CSE 145 and CSE 237D combine the talents of undergraduate and graduate students to develop quarter long projects on a variety of topics in embedded systems. This year saw the development of a number of great projects. Many were proposed by Ryan and members of our research group. A number of them came directly from the students. All of the students put in countless hours to develop these projects, which were highlighted in news releases from the Jacobs School of Engineering and a two part series at Calit2 (Part 1, Part 2). The classes will be offered again in Spring 2015. Start thinking of some good ideas for next year!

The hardware security techniques developed in our research group, and being commercialized by Tortuga Logic, recently received a significant amount of news coverage. This all started with a story from the Jacobs School of Engineering that got picked up by a number of different venues including ACM TechNews, Calit2, R&D Magazine, Science Codex, Counsel and Heal, Phys.org, Science Daily, RF Globalnet, Product Design and Development, Red Orbit, and probably several others that I have missed. The International Business Times also interviewed Ryan and put out a rather lengthy story.

Our group continues its success at FPL following up last years three papers and best paper award with three papers in this upcoming FPL to be held in Munich, Germany in September. Pingfan was the lead author on the paper “Hardware Accelerated Novel Optical De Novo Assembly for Large-Scale Genomes” which develops a hardware accelerated solution for genome matching. This paper was done in collaboration with our friends at BioNano Genomics. The second accepted paper was “Improving FPGA Accelerated Tracking with Multiple Online Trained Classifiers” with Matt as the lead author. This paper utilizes the performance of FPGAs to create a robust tracker by training the features in an online manner. Dajung was the lead author on the final paper, “High Throughput Channel Tracking for JTRS Wireless Channel Emulation”, which developed a channel tracker which is an integral part of the wireless channel emulator project with Toyon Research Group. Congrats and beifall to all the authors!

Matt and Jason successfully defended their theses bringing the total to three people who have graduated with PhDs from the Kastner Group this year. Matt’s research focused on developing a Smart Frame Grabber framework to ease the development of building computer vision applications using heterogeneous systems. Jason’s research on hardware security developed the first method for determining the existence of timing channels in hardware.

Both will be missed, but will not be going too far. Matt will work at Google in Irvine though will still reside in the San Diego area. Jason will be full-time CEO at Tortuga Logic. Congrats to both!