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  • - Keynote Speakers
  • - Speaker Profiles
  • - Session Descriptions
  • - Breakout Abstracts
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Engineering Insights Session Descriptions

Opening Session, Thursday, February 28

From Bench to Boardroom: The College of Engineering receives millions of dollars of funding annually from its corporate collaborators. This opening session will offer insight into how the College of Engineering supports these exceptional relationships, showcase examples of successful corporate collaborations, and describe how our strong interdisciplinary and entrepreneurial culture catalyzes the work. In addition, it will introduce best practices for long-term industry-academic partnerships.

The Opening Session concludes with a keynote presentation by Dr. Jeong Kim, President of Bell Labs at Alcatel-Lucent, on "Creative Innovation."

Thursday Breakout Sessions:

Energy-Efficient Electronics will investigate the application of research in silicon photonics, quantum computation, and chip architecture in realizing significant energy savings. U.S. businesses now spend over $3.3 billion to power their computers and data centers, and that cost is growing rapidly. UCSB faculty members are developing more efficient means of data transmission, energy transmission and storage.

Toward Terabit Access Networks features experts in telecommunications from UCSB, UC San Diego, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, covering the latest research in multi-Gigabit indoor and outdoor millimeter wave wireless networks, and dynamic optical networking based on optical transceivers that merge photonics with silicon. This research is part of CTAN, Center for Terabit Access Networks, a proposed $16 million NSF Engineering Research Center aimed at producing the next quantum leap in telecom technology.

Bio-Inspired Engineering brings the innovation of nature into the realm of human potential. Research inspired by nature offers new possibilities in addressing human health, creating advanced materials and developing autonomous systems. Faculty from the Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies -- a $50 million research collaboration between UCSB, Caltech, MIT and the Army -- will present research leveraging nature’s design in systems biology, network science and novel materials synthesis for the benefit of society.

Opening Session, Friday, February 29

Learn about the many opportunities to collaborate with UCSB as a whole and hear more about models of collaboration that have been successful. Presented by the UCSB Office of Research and its Office of Technology and Industry Alliances, this session concludes with a panel presentation by a number of corporate representatives who have worked with UCSB over the years. The panel will include a range companies whose leaders will offer insight into how to work successfully with UCSB.

Friday's breakout sessions:

Energy-Efficient Building Systems: Energy spent for powering buildings accounts for 40% ($320 billion) of the total U.S. energy expenditure. A large building equipped with HVAC, data centers, and a myriad of sensors and wireless communication devices is a complex system whose operation includes multi-physics and multi-scale effects. It is estimated that substantial savings (10% to 50%) of energy can be earned by using existing hardware, energy-efficiency modeling tools and algorithms (such as "Energy Plus") for retrofit of old and the design of new buildings. But much more can be achieved with modern analysis and control tools based on dynamic systems and control theory methodology, when these are used to optimize the performance of the building system. Hear highlights of UCSB research and commercial and government laboratory perspectives on the problem of energy-efficient retrofit and design of building systems.

Design and Computing with Emerging Technologies explores the convergence of hardware and software research to improve sensor, large scale, and general computing. Faculty from UCSB's Computer Engineering program will address the promise of nanotechnology and new architectures on the future of computing. The Computer Engineering program combines 21 faculty members from Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering with over $3 million in annual research expenditures and major research collaborations with Intel, Altera, Mitsubishi, IBM, Texas Instruments, Mentor Graphics and Aerospace Corporation.

Large Scale Image/Video Databases presents research in three technologies: image analysis, data storage, and data-mining fundamental to modern scientific discovery. Presenting faculty will address how the collection of data -- its analysis, and storage -- has application not only in pursuing scientific discovery, but in addressing societal and individual needs. Applied research examples for these technologies are drawn from collaborations between biologists, computer scientists and electrical engineers through UCSB’s $9 million NSF Center for Bio-image Informatics.