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!

The article “Leveraging Gate Level Properties to Identify Hardware Timing Channels” was accepted to the IEEE Transactions on Computer-aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems (TCAD). Jason was the lead author along with co-authors Sarah Meiklejohn (UCSD), Timothy Sherwood (UCSB), and Ryan. This paper formalizes how Gate Level Information Flow Tracking can be used to detect timing channels: a form of information leak where secret information can affect run time.

Congratulations to Dr. Barngrover on successfully defending his thesis titled “Automated Detection of Mine-Like Objects in Side Scan Sonar Imagery”. His PhD research focused detecting underwater mines using side scan sonar on autonomous underwater vehicles. He developed a number of computer vision techniques that can accurate detect these mines. Additionally, he developed the first method of using a brain-computer interface system to quickly identify the mines. During his time in the Kastner Group, he also became a skilled fisherman as evidenced by the nice rainbow trout that he caught during one of our group retreats in Mammoth. Dr. Barngrover will continue to work at SPAWAR after graduation.

Team FANGS took home an honorable mention at the Cornell Cup. The team consisted of Engineers for Exploration members Xavier Tejeda, Dominique Meyer, Andrew Elgar, Kevin Cheng, and Jorge Pacheco. The team was advised by Ryan. These undergraduate students spent the past several months developing a terrestrial vehicle that is capable of remotely monitoring wolves at the California Wolf Center. They competed with over 30 teams in Orlando, FL on May 2-3.

Ryan was highlighted for his work in the Marshall Mentor Program. This is a year long program that pairs first year transfer students with a faculty mentor. Thurgood Marshall College is one of the six colleges at UCSD. This unique system allows students to select a focus on their general elective classes.

Jason and Jonny were invited to represent Tortuga Logic and compete in the California Dreamin’ Entrepreneurship Competition held by Chapman University on April 25-26. The competition, which included the top start-up from 30 schools, focused on connecting founders to investors and business mentors. Jason and Jonny were finalists in the Case Competition portion of the event and left with a $2,000 prize.

Our research to develop a low energy system for canonical Huffman encoding was accepted to the IEEE International Conference on Application-specific Systems, Architectures, and Processors (ASAP). The paper was the result of work done last summer during Janarbek‘s internship at Microsoft Research. It is a collaborative work with Joo-Young Kim at MSR.

Matt Jacobsen and Pingfan Meng’s research on object tracking won the Best Poster Award for Computer Science and Engineering at the Jacobs School Research Expo on Thursday April 17. From the Jacobs School Press release: They developed a computer vision tracking system that is faster and more accurate than the current state of the art. They did so by devising an algorithm that divides the processing between software running on a CPU and custom hardware implemented using a field-programmable gate array. This system can track a single target at 1160 frames per second or 57 independent targets at 30 frames per second. That’s 68 times faster than an approach that uses software only. This considerable increase in computing power improves the accuracy of the tracking algorithm by tracking multiple targets on the object under consideration. For example, instead of tracking a hand using a single target, the system will track six objects – each of the fingers and the palm – making it significantly more accurate.

Our upcoming expeditions to Lake Tahoe and Guatemala where highlighted in the UT San Diego newspaper article discussing where San Diego scientists are doing field research over the summer. Ryan and Curt Schurgers will once again venture into the Guatemalan jungle to the Maya archaeological site El Zotz to support USC archaeologist Tom Garrison in the excavation of a temple. We will be using lidar to create a 3D time lapse of the excavation. Ryan and Perry will be imaging a sunken barge in Emerald Bay in Lake Tahoe in the middle of June.