Month: June 2020

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V7

Integrating Robots in Public and Private Spaces for the Common Good

Integrating Robots in Public and Private Spaces for the Common Good

San Diego, Calif., Feb. 5, 2020 — UC San Diego alumna Hee Rin Lee, now an assistant professor in MSU’s Department of Media and Information, explores how we can integrate robots into our lives for social good, whether it be in a retirement community or a bustling factory. The roots of her research go back to her time in the lab of computer science professor Laurel Riek here at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego. 

Robotic inspirations

Lee first moved to the United States from South Korea a decade ago to attend graduate school. As she tried to fit into American society, Lee encountered many different experiences that amounted to culture shock in her new home. Her need for cultural adjustment led to her interest in implementing robots in human spaces. Lee stated that there is a parallel: Robots have to undergo a form of culture shock when integrating into human life, just as Lee did.

Lee wanted to not only bridge this divide, but to also improve human experiences with robots once this divide is crossed, while at the same time addressing the need for social intervention.

Robots currently used in factories, for example, are segregated to their own section of the workspace. Lee said they are focused on efficiency. To her, there are greater possibilities for the establishment of robots in the workforce than separation and improved workflow. There is a lack of interaction with humans when addressing the presence of robots. 

“Those people were engineers, which means when you’re trained in school, what you’re learning is how to talk to machines,” Lee said. “You’re not really getting into this space, how you interview people and analyze data.”

Lee wants to take the interaction of robots and humans a step further, with a focus on the positive social impact robots can have on humans. Through working with elders with dementia, nurses in hospitals and factory workers, Lee plans to assist humans with the implementation of robots to aid with their own needs.

Personalized robotic elder care

Lee’s goal is to help those who are marginalized in society. This first came to fruition through her work with elders. She sought to personalize care below the surface of what gets recorded on the medical charts. These human-friendly robots would not be focused on disabilities or the typical stereotypes related to aging, but on what support the elders in her study felt they needed in their everyday lives.

During her work as a postdoctoral researcher at UC San Diego, Lee went about creating individualized prototypes for robots that could suit elders’ specific needs. She began by interviewing the elders, not for their medical condition or what they needed assistance with, but to learn about them as unique individuals who have lived fulfilling lives.

“That became my focus,” Lee said. “How can I reflect those groups? What are their actual issues? How can we design a robot to support them from their perspective?”

The elders created situational maps to highlight their needs. Lee then worked closely with the elders to design the robots and created customized prototypes. The elders in the study tested and used the prototypes, and Lee reworked the design based on their feedback.

The concept of using robots to assist aging citizens is not uncharted territory. Lee discussed the previous ventures many robotists have had into assisted living and in improving the lives of older adults with machines.

“It becomes really interesting research, because they were so interested in robots but they didn’t really think about how elders would feel about this,” Lee said. “Robotists’ understanding of aging and older adults’ understanding of aging is completely different.”

AI implications in nursing

Lee’s most recent work took place in the sterilized white walls of the common hospital. She and her research partner, Angelique Taylor, one of Riek’s Ph.D. students at UC San Diego, noticed a power hierarchy between physicians and nurse practitioners in the medical space, where they were concerned with errors in patient care.

Lee and Taylor developed a group tracking algorithm that nurses can use to keep track of errors they find made by their cohorts, in order to ensure there is no cross contamination of germs in the workplace. The technology has broader implications in team communication and improving everyday workflow.

During her work, Lee said she observed a shortage of nurses at the hospital. So, the team also devised ways for the algorithm to be used in critical situations, providing a “robot crash cart” as a backup service. They brainstormed a set choreography that would help to ensure the right amount of people were present at the right time, with the “robot crash cart” making up for any shortages in staff.
 
“Throughout our design process, we want to test our technology with nurses to ensure their needs are being met when they work alongside our robots, as well as use robots as a means of speaking up for nurses in situations that make them uncomfortable or when doctors/physicians do not take their concerns seriously,” Taylor said.

“These situations lead to patient safety risks, which can lead to patient deaths.”

Robotic ventures into factories and education

An avenue of social assistance Lee has already scoped out, but wants to investigate further, is the factory work environment. Lee visited a factory that was already using a robot to carry out certain duties. These duties included carrying packages and making sure materials arrived where they needed to be. Lee found an issue: the removal of jobs from older workers to make room for this robotic innovation. 

Lee aims to educate workers who know little about the robot and its capabilities, while coming up with a solution to use the robot without interfering with the current factory workflow. She is also interested in creating an educational program that teaches youth about AI, with a focus on what people most want to learn about the advanced technology.

Lee plans to continue researching robotics, as it relates to how machines can fit into human spaces to better human society.

 

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V7

Algae Shown to Improve Gastrointestinal Health

Algae Shown to Improve Gastrointestinal Health

Project is the first to test green algae on symptoms related to human digestion

San Diego, Calif., Feb. 3, 2020 — A widespread, fast-growing plant called Chlamydomonas reinhardtii is famous in scientific laboratories due to its position as the world’s most exhaustively studied algae.

For decades, the green, single-celled organism, which primarily grows in wet soil, has served as a model species for research topics spanning from algae-based biofuels to plant evolution. While other species of algae have been used as dietary nutraceuticals that provide beneficial oils, vitamins, proteins, carbohydrates, antioxidants and fiber, the benefits of consuming C. reinhardtii were previously unexplored.

Researchers at the University of California San Diego recently completed the first study examining the effects of consuming C. reinhardtii and demonstrated that the algae improves human gastrointestinal issues associated with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) such as diarrhea, gas and bloating. Results of the project are published in the Journal of Functional Foods.

“People have been looking at this algae for decades, but this is the first study to show what many of us have suspected—it’s good for you,” said principal investigator and algae expert Stephen Mayfield, a distinguished professor in UC San Diego’s Division of Biological Sciences and co-director of the Food and Fuel for the 21st Century Program (FF21). “This is exciting because it demonstrates a clear benefit: If you have IBS-like symptoms, this is good for you.”

For the human digestion study, algae were grown in a large stainless steel fermentation tank, similar to fermentation tanks seen at beer breweries. A smaller bench-top fermentation tank, or bioreactor, is pictured.
Credit: Frank Fields, UC San Diego

For years researchers in Mayfield’s laboratory have been exploring C. reinhardtii as a cost-competitive and sustainable source of valuable plant-based products, specifically pharmaceuticals and biofuels. Now, working with several collaborators, including UC San Diego’s John Chang (School of Medicine), Rob Knight (School of Medicine, Jacobs School of Engineering and Center for Microbiome Innovation) and the San Diego-based startup Triton Algae Innovations, they turned their attention towards investigating the algae as a nutritious food additive for improving human health.

The C. reinhardtii biomass used in the study, which was grown by Triton Algae Innovations, was subject to rigorous safety testing and designated as “Generally Recognized As Safe” by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, green-lighting the use of the organism in a human study.

Preliminary data in mouse studies demonstrated that consuming C. reinhardtii significantly reduced the rate of weight loss in mice with acute colitis, which is generally linked to inflammation of the digestive tract. Building off these results, the researchers set out to test for a similar effect when the algae was consumed by human volunteers, including those with and without symptoms associated with IBS. Volunteers consumed daily spoonfuls of powdered C. reinhardtii biomass and reported their gastrointestinal health for one month. Of the hundreds of interested participants in the project, data from 51 volunteers met the study’s requirements for inclusion in the final data analyses.

Results showed that participants who suffered from a history of frequent gastrointestinal symptoms reported significantly less bowel discomfort and diarrhea, significantly less gas or bloating and more regular bowel movements.

“The benefits of consuming this species of algae were immediately obvious when examining the data from both mice and humans who suffered from gastrointestinal symptoms,” said Frank Fields, a research scientist in Mayfield’s lab and lead author of the paper. “I hope that this study helps destigmatize the thought of incorporating algae and algae-based products into your diet—it is a fantastic source of nutrition and we have now shown that this species of algaehas additional benefits to animal and human health.”

Volunteers also were provided with stool sampling kits and sent samples to the American Gut Project, a citizen science effort led by Knight and his lab, to assess any changes in their microbiomes. The results indicated that the gut microbiome composition remained diverse, which is typical of healthier individuals, and that no significant changes to the composition of their gut microbiome occurred during the study as a result of consuming the algae.

The researchers say much more testing with larger groups of participants across longer time periods is needed. At this point, they are unclear about how the algae works to improve gastrointestinal health. The scientists believe the benefits could be traced to a bioactive molecule in algae or perhaps a change in gene expression of gut bacteria caused by algae consumption.

Still, the observed results in human volunteers led them to conclude in the paper that “the addition of C. reinhardtii into the diet will not only add nutritional value but may also function to relieve some gastrointestinal symptoms of certain individuals.”

The full coauthor list includes Frank Fields, Franck Lejzerowicz, Dave Schroeder, Soo Ngoi, Miller Tran, Daniel McDonald, Lingjing Jiang, John Chang, Rob Knight and Stephen Mayfield. Collaborators included the California Center for Algae Biotechnology, American Gut Project, Center for Microbiome Innovation and Jacobs School of Engineering.

The project was partially supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DE-EE0008246).

Triton Algae Innovations provided the C. reinhardtii biomass and the funding necessary to conduct the mouse feeding trial and to sequence stool samples.

 

 

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V7

Lim(b)itless in India: UC San Diego Students Travel Abroad to Empower Amputees

Lim(b)itless in India: UC San Diego Students Travel Abroad to Empower Amputees

 

In November, 2019, ten UC San Diego students filed into a bustling amputee clinic in Jaipur, India. On one side of the room, men and women, some bearing crutches, watched as their new limbs took shape under the staff’s careful hands. For many of them, a prosthetic limb represented the chance to regain their mobility, independence and livelihoods.

The students’ visit to the Jaipur Foot clinic—a non-profit known around the world for providing affordable, prosthetic limbs and other mobility aids to those in need—marked more than a year of painstaking work to develop technology connecting amputees directly to prosthetists. The work is part of Project Lim(b)itless, an initiative founded by Albert Lin, a recent amputee and researcher at the Qualcomm Institute (QI) at UC San Diego.

With Lin’s guidance, and led by graduate student Isaac Cabrera, the students created a cellphone app that gives amputees the power to scan their residual limb, send an autonomously-generated 3D model to a prosthetist, and have a custom-built prosthetic delivered right to them. The project has the potential to help organizations like Jaipur Foot reach many more amputees, especially those without the means to travel.

In new territory

Days earlier, the students touched down west of Jaipur in the rural town of Jaisalmer, India. Jet-lagged and exhausted, they rallied together, donned matching team T-shirts and accompanied Lin and Qualcomm Institute Director Ramesh Rao to the November 2019 INK Conference, where Lin presented Project Lim(b)itless. As he spoke to the rapt crowd, Lin wore a bright red, 3D-printed limb created just for him by the students days earlier through the Project Lim(b)itless app.

The students of Project Lim(b)itless pose with Albert Lin and a 3D-printed prosthetic limb in the desert dunes outside Jaisalmer, India.

Cabrera, a Ph.D. candidate and co-leader of the Project Lim(b)itless student team, remembers being thrilled. It had been his dream to bring the team’s students to India, where nearly a million citizens are amputees. He wanted them to witness how their efforts could help people.

“I was incredibly inspired by how motivated, disciplined and determined my students were,” said Cabrera. “They each worked hundreds of hours, including many late nights and weekends, all because they believe that this project has the potential to change the world.”

At Rao’s invitation, Cabrera had shared Project Lim(b)itless at an annual awards ceremony for the Mahatma Ghandi Memorial Scholarship earlier that fall. His request touched many in the audience and Project Lim(b)itless raised enough money to cover travel funds for the entire student team.

Soon, the students were networking with high-profile individuals, like the Vice President of Google India, and celebrating Lin’s successful presentation at INK. Kaela Wong, a Mechanical Engineering undergraduate and Cabrera’s co-leader, recalls an especially bright moment as Lin danced through the night on the 3D-printed leg she and her teammates had designed.

“It was proof of the power of undergraduate students—everyone in the audience and on the dance floor with Albert was so impressed and moved by our dedication to the project and the amount of progress we have achieved as undergraduates,” she said.

The work begins

Project Lim(b)itless’ student team was born out of the determination of a handful students wanting to make a difference. Inspired by a recent class on 3D-printing, Cabrera, Wong and a few classmates had started their own project designing a prosthetic limb that could be 3D-printed with cost-effective materials. They began working with Lin, who had been involved in an off-roading vehicle accident that ultimately led to the amputation of his right leg below the knee in 2016. At the time of the accident, Lin had been thriving as an engineer, QI innovator and National Geographic explorer. Active and adventurous, he used his background in research to search for hidden markers of civilization buried deep underground, and surfed, ran or rock-climbed during his time off.

The team poses in Jaisalmer. Albert Lin, project lead, stands far left. Ramesh Rao, director of the UC San Diego Qualcomm Institute, stands third from the left, background.

After the loss of his lower leg, Lin struggled with overcoming phantom limb pain and adjusting to life as an amputee. As he learned to use a prosthetic, he began to consider the lives of other amputees around the world. His false limb would allow him to rejoin his old life; what of those who couldn’t?

“I feel this guilt for having access to a prosthetic that lets me have a full life when so many others don’t. So, in a way, I know I have this responsibility to take on the barriers to democratizing that access,” said Lin, founder of the QI Center for Human Frontiers.

Of the approximately 40 million amputees worldwide, only a fraction have access to a prosthetic limb. Multiple office visits, travel fees, and material and labor costs can drive prices into the tens of thousands of dollars.

Lin planned to use an engineering approach to devise a way to lower the cost of prosthetic limbs and remove the need for an amputee (the most immobile population he notes) to travel to a prosthetist for care. He suspected that 3D-printing and nearly-ubiquitous cellphone technology might be the key. In coming across Cabrera and Wong, he’d found the team with the intense drive, curiosity and background needed to make Project Lim(b)itless a reality.

“I have never encountered such a dedicated group of individuals. These students put in countless hours of problem-solving and innovating, purely out of the desire to help others,” said Lin. “What’s more, they self-organized in a way that describes the best in engineering leadership.”

3D-printing the road to India

The Project Lim(b)itless team has continued to expand. Soon after meeting Lin, Cabrera and Wong set about recruiting other students from diverse engineering backgrounds to strengthen their team. Together, these dedicated students helped Lin repurpose photogrammetry—an imaging technique Lin has used to map historical sites in Mexico, China and Guatemala—to create a 3D model of someone’s limb using a cell phone app.

All an amputee needs to do is snap photographs of their limb from different angles, and let the app recreate it digitally. The amputee can then electronically deliver the virtual model of their limb to a prosthetist, who will use cutting-edge software to design a comfortable, custom-fitted prosthesis. With 3D printing added in, a prosthesis takes fewer hours of human labor to produce, and the price drops significantly.

Albert Lin sits beside a patient at the Jaipur Foot amputee clinic.

In India, the Project Lim(b)itless team had an opportunity to put their workflow to the test. Rao and Lin established a formal partnership with Jaipur Foot, with the promise to send 100 3D-scans of residual limbs as a reference for prosthetics. It is the first step in a new experiment, one that will support Jaipur Foot’s ongoing efforts to reach remote patients and give students a chance to learn through real, person-to-person interactions outside the classroom.

“The trip to India was an inspiration to those of us involved in designing students’ educational experiences,” said Rao. “Project Lim(b)itless exemplifies experiential learning in an interdisciplinary setting. As the Qualcomm Institute extends its mission to education, we seek to nurture such opportunities for UC San Diego students on a large scale. We welcome engagement with partners on and off campus who may wish to join hands with us to enable more such educational initiatives.”

Near the close of their trip, Rao and Cabrera visited partners at the Webel-Fujisoft-Vara Center of Excellence (COE) in Calcutta. As an initiative of the West Bengal government, the COE offers services, training and access to high-end laboratories, including ones equipped with state-of-the-art 3D printers, to promote local talent and benefit the community. In the future, Cabrera says, Project Lim(b)itless and the COE plan to 3D-print prosthetics right in Calcutta and distribute them through a network of high-tech kiosks run by Sahaj Retail Limited, allowing them to reach amputees from the bustling city of Jaipur to more isolated villages.

In their own words, here are the team’s favorite moments or takeaways from their travels:

Eric Ngo, B.S. Mathematics – Computer Science: I learned a lot from this whole trip, mostly about what I want to do in life. I had always struggled with the thought of going into industry or going into a PhD program as a computer science student. But after seeing how passionate many of these people were at the conference, it inspired me to continue forward with humanitarian work.

Connie Gean, B.S. Bioengineering 2019: Even though we were in a foreign country that most of us had never been to before, we were able to connect to the people at the conference and the people at Jaipur Foot. Humans have a way of communicating and supporting each other that can surpass barriers of culture and language, and I feel so grateful to have been a part of this experience.

Patricia Castillo, B.S. Bioengineering: My absolute favorite moment of the trip was when we went to Jaipur Foot and saw Albert walk and jump on his new leg that [the clinic staff] made [for him]. I think it really made an impact on me because it was the first time I could actually see the impact our project could have on amputees everywhere.

Joseph Martin, B.S. Mechanical Engineering: I have to say my favorite general takeaway was from the cumulative small moments bonding with the team. You learn a lot about people’s tolerances and how they deal with the pressure, and how to work through the confusion with them while maintaining a sense of humor to pull each other through.

Samantha Fong, B.S. Mechanical Engineering: While our team had some ideas as to what the experience was going to be like, there was no way to account for exactly what it was going to be like… There were many times it was difficult to come up with a response or have a plan of action, but one of the best things about working with a team is that when you yourself do not have an answer or solution, you can fall back on your team to help you out.

Sebastian Troncoso, B.S. Biochemistry 2019: My heritage is Chilean, but I was born in Mexico City and spent my childhood moving to different countries (Chile, Peru, Mexico City, and the US). People in South America have a common bond through language, so it feels like being home. India, on the other hand, was a different culture beyond the language difference. People value education very much, the sense of being with your family is strong, and [the drive] to strive for success flows among the people we met.

Victor Bourgin, Master’s in Machine Learning and Machine Intelligence (University of Cambridge): I was born in Austria, raised in Slovakia, Czech Republic and Belgium, I studied in the U.K. and in the U.S., so I was accustomed to traveling and discovering new cultures. But little could I imagine how exciting and rewarding this 3-day trip would be. It was amazing to hear inspiring talks from people who are bringing transformative projects to life.

Zhaoliang Zheng, graduate student in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering: My favorite moment was when I was in Jaipur Foot. I was so astonished those [amputees] regained mobility because of Jaipur Foot and I was shocked that Jaipur Foot would be able to make such a cheap and robust residual limb in such a short time (approximately within one day).

The students of Project Lim(b)itless would like to thank the late Professor Joanna McKittrick for her invaluable mentorship and support. An expert engineer and compassionate advisor, she advocated for engaging women and minority students in the STEM fields and extended her kindness to the Project Lim(b)itless team, guiding it from its inception. A more detailed recounting of her life, research and contributions can be found at the Jacobs School of Engineering website.

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V7

We Are CSE: Angelique Taylor, PHD ’21

We Are CSE: Angelique Taylor, PHD ’21 

The rich diversity of research and perspectives found in UC San Diego’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering makes it the thriving, supportive and world-class community it is today. Read about one of our members, Angelique Taylor ’21, and the impact of CSE on her present and future. 

Angelique is a PhD student in the Healthcare Robotics Lab working with Professor Laurel Riek. Her research lies at the intersection of computer vision, robotics, and artificial intelligence. She’s working to design algorithms that enable robots to interact with groups of people in real-world environments. 

1) Why did you choose CSE?

I started my PhD at the University of Notre Dame because I wanted to work with Dr. Laurel Riek, my advisor, in the Healthcare, Communications, and Robotics lab. After my first year in the PhD, she invited me to move UC San Diego to continue working with her. I accepted her invitation because UC San Diego was starting a Contextual Robotics Institute where multidisciplinary researchers come together to build community, collaborate, and work with local robotics companies. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to gain exposure  to the robotics field.

2) Who has influenced or guided you the most? And how?

Laurel Riek has guided me the most throughout my PhD. She has taught me the ins and out of my research field and she has provided me many opportunities to meet and network with top researchers in my field.

3) Can you talk about the impact of the research and projects you’ve been able to be part of at CSE?

It’s a good time to be at UC San Diego because we just started the Contextual Robotics Institute, directed by Professor Henrik Christensen, and there’s a lot of work being done in soft robotics and surgical robotics. Laurel Riek is actually working to build robots from scratch to help older adults stay in their homes longer.

We are actually trying to design technology that will help people, working to make people’s lives easier and better. And for me, that’s what’s most valuable about it. I feel like the work that I’m doing is actually moving towards something that will be put into people’s homes, be put into hospitals, be put in these different public spaces where people will find them useful.

Learn more about Angelique and her research in this video.

4) You’ve won some impressive awards and recognitions, including a recent Microsoft Research Dissertation grant. How did CSE help you achieve those successes?

CSE afforded me the opportunity to collaborate with local clinical institutions to help shape my research agenda.

*Angelique received one of the 2019 Microsoft Research Dissertation Grants for her work to investigate ways to help robots work more effectively with people. The grants provide up to $25,000 and offer recipients the opportunity to attend Microsoft’s Ph.D. Summit at Microsoft Research headquarters in Redmond, Washington. 

She and fellow PhD student Alyssa Kubota, former postdoc Hee Rin Lee and PI Laurel Riek recently received a best paper honorable mention at the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Collaborative Work for Coordinating Clinical Teams: Using Robots to Empower Nurses to Stop the Line.

Angelique is also  the recipient of theNational Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, Arthur J. Schmitt Presidential Fellowship, GEM National Consortium, Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship, National Center for Women in IT and the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Scholarship.

5) How do you think CSE will help shape or influence you in the future

CSE has provided a community for me which I intend to foster beyond my time at UC San Diego

Learn more about what makes CSE a special place in this video.

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V7

Alan Turning Memorial Scholarship Recognizes Two Outstanding Scholars

Alan Turning Memorial Scholarship Recognizes Two Outstanding Scholars

Each year, the Center for Networked Systems (CNS)  awards the Alan Turing Memorial Scholarship  to one or more students for their academic commitment, particularly in networked systems, and their ongoing support for the LGBTQ community.

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Around the Department – Research and COVID-19 Response

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”Around the Department – Research and COVID-19 Response” font_container=”tag:h2|font_size:34|text_align:left|color:%23191e23″ google_fonts=”font_family:Raleway%3A100%2C200%2C300%2Cregular%2C500%2C600%2C700%2C800%2C900|font_style:700%20bold%20regular%3A700%3Anormal”][vc_column_text el_class=”no-marg-bottom”]COVID-19 PANDEMIC: THE CSE COMMUNITY RESPONDS[/vc_column_text][cl_posts unique_id=”id5de7f3900c9016-47663171″ style=”simple-no_content” image_size=”news_grid” image_filter=”darken” excerpt_length=”30″ count=”9″ order_by=”post__in” order=”desc” include=”4279, 4267, 4259, 4273, 4276, 4263″][vc_column_text el_class=”no-marg-bottom”]RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS[/vc_column_text][cl_posts unique_id=”id5de7f3900c9016-476631713222″ style=”simple-no_content” image_size=”news_grid” image_filter=”darken” excerpt_length=”30″ count=”9″ order_by=”post__in” order=”desc” include=”4290, 4297, 4301, 4305, 4308, 4311, 4314, 4318, 4294, 4321″][/vc_column][/vc_row]

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V7

New Faculty V7

New Faculty

Albert Chern

Assistant Professor

Assistant professor Albert Chern comes to CSE from the Technische Universitat Berlin, where he conducted his postdoctoral research in mathematics. Chern earned his PhD at Caltech and studies the interplay between differential geometry, algebraic topology, differential equations and computational mathematics. His work has helped generate novel applications in fluid dynamics, geometry processing and classical numerical PDE challenges, such as absorbing boundary conditions in wave computations.

Nadia Heninger

Associate Professor

Associate professor Nadia Heninger was a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania before joining CSE. Heninger’s research focuses on security, applied cryptography and algorithms, with particular interest in cryptography in practice, cryptanalysis, privacy, computational number theory and coding theory. She is best known for identifying widespread vulnerabilities in cryptographic keys on the Internet. Heninger received her PhD at Princeton.

Rob Knight

Professor

Rob Knight, a highly regarded professor in the UC San Diego Pediatrics Department, will continue his appointment as a professor with CSE. A tireless researcher, Knight has helped revolutionize our understanding of the microbiome. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Microbiology and the founding director of the Center for Microbiome Innovation at UC San Diego.

Niema Moshiri

Assistant Teaching Professor

Assistant teaching professor Niema Moshiri recently received his PhD at UC San Diego. He focuses on developing high-quality, online educational materials, mostly as massive adaptive interactive texts. These can be used in flipped classes or integrated into massive open online courses. Moshiri will also investigate open computational problems in HIV epidemiology.

Pat Pannuto

Assistant Professor

Acting assistant professor Pat Pannuto comes to CSE from UC Berkeley, where they will soon receive their PhD. Pannuto seeks to increase the digital world’s reach into the physical world. Pannuto’s work identifies opportunities for systems-based solutions that enable the study of broad classes of phenomenon that previously could not be measured. These include fine-grained interaction behavior in social groups, in-body physiology and country-scale power grid performance estimates.

 

Gerald Soosai Raj

Assistant Teaching Professor

Assistant teaching professor Gerald Soosai Raj comes to CSE from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he recently received his PhD. Soosai Raj seeks to design and evaluate student-centered methods to teach computer science to diverse learners. He studies the impact bilingual CS education has on non-native English speakers; the effectiveness of live-coding when teaching introductory programming; and bridging the gap between academia and industry.

 

Jingbo Shang

Assistant Professor

Acting assistant professor Jingbo Shang recently earned his PhD at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on developing data-driven approaches, with little human curation and labeling, to transform unstructured text data into structured heterogeneous information networks. With these tools, actionable knowledge could be flexibly and effectively uncovered based on a user’s instructions.

 

 

Yiying Zhang

Assistant Professor

Prior to joining CSE, assistant professor Yiying Zhang was at Purdue. Zhang works on the intersection between systems and security, programming languages and ML/AI. She explores new ways to build software, hardware and networking systems for the next generation of data centers by focusing on operation and distributed systems, computer architecture and data center networking. She received her PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

 

 

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CSE Alumni News

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”Alumni + Faculty News” font_container=”tag:h2|font_size:34|text_align:left|color:%23191e23″ google_fonts=”font_family:Raleway%3A100%2C200%2C300%2Cregular%2C500%2C600%2C700%2C800%2C900|font_style:700%20bold%20regular%3A700%3Anormal” el_class=”.title-fix”][cl_posts unique_id=”id5de7f3900c9016-47663171″ columns=”2″ style=”simple-no_content” image_size=”news_grid” image_filter=”darken” excerpt_length=”30″ count=”6″ order_by=”post__in” order=”desc” include=”4229, 4238″][/vc_column][/vc_row]

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Farewell from Becky Hames

Farewell from Becky Hames

After twenty years in higher education, and the past three as CSE director of External Relations, I will be retiring at the end of June and moving to Arizona. It has been a pleasure to meet and work with so many CSE alumni over the past three years. Your continued support has been wonderful and sincerely appreciated by the entire CSE community. I encourage you to stay involved with the department and share any suggestions or comments you have to cseinfo@eng.ucsd.edu. I wish each of you the best in your career and personal journeys.

 

Becky Hames

 

 

 

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V7

Letter From the Chair, Dean Tullsen

Letter From Chair

CSE Professor and Chair
Dean Tullsen

Spring quarter 2020 began with our campus, our CSE community and our world facing unprecedented challenges. Yet, in the midst of learning how to grapple with COVID-19, we refused to compromise the quality of our research and education. Our dedicated staff made major adjustments to keep us running as smoothly as possible. Our faculty made tremendous efforts, over a short period, to transform our entire curriculum to be delivered remotely and effectively, providing a true Triton experience for our students.

Meanwhile our CSE alumni and faculty have stepped up to lend their expertise in the fight to help us understand and combat this global pandemic. You can read more about the wide range of work and contributions they are making in Around the Department below.

I want to express the pride and gratitude I feel in seeing our alumni, faculty, staff and students step up to meet this crisis head-on. And as you’ll read in this issue of CSE Alumni Magazine, our alumni continue to be trailblazing entrepreneurs, not afraid to take on challenges and forge new paths to success. 

As we are navigating this challenge, I also must reflect on another one gripping our nation: incidents of racism and violence. I want our CSE community to know that we stand with all of our members and embrace diversity and inclusion of all perspectives, backgrounds and experiences. Our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) committee has been working hard to make sure those values are front and center in all that we do at CSE. As a recent note from the DEI committee to our community affirmed, Black Lives Matter. 

While this has been a turbulent time, we are looking forward to starting our next academic year with several new faculty, which will be announced at a later date, and a new department chair. I’d like to congratulate Sorin Lerner, a tireless supporter of CSE and our 2018-19 Teacher of the Year, who will be taking over as department chair for a three-year term on July 1.

It has been a true privilege to have served as CSE department chair for the last four years, and I wish you all good health and happiness. 

Dean Tullsen
Professor and Chair, CSE