ucsd - AI Weirdness

College courses of the future, courtesy of a neural network

By Janelle Shane On September 21, 2018 - 3 min read

There are a lot of strange courses that make it into a college course catalog. What would artificial intelligence make of them? I train machine learning programs called neural networks to try to imitate human things - human things they are absolutely are not prepared to understand. I’ve trained

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By Janelle Shane On August 26, 2015 - 1 min read

ucresearch [http://ucresearch.tumblr.com/post/127567457311]: How Dust Is Holding Science Back > To most of us dust is just something we clean off our furniture, but to scientists dust can cause big problems in the lab. Computer chips are put together and tested in what are called clean

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By Janelle Shane On June 26, 2015 - 2 min read

This seemed like a good day to post some rainbow laser modes! Light in a circular cavity makes a variety of standing wave patterns, some of which look like flowers, wagon wheels, or even tie-fighter spaceships. These images are from my simulations of the light in the cavities of nanolasers

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By Janelle Shane On April 24, 2015 - 1 min read

Top: An electron microscope photo of long, straight waveguides (left) interrupted by an accidental scratch during fabrication, that turned the orderly stripes into naturalistic chaos. Each structure is about 0.5 microns high, or less than 1/200 the thickness of a typical human hair. Bottom: A photo on quite

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By Janelle Shane On February 02, 2015 - 1 min read

This is the nanolaser equivalent of being smacked in the face with a slab of corrugated roofing during a tornado. There’s one step in making microscopic lasers where you have to peel away metal from much of the substrate, leaving behind pillar-shaped lasers surrounded by small metallic patches. These

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By Janelle Shane On November 25, 2014 - 1 min read

On the right: a photonic nanostructure, used in researching new light-based ways to make computers communicate faster. On the left: a single human hair (oops). Fortunately, according to Dr. Felipe Vallini of UCSD (who made and imaged this structure): “A hair hit my device, but he is still fine!”

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By Janelle Shane On September 17, 2014 - 1 min read

This fractal pattern is actually a guide to shaping laser pulses. Each pixel in this image represents one possible laser pulse shape (the arrival time of the frequencies in a broadband laser pulse). The pixel’s color indicates how good that particular pulse shape should be at controlling a particular

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By Janelle Shane On September 14, 2014 - 1 min read

Nano Street Fight Electron microscope image submitted by grad student Rajat Sharma of UCSD, who looked unsuccessfully with another grad student for a Brad Pitt-esque central character, before giving up and declaring the fight a total mess. They were testing the etching conditions for making a series of tiny uniform

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By Janelle Shane On August 26, 2014 - 2 min read

Nanolasers with googly eyes! Because grad students. These are microscopic lasers, shown in various stages of completion. The innermost layer, looking like a slim grey column, is the semiconductor core, which actually does the light-amplifying. Next comes a layer of glass that coats the entire laser (the white puffy-looking laser)

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By Janelle Shane On August 12, 2014 - 1 min read

A nano-lollipop? This is a tiny glass ball on a tiny stick made of polymer, a partially-completed nano-sized chemical sensor made by then-grad-student Matthew Chen. It’s on its way to becoming a nano-torch [http://lewisandquark.tumblr.com/post/92218390187/this-is-a-nanotorch-which-is-an-ultra-sensitive] , which can detect minute concentrations of chemicals due to

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College courses of the future, courtesy of a neural network

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