The University of California San Diego is once again ranked one of the top 10 public universities in the country, according to the Center for World University Rankings (CWUR).
Tag: Uc San Diego
Cleaning up Online Bots’ Act – and Speech
Researchers at the University of California San Diego have developed algorithms to rid speech generated by online bots of offensive language, on social media and elsewhere.
NSF makes $20 Million investment in Optimization-focused AI Research Institute led by UC San Diego
The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced today an investment of $220 million to establish 11 artificial intelligence (AI) institutes, each receiving $20 million over five years. One of these, The Institute for Learning-enabled Optimization at Scale (TILOS), will be led by the University of California San Diego.
$5 million gift to establish new Center for Taiwan Studies at UC San Diego
Longtime campus supporters Chiu-Shan Chen Ph.D. ’69 and Rufina Chen have committed $5 million to the University of California San Diego to establish a new Center for Taiwan Studies within the Division of Arts and Humanities, highlighting the alum’s deep commitment to both giving back and supporting programs that expand cultural understanding of Taiwan and Taiwanese Americans.
Nation’s First Civility Research Center Launched by National Conflict Resolution Center and UC San Diego
The civility center plans to refine a national model to promote national criminal justice reform and reduce mass incarceration.
Conrad Prebys Foundation Awards $500,000 Grant to Support UC San Diego Department of Music Outreach
The University of California San Diego Department of Music will expand its post-pandemic reach with support from a $500,000 grant from The Conrad Prebys Foundation. The grant, which contributes to the Campaign for UC San Diego, helps launch the department’s outreach to both regional audiences, and the international music community.

UC San Diego approves new undergraduate degree in Black Diaspora and African American Studies
The university’s new bachelor of arts degree will not only enhance the academic offerings at UC San Diego, but will foster collaborative study for students and faculty regarding the current experiences and histories of people of African descent.

UC San Diego receives 12-piece collection of mid-20th century Soviet art
Twelve pieces of art from the Soviet Impressionism and Socialist Realism periods will find a new home at the University of California San Diego, thanks to longtime Division of Arts and Humanities supporters Ann and Joel Reed.

Supercomputers Illustrate the Mechanical Process of Cancer Growth
According to the World Health Organization, one in six worldwide deaths are attributed to cancer, but not due to initial malignant tumors. They were caused by the spread of cancer cells to surrounding tissues, which consist largely of collagen. That was the focus of a recent study by Stanford University and Purdue University researchers.

Supercomputers Help Advance Computational Chemistry
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have succeeded in developing an artificial intelligence (AI) approach to detect electron correlation – the interaction between a system’s electrons – which is vital but expensive to calculate in quantum chemistry.

Supercomputers Used to Develop Longer-Lasting, Faster-Charging Batteries
Supercomputers funded by the National Science Foundation are being used to develop more reliable and efficient electric vehicles and other products by focusing on the batteries that power them.

Researchers Use Supercomputers to Better Understand the Sun’s Corona
As worldwide mandates prevented gatherings over the holiday season, crowds in Chile and Argentina donned masks and eye shields to take in some outdoor magic: a two-minute solar eclipse on December 14. A week before however, everyone had a chance to see what the eclipse might look like thanks to simulations generated on the recently launched ‘Expanse’ supercomputer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego.

Supercomputer Models Describe Chloride’s Role in Corrosion
While researchers have been studying chloride’s corrosive effects on various materials for decades, high-performance computers were recently used to create detailed simulations to provide new insight on how chloride leads to corrosion.

Supercomputer Modeling Aids Sickle Cell Research Discovery
Researchers recently created detailed simulations showing how stiff red blood cells flow through blood vessels, deforming and colliding along the way.

‘Expanse’ Supercomputer Formally Enters Production
The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego announced that its new Expanse supercomputer formally entered service for researchers following a program review by the National Science Foundation (NSF), which awarded SDSC a grant in mid-2019 to build the innovative system.

Supercomputers Help Model Potential SARS-CoV2 Protease Inhibitors for COVID-19
A team of researchers recently created a pharmacophore model and conducted data mining of the database of drugs approved by the U.S. Federal Drug Administration (FDA) to find potential inhibitors of papain-like protease of SARS-CoV2, one of the main viral proteins responsible for COVID-19.

UC San Diego Student Team Shines at Supercomputing 2020 Conference
A team fielded for the first time by the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego competed in this year’s Student Cluster Competition at the annual International Conference for High-Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC20) achieved fourth place overall among 19 teams during the 72-hour challenge.

SDSC Receives Two ‘Best’ HPCwire Awards for 2020
The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California San Diego received two HPCwire awards for 2020, including ‘Best Use of HPC (High-Performance Computing) in the Cloud’, and ‘Best Use of HPC in Energy’.

UnitedHealth Group Awards $4M to UC San Diego to Expand State’s Mental Health Workforce
With the support of a $4 million grant, UC San Diego School of Medicine has launched a program to expand and diversify the pipeline of child and adolescent psychiatrists in California.

New Study Finds That Parasites Can Drain Energy from Hosts Prior to Infection
A new study by Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego and the Norwegian University of Life Sciences has found that a species of brain-infecting parasite can disrupt the metabolism of its host—the California killifish—both before and after infection.

UC San Diego Commits $2.5M to the Black Studies Project
This is a crucial time for each and every university to consider the role that Black studies plays in its intellectual and institutional formation, according to the conveners of the Black Studies Project (BSP) at UC San Diego. The current political moment has not only heightened the urgency of grappling with questions of Blackness and anti-Blackness, but has underscored the critical role that Black studies scholars and scholarship must play in this ongoing dialogue. Black studies has never been more relevant.

High-Performance Computing Aids in Predicting Oil Dispersal During Spills
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, thousands of oil spills occur each year in the United States. Although the majority of incidents involve less than one barrel, the spills have wreaked economic and environmental devastation for decades. Researchers recently created supercomputer simulations to better understand the fate of oil droplets for effective countermeasures.

Supercomputer Calculations Boost Our Understanding of Our Immune System
While researchers around the world race to develop an effective and safe COVID-19 vaccine, a team from the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego contributed to a study led by Vanderbilt Vaccine Center of Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) on T cell receptors, which play a vital role in alerting the adaptive immune system to mount an attack on invading foreign pathogens including the Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2.

Grants Totaling $700K Fund Two Major UC San Diego Projects Aimed at Advancing Faculty Diversity
With the largest proportion of applicants to the University of California System now students of color, it is critical that UC San Diego recruit more diverse faculty to better reflect the statewide population, and to foster an inclusive campus climate.

Former UC San Diego Chancellor and UC President Emeritus Richard Atkinson and Rita Atkinson to Establish Physician Assistant Education Program at UC San Diego
University of California President Emeritus and former UC San Diego Chancellor Richard Atkinson and Rita Atkinson have committed to give nearly $7 million to establish and endow the Richard C. and Rita L. Atkinson UC San Diego Physician Assistant Education Program at UC San Diego.

UC San Diego launches Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies program and minor, a welcome addition to campus
UC San Diego will have a new program in Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies starting in fall, a long-awaited move that many students, faculty, staff and alumni have been eager to see.
Offering cultural programming and the university’s very first minor in Asian American and Pacific Islander studies, the new program is housed in the Institute of Arts and Humanities, along with 14 additional programs.

Robots to Help Children Touch the Outside World
A team of University of California researchers is working to improve telepresence robots and the algorithms that drive them to help children with disabilities stay connected to their classmates, teachers and communities. The effort is funded by a $1 million grant from the National Robotics Initiative at the National Science Foundation.

National Science Foundation Funds Development of a Science Gateway for New Materials Discovery
The National Science Foundation has awarded a $1 million Research Advanced by
Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering (RAISE) grant to a multidisciplinary team of researchers at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California San Diego, the University of Minnesota, Carnegie Mellon University, and Cornell University to create the X-ray Imaging of Microstructures Gateway (XIMG), a science gateway designed to make it possible for global material sciences researchers to study the behavior of new and existing materials using X-ray diffraction.

Campaign for UC San Diego Raises Record-Breaking $344.4M
Donors gave generously to the University of California San Diego in fiscal year 2019-2020 resulting in a record-breaking year for the Campaign for UC San Diego: $344.4 million was raised, bringing the campaign total through June 30, 2020 to $2.27 billion.

National Science Foundation-funded CloudBank Now Operational
The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California San Diego and its partners at the University of Washington (UW), UC Berkeley, and Strategic Blue have entered production operations of the National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded CloudBank program, which aims to simplify the use of public clouds across computer science research and education.

Machine Learning Helps Plasma Physics Researchers Understand Turbulence Transport
UC San Diego researchers published a study that used the ‘Comet’ supercomputer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center on campus showing how machine learning produced a model for plasma turbulence.

OpenTopography Collaboration Awarded New Four-Year Grant
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has renewed funding for OpenTopography, a science gateway that provides online access to Earth science oriented high-resolution topography data and processing tools to a broad user community advancing research and education in areas ranging from earthquake geology to ecology and hydrology.

Supercomputers Help Uncover ‘Noisy’ Neutron Star Collisions
A series of simulations using multiple supercomputers, including Comet at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego, suggests that when the neutron stars’ masses are different enough, the result is far noisier. The models predicted an electromagnetic ‘bang,’ which isn’t present when the merging stars’ masses are similar, according to researchers.

Supercomputers Simulate Environmental Changes in Chesapeake Bay
Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) researchers used supercomputer simulations to examine impacts of both regional and global changes affecting the Chesapeake Bay. They discovered that historical increases in fertilizers and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations have forced the bay to behave increasingly like a small sea on a continental shelf rather than a traditional estuary.

Does Remote Instruction Make Cheating Easier?
Today, colleges across the nation are making critical decisions for the coming academic year. For some, all courses will be online; for others, the decision may be to have some classes offered in person, and the rest conducted in remote or hybrid formats. Higher education is embracing virtual learning in what could become the norm in a post-pandemic future—leading to the question: Does remote instruction and cheating go hand in hand?

Supercomputer Simulations Help Researchers Predict Solar Wind Storms
Researchers at the University of New Hampshire used SDSC’s Comet supercomputer to validate a model using a machine learning technique called Dynamic Time Lag Regression (DTLR) to help predict the solar wind arrival near the Earth’s orbit from physical parameters of the Sun.

UC San Diego Receives $1.6 Million to Better Prepare Young Adults for Engineering and Technical Careers
Longtime University of California San Diego supporter Buzz Woolley has pledged $1.6 million over the next three years to fund an innovative new initiative that will significantly expand the region’s engineering and technical workforce.

National Science Foundation Awards $5 Million to Develop Innovative AI Resource
The NSF has awarded the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego a $5 million grant to develop a high-performance resource for conducting artificial intelligence (AI) research across a wide swath of science and engineering domains.

Supercomputer Simulations Show How DNA Prepares Itself for Repair
Researchers from Harvard University and the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston recently used the Comet supercomputer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California San Diego to uncover the novel ways in which DNA prepares itself for repair.

SDSC’s Sherlock Cloud Announces ‘Skylab’ Cloud Solution
The Sherlock Division of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California San Diego has broadened its secure Cloud solutions portfolio to offer Skylab, an innovative customer-owned Cloud platform solution that provides a self-standing, compliant environment for secure workloads in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud.

Georgia Tech Engineers Simulate Solar Cell Work Using Supercomputers
Because of silicon’s relatively high cost, hybrid organic-inorganic perovskites (HOIPs) have emerged as a lower-cost and highly efficient option for solar power, according to a recent study by Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) researchers.

SDSC Sherlock Cloud adds Google Cloud Platform to Extend its Multi-Cloud Service
The Sherlock Division of the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California San Diego has expanded its multi-Cloud solution, Sherlock Cloud, to include the Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Pioneering Scientist and Innovator Larry Smarr Retires
After 20 years at UC San Diego, Larry Smarr will step down as the director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) and retire as a distinguished professor from the Jacobs School of Engineering’s Computer Science and Engineering Department at the end of this month.

Cheryl Anderson Named Founding Dean of School of Public Health at UC San Diego
Dr. Cheryl Anderson, professor and interim chair of the Department of Family Medicine and Public Health in the School of Medicine at the University of California San Diego, has been named founding dean of The Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health and Human Longevity Science. The school was established at UC San Diego in 2019 with a $25 million lead gift from the Dr. Herbert and Nicole Wertheim Family Foundation with an emphasis on research and education designed to prevent disease, prolong life and promote health through organized community efforts.

$1M Gift Speeds COVID-19 Testing and Tracking at UC San Diego
A $1M gift from the John and Mary Tu Foundation is accelerating the efforts of UC San Diego translational research virologist Davey Smith to increase the number of people tested for COVID-19, as well as develop new ways to track and treat the virus. Smith and his team are studying how the disease spreads to better inform contact tracing, as well as leading clinical trials to test new drugs for treatment of COVID-19.

These flexible feet help robots walk faster
Roboticists at the University of California San Diego have developed flexible feet that can help robots walk up to 40 percent faster on uneven terrain such as pebbles and wood chips. The work has applications for search-and-rescue missions as well as space exploration.

Supercomputers Reveal True Strengths of Some Zirconia Ceramics
Researchers from the Colorado School of Mines have been using multiple supercomputers to study certain characteristics of zirconia. The team recently published their findings in the Journal of the European Ceramic Society.

Supercomputing Drug Screening For Deadly Heart Arrhythmias
Using supercomputers, scientists have developed for the first time a way to screen drugs through their chemical structures for induced arrhythmias.
Supercomputer Simulations Help Advance Electrochemical Reaction Research
University of Texas at Austin researchers recently simulated the catalytic mechanism and atomic structure of nickel-doped graphene using Comet at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and Stampede2 at the Texas Advanced Computing Center. The simulations showed how the catalyst converts carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide, an important feedstock for chemical engineering.

Joe Tsai and Clara Wu Tsai Donate Personal Protective Equipment to San Diego Health Care Providers
Joe Tsai, co-founder of Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba, and his wife Clara, have donated nearly half a million pieces of personal protective equipment (PPE) to be distributed by UC San Diego to health care providers in the San Diego region.