“Over the last century, whether it was from computers or mobile phones, stealing data was all about directly stealing zeros and ones,” says Mohammad Abdullah Al Faruque, a computer scientist at UC Irvine whose lab led the latest eavesdropping efforts.
Twenty-six high school teams from Orange County and Long Beach have been tasked with building the most efficient electric car they can. Their cars were inspected last weekend, and it’s all been leading up to race day Saturday morning at Parking Lot 70 at UC Irvine.
“Over the next year-and-a-half we will be designing, building, and testing a 1,200-square foot Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) that is carbon-neutral, resilient, affordable, water- and energy-efficient, and of course attractive and comfortable,” says the website for Team M.A.D.E.-OC — “Modular Affordable Dwellings for the Environment” — which pairs up Orange Coast College and UCI’s School of Engineering.
“Coastal communities face huge uncertainties,” said Brett Sanders, a civil and environmental engineering professor at UC Irvine. “Engineers aren’t used to designing within that uncertainty. But you can do something small for now, like increase the height of the seawall a little to provide protection against high-tide events. You may be able to design a better system in the future.” … Sanders’ main effort these days seems to be trying to understand how municipalities deal with sand.
The modular unit was designed and built by a group of 30 students from UC Irvine and Orange Coast College as part of the inaugural Orange County Sustainability Decathlon. The competition brought together college students to not only get hands-on architecture experience, but to do so with affordability and sustainability in mind. … “The ADU gifted from UCI and OCC is going to give us the ability to expand our program. Currently with just the home that we have, we can serve up to nine individuals, both male and female,” Alfa Hernandez, program director at HIS-OC, said.
“I can’t overemphasize the calamity that these events cause at the neighborhood level. Hundreds of health care facilities don’t have back-up generators,” said Jack Brouwer, an engineering professor and director of the National Fuel Cell Research Center at the University of California, Irvine.
“We continue to work with SoCalGas on transforming several parts of its gas system for introducing some percentage of hydrogen initially and transforming it for eventually carrying all hydrogen,” said Jack Brouwer, UCI engineering professor and hydrogen [National] Fuel Cell Research [Center] director. UCI’s work with Sempra’s SoCalGas utility involves determining what impacts hydrogen-natural gas blends would have on various gas-fired appliances and end-uses.
“This emerging fusion of the AI and engineering fields represents a profound opportunity to make breakthrough research advances as well as to address some of the most pressing challenges facing society today,” said Pramod Khargonekar, professor of electrical engineering and computer science and vice chancellor for research at the University of California, Irvine, and chair of the visioning event.
Newsha Ajami, [UCI alumna, Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering and] chief development officer for research at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, adds that it’s especially important to capture stormwater as droughts are becoming more common. “Water, if we protect it as soon as it hits the ground and keep it clean, we can actually reuse it and repurpose it in various ways, especially during the wet years that we get,” Ajami says.
As the coronavirus outbreak spread into the United States, Dr. Brian Wong, a plastic surgeon at the University of California, Irvine Medical Center, wanted to know what doctors on the front lines could do if they ran out of ventilators. In March, Wong organized daily conference calls on Zoom to brainstorm ideas with a couple of his colleagues, and they adopted the name Bridge Ventilator Consortium. Soon, medical professionals from all over the country began dialing in. … "I was amazed." Dr. Govind Rajan, an anesthesiologist at UCI, said.
Iryna Zenyuk, Ph.D., is a researcher, associate professor of [chemical] and biomolecular engineering, and associate director of the University of California, Irvine National Fuel Cell Research Center. … Dr. Zenyuk also sees a major shift toward fuel cells for trucks. “For long-haul truck drivers and their employers, time and every pound of payload is money,” she said. “Heavy-duty trucks are virtually impossible to decarbonize with batteries.
To reduce reliance on fossil fuels in industries where electricity is impractical, unreliable or too expensive, California is building a massive “hydrogen hub” to generate a steady supply of an alternative fuel with no carbon emissions — bringing us closer, say advocates, to a completely green future. “It’s the beginning of the investment that must be made if we are to meet our zero-emission policy goals,” said UC Irvine engineering professor Jack Brouwer, director of the university’s Clean Energy Institute and an interim director for business development on the hub’s leadership team.
UC Irvine researchers created a free smartphone app, dubbed TrackCOVID, which develops an anonymous graph of interactions by pooling user data every time an individual gathers with others or goes to a public place. App users can log their interactions and "checkpoints", or places visited, and the app anonymously links users' interactions as they congregate in the same places over time.
