The end of the academic year brought to close yet another successful set of projects in Ryan’s CSE 145 – Embedded Systems Design Project class. The focus of the class is to let the students understand the end to end process of building an embedded system. Along the way, they also learn how to better present their project ideas, write technical documents, create promotional videos, and even how to create startups from their ideas.

There were 14 projects this year. They ranged from playful (e.g., an system that automates the process of making a light show for raves — this BlueRave team is in the picture) to much more serious (e.g., a device to detect when a person is having an epileptic seizure). And there were many other projects in between. You can see all of the final videos on the class project website. Or you can learn about a few of the other projects in the news release from Calit2.

A special thanks to Tiffany Fox for teaching the students how to give outstanding presentations, and providing the students with critiques on their oral presentations. And the class very much enjoyed special guest lectures from Jay Kunin (entrepreneurship), and Mike Kalichman (ethics).

Nonnegative least squares (NNLS) is important in many application domains including graphics, imaging, digital signal processing, and compressive sensing. Our paper titled “A Scalable FPGA Architecture for Nonnegative Least Squares Problems” details the first FPGA architecture for this application; it will be published in the International Conference on Field-programmable Logic and Applications (FPL). The paper describes two different architectures that provide a low cost, low power, and high performance computing solution. It is the first NNLS implementation for an FPGA. Alric Althoff is the lead author along with Ryan. FPL is a premier conference in the area of reconfigurable computing and FPGAs. It is held in London, England this coming September.

The UCSD Department of Computer Science and Engineering had its first annual award ceremony to highlight outstanding contributions to research, teaching, and diversity at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. Our group won the best research awards at both the undergraduate and graduate level. Pingfan Meng received the graduate research award to cap off an outstanding year in which he won the best paper award at FPL, and continued his stellar research on heterogeneous computing. Antonella Wilby received the undergraduate award; she has also had an eventful year having received a National Geographic Young Explorer Award earlier this academic year. Her work develops technologies for documenting the Vaquita – the worlds most endangered marine mammal.

CSE Story
Awards Ceremony Video
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The Food and Drug Administration recently issued a warning about security vulnerabilities in infusion pumps. Unfortunately, this is likely just the start of such warnings. Clearly the medical device manufacturers need to consider security as a first order design constraint. Ryan and other embedded security experts discusses these issues in a recent article on Healthcare Info Security.