News Archive - Ioana Patringenaru

New $42M Grid-Tech Sandbox Will Help Get More Renewables on Electric Grids

A dozen buildings on the University of California San Diego campus. All of the campus’ solar panels. All the chargers for electric vehicles. More than 2,400 light fixtures. More than 800 smart plugs. These are some of the assets that DERConnect, a NSF-funded testbed for the powergrid, will be able to control on the UC San Diego campus.

How Much Risk are Humans Willing to Take When Interacting With Robots?

How do people like to interact with robots when navigating a crowded environment? And what algorithms should roboticists use to program robots to interact with humans? These are the questions that a team of mechanical engineers and computer scientists at the University of California San Diego sought to answer in a study presented recently at the ICRA 2024 conference in Japan.

A Simple Firmware Update Completely Hides a Device’s Bluetooth Fingerprint

A smartphone’s unique Bluetooth fingerprint could be used to track the device’s user–until now. A team of researchers have developed a simple firmware update that can completely hide the Bluetooth fingerprint, eliminating the vulnerability.

Meet CARMEN, a Robot That Helps People with Mild Cognitive Impairment

Meet CARMEN, short for Cognitively Assistive Robot for Motivation and Neurorehabilitation–a small, tabletop robot designed to help people with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) learn skills to improve memory, attention, and executive functioning at home.

How Your Sleep Patterns Change Can Tell You About Your Health

Your sleep tracker might give you information about more than just your sleep–specifically, it might give you information about chronic conditions such as diabetes and sleep apnea, and illnesses such as COVID-19.

Breakthrough UC San Diego Brain Recording Device Receives FDA Approval for a Clinical Trial

The Federal Drug Administration approved a clinical trial to test the effectiveness of an electronic grid that records brain activity during surgery, developed by engineers at the University of California San Diego.

Advanced AI-Based Techniques Scale-up Solving Complex Combinatorial Optimization Problems

A framework based on advanced AI techniques can solve complex, computationally intensive problems faster and in a more more scalable way than state-of-the-art methods, according to a study led by engineers at the University of California San Diego.

Franklin Antonio Hall Sparks Research Collaborations

From improving tools for robot-assisted surgery to studying how humans prefer to interact with robots, collaborations across different departments at the Jacobs School of Engineering are in the spotlight in this year’s accepted papers for the 2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

Soft Robots, Tough Problems

Robots that can assist physicians during surgery. Robots that can swim. Robots that can grip delicate objects. These were some of the demonstrations on display at Robosoft, the biggest conference in the field of soft robotics, in San Diego this year.

AI Algorithms Can Determine How Well Newborns Nurse, Study Shows

A modified pacifier and AI algorithms to analyze the data it produces could determine if newborns are learning the proper mechanics of nursing, a recent study shows. Specifically, the researchers from the University of California San Diego measured if babies are generating enough suckling strength to breastfeed and whether they are suckling in a regular pattern based on eight independent parameters.