Technical Breakouts
Technical Breakout I
9:30-10:30am
COMBINING MOORE'S LAW WITH MOLECULAR RECOGNITION
Tom Soh, Mechanical Engineering
The current research goal at the Soh Laboratory at UCSB is to accelerate the biomedical discovery process and its validation by combining highly integrated microsystems with the specificity of molecular recognition elements. In particular, his lab is currently focused on two areas; the first area seeks to utilizes electrokinetic and magnetophoretic phenomena in microfluidic environments for high throughput sorting of cells and separation of viruses and molecules. The second area aims to combine multiple physical/chemical and biological processes to develop highly integrated biosensors. In this presentation, we will discuss the development of Dielectrophoresis Activated Cell Sorter (DACS) technology, wherein the electric fields are engineered to achieve efficient isolation of rare bacterial cells. Using the DACS microsystem, we demonstrate for the first time, the screening of a molecular library in a microfluidic device, where a large high-diversity peptide library was screened and enriched for its affinity against the target proteins.
SPECIALIZED DRUG DELIVERY
Samir Mitragotri, Chemical Engineering
Polymeric micro- and nanoparticles have very exciting applications in drug delivery. Encapsulation of drugs in polymeric carriers protects them from enzymatic degradation and provides sustained release over prolonged periods. Further, encapsulation also allows drug targeting via cell and tissue-specific ligands. The performance characteristics of polymeric particles in the body, for example circulation times, macrophage clearance, targeting and drug release rates, depend on several particle parameters including size, shape, surface chemistry, and mechanical strength. Our research aims at developing quantitative laws describing the relationships between particle design and performance. We particularly focus on engineering particle shape, a design parameter that has received little attention in the past. We have devised methods to generate particles of several distinct shapes and studied their impact on key processes in drug delivery, in particular phagocytosis, the clearance of particles by macrophages. Our results show that particle shape makes a profound impact on phagocytosis, more so that particle size. Based on this understanding, we have designed novel polymeric particles possessing complex shapes that are highly resistant to phagocytosis. These studies reveal that particle shape provides a new dimension in engineering of polymeric carriers and opens up new opportunities in drug delivery.
ENGINEERING NANOPARTICLES FOR TARGETED DRUG DELIVERY
Joe Zasadzinski, Chemical Engineering and Materials
One of the main limitations of drug delivery via liposomes and other biodegradable lipid carriers is premature drug release in vivo. While these lipid carriers can encapsulate drugs for weeks or months in saline, they lose their contents in hours in a physiological environment. This shows that in vivo, drug release is via degradation of the lipid bilayer via lipases or other enzymes that punch holes in the carrier. We have created a new bilayer within bilayer capsule called the vesosome that provides extended release in serum due to the nested construction. Lipases and other enzymes are kept away from the interior capsules that contain the drug by the outer membrane, resulting in 50 - 100 fold increases in the drug retention time in serum or blood. This extended retention could make the vesosome a much more versatile delivery system than conventional liposomes.
SYSTEMS BIOLOGY
Frank Doyle, Chemical Engineering
Our research is focused on unraveling the regulatory architectures of complex biological systems. As gene-level architectures become known, the open challenge is to assign predictable behavior to a known structure, the so-called “genotype-to-phenotype” problem. In response to this challenge, the discipline of systems biology has emerged with an integrative perspective towards determining complex systems behavior. A property of particular interest is the /robustness /of the biophysical network: the ability to maintain some target level of behavior or performance in the presence of uncertainty and/or perturbations. In this talk, a number of quantitative tools from systems theory will be presented as enabling methodologies for unraveling robust biological regulatory systems, with an emphasis on sensitivity analysis. Our work on modeling and analysis of the gene network underlying circadian rhythm for various organisms (/Arabidopsis, Drosophila/, mouse) will be highlighted, and generalizations will be drawn for more general gene regulatory networks.
BIOINFORMATICS AND IMAGING TECHNOLOGIES
B.S. Manjunath, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Recent advances in imaging technologies have resulted in large volumes of image and video data in biology research, with most of the analysis still done manually and in a qualitative manner. Manual analysis is not only time intensive but often is not reproducible as well. In this context, computer vision and database methods offer promising and scalable solutions to quantitative bioimage analysis. At the NSF supported Center for Bioimage Informatics at UCSB, biologists, computer scientists and engineers are working together in developing new methods for analyzing and mining large amounts of bioimage data. A testbed is being developed for sharing and exploring biological images, and will soon be made available to public. This talk will focus recent advances in image analysis, including new methods for segmentation, registration, tracking, modeling, and quantifying cellular and subcellular processes using microscopy images.
THE COMPLEX FLUIDS DESIGN CONSORTIUM: OVERVIEW AND RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS
Glenn Fredrickson, Chemical Engineering and Materials
I will provide an overview of the Complex Fluids Design Consortium (CFDC), a university-industry-national lab partnership in developing computational tools for the design of polymer fluid formulations, including those relevant to personal care products, paints and coatings, and plastic materials. The CFDC is affiliated with UCSB's Materials Research Laboratory (MRL). The structure and operation of the consortium and some research highlights will be presented.
TITANIUM MEMS
Noel MacDonald, Mechanical Engineering
ENGINEERING ON THE PORE SCALE FOR MICROFLUIDIC SYSTEMS
Todd Squires, Chemical Engineering
A well-known consequence of miniaturizing fluidic systems is that walls are never very far from the fluids. I will discuss ideas towards exploiting, rather than minimizing, the influence of the walls in such systems, by employing the most 'wall-intensive' systems around -- porous media. More specifically, I will discuss a variety of possibilities that exist when porous media are rationally designed to have specific pore-scale properties, and will illustrate with two concrete examples: first, 'sculpting' field and flow lines using microfabricated `porous media' with highly anisotropic properties (with Max Narovlyansky, Harvard), and second, porous media with locally anisotropic surface chemistry that employ induced-charge electro-osmotic flows to generate extremely high pressures using low-voltage AC electric fields.
Speaker to be announced
ELECTRONICS WITH ADVANCED MATERIALS
Mark Rodwell, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Despite formidable progress with CMOS, transistors built from III-V materials offer important advantages for high-performance applications, having greater bandwidth at a given scaling generation, and greater breakdown voltage at a given bandwidth. InP-based bipolar transistors now offer 650 GHz bandwidth and 5-V breakdown at 250 nm scaling; 65-nm devices should obtain ~1.2 THz cutoff frequencies and should serve applications to 650 GHz. III-V channels are also under serious consideration for use in CMOS VLSI at the 22 nm scaling generation and beyond.
SYSTEM-ON-CHIP DESIGN METHODOLOGY
Tim Cheng, Electrical and Computer Engineering
For nano-CMOS, the drastic device shrinking, low power-supply levels, and increasing operating speeds significantly reduce the noise margins and increase the error rates. With further scaling of technology, high variability and low reliability are bound to become the dominant challenges for system-on-chip design. Our research addresses the functional verification, silicon debug and test issues involved in several levels of design hierarchy, including logic, integration, and architectural levels. The goal is to achieve an integrated design methodology supporting embedded self-test, self-reconfiguration and even error-tolerance for complex systems in the presence of components with relatively high variability and failure rates. In this presentation, we will present some of our recent results on embedded self-test and silicon debug.
HOT TOPICS AND COOL IDEAS IN SCALED CMOS ANALOG DESIGN
Patrick Yue, Electrical and Computer Engineering
In this seminar, Prof. Yue will discuss the latest research in the area of high-speed CMOS analog design, a cell-based CAD methodology for CMOS RF and millimeter-wave ICs and integrated sensors for biomedical applications. Prof. Yue will discuss the importance of device layout and bias conditions for RF design and present a novel sub-circuit-cell-based RF/mm-wave modeling/CAD methodology. This design framework mitigates modeling uncertainty and process variation effect to minimize design re-spins. The design of key building blocks in a low-voltage, low-power wideband (3–5 GHz) RF front-end including T/R switch, LNA and mixer will be described. Next, a novel in-scribe-line process variation monitoring circuit will be presented. For future high-speed parallel serial interface, Prof. Yue will talk about the system and circuit design of a very-low-power continuous-time adaptive equalizer utilizing on-chip passive components to compensate high-frequency chip-to-chip channel losses. Lastly, he will briefly talk about several enabling IC components for futuristic integrated sensors for health monitoring.
Technical Breakout II
10:45-11:45am
OPTICAL AMPLIFICATION OF FLUORESCENT BIOSENSORS USING LIGHT HARVESTING CONJUGATED POLYMERS
Gui Bazan, Materials
Homogeneous biosensor assays can be designed which take advantage of the optical amplification of conjugated polymers and the self-assembly characteristic of aqueous polyelectrolytes. Signal transduction is controlled by hybridization of neutral PNA-C* probe and the negative ssDNA target, resulting in favorable electrostatic interactions between the hybrid complex and cationic polymer. Distance requirements for Förster energy transfer are thus met only when ssDNA of complementary sequence to the PNA-C* probe is present. Signal amplification by the conjugated polymer provides fluorescein emission >100 times higher than that of the directly excited dye. The water soluble conjugated polymers have also found utility in the fabrication of organic optoelectronic devices.
NEW TOOLS FOR ENGINEERING BIOPHARMACEUTICALS FOR CANCER AND CARDIOVASCULAR DISEASE
Patrick S. Daugherty, Department of Chemical Engineering, UCSB
Current biopharmaceuticals, including peptides and antibodies, rely upon specific interactions with their intended targets in complex environments. In human serum, for example, therapeutic and diagnostic reagents must discriminate between tens of thousands of different molecular species present in widely varying concentrations. Yet, precise selectivity is seldom achieved, or even characterized. In fact, current therapeutics are molecularly promiscuous leading to reduced efficacy and increased side-effects. Protein engineering methodologies offer the potential to engineer therapeutics that possess increased target specificity and binding affinity, and consequently, improved efficacy. Towards this goal, we have developed a set of new protein engineering tools to enhance biomolecular targeting, environmental sensing, and highly-specific inhibition activities. These tools provide significant opportunities to generate biomolecular reagents with enhanced properties for next generation diagnostics and therapeutics.
PROTEIN FOLDING
Kevin Plaxco, Chemistry and Biochemistry
Biomolecular folding is rapid, cooperative and extremely specific. We have been exploiting these properties by using biomolecular folding as a signal transduction mechanism in a new class of electronic biosensors. These sensors are rapid (seconds to minutes), sensitive (micromolar to femotomolar) and selective enough to deploy directly in blood serum and other grossly contaminated materials.
OPTOELECTRONICS
Dan Blumenthal, Electrical and Computer Engineering
CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES IN NETWORKS OF EMBEDDED SENSORS, PROCESSORS, AND ACTUATORS
Joao Hespanha, Electrical and Computer Engineering
In the last few years the interest in networked distributed systems has increased tremendously. This can be explained by independent developments in enabling technologies related to embedding processing, wireless communication, low-cost sensing, and autonomous mobility. In parallel (but certainly not independently), it became clear that this type of systems could have a tremendous societal impact in areas as diverse as transportation, the chemical industry, environment management, homeland security, and defense. This impact can be especially significant if the design, production, and maintenance costs for networked distributed systems becomes very small. This talk will discuss the research challenges posed by this type of systems as well as selected recent results in this active area of research.
WORLD'S FIRST HYBRID SILICON LASER
Mario Paniccia, Intel’s Photonics Technology Lab
Researchers from UCSB and Intel have built the world’s first electrically powered Hybrid Silicon Laser using standard silicon manufacturing processes. This breakthrough addresses one of the last major barriers to producing low cost, high bandwidth silicon photonics devices for use inside and around future computers and data centers. Hear what it took to make this discovery and learn more about what it will take to develop market applications.
NOVEL ADHESIVE
Kimberly Turner, Mechanical Engineering
Geckos, as well as many insects, have evolved a robust reversible adhesion mechanism, enabling them to traverse rough, smooth, vertical or inverted surfaces. This feat is enabled by a hierarchical structure of 20 µm diameter setae splitting into 200 nm wide spatulae. The setae are able to conform to the microscale roughness of a surface, enabling the spatulae to make intimate surface contact—enhancing short-range van der Waals interactions. In addition, the hierarchical structure provides a fast and effective release mechanism. This talk will focus on the fabrication and demonstration of hierarchical synthetic adhesives based on maximizing van der Waals interaction. In addition, a new class of reversible bio-inspired synthetic adhesives will be presented. This biomimetic system is composed of 10 µm wide, 130 µm long flexible nickel paddles coated by 200 nm diameter aligned vertical polymeric nanorods (analogous to the gecko’s setae and spatulae, respectively). When subjected to a magnetic field, the nickel paddles undergo a reversible conformational change, greatly reducing the contact area, and decreasing adhesion by a factor of 40. Such controllable adhesion may impact technologies ranging from ubiquitous latching systems to high-tech applications such as microrobotics.
METHANE CONVERSION TO LIQUID FUELS AND CHEMICALS
Eric McFarland, Chemical Engineering and GRT Inc.
The world economy depends upon hydrocarbons and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. As oil reserves are depleted coal and methane (in natural gas) will become increasingly important feedstocks. There remain enormous quantities of methane on earth and the potential exists to renewably produce large quantities on an ongoing carbon neutral basis. The selective chemical conversion of methane to fuels and chemicals continues to be among the most important unmet challenges of the chemical sciences. A new halogen based process developed in a UCSB-Industry collaboration incorporates innovative chemistry and reactor design to potentially overcome hurdles previously encountered in methane conversion processes.
NEW FACES OF NITRIDES FOR ADVANCED ELECTRONICS AND OPTOELECTRONICS
Jim Speck, Materials
GaN and its important alloys for devices, AlGaN and InGaN, commonly form in the wurtzite structure, which is polar. The polar nature of the wurtzite structure gives rise to polarization-induced internal electric fields which hinders the performance of III-nitride devices. The spontaneous and piezoelectric-realted internal electric fields polarizations are parallel to the common [0001] c-axs thin film orientation. To mitigate polarization effects, we have developed new orientations of GaN its alloys for advanced device applications.
TERASCALE COMPUTING INITIATIVE
Rich Wolski, Computer Science
Recent advances in processor heat and power management coupled with the availability of scalable, high-speed networking technology has is fueling attempts to achieve yet another order or magnitude increase in high-end computing capability: from the teraflop to the petaflop. This talk will discuss some of U.C. Santa Barbara's high-end computing efforts including it participation in a project that is attempting to achieve a sustained petaflop for scientific computing applications by 2009.
NETWORKING AND COMMUNICATIONS
Kevin Almeroth, Computer Science
A prediction about the evolution of the Internet is a trend towards pervasive access, largely enabled by wireless communication. This trend has profound implications in numerous areas: (1) the design of wireless network hardware; (2) the development of efficient wireless protocols; and (3) even the creation of new applications. These implications eventually lead to a set of questions focused on the profound opportunities for people to interact. This talk will focus on these issues using a current research project of ours. This project seeks to develop a new class of applications for social networking using mobile devices. In the end, the goal of this talk is to link computer science protocol research and the development of new social networking applications.
WEB APPLICATION SECURITY
Richard Kemmerer, Computer Science
Web-based systems are a composition of infrastructure components, such as web servers and databases, and of application-specific code, such as HTML-embedded scripts and server-side applications. While the infrastructure components are usually developed by experienced programmers with solid security skills, the application-specific code is often developed under strict time constraints by programmers with little security training. As a result, vulnerable web-applications are deployed and made available to the entire Internet, creating easily-exploitable entry points for the compromise of entire networks. This talk presents a novel approach to anomaly-based detection of web-based attacks. The approach uses an anomaly generalization technique that automatically translates suspicious web requests into anomaly signatures. These signatures are then used to group recurrent or similar anomalous requests so that an administrator can easily deal with a large number of similar alerts.
RESEARCH IN IMAGING, INTERACTION, AND INNOVATIVE INTERFACES
Matthew Turk, Computer Science
Although computer technology has been improving exponentially for decades, there has not been commensurate progress in human-computer interaction – we still mostly interact with the same devices and styles that we used two decades ago. The GUI-based style of interaction has made computers simpler and easier to use, especially for office productivity applications where computers are used as tools to accomplish well-defined tasks. However, as computers become more ubiquitous, take on a wide variety of form factors, and are used in a variety of new ways, these standard interaction techniques will no longer adequately support the needs of users. In order to accommodate a wider range of scenarios, tasks, users, and preferences, we need to move toward interfaces that are natural, intuitive, adaptive, and unobtrusive. In recent years, perceptual and multimodal interfaces have emerged as an increasingly important research direction to address the need for new interaction models and technologies. The general focus of this area is to integrate multiple perceptual modalities (such as computer vision, speech and sound processing, and haptic I/O) in order to provide interactions not feasible with standard interfaces. In this presentation, I will describe this emerging area of research, and describe research in the Four Eyes Lab at UCSB that focuses on these intersecting areas of imaging, interaction, and innovative interfaces.
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