All propulsion systems that leave the Earth are based on chemical reactions. Chemical reactions, at best, have an efficiency compared to rest mass of 10^-9 (or about 1eV per bond). All the mass in the universe converted to chemical reactions would not propel even a single proton to relativistic speeds. While chemistry will get us to Mars it will not allow interstellar capability in any reasonable mission time. Barring new physics we are left with few realistic solutions.

The evolution of organic electronics has now reached the commercial phase, with the recent market introduction of the first prototypes based on organic transistors and organic solar cell modules fabricated from solution.  Understanding the impact of both the organic semiconductor design and processing conditions, on both molecular conformation and thin film microstructure has been demonstrated to be essential in achieving the required optical and electrical properties to enable these devices.  Polymeric semiconductors offer an attractive combination in terms of appropriate solutio

There is no evidence that significant reductions in the carbon dioxide emissions associated with power generation will be achieved using current commercial alternatives to abundant and low-cost fossil fuels. The massive infrastructure and equipment changes required for such a transition would require multiple decades if and when a serious commitment is made and an economical transition pathway identified.

Although Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications and services have their roots in ideas that are decades old, their increasingly widespread deployments have made them a hot topic these days. Frequent topics of discussion and hype, they are causing both excitement and concern.

Today, the IT industry accounts for about 2 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions, comparable to the footprint of air travel. This footprint includes everything from datacenters and servers to networks and client equipment like laptops and printers. More and more information is being generated every day, and more and more consumers and enterprises are processing this information every day. Will IT emissions eclipse air travel one day soon?

In a low-carbon world, there is a need for energy storage to match nuclear, wind, and solar output with energy demand. These are high-capital-cost low-operating cost technologies where operating at a part load implies much higher costs for energy. Because energy is 8% of the world gross national product, significant increases in energy costs imply significant reductions in global standards of living. Heat storage costs are an order of magnitude less expensive than work (electricity) storage and thus may be the affordable pathway to an economic low-carbon world. 

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are rapidly becoming the dominant approach to computer vision and a major component of many other pervasive machine learning tasks, such as speech recognition, natural language processing, and fraud detection.  As a result, accelerators for efficiently evaluating DNNs are rapidly growing in popularity.  Our work in this area focuses on two key challenges: minimizing the off-chip data transfer and maximizing the utilization of the computation units.  In this talk, I will present an overview of my research work on understanding and impr

Enabled through the rapid advancement of real-time sensing and communication technologies, we are seeing a more flexible resource consumption behavior in many of our societal infrastructure systems that previously faced "inelastic" demand. This transformation can provide us with new operational flexibility and potentially enable us to make our urban world safer and more efficient. However, dispatching this new form of flexibility requires modeling and influencing human behavior.

Join us as we discuss the Carbon Neutrality Initiative (CNI) at UCSB! To begin the discussion we will have Dr. David Lea, the Global Climate Leadership Council (GCLC) representative for UCSB, discuss his role. This will be followed be a brief presentation by Jordan Sager, our Campus Energy Manager and Elizabeth Szulc, a Carbon Neutrality Fellow at UCSB. We will conclude with a Q&A and will leave plenty of room for discussion.

With the decline and eventual end of historical rates of lithographic scaling, we arrive at a crossroad where synergistic and holistic decisions are required to preserve performance over power scaling in digital computing. Numerous technologies are emerging with this exact aim, from devices (transistors), memories, 3D integration, specialization, photonics, and others.