Discovery Lectures
Get a taste of recent STEM research from UCSC professors and guest lecturers!
Photo by Professor Shaowei Chen
Day 1Designing Spatialized Audio in Games (Prof. Tamara DuPlantis)
By Victor Gong and Max Zhai
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Week 2 discovery lectures kick off with the workings of spatialized audio in video games, presented by Professor Tamara Duplantis. Prof. Duplantis began with a relatable example from the popular video game Fortnite, which uses a complex sound system to enhance the player’s experience. In order to demonstrate multichannel sound, Prof. Duplantis played a song using two speakers in the lecture hall. She explained how our brains process the sound and calculate the location, but that it is harder to determine the sources of sound when there are multiple. One technique that mimics sound in video games is known as ambisonics, or the reconstruction of the sound field. Ambisonics are able to accurately represent the location, direction, and amplitude of a sounding object, regardless of which sound system is used for it. However, they are an expensive and complicated process, limiting their use. “If you had speakers everywhere in this room, you could pinpoint the sound of a cricket accurately [with the ambisonic method],” Prof. Duplantis proclaimed. Other methods of sound simulation include multichannel sound, binaural recording, and HRTF, all with their different pros and cons as well as usage. Prof. Duplantis ended the lecture by demonstrating a video game, which included a sound system that she and her team devised.
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Day 2
Bringing the Lab Into the Ocean: Designing Scientific Robotic Vehicles (Eric Martin)
By Victor Gong and Max Zhai
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Ever wondered what lies at the bottom of the ocean? In today’s lecture on oceanic robotic vehicles, Professor Eric Martin dove into the design of underwater robotic vehicles as well as potential challenges. Prof. Martin, who works for the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute believes that the ocean holds numerous untouched secrets that may prove useful to scientific advancement. “We know more about the surface of Mars than about the bottom of the ocean,” Prof. Martin said. Furthermore, due to the ever changing landscape of the ocean, including warming, oxygen depletion, and acidification, comprehensive ocean exploration technology has become more and more crucial, thus requiring the development of underwater robotic vehicles. Many types of ocean vehicles exist, including submarines, remotely operated vehicles (ROVs), and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). For effective and efficient exploration, underwater vehicles must consider four crucial aspects: buoyancy, control, navigation, and exploration. For buoyancy, Prof. Martin utilized the analogy of a hot air balloon, explaining that vehicles designed to be naturally buoyant “operate very much like hot air balloons with fans attached to the side.” The lighter the vehicle is, the less power it consumes. Continuing on to control and navigation, Prof. Martin discussed the different technologies used in these two aspects, including thrusters for control and various positional and terrain mapping devices for navigation. Finally, for exploration, ocean vehicles are equipped with a range of sensors and instruments that are extensively used for underwater archaeology, environmental monitoring, and further studies. With continued advancements and efforts by organizations and researchers alike, Prof. Martin hopes to revolutionize our understanding of the ocean’s behavior and unravel more of its mysteries.
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Day 3From Microbes to Mercury – How Anaerobic Bacteria Make Mercury Really Toxic (Profs. Peter Weiss and Nettie Calvin)
By Victor Gong and Max Zhai
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In the present day, even the air we breathe is contaminated with harmful chemicals, including mercury. Professors Peter Weiss and Nettie Calvin detail the various issues caused by mercury as well as potential sources and solutions. Prof. Weiss began the session by explaining the unusual properties of mercury. Most metals, such as iron and silver, are solids at room temperature, while mercury is a liquid. Since liquids evaporate, this property becomes extremely dangerous very quickly. According to Prof. Weiss, many different circumstances can lead to mercury exposure, such as gold mining operations in smaller countries and mercury-contaminated products ranging from batteries to soaps. Mercury, which is an environmental pollutant, can also last in the atmosphere for approximately 1 year, albeit at low concentrations. Prof. Weiss further explained the difference between elemental and organomercury. Elemental mercury is slow to oxidize in the environment and only the vapor form is extremely toxic, while organomercury, such as methylmercury can bioaccumulate is also one of “the most toxic compounds that we know of.” Formed naturally through anaerobic bacteria, organomercury can be biomagnified, such as through a fish ingesting little amounts resulting in an eventual build-up in its stomach. As mentioned before, methylmercury is most commonly produced by microbes. In recent years, scientists have discovered that certain genetic properties of specific microbes may cause them to produce organomercury. Prof. Calvin followed up discussion of these developments with her own research, which focuses on finding correlations between organomercury and the presence of other compounds in the environment. All in all, understanding and actively seeking solutions to the risks posed by organomercury are essential steps towards safeguarding our environment and protecting human health from this pervasive and dangerous element.
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Day 4Building Generalizable, Scalable, and Trustworthy Embodied Agents (Prof. Xin (Eric) Wang)
By Victor Gong and Max Zhai
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In this day and age, almost everyone knows or has heard about the renowned AI engine ChatGPT. However, this “all-knowing” entity still has its own weaknesses, such as being unable to perform any physical tasks. In today’s lecture, Dr. Eric Wang discussed the types and processes of modern AI models that serve as the backbone of modern AI technology, as well as their limitations. To demonstrate an issue of AI models, Dr. Wang displayed separate pictures of a man and a dog, both catching a frisbee. While a human could easily distinguish between the human figure and the animal figure, state-of-the-art programs such as CLIP cannot. One method to deal with this issue is through counterfactual prompt learning (CPL), in which the model grabs positive features from the right answer and assigns negative associations with features from the wrong answer. Other methods, such as visual question answering (VQA), and AMSolver (automatic manipulation solver), focus on simplifying complex tasks by breaking them down into manageable steps for the AI. Dr. Wang stated that the goal is for future AI programs to solve tasks with their own reasoning and little to no human input, making AI more dynamic.
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Day 5Imaging and Probing Atomically Thin Quantum Devices at the Nanoscale (Dr. Jairo Velasco Jr.)
By Victor Gong and Max Zhai
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You’ve probably heard of technological revolutions, such as the Industrial and Digital Revolutions, but did you know that another is happening today? Semiconductor chips have been around for decades, and as Dr. Velasco stated, “All the devices you have, your cell phones, your laptop, are all a function of this hardware (semiconductor).” Dr. Velasco explained that our devices and computing power are limited by semiconductor technology. He then introduces the concept of the quantum computer, which utilizes quantum bits. Essentially, the quantum system has two states within an electron, determined by the direction of its spin (0 or 1), which provide much more information than classical bits. These advances in quantum computing can create major advances in the future, but they are limited by the enormous size of quantum computers as of now. Dr. Velasco believes that the development of quantum materials, such as a sheet of graphene a single atom thick, can be useful to improve quantum computing. Regarding future development, Dr. Velasco predicts that there will be fierce competition between companies working on quantum computers in the future, which will drive better products.
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