FAST runway show flaunts student designers’ varied inspirations and backgrounds

A hooded, robelike jacket made out of a KISS T-shirt made its debut among other student fashion lines Thursday night.

The collection was one of 14 student fashion lines displayed on the catwalk at the 18th annual Fashion and Student Trends runway show in Pauley Pavilion. Since UCLA does not offer a fashion design major or minor, the show offers a platform for students to express their passion for design, said FAST President Katie Kim, a fourth-year communication student.

Ellie Tsang, a second-year psychobiology student who attended the fashion show, said she appreciated how it displayed UCLA’s diverse student body and the designers’ different inspirations for their lines.

“It’s pretty interesting to see how diverse our students here at UCLA are,” Tsang said. “You have different styles and different cultures and different causes.”

The show opened with models debuting the line “Free Spirit Collection” by Mariama Bah, a fourth-year anthropology student, who was inspired by street-style summer wear. A women’s strapless white pant jumpsuit was the first piece of the night, followed by a men’s loose satin shirt paired with ripped light-wash jeans. The satin fabric, which highlighted an intricate blue pattern, was apparent throughout the line’s menswear and on a women’s slip dress. Bah’s women’s jumpsuits, two-piece sets and dresses featured rich reds, dark greens and deep blues.

Later in the show, “The Garden of Eden,” designed by first-year physics student Anna Tsai, featured flowers and gold accessories. Her line embodied a natural theme and was inspired by the white camellias that bloom in the backyard of her home. She used cream and white fabrics, along with colored flowers fastened to dresses, draped around models’ arms and woven into flower crowns. Layla Morsi, a first-year psychology student who attended the show, said she liked Tsai’s collection because of its elegance.

Hope Pham, a second-year political science and psychology student, sported a dress of her own design toward the end of the show. The final design in her line, “PHASE,” was a navy evening dress accented by a long train of bright red fabric with a flame-shaped gold applique trim. Her collection also featured a textured gold two-piece set with an asymmetrical satin necktie scarf and a layered skirt. Her next outfit was a pleated white dress with navy trim and thin gold stripes.

While lines such as “The Garden of Eden” and “PHASE” used neutral tones, other lines drew on brighter hues. Third-year design media arts student Madux Middaugh’s line “XXX SS3019” featured graphic design and vibrant colors, such as neon yellow. A few of his styles contrasted with a white jean material dyed with pastel colors that was used in two outfits. Middaugh also refashioned the black KISS T-shirt, pairing it with multicolor painted jeans.

Middaugh’s line was designed to bring light to the fashion industry’s ecological impact. Tsang said Middaugh’s piece composed of Trader Joe’s and Ralphs brown bags stood out to her. She said she also appreciated other designers’ contrasting styles, such as those in “Curvy in Color,” designed by third-year neuroscience and human biology and society student Caliope Marin and fourth-year molecular, cell and developmental biology student Risachi Ogan. Marin, Ogan and Middaugh used their fashion lines to comment on social issues, including ethical fashion and representation of different cultures and body shapes in modeling.

“I really like the contrast (of ‘Curvy in Color’). I like the bright colors,” Tsang said. “I see how (the line) targets issues going on in society today.”

‘Week of action’ promotes Southeast Asian solidarity with campaigns, forums

Southeast Asian student groups at UCLA and across the nation called attention to rising deportation rates of Southeast Asian Americans under President Donald Trump’s administration.

The Asian Pacific Coalition at UCLA, several of its member organizations and Southeast Asian student groups nationwide held a “week of action” last week to raise awareness about the issue. The week included a photo campaign and a forum. Other universities held film screenings, hosted social media campaigns and published deportation timelines.

Over 16,000 Southeast Asian Americans live under threat of deportation, said Lan Nguyen, a graduate student in Asian American studies and member of Southeast Asian Community Alliance.

Southeast Asian immigrants arrived in large numbers to the United States as refugees after the Vietnam War and Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia. They were granted refugee green cards when they arrived, but a green card holder charged with any crime carrying a sentence of a year in prison, including 265 days of probation, can have their green card revoked and be subject to deportation, Nguyen said.

“Even after they had done their jail time or even after they got their probation or wherever, even after they completed the time, whatever the punishment was, they got their green cards taken away,” she said.

Ngoc Nguyen, president of the Vietnamese Student Union, said it used to be unlikely for Southeast Asian American green card holders to be deported for a crime, but deportation rates increased after Trump became president.

She said she thinks the Trump administration has used criminal charges more frequently to deport immigrants than any previous president.

Ngoc Nguyen said she thinks students haven’t been aware of deportation in Southeast Asian American communities because most people aren’t even aware that Southeast Asian Americans are a distinct cultural group from other Asian American cultures.

“If I search for ‘Southeast Asian’ in the … UCLA library, I’m always curious how many books I can find,” she said. “You can probably find one or two, but I’m pretty sure you can find that many even if you were to Google ‘Southeast Asians.’”

Ngoc Nguyen said this lack of awareness prevents students from understanding the challenges faced by Southeast Asian Americans.

“The narrative of Southeast Asians is often being left out from the popular discourse,” Ngoc Nguyen said. “That makes it difficult for the issues of deportation in our community to be known about.”

To raise awareness about this problem, the APC began planning its “week of action” in winter quarter, Ngoc Nguyen said. It also offered a student-taught class in the Asian American Studies department spring quarter.

The week culminated with a forum Friday, during which speakers offered advice about interacting with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and discussed their experiences either facing deportation personally or facing deportation of loved ones.

Johana Guerra Martinez, a third-year political science student and member of APC, said hearing the speakers reminded her of the work she has done to fight recent attempts to deport students’ family members.

“So I think the stories of the speakers, about the kind of efforts I often hear about, but to see it happening across the country in … another state like Minnesota, was really good to see,” she said. “Because we know that, you know, I know, I think for communities of color, it’s good to be part of community effort.”

Ngoc Nguyen said she hoped the event would spark awareness, both in her community and in UCLA as a whole.

“At the end of day, everyone is subject to deportations, and everyone’s in danger in certain ways,” Ngoc Nguyen said. “We just feel like we’re not in danger because we’re just stuck in this bubble and that we’re protected, but we’re not.”

She said the APC hoped to continue holding events to raise awareness and advocate against deportation next year.

Computer science student creates innovative, award-winning glucose monitoring app

A UCLA student developed an application that allows diabetic patients to monitor their glucose levels on their phones.

Bryan Chiang, a first-year computer science student, created EasyGlucose, a mobile application designed to monitor diabetic patients’ glucose levels using a picture of their eye taken on their smartphone. Chiang won first place in the Microsoft Imagine Cup, an international competition for computer science students, in early May for the application.

EasyGlucose allows diabetic patients to forgo traditional methods of monitoring their glucose levels, such as pricking their finger to acquire a blood sample.

Glucose levels in the human eye are correlated with the glucose levels in blood, Chiang said.

Changes in the blood glucose level lead to changes in the glucose concentration in the fluid of the eye, said David Myung, an assistant ophthalmology professor at the Byers Eye Institute at Stanford.

“This leads to very subtle differences in how the iris appears,” Myung said in an email statement. “(Chiang’s) idea is to use artificial intelligence to analyze these fluctuations and to one day measure blood glucose with a simple photograph.”

Researchers have tried devising methods that can predict glucose levels based on features of the eye. However, most of these methods have relied on large machinery or lasers to observe the eye, Chiang said.

This makes these methods less portable and accurate, Chiang said. Furthermore, complicated machinery can make the system less stable, as it relies on more intricate systems that can fail easily.

Chiang said the method behind EasyGlucose is more effective because it utilizes deep learning, a subset of machine learning, to accurately analyze and classify images of the eye.

“That was something unique that I brought to the problem because most of the people working on glucose monitoring are not going to be from a computer science background,” Chiang said.

He said his background in computer science allowed him to come up with a more effective method of noninvasive glucose monitoring. Chiang was inspired to create this app when he found out his grandmother had been diagnosed with diabetes. He said he saw this as an opportunity to apply his knowledge of technology and computer science.

For the project, Chiang said he entered around 15,000 images of an eye along with the person’s glucose levels at the time the images were taken into the machine learning algorithm.

“Because the eye is so complex with so many structures, we don’t really know which parts are going to be most predictive of your blood sugar level,” Chiang said. “What we do with deep learning is that we actually just give it a bunch of eye images; we tell it, ‘On your own, go find which parts of the image and structures inside these eye images are going to be most predictive of blood sugar levels.'”

Matthew Freeby, an assistant clinical professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine and director of the Gonda Diabetes Center, said he thinks patients might be interested in a less invasive way to measure blood sugar.

“If this were to come out for human use and it was noninvasive, it would definitely be a breakthrough and absolutely wonderful for our patients,” Freeby said.

Chiang said he hopes to gather more data to increase the accuracy of EasyGlucose and eventually publish his research. Chiang added he hopes to begin clinical trials this summer to get approval from the Food and Drug Administration before releasing EasyGlucose for commercial use.

Newly opened Baja California Tacos brings Ensenada-inspired cuisine to Westwood

A new taco restaurant is now open in Westwood.

Baja California Tacos opened on Broxton Avenue, across from Diddy Riese, on May 16. It is located in the storefront previously occupied by The Poke, which opened in 2017.

The restaurant serves Mexican cuisine with a focus on fish and fresh ingredients and offers a range of food options including ceviche, tacos, bowls and burritos. Baja California Tacos is one of several Mexican restaurants in Westwood, including Pinches Tacos, Tocaya Organica and Frida.

Karim Kurdi, founder and CEO of Baja California Tacos, said he was inspired to open a taco restaurant based on the fresh Mexican food he would eat while visiting family in Ensenada, Mexico.

“I wanted to open a couple of taco spots, and that’s what the Westside needed,” Kurdi said. “There’s not too many fish places or ceviche, shrimp cocktail (or) fish taco places.”

Ahmad Kurdi, Karim Kurdi’s father and project manager of the Westwood location, said he wanted to open a location in Westwood partly due to good memories he had of visiting Westwood Village as a student at UCLA.

“I always liked Westwood and UCLA. It’s my school,” Ahmad Kurdi said. “We know Westwood inside out.”

The Westwood location is the second Baja California Tacos restaurant to open in the past year. A third location opened near Downtown Los Angeles on Friday, and two more are scheduled to open soon, Karim Kurdi said.

Ahmad Kurdi said he and his son have over 50 years of combined experience in the food industry.

Karim Kurdi added his father’s knowledge of the city’s rules and regulations helped when they were opening the Westwood store. He said he hopes the prices and quality of food will attract students and those who work in the area.

Natalia Urena-Tregillis, a first-year global studies student, said she has several go-to places to eat in Westwood but would be interested in trying a new Mexican restaurant, especially if it offers low prices.

“I really only like Mexican food if it tastes pretty authentic,” Urena-Tregillis said. “When I go to Mexico, I think the food there is much better.”

Andrew Thomas, executive director of the Westwood Village Improvement Association, said the turnover of businesses in Baja California Tacos’ location is part of the normal business cycle.

He added he thinks it will be more successful than its predecessor based on the level of interest in the new restaurant.

“The place is popular. There was a line of people formed; I think people are starting to catch on,” Thomas said. “I think they’re going to be here for a while.”

Around the League: May 31

Men’s Basketball

Jason Maikis, Daily Bruin reporter

Recruiting classes around the Pac-12 are being finalized as the final players make their decisions.

Washington, Arizona and USC basketball have all bagged top-20 recruits, according to ESPN’s rankings. Oregon also has multiple consensus top-100 recruits, and UCLA’s Jaime Jaquez Jr. rounds out the list of top incoming Pac-12 freshmen.

Washington added a top player to its rotation as well with a recent commitment from in-state forward Jaden McDaniels. This adds on to the star-studded class that already includes center Isaiah Stewart from La Lumiere School.

Sean Miller, the Wildcats’ coach, and his staff’s ongoing trouble with the FBI has not hindered Arizona’s recruiting standing in the Pac-12. They landed two top-10 backcourt players – point guard Nico Mannion and shooting guard Josh Green.

Five-star center Isaiah Mobley from Temecula, California, will be a Trojan and will be coached by his father Eric Mobley, an assistant on Andy Enfield’s staff.

Another of Mobley’s sons, Evan Mobley, is the No. 1 ranked recruit for 2020 according to ESPN.

Oregon’s top recruit, C.J. Walker, is another top-ranked player headed west this upcoming season. The power forward from Florida marks Oregon’s third straight season securing a five-star recruit, following Bol Bol and Troy Brown Jr., respectively.

There are also some notable non-commits among the elite high school players. Texas native R.J. Hampton recently decided he would forego college and play overseas in New Zealand next season.

LaMelo Ball also failed to commit to a school for his college career. The youngest son of Lavar Ball and brother of former UCLA point guard Lonzo Ball hasn’t officially been recruited or offered by any school since his stint playing in Lithuania.

Ball previously said that both Kansas and USC were recruiting him.

Track and Field

Jared Tay, Daily Bruin reporter

The track and field NCAA championships are less than a week away.

Pac-12 schools traveled to Sacramento to participate in the NCAA west regional – the qualifying competition to the 2019 NCAA championship to be held in Austin, Texas, beginning Wednesday.

Oregon, the highest ranked team in the conference, had 30 athletes qualify for the championships. In men’s 110-meter hurdles, the Ducks had two athletes qualify. Eric Edwards Jr. finished as the second-fastest qualifier with a time of 13.60 seconds, just one-tenth of a second behind his personal best. Jessica Hull, the 2018 NCAA champion in the women’s 1,500-meter, also qualified for Austin with a time of 4:09.90 – her season best.

Stanford advanced 14 athletes to next week’s national championships. Grant Fisher, who was the 2017 champion in the men’s 5,000-meter, finished in 13:45.64. He is one of two athletes in that event who qualified for the Cardinal. In the women’s 5,000m, Fiona O’Keefe set a personal best with a time of 15:31.45, finishing second overall.

UCLA earned five of its qualifying spots in the shot-put. Redshirt senior thrower Dotun Ogundeji was one of four athletes to reach 20 meters, tallying a 20.00-meter throw exactly. Junior distance runner Robert Brandt finished second overall in the men’s 10-kilometer, with a time of 29:00.43.

The championships kick off Wednesday with the decathlon events scheduled first.

Beach volleyball players compete in international tournaments on road to Olympics

Three Bruins returned from China, and one has a fifth-place finish to show for it.

UCLA beach volleyball seniors Sarah Sponcil, Nicole McNamara and Megan McNamara competed in the 2019 FIVB Beach Volleyball World Tour in Jinjiang, China last week. The four-star tournament is one of many on the way to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

Representing Canada, the McNamaras fell 2-0 in the second qualification round to Ukraine’s Diana Lunina and Maryna Samoday.

Sponcil partnered with USC graduate Kelly Claes to represent the U.S. in the international circuit. The duo placed fifth in Jinjiang after not even making it to qualifiers in the Itapema Open in Brazil days prior, given that only 10 out of the U.S.’s 11 pairs could compete.

In China, Sponcil and Claes dropped their first match to Latvia’s Tina Graudina and Anastasija Kravcenoka. Graudina was a court-one regular for USC this season as a sophomore alongside Abril Bustamante. The two were recently named the 2018 VolleyballMag.com national college beach pair of the year.

Sponcil and Claes went on to win three consecutive matches. They posted straight-set wins over China’s Fan Wang and Xinyi Xia and the U.S.’s Betsi Flint and Emily Day, and a 2-1 win over Spain’s Liliana Fernández Steiner and Elsa Baquerizo McMillan.

But the U.S. pair was eliminated from the tournament following a 2-0 loss to fellow Americans Brooke Sweat and Kerri Walsh Jennings. Sweat and Walsh Jennings claimed the gold at the Itapema Open and went on to win in China, too.

The next four-star tournament on the way to Tokyo is taking place in Ostrava, Czech Republic. The competition began Wednesday, when Sponcil and Claes defeated Karla Borger and Julia Sude of Germany in the main draw.

But the duo was eliminated after a 2-1 loss to Brazil’s Ana Patricia Silva Ramos and Rebecca Cavalcanti Barbosa Silva.

Both Sponcil and Claes and the McNamaras will continue international competition this summer on their quest for an Olympic berth. The pairs will have their first opportunity to clinch a guaranteed spot by winning next month’s 2019 FIVB Beach Volleyball World Championships in Hamburg, Germany.

Sponcil and Claes will enter the 48-team draw as the No. 14 seed, and the McNamaras will be the No. 34 seed. The 12 pools will be determined Monday.

DataRes showcases data science’s scope, from Earthlike exoplanets to LA crime stats

This post was updated August 3 at 10:37 a.m.

Mason MacDougall presented a model that uses data science to help astronomers find planets with the same living conditions as on Earth by monitoring nearby stars.

When a planet crosses in front of a star, he said, the received light from the star dims. By tracking the luminosities of thousands of stars, the model can pinpoint those that may have potential planets in their orbits.

MacDougall, a graduate student in astrophysics, was one of several students who presented their end-of-quarter data projects at DataRes Demo Day on Wednesday. DataRes, founded in winter quarter, is a student organization that teams up students interested in data science to complete projects, which they publish and present at the end of the quarter.

Data science involves analyzing and creating visual representations of data and building predictive models, said Arnav Garg, co-founder and president of DataRes at UCLA and second-year computer science student.

Students presented projects, such as a predictive model that detects toxicity in YouTube comments, a comparison between audience and critic film ratings in different genres, a computer model that detects exoplanets similar in mass and density to Earth and an analysis of crime rates in different areas of Los Angeles.

Richard Yim, a member of DataRes and second-year applied mathematics and statistics student, presented a study that correlates suicide and unemployment rates in the U.S. using data from the World Health Organization.

“Up until 1985 to 2000, there’s been a dramatic decrease in suicide rates for males and females aged between 15 and 24,” he said. “But starting (in) 2000, there’s been a rapid increase in suicides (per) year between both genders … in that age group.”

Yim said he and his partner had worked on the project once a week for seven weeks.

“The main purpose of this project was just to see … what we can learn from just trying to pick out a dataset and clean it (up) and study all the things you can do with different libraries,” Yim said.

Nadine Tabucol, a third-year physics student, Frank Wang, a second-year computer science student, Edward Shiang, a third-year statistics student and Nikhil Sharma, a third-year statistics student compared education levels in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Northern and Southern Africa.

“I wanted to see how data science could be applied to social issues, (and) whether we could garner any new information through data science,” Tabucol said.

Garg said he created DataRes to provide students the chance to learn and practice different methods in data science.

“(When) people think data scientists, they think computer science or math or stats, but it’s also used in medicine, medical imaging and medical research,” Garg said. “It’s used in sports, it’s used in music – it’s used everywhere.”

Garg said he and co-founder Raghava Govil, a second-year statistics and economics student, started DataRes after they attempted to join a data science organization in their first year and realized none existed at UCLA.

“We just found that really crazy, given that there’s 1,200 clubs on campus,” Garg said. “And data science is supposed to be something that’s growing, that’s getting really popular, that’s being used in industry, but there’s just none of it here.”

He said although computer science classes teach many of the skills involved in data science, they are restricted to computer science students. He and Govil wanted to start a data science organization that teaches these skills and is accessible to everyone on campus, Garg said.

Govil said the club aims to create networking opportunities for students on campus who want to enter the field of data science, and give them the chance to apply skills they learned in class to become more attractive candidates for future employers.

“At the end of the day, if you’re a recruiter, you’re going to ask me what projects I’ve worked on,” he said.

Boyang Yu, a second-year economics and statistics student, said she first heard about the organization on Facebook. She said she joined because she wanted to practice her coding but couldn’t take computer science classes because she isn’t in the major.

Adam Cole, a second-year computer science student who attended the presentations, said he liked that the presenters came off as passionate about data science. He said he hopes to join next year to learn how to code predictive models.

Garg said he hopes rising interest in data science on campus will encourage UCLA to introduce a data science major for undergraduates, which is already offered at UC San Diego and UC Irvine.

“I just think that it’s crazy that at UCLA, we don’t have a data science major … for undergraduates,” he said. “But the goal is that if enough people are talking about it, and enough people demand it, then we will eventually get it.”