UPCOMING SEMINARS
March 27, 2013
Vassilios Kovanis
Efficient Design of Tunable Photonic Oscillators
April 17, 2013 Wen-Hann Wang Energy Efficiency through Technology Scaling: A System Perspective
RECENT SEMINARS
March 13, 2013
Max Shtein
New Architectures for Improving the Efficiency of Excitonic Solar Cells
March 6, 2013
Progress and Challenges
in Plasmon-enhanced Photocatalysis and Photovoltaics
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February 20, 2013
Charlie Hu
Energy Debugging in Smartphones
February 13, 2013
Thomas Wenisch
Power Management from Smartphones to Data Centers
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Greetings!
The Winter quarter was a busy and exciting one here at the Institute for Energy Efficiency. We are pleased to share our latest news with you including details on the 2013 UC Santa Barbara Summit on Energy Efficiency, our most recent technology roundtable on Information & Communications Technologies (ICT) core networks, and faculty research updates on efficient wireless networks and electrochemical storage. We look forward to connecting with you over the next few months.
John Bowers Dave Auston
Director Executive Director |
| Institute News | |
Summit on Energy Efficiency May 1-2, 2013 - Register today!
ICT Technology Roundtable
On February 7-8th, 2013, the Institute for Energy Efficiency hosted a Technology Roundtable on Information and Communications Technologies Core Networks. This  high-level event brought together 27 leading stakeholders from the private sector, government, and academia. Through highly interactive discussions, participants identified technological and architectural advancements needed in transmission, switching, and routing to develop scalable, energy-efficient, next-generation core networks. A report is currently being prepared highlighting roundtable findings.
The lead sponsor for this Technology Roundtable was Juniper Networks, and supporting sponsors were Ciena, Sprint, and the U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Sciences Network. Read more about the roundtable here.
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| Faculty News & Research | |
Institute is awarded $1.6 Million from DOE's ARPA-E
 The Department of Energy's ARPA-E awarded the Institute $1.6 million to develop an energy storage device for hybrid electric vehicles led by Professor Galen Stucky's research group. The technology combines the properties of batteries and capacitors into one technology.
According to ARPA-E the device "could charge within minutes, deliver more power, and have a longer life expectancy compared to today's electric vehicle batteries." Click here to read the full news release.
Eliminating network congestion in data centers
Institute faculty member Dr. Heather Zheng and her colleagues in the Computer Science department have been working on innovative solutions to the issue of network congestion in data centers. This congestion often occurs during sudden bursts of activity and can cause major
 bottlenecks in the transfer of data, which translates into service downtimes. Their solutions involve bouncing wireless 60GHz beams off polished metallic plates on the ceiling, reducing interference and taking advantage of the multi-gigabit bandwidth that the 60GHz radios provide. Their most recent experiments have verified the properties using real hardware. Now these wireless links can augment existing wired connections in data centers, alleviating the congestion in a matter of milliseconds.
Dr. Zheng's research has received significant press coverage over the last year: New York Times (01/12), MIT Techology Review (04/12), ComputerWorld (05/12). Read the full text paper here
and more about Heather and her group here. See their most recent conference presentation from Sigcomm 2012, including figures illustrating the testbed and results.
UC Santa Barbara Students Win National Sustainability Contest at White House
 An interdisciplinary team of UC Santa Barbara undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral students have taken a top prize at the 2013 Better Building Case Competition. This competition is part of President Obama's Better Buildings Initiative, which is striving for a 20 percent reduction in commercial and industrial energy use by 2020. Several Institute faculty and graduate students were involved with this team. Read the full news release here.
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| Featured Seminar and Video |
Professor David Lea on Global Warming
 David Lea, professor in UC Santa Barbara's Department of Earth Science delivered a special seminar in October 2012 titled Can Global Warming Be Held to 2 Degrees Celsius above Pre-Industrial? Professor Lea was awarded the prestigious Jefferson Science Fellowship by the US Department of State in 2010 and has served as science advisor to the Honorable Todd Stern, President Obama's Special Envoy on Climate Change. Watch David's video and presentation here.
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