders, the challenges many responders are facing. With so much in flux, providers are being asked to find new solutions. In response, a group of UC San Diego faculty, with the help of hundreds of students and community volunteers, has stepped up to create an online portal called Earth 2.0 COVID-19 Rapid Response.
The portal’s first live component is CoRESPOND, a just-in-time research and innovation system that offers doctors, nurses, researchers and other responders a simple way to ask urgent questions and receive rapid responses from expert teams, providing timely solutions during this quickly changing crisis.
The Earth 2.0 COVID-19 Rapid Response platform will also include OASIS, a crowd-sourced information and resource-sharing platform, and HomeBound, an app to manage COVID-19 symptoms at home and a living data system to drive learning and innovation. The platform is a collaboration between the UC San Diego School of Medicine, the Qualcomm Institute, the Department of Computer Science and Engineering in the Jacobs School of Engineering and many others.
Earth 2.0 Brings a Collaborative Response to COVID-19
Earth 2.0 was envisioned several years ago to solve global-scale problems through crowd-sourced innovation. When the COVID-19 pandemic emerged, the platform was immediately retasked to help manage the pressing crisis and the Earth 2.0 COVID-19 Rapid Response platform was born.
“We wanted to reformulate the Earth platform so that researchers or healthcare workers could reach out and get answers, resources or even DIY inventions. Anyone can join the platform and add their expertise to the system, whether it’s clinical experience, engineering know-how or current supply-chain information,” said Eliah Aronoff-Spencer, a physician-scientist with UC San Diego School of Medicine and the Qualcomm Institute. Aronoff-Spencer also directs the UC San Diego Design Lab Center for Health.
Aronoff-Spencer and Nadir Weibel, an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and head of the Human-Centered and Ubiquitous Computing Lab, quickly pulled together several customer service, communication and collaboration platforms, including Freshdesk, Google Docs, Github, GrabCAD and Slack. From there, the team, which also includes Linda Hill, a clinical professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Public Health, and Andrew Baird, a professor in the Department of Surgery, created CoRESPOND.
Finding Answers in the Midst of a Crisis
CoRESPOND gives workers responding to COVID-19 ready access to information they don’t have time to research on their own. Through the portal, workers simply email their queries to covid-help@ucsd.edu, and the system goes to work to find an answer.
Each email triggers a problem ticket, which is then categorized and forwarded to a system moderator, who immediately assembles a team of relevant experts. The platform uses Slack to enable and stimulate discussion among ad hoc research groups who reply to moderators with possible answers.
CoRESPOND then leverages uPub, an online authoring system, to publish open access solutions that can be continuously updated and made available worldwide. The answers are further vetted for quality and accuracy before being emailed – all within as short a time-frame as possible.
“In two or three days, we created a ticketing system and an ad hoc response and innovation network, as well as an editorial structure to make sure the solutions were valid,” said Aronoff-Spencer. “We have been getting most responses back to people on the frontline in 24 hours or less.”
Since launching, the platform has received and answered numerous questions, matched needs to resources and even developed new innovations in protective equipment. Questions have ranged from how long a person is contagious to how to make a face shield. Each query activates a network of more than 200 knowledge experts and several hundred students who provide the legwork, searching for answers, building innovations, validating the results, and sending that information back to the requester.
“We have people triaging the tickets and communicating back directly with the frontline workers,” said Weibel. “We have infectious disease and primary care physicians, supply chain people trying to figure out where to find masks and other important items, a whole team of experts.”
Some questions are easier than others as knowledge about the virus grows and changes, but all answers end up in a solutions portal where the information is accessible for future use.
“We get questions like ‘do people create antibodies when they’re recovering?’” said Hill. “The teams will research what we call the gray literature, as well as the medical literature, and develop a response. The field is changing in real time. We have told our teams these are living documents, like a wiki, and we have the capacity to continuously update the platform and keep it current.”
The bottom line for the entire team is making sure they always provide relevant, accurate information that will be useful. The team encourages everyone to join Earth 2.0 and contribute their expertise to the system.
“It’s not just an information exchange, it’s a quality information exchange,” said Aronoff-Spencer. “For instance, we have to do more than come up with an alternative PPE [personal protective equipment]. We have to come up with an alternative PPE that can actually be built in the places it is needed, meets specific requirements, and we can track those specifications.”
In addition to Aronoff-Spencer, Weibel, Hill and Baird, other members of the Earth 2.0 COVID-19 Rapid Response leadership team include: Sandra Brown, UC San Diego Vice Chancellor for Research and a distinguished professor of psychology and psychiatry, Doug Ziedonis, UC San Diego Associate Vice Chancellor for Health Sciences, Ramesh Rao, director of the Qualcomm Institute, Henrik Christensen, a professor of computer science and director of the Institute for Contextual Robotics, Don Norman, director of the Design Lab, Nikhil Jain, VP and lead on the Qualcomm Toq smart watch, and Nicolas DiTada, chief technical officer at InSTEDD. The Earth 2.0 COVID-19 Rapid Response platform is also supported by many partners and sponsors.
Here’s How Scientists are Tracking The Genetic Evolution of COVID-19
When you hear the term “evolutionary tree,” you may think of Charles Darwin and the study of the relationships between different species over the span of millions of years.
While the concept of an “evolutionary tree” originated in Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species,” one can apply this concept to anything that evolves, including viruses. Scientists can study the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 to learn more about how the genes of the virus function. It is also useful to make inferences about the spread of the virus around the world, and what type of vaccine may be most effective.
I am a bioinformatician who studies the relationships between epidemics and viral evolution, and I am among the many researchers now studying the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 because it can help researchers and public health officials track the spread of the virus over time. What we are finding is that the SARS-CoV-2 virus appears to be mutating more slowly than the seasonal flu which may allow scientists to develop a vaccine.
How do sequences evolve?
Viruses evolve by mutating. That is, there are changes in their genetic code over time. The way it happens is a little like that game of telephone. Amy is the first player, and her word is “CAT.” She whispers her word to Ben, who accidentally hears “MAT.” Ben whispers his word to Carlos, who hears “MAD.” As the game of telephone goes on, the word will transform further and further away from its original form.
We can think of a biological genetic material as a sequence of letters, and over time, sequences mutate: The letters of the sequence can change. Scientists have developed various models of sequence evolution to help them study how mutations occur over time.
Much like our game of telephone, the genome sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus changes over time: Mutations occur randomly, and any changes that occur in a given virus will be inherited by all copies of the next generation. Then, much as we could try to decode how “CAT” became “MAD,” scientists can use models on genetic evolution to try to determine the most likely evolutionary history of the virus.
How can we apply this to viruses like COVID-19?
DNA sequencing is the process of experimentally finding the sequence of nucleotides (A, C, G and T) – the chemical building blocks of genes – of a piece of DNA. DNA sequencing is largely used to study human diseases and genetics, but in recent years, sequencing has become a routine part of viral point of care, and as sequencing becomes cheaper and cheaper, viral sequencing will become even more frequent as time progresses.
RNA is a molecule similar to DNA, and it is essentially a temporary copy of a short segment of DNA. Specifically, in the central dogma of biology, DNA is transcribed into RNA. SARS-CoV-2 is an RNA virus, meaning our DNA sequencing technologies cannot directly decode its sequence. However, scientists can first reverse transcribe the RNA of the virus into complementary DNA (or cDNA), which can then be sequenced.
Given a collection of viral genome sequences, we can use our models of sequence evolution to predict the virus’s history, and we can use this to answer questions like, “How fast do mutations occur?” or “Where in the genome do mutations occur?” Knowing which genes are mutating frequently can be useful in drug design.
Tracking how viruses have changed in a location can also answer questions like, “How many separate outbreaks exist in my community?” This type of information can help public health officials contain the spread of the virus.
One such initiative is Nextstrain, an open-source project that provides users real-time reports of the spread of seasonal influenza, Ebola and many other infectious diseases. Most recently, it has been spearheading the evolutionary tracking of COVID-19 by providing a real-time analysis as well as a situation report meant to be readable by the general public. Further, the project enables the global population to benefit from its efforts by translating the situation report to many other languages.
As the amount of available information grows, scientists need faster tools to be able to crunch the numbers. My lab at UC San Diego, in collaboration with the System Energy Efficiency (SEE) Lab led by Professor Tajana Šimunić Rosing, is working to create new algorithms, software tools and computer hardware to make the real-time analysis of the COVID-19 epidemic more feasible.
What have we learned about the epidemic?
Based on current data, it seems as though SARS-CoV-2 mutates much more slowly than the seasonal flu. Specifically, SARS-CoV-2 seems to have a mutation rate of less than 25 mutations per year, whereas the seasonal flu has a mutation rate of almost 50 mutations per year.
Given that the SARS-CoV-2 genome is almost twice as large as the seasonal flu genome, it seems as though the seasonal flu mutates roughly four times as fast as SARS-CoV-2. The fact that the seasonal flu mutates so quickly is precisely why it is able to evade our vaccines, so the significantly slower mutation rate of SARS-CoV-2 gives us hope for the potential development of effective long-lasting vaccines against the virus.
UC San Diego Team Delivers Protective Equipment To Hospitals In Baja California
The COVID-19 pandemic is impacting the availability of personal protective equipment (PPE) supplies in Baja California, and researchers with UC San Diego’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) are developing solutions to help.
Nadir Weibel, an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and head of the Human-Centered and Ubiquitous Computing Lab, is collaborating with university colleagues, government and industry to develop PPE solutions and to transport supplies, like masks and face shields, to hospitals in Baja.
So far, the team has produced and tested 3,000 face shields and 1,100 masks. The protocols to make this equipment have been published on Earth2.0’s COVID-19 Rapid Response, an online portal that supports information sharing, rapid science and innovative solutions curated by UC San Diego’s Weibel, Eliah Aronoff-Spencer, Linda Hill, and many other faculty and students.
Scaling Up Production and Distribution
After engineering an initial batch of masks and face masks, Weibel and Earth 2.0 partner Linda Hill, a clinical professor in UC San Diego’s Department of Family Medicine and Public Health, began developing a PPE pipeline to Mexico, working closely with the San Diego Mayor’s Office of International Affairs, the State of Baja Economic Development Authority and others.
Hospitals in Baja California aren’t the only group that could benefit. “There might be others who need it, like populations that typically have less access to this kind of protection: refugees, homeless people, small community clinics, nursing homes,” Weibel pointed out.
The group’s next goal is to partner with industry in Baja to scale up their efforts and fully implement their project. They are supplying their instructions and specifications to create the safe and effective PPE in both English and Spanish, so local manufacturers can lend a hand.
“We will act as technical know-how liaisons for potential industry partners and manufacturers in Baja who are interested in producing these supplies at scale,” Weibel said.
Developing DIY Solutions
Weibel and colleagues had been looking for ways to support COVID-19 care and prevention since the earliest days of the pandemic.
“We started to research existing solutions,” said Weibel. “A physician at the University of Florida had designed a mask using surgical wrap, a material that keeps surgical equipment sterile, and that solution really intrigued us.”
While surgical wrap protects instruments from viruses and other potential contaminants and is relatively plentiful, making it great DIY mask material, the initial design was too labor-intensive to scale up.
Working with UC San Diego’s Simulation Training Center and others, Weibel and his team began refining it. The researchers, including computer science PhD student Tommy Sharkey and undergraduate Shiv Patel, iterated several mask designs, using surgical wrap and other easy-to-find materials.
Developing these designs was just the first step – they also had to be validated. Weibel’s team worked closely with infectious disease, emergency room and other UC San Diego physicians to get feedback. They’ve also been testing prototypes on a PortaCount, a device that measures the numbers of particles going through the mask.
“We have been able to produce a surgical mask that has better protection than any other DIY masks out there,” said Weibel.
Weibel’s group has also been working with Qualcomm Institute’s Prototyping Lab and Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s CAICE Lab to produce mask components. The UC San Diego chapter of Delta Epsilon Mu, led by Ann Nguyen, an undergraduate research assistant in the Human-Centered and Ubiquitous Computing Lab, is helping assemble them. CSE has provided much-needed funding.
New Algorithm Analyzes The Genetic Building Blocks of Immunity
It could help determine why a potential COVID-19 vaccine may be effective in some people but not others
Scientists with UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering and the Qualcomm Institute have developed a new gene prediction algorithm, called MINING-D, that could help researchers investigate the genetic clues behind the variation of symptoms shown in COVID-19 patients — information that is key to creating a versatile and effective vaccine.
The findings and algorithm, which were published in PLOS Computational Biology on April 27 may give scientists a more comprehensive view of how the genes that form the foundation of our immune system create a personalized repertoire of antibodies to protect against invading pathogens. They may also shed light on why some people have a more effective immune response to an infection.
“This study will be particularly helpful as dozens of groups begin testing potential COVID-19 vaccines, and see that the vaccine works on some people and not on others—and the secret may be in the mutations in each individual’s immune system,” said Pavel Pevzner, a professor with UC San Diego’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering and co-author on the paper. “Without knowing the immune makeup of an individual, we won’t be able to say why it worked or didn’t work. MINING-D may help provide answers.”
There are three groups of core immunoglobulin genes that are the building blocks of an individual’s immune response: the variable (V), diversity (D) and joining (J) germline genes. MINING-D analyzes how those blocks, particularly the lesser-studied D gene, are shuffled and repackaged to create a large variety of antibodies. D genes play a critical role in creating the regions of antibodies that are responsible for recognizing pathogens.
“MINING-D will help researchers study mutations in D genes, which up until this point has been a challenge,” said Vinnu Bhardwaj, the paper’s lead author and a Ph.D. candidate with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Qualcomm Institute at UC San Diego. “Our initial study revealed that some variants of D genes are used more often than others in response to various infections. We hope this information will pave the way to unlocking clues about the role the D genes play in how difficult or easy it is for a patient to fight infection.”
When a pathogen enters a healthy organism, it triggers an immune response that includes recombination of the germline genes and their random mutations. The process, which differs from individual to individual, results in roughly a billion antibodies circulating in each of us at any given moment. This personalized antibody repertoire is constantly changing to fight new infections.
“Our next step is to collaborate with leading immunogenomics experts at University of Louisville who are starting to sample antibody repertoires in patients with varying severity of COVID-19,” said Yana Safonova, paper co-author and postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering.
Safonova points out that, as in the case of flu, earlier studies showed a single mutation in a gene called IGHV1-69 resulted in an individual’s reduced ability to recognize the flu virus and thus a failure to produce an immune response against it.
“Understanding similar genetic variations among COVID-19 patients may be the key to developing versatile vaccines that trigger the development of antibodies that recognize and neutralize the SARS-CoV-2 virus,” Safonova said.
Collaboration Spurs Innovation
The idea for MINING-D took shape several years back when Safonova, a bioinformatics researcher and postdoctoral fellow at the time with the Qualcomm Institute’s Information Theory and Applications Center, started working with Bhardwaj, a Ph.D. candidate with an applied machine learning and data science background. They discussed the idea of developing an algorithm to study the genetic puzzle that is the foundation of our immunity. From there, the two paired their skill sets to create research they hope will have a lasting impact.
In addition to Pevzner, Safonova and Bhardwaj worked closely with Qualcomm Institute Director Ramesh Rao and Massimo Franceschetti, a professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Rao and Franceschetti are co-authors on the paper and also co-advise Bhardwaj.
“At the heart of this research is the topic of ‘string matching,’ where one seeks to efficiently and accurately infer the whole based on awareness of its parts. This problem emerges in many different contexts including spell checkers, malware detection and pattern recognition in general,” Rao explained. “This collaboration illustrates how solutions to a well abstracted problem have the potential to impact numerous applied fields. Pavel, Massimo and I couldn’t be more delighted to see the development of this boundary-crossing collaboration.”
“Our work is a wonderful example of how engineering insight can be successfully applied to biological problems, and once again it shows how the Jacobs School and QI provide fertile grounds for cross-disciplinary innovation,” Franceschetti said. .
Jason Oberg ’12, ’14: Taking a Founding Role in Hardware Security
By Katie E. Ismael
Jason Oberg (MA ’12, PhD ’14) is the co-founder and CEO of Tortuga Logic, a San Jose-based cybersecurity company specializing in hardware threat detection and prevention. He’s a leading expert in hardware security whose work has been cited over 1,000 times and been granted six issued and pending patents.
But the roots of these accomplishments go back to the halls of UC San Diego’s Computer Science and Engineering Department, where “wacky ideas,” unique and innovative ways of thinking and tremendous intellectual power combined to make a start-up dream a successful reality.
CSE and UC San Diego not only sparked the entrepreneurial spirit behind the company but played a major role in its founding. Its technology is based on previous research Oberg carried out as a PhD student in the lab of CSE Professor Ryan Kastner. And it’s been steered by a team of pioneers in the hardware security space that include Kastner and Tim Sherwood, a UC Santa Barbara computer science professor who is also a CSE alumnus (MS, PhD ’03).
Free beer, “wacky ideas” and some of the brightest minds in the field
Oberg, who earned his undergraduate degree at UC Santa Barbara, says he was attracted to UC San Diego’s CSE department because it has some of the brightest minds in the field with a wide depth of expertise.
“My skills were at a really interesting intersection of hardware design and cybersecurity and it is difficult to find computer science departments that have such strong expertise in both of those areas,” he says. “The open and collaborative atmosphere between different groups and teams was also a huge bonus.”
On the social side, he recalls “many fond memories of free beer during our weekly graduate student social hours and playing hours of Street Fighter and NBA Jam on the arcade machine in Chez Bob, our communal break room.”
“Not only did this help me in building lasting relationships with friends but provided a very unique environment to discuss completely wacky ideas. Wacky ideas often lead to the best research topics,” he reflects.
And on the academic front, he recalls there was never a shortage of innovation and unique ideas either.
“I have several fond memories of discussing security-related aspects of programming languages, theory, entire systems, and hardware,” he says. “Getting access to experts across all domains was always just a few offices away. It’s really hard to find that type of intellectual power in one building.”
From that environment, where innovation and free thinking was allowed to flourish, Tortuga Logic emerged.
Oberg’s PhD advisors, Kastner and Sherwood, had been seeing the market need for hardware security grow significantly over the years, Oberg recalls.
What really kick-started their initiative, he says, was participating in National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program, which provides a small amount of funding to universities to conduct customer discovery and identify whether there is a market for the technology, what product would best serve that market and how to best go-to-market.
Following the completion of I-Corps, Oberg says the team saw a clear path to market and took the leap to start the company.
In the early days of Tortuga Logic, Oberg remarks that UC San Diego offered a variety of helpful resources to help start a company. He cites work the team did with the von Liebig Entrepreneurism Center during their NSF I-Corps for providing business mentorship and guidance.
“Those resources were really invaluable in helping us shape the necessary business mindsets for starting the company,” he says.
Extreme Risks, and Rewards
In 2017, the company became positioned for new growth. Thanks to an infusion of capital from the venture-capital firm Eclipse Ventures, Tortuga Logic received $2 million in seed funding to accelerate engineering efforts and expand sales and marketing.
“There is an enormous amount of software-based cybersecurity companies in the world, but with the advent of autonomous vehicles, growing complexity of mobile devices and trust issues in the supply chain for military applications, there is a gaping hole in how the industry approaches cybersecurity—specifically the hardware,” Oberg said in a story in the online publication TechCrunch about the funding.
With several years now under his belt as a company co-founder and CEO, Oberg offers some advice to others with an entrepreneurial spirit.
“Starting your own company is extremely tough,” he says. “There is a lot of allure around being a start-up founder with the huge successes we see in the public market. But the struggles cannot be overstated.”
He notes that leaders should be prepared to tackle everything from raising money to hiring the right team to driving the vision and plan and then keeping things on course through the successes and failures.
“For those considering starting their own company, you really have to accept that you have an extremely high likelihood of failure and be completely comfortable with that. More than 1 out of 10 startups fail,” he says.
But the flip side is that with extreme risk comes huge rewards, he notes. And he’s prepared for the swings.
“I am very happy with the progress our team at Tortuga Logic has made thus far and extremely excited about the opportunities ahead. No matter how hard or easy they will be.”
Two members of the CSE community have been honored with Inclusive Excellence Awards from UC San Diego for their contributions to a more diverse and inclusive community. Ph.D. student Ariana Mirian and Undergraduate Affairs Manager Veronica Abreu were recognized during an awards ceremony on February 4.
In January 2018, Mirian and two peers launched the CSE Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) committee, a grassroots organization that provides a platform for students, faculty and staff interested in change. The committee has grown to include more than 30 regular members. Mirian counts its formation as one of her proudest achievements.
Within the DEI committee, Veronica Abreu acts as a culture subcommittee co-lead, focusing on forward momentum and identifying social justice issues. She realized she felt “very frustrated” with power imbalances in society and decided to channel that into action.
With the help of a colleague, Abreu established a training workshop for advisors in her department, preparing staff to identify microaggressions. Abreu’s peers were exceptionally positive about the workshop.
In the face of COVID-19, many caregivers, engineers and gifted amateurs are stepping up to find ways to support healthcare workers.
