News Archive

June 15, 2015 — Recently, over 50 students – most of them graduate students – showed up for the day-long Big Pixel Hackathon to Discover the Planet in Atkinson Hall’s Calit2 Theater. The May 23 hackathon was organized by the Big Pixel Initiative (BPI) to showcase what can happen when you let students loose on the largest private collection of high-resolution satellite imagery on earth. Co-directors Gordon Hanson, a professor in the School of Global Policy and Strategy (GPS), and Qualcomm Institute research scientist Albert Yu-Min Lin oversaw the event, with hands-on management by lead coordinator Jessica Block and postdoctoral researcher (and GIS expert) Ran Goldblatt, both based in the Qualcomm Institute.

June 3, 2015 — In a major step toward broader adoption of document-oriented data and the JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) data format, University of California, San Diego computer science and engineering professor Yannis Papakonstantinou and Couchbase Inc., today announced their collaboration on a next-generation query language for big data. Their work brings together the full power of SQL with the flexibility of JSON.

June 1, 2015 — To encourage a more diverse community in computer science education and research, the Center for Networked Systems (CNS) at the University of California, San Diego is establishing the Alan Turing Memorial Scholarship in partnership with private donors.

May 26, 2015 — One of the inaugural startups located in the Qualcomm Institute Innovation Space, VirBELA, has been selected to compete June 4 in the 2nd Annual World Cup Tech Challenge. The Silicon Valley contest will culminate in the event at Microsoft in Mountain View, CA, where 25 competing startups from 17 countries will present their companies.

May 20, 2015 — On June 15, the Qualcomm Institute will kick off its new season of nine works involving residencies and performances funded by the institute’s Initiative for Digital Exploration of Arts and Sciences (IDEAS). The interdisciplinary work, titled CrowdCAVE, will use two of the Qualcomm Institute’s key visualization spaces: the StarCAVE virtual-reality environment, where small groups of visitors are surrounded by a virtual crowd to which they are added; and the large-scale Vroom display wall next door in the Calit2 Theater, which will showcase the full breadth of the virtual group portraiture. “By using the Vroom display wall,” says UC San Diego visual arts lecturer Emily Grenader (MFA ’13), “we will be able to adequately show the ties between individuals at different locations performing in different ways.”

May 14, 2015 — Representatives from the first seven companies admitted into the Qualcomm Institute Innovation Space wowed the campus community at a press briefing and networking reception to mark the official opening of the new 6,000-square-foot facility inside Atkinson Hall on the UC San Diego campus. The event took place May 7.

May 5, 2015 — Dr. John Wooley, the long-time associate vice chancellor for research and professor of pharmacology at the University of California, San Diego, passed away in April after a long battle with cancer.

April 21, 2015 — Xiaoxiang refers to the region in China’s Hunan Province where the rivers Xiao and Xiang intersect. It is also the title of a concerto for alto saxophone and orchestra composed by UC San Diego music professor and Qualcomm Institute composer in residence Lei Liang. The work was one of three finalists for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Music. The Pulitzer awards and finalists were announced on Monday, and Xiaoxiang by Lei Liang (published by Schott Music) just missed out on the prize, which went to Julia Wolfe for her folk-classical hybrid, Anthracite Fields, an oratorio about coal miners in Pennsylvania at the turn of the last century.

April 16, 2015 — There must be something about hoops, Tritons and computer science. Meet Marissa Hing. The 18-year-old high school senior was on campus April 4 to attend Triton Day, when more than 20,000 accepted students and their families converged on UC San Diego to get a taste of everything the university offers its students-to-be. Despite her 5-foot-1-inch height, Hing is also coming to play basketball on an athletic scholarship for the NCAA Division II team, after starring since her freshman year at Pinewood High School in Los Altos, Calif.

April 10, 2015 — An upcoming exhibition at the University of California, San Diego’s Qualcomm Institute will showcase art works derived from large-scale laser scans of buildings, landscapes and the environment. Autonomous Sensing ScanLAB opens April 16 in Atkinson Hall’s gallery@calit2, with a 5pm panel discussion with speakers Thomas Pearce and Matthew Shaw from the UK-based ScanLAB, whose 3D LIDAR scans form the basis of the art works on display. The panel will be followed by a reception and official opening to the public.