“The infrastructure is optimized to move water quickly to the ocean, and it did its job,” said Brett Sanders, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Irvine.

Gene Tsudik, a UC Irvine professor and one of the participants, is a computer scientist specializing in privacy and security. … “We are surrounded by smart devices all over the place. Of course, they violate your privacy.” … One takeaway for Scott Samuelsen, director of UCI’s Advanced Power and Energy Program, which ran the project, is that while the adoption of smart home devices is growing fast, regulation and consumer protections that should accompany them are not keeping pace. “The market is out of control with respect to regulation (of devices),” Samuelsen said.

A publicized train ride last week between a federal rail administrator and Congressman Mike Levin put these issues into focus, with the announcement of requests for federal funding in the coming days for rail relocation studies, as well as a new county task force studying issues like beach sand replenishment. And at a Friday news conference in the rain, wind and cold, officials announced one of its first members: UCI civil engineering professor Brett Sanders, a coastal erosion and flooding expert, who has been sounding the alarm about the coastline’s railroad threat