Daily Bruin – Page 53

Engineering professor awarded Ellis Island Medal of Honor for antenna work

Yahya Rahmat-Samii’s lifelong passion for mathematics and space brought him from Iran to the United States to research antennas in the field of electromagnetics.

“Like van Gogh used his brush to paint on canvas, so electromagnetic scientists are artists who use their antennae to paint electromagnetic waves,” he said.

Rahmat-Samii, a distinguished professor of electrical engineering and electromagnetics, received the Ellis Island Medal of Honor in a ceremony on Ellis Island on May 11. The medal is awarded to people whose work has impacted American society.

Other recipients this year included well-known figures such as Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google. Notable past recipients include seven U.S. presidents, Henry Kissinger, Rosa Parks and Gregory Peck.

Rahmat-Samii, who was born in Iran, received the award for his work with antennas and electromagnetic microwaves. He currently directs UCLA’s Antenna Research, Analysis, and Measurement Laboratory, which researches wireless communication.

He is also the Northrop Grumman Chair in Electrical Engineering/Electromagnetics and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. Rahmat-Samii has won more than 40 awards for teaching and research over 30 years.

Rahmat-Samii attended the University of Tehran before coming to the United States to pursue his graduate studies at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He said he decided to leave Iran because the best electromagnetic and antenna research was taking place in the United States.

From there, he joined the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

“From childhood, I was always fascinated from space,” he said. “So that probably at the end brought me to Jet Propulsion Laboratory, because they always were excited with looking towards the heavens.”

Rahmat-Samii worked at JPL for over 10 years. While there, he became one of the youngest senior research scientists in the lab’s history.

However, Rahmat-Samii said he had always loved teaching, which brought him to UCLA in 1989.

Vignesh Manohar, a graduate student of electrical engineering who works under Rahmat-Samii, said he considered Rahmat-Samii a role model because he stayed involved with students in and out of the classroom even as he was busy making advancements in the field of electrical engineering.

“He’s been in this field forever, and still every day that we meet him, he seems to be growing younger and younger in terms of his field,” Manohar said. “Finding a professor like him who gets involved in every aspect of research, be it a writing paper, be it doing your research, be it his involvement with his products that we have in the lab, (is amazing).”

Aydin Babakhani, an associate professor of electrical engineering at UCLA and a former student of Rahmat-Samii, said he found Rahmat-Samii’s reception of the award particularly impressive because Rahmat-Samii had to compete with notable figures across many fields.

“It’s not just academia. He is getting the same award that presidents are getting,” Babakhani said.

Babakhani said he felt the award brings prestige to the entire electrical engineering department.

“We are all honored to have Dr. (Rahmat-Samii) winning this award,” Babakhani said. “When you see the impressive list of people winning this award, and his office next to mine, makes it impressive.”

Rahmat-Samii said he felt that this award was more special than others he had received because it recognized his achievements not just within the field of electrical engineering, but for society as a whole.

“This one is very dear to me, because it represents not necessarily my scientific work per se, but also recognition that the kind of work (scientists) do is appreciated in society,” he said.

He added he sees this award as a sign he has been moving in the right direction.

“It adds another stamp (of approval),” Rahmat-Samii said. “(It says,) ‘Do your work! And make sure you share your knowledge with others.’”

Engineering professor wins $175,000 award for potentially lifesaving research

A UCLA professor earned a National Science Foundation award for research that could improve the technology used in search and rescue missions, according to a university press release Thursday.

Achuta Kadambi, an electrical and computer engineering professor, received the foundation’s $175,000 Computer and Information Science and Engineering Research Initiation Initiative award March 15.

If successful, Kadambi’s research would be able to help emergency responders find survivors in natural disasters who might be obscured by smoke or fire. His research focuses on robotics and computational vision, as well as finding ways to search through biological tissue using imaging technology.

Kadambi, who was named in the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for science this past year, is also the leader of UCLA’s Visual Machines Group, which aims to give robots visual capabilities through the intersection of optical physics and deep learning, a subset of machine learning.

In addition to leading the research group, Kadambi teaches classes on computational imaging, computer vision and digital image processing to undergraduate and graduate students.

Kadambi joined the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science after earning his doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and became an assistant professor in 2018.

NWWNC to sponsor chamber orchestra performance for Westwood residents, students

Students and Westwood residents can attend a free chamber orchestra concert next year.

The North Westwood Neighborhood Council awarded Kaleidoscope, a conductorless chamber orchestra, a $5,000 neighborhood purpose grant at a meeting May 8 to hold a free concert in Westwood in the coming year. Kaleidoscope has performed in Westwood locations before, including in Powell Library and the Hammer Museum.

Benjamin Hoffman, Kaleidoscope’s grant manager and one of its violinists, said the orchestra’s public mission is to connect the diverse communities of Los Angeles and make classical music more accessible to varied groups.

“We perform for people who have access to classical music, but we also perform for people who have little to no access to or have never heard or have never been able to hear classical music before,” Hoffman said. “So that includes people at hospitals, (primarily low-income) elementary schools and homeless shelters on Skid Row.”

Michael Skiles, president of the NWWNC, said Kaleidoscope’s mission to perform for the public aligns with the council’s goal of staging events to enliven the Westwood community.

Hoffman said the orchestra had already planned to perform in the area next year and thought it would be fitting to apply for the grant. The grant will go toward paying the musicians for their services.

There is still no set time or date for the concert, but the orchestra is planning to announce their season schedule toward the end of the summer, Hoffman said. Skiles said he expects the orchestra to draw a large crowd based on their previous events, such as its performance in Powell Library in 2017 and in the Hammer Museum in February.

“The event at the Hammer was not only packed, with well over 100 people, but they actually had to turn some people away because they reached the event capacity,” Skiles said.

Some students said they would be interested in attending the event.

Alin Abrahamian, a fourth-year political science student, said she would come out to a free concert in Westwood because it would allow her to destress from exams.

Jannat Irshad, a fourth-year sociology student, said she would also be interested because she loves orchestras and would be interested in seeing an opera show come to Westwood one day.

Skiles said he thinks Kaleidoscope will put on a high-energy event that brings together the community.

“They are a top-notch orchestra, they bring in really good talent and they bring crowds of people,” Skiles said. “I do expect hundreds of community members to come together and enjoy the experience.”

Panel discusses psychological impact of border centers of detained immigrant youth

Lisa Gantz said her experience working with immigrant children at a detention center in Brownsville, Texas, inspired her to create a task force at UCLA dedicated to helping immigrant youths at the Mexico-U.S. border.

“After coming back to Los Angeles, I really tried to start looking around and see what was happening here at UCLA,” Gantz said.

Gantz, a former resident at the UCLA internal medicine program and co-founder of the Immigrant Youth Task Force at UCLA, helped organize the first Immigrant Youth Speaker Series, which the task force hosted Thursday. The task force is dedicated to supporting research, advocacy and outreach to address issues of family separation and the detention of immigrant children at the border.

Speakers from UCLA and Harvard University spoke at the event about the psychological and legal implications for children detained at the border.

Steven Shafer, supervising attorney for the Legal Orientation Program for Custodians of Unaccompanied Minors and a UCLA School of Law alumnus, said he thinks challenges to the Flores Settlement Agreement, an agreement that sets guidelines for how the U.S. government must treat all detained immigrant children, could be detrimental to the safety of those who are detained.

Katie McLaughlin, a Harvard assistant psychology professor, spoke about the neurological implications of childhood trauma and how the brain develops in response to threatening cues. She said although she’s not a policy expert, she thinks some policies that lead to unfair treatment of detained immigrants can cause preventable trauma.

“I see the policies that are being enacted as being engaged in enacting preventable trauma,” McLaughlin said. “I know we can be doing better.”

Gantz helped establish the Immigrant Youth Task Force at UCLA in January after receiving funding from the UCLA Pritzker Center for Strengthening Children and Families.

Gantz invited Jaana Juvonen, a professor of developmental psychology, and Jennifer Silvers, an assistant professor of developmental psychology, to help her develop the task force after reading an op-ed about family separation at the border that they submitted to the Washington Post in 2018.

Juvonen said she partnered with Silvers to write the op-ed to prove that family separation at the border was a form of torture.

“It actually met the (United Nations) definition, of torture, which was quite striking … it was unbelievable how well it fits,” Juvonen said. “And then we use the psychological research to demonstrate how it fits that definition.”

Gantz then continued to reach out to other UCLA faculty from different disciplines and eventually created the task force as a collaborative project under the UCLA School of Law, the David Geffen School of Medicine and the UCLA Department of Psychology.

The task force aims to create a campus-wide database of faculty that are working on projects related to immigration, support student research that could benefit immigrant communities and host a speaker series for UCLA community members to learn more about the interdisciplinary aspects of immigration policy.

Students at the event said they had only recently heard of the task force, but said they thought its campus-wide approach to addressing issues affecting people in border detention centers was interesting.

Donia Hijaz, a fourth-year psychology student, said she thinks the interdisciplinary approach of the task force is necessary to address detention of children at the border.

“I think sometimes like when it comes to things like this, people don’t realize the consequences, so I think that this task force is demonstrating that by using these different disciplines,” Hijaz said.

Stephanie Aguilar, a fourth-year psychology student, said she thinks getting different perspectives from UCLA faculty could help the task force better inform others about immigration and immigration policy.

Gantz said the task force is continuing to expand and is looking to get more students in leadership roles.

“We’re just getting started, this is what we have going so far, but we’re really excited to get more students involved,” Gantz said.

Student orchestra to share music of Studio Ghibli in performance at UCLA

As a little boy, David Dong’s musical passions were “spirited away” by Studio Ghibli.

Dong said the soundtracks of films from the well-known Japanese animation studio, such as those found in “Spirited Away” and “Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind,” inspired him to study music at the University of California, San Diego. Last year, Dong founded the Tonario Orchestra, an ensemble of Los Angeles-based musicians who share his passion for anime musical scores that performs shows exclusively featuring such music. The community orchestra, conducted by Dong and consisting of members from UCLA, will play works from various Studio Ghibli films Saturday in Schoenberg Hall.

“When I was younger, I probably watched Studio Ghibli every day or so,” Dong said. “I wanted to study that music of that film, and that brought me to music as my area of study.”

Violinist Vivian Nguyen, a second-year microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics student at UCLA, said Studio Ghibli films are recognized by their whimsical stories. Since Nguyen and many of her fellow orchestra members grew up alongside Ghibli films, she said playing the soundtracks allow them to appreciate the films and their childhood memories of them. Hearing the soaring theme song from her favorite Ghibli film “Kiki’s Delivery Service,” which follows a young witch’s coming-of-age, reminds her of how she felt when first watching the film, Nguyen said.

“It’s nice to play music from something so dear to me, and I’m sure a lot of the other members feel that way too,” Nguyen said. “We all have our favorite films, and it’s just nice to actually play (the) music and create that experience.”

Fellow Ghibli enthusiast Beverly Shih, a second-year biology student at UCLA and a violist, said Joe Hisaishi composed the majority of Ghibli film soundtracks, including “Ponyo” and “Howl’s Moving Castle.” Shih said the caliber of Hisaishi’s work is comparable to that of John Williams, an American composer known for his compositions in franchises such as “Jaws” and “Star Wars.”

Many Western musical scores contain complex instrumentation, but Shih said Hisaishi uses a minimalist approach – typically involving a piano solo with strings or brass in the background – to highlight each film’s narrative and visual components. While Hisaishi’s scores were complementary to the films, Dong said each song’s distinct, catchy melody allows it to be appreciated as an individual work and more easily popularized in the mainstream than more convoluted Western scores.

“It just feels very different from a lot of Western soundtracks that we hear,” Shih said. “For the Ghibli films, I feel like the composer normally tends to go with minimalism to draw out the beauty in what the picture is showing.”

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With the exception of a few organizations such as Game Music Ensemble at UCLA and the California State University, Long Beach’s Studio Orchestra at the Bob Cole Conservatory of Music, Dong said very few orchestras in the Los Angeles area play anime scores. Shih said she joined the orchestra to honor the works of Asian composers, despite not having seen many Ghibli films. Eastern music is often overlooked by Western orchestras, she said, due to the globalization of Western music.

“Hisaishi’s music has as much impact on culture as John Williams’, but he comes from a completely different perspective,” Shih said. “I think it’s really cool that the orchestra focuses on this.”

As one of the few LA orchestras that exclusively perform anime scores, the Tonario Orchestra has opened for events such as Anime Los Angeles. Orchestra members originate from different places, but Dong said their shared passion for Ghibli films keeps them connected.

“All these people from different places and different walks of life can come together and enjoy Studio Ghibli music,” Shih said.

Experimental works invite interaction, comment on sociopolitical systems

Curators usually chide visitors for touching an artistic installation. But in “An Unreal Unity,” interaction is key.

The ongoing exhibition featuring work from graduating design media arts students will be displayed in the New Wight Gallery in Broad Art Center through Thursday. Jennifer Steinkamp, a design media arts professor, curated the exhibition and said the pieces showcase the culmination of the students’ learning and ideas since fall quarter.

Read about some of the featured installations below.

“Rock, Wealth, Kettle, Writing Brush, Pine”

Machine learning escaped its analytical usage in graduate student Hye Min Cho’s creation.

web.ae.unrealunity.2.KM.jpg — "Rock, Wealth, Kettle, Writing Brush, Pine," created by graduate student Hye Min Cho, utilizes a machine learning system that categorizes each of the titular nouns and images. (Kanishka Mehra/Daily Bruin)

“Rock, Wealth, Kettle, Writing Brush, Pine” features five screens that each materialize images of one of the titular nouns. Cho said she trained a machine learning algorithm to classify photos into each of these five categories. She then inverted the typical usage of machine learning algorithms by having the machine output a series of images based on each specific noun.

“I’m going backwards using the same trained model,” Cho said. “I am asking it, ‘I would like a kettle, can you put (up a) distribution of images you associate to be a kettle and output the characteristics you consider to be a kettle?’”

The images themselves are 224 by 224 pixels, so Cho said she utilized between 50,000 and 100,000 pictures to generate each display in a manner that seems to animate the objects. Her inspiration came from East Asian still-life paintings from 100 years ago, which focused on capturing the spirit of an object in a two-dimensional space instead of emphasizing perspective. Cho said the machine learning algorithm is essentially capturing what it considers to be the most characteristic textures of each category to classify the photos.

Steinkamp said Cho’s background in computer science and electrical engineering is extraordinary in that it allows her to create her own software tools for her artwork.

“Looking back at my previous works, I was constantly exploring what it means for me to draw with computational technology,” Cho said. “I found machine learning to be a very natural extension from (my previous) techniques. And when I was choosing the objects (for the machine learning) I realized the analogy between machine learning and East Asian painting.”

“Buddy Party (Propositional Un-memberment for a Brighter Future)”

Male performers engaged with plaster-covered plastic bags in Sam Congdon’s installation the opening night of May 16. Now, only the cages and futuristic objects remain in the exhibit.

web.ae.unrealunity.4.KM.jpg — The objects within Congdon's project are supposed to feel futuristic, he said, in an exploration of the idea of queer futures. (Kanishka Mehra/Daily Bruin)

“Buddy Party (Propositional Un-memberment for a Brighter Future)” comprises three separate cages, each holding differently shaped plaster objects with which performers interacted. In one of the cages, a performer held a plaster object vaguely resembling a box, which supposedly contained his castrated genitals, Congdon said. Graduate student Congdon said his work portrays human interaction with technology – the more performers interacted with their plaster objects, the more they acted as if they were hypnotized by them.

Steinkamp said Congdon – or his alter ego, TOLVA – presented the performers as euphoric beings who carried artifacts from the future. Congdon said his work also served to explore queer futures, which critique masculinity. A queer future, Congdon said, is an imaginary future in which the lines defining typical gender roles are blurred. He showed this in his art by having a male performer nurture his object to challenge the stereotypically female act. Congdon said the idea of queer futures stems from the fact that queer culture has a different relationship with the future than other people. An example of this is the fact that queer people have a different relationship with making babies than other people, he said.

“This is another instance of me daydreaming and imagining futures that may be more powerful,” Congdon said. “(I’m) proposing queer futures as a way of critiquing the present and as a way of starting dialogue and conversations about the social and political forces in our world.”

“Vacuoles” and “Vacuoles II: Bioremediating cultures”

Maru García’s pieces allow viewers to physically join the bioremediation process of lead-contaminated soils.

web.ae.unrealunity.1.KM.jpg — Graduate student Maru García's “Vacuoles” projects images of ceramic vacuoles onto the exhibition wall, and viewers who walk close to the objects can see their own images projected. (Kanishka Mehra/Daily Bruin)

“Vacuoles” consists of 29 ceramics taking the shape of plant organelles, each of them filled with contaminated soil from 29 areas in southeast Los Angeles. The ceramics lay on the gallery floor, while two walls display projections of the vacuoles alongside footage of the contaminated area.

The graduate student said a lead-battery recycling plant for the company Exide contaminated the soil in the collection areas. One solution for decontaminating the soil is to use plants that can absorb the lead from the soil and store it in their vacuoles, she said, which is why she chose to emulate the shape of the biological organelle.

Cameras installed above the vacuoles capture and project them onto the walls. When visitors stand near the vacuoles, their images are projected onto the wall as well.

García’s other installation features mustard plants in contaminated soil. A microscope records the bioremediation process live and projects it onto the wall sitting behind the plant. The projected vacuoles are superimposed onto the live feed, and visitors can see themselves in the projection when they walk near the ceramic vacuoles.

Steinkamp said García comes from a background in biotechnology and chemistry and is able to blend her scientific interests with incredible aesthetics.

“a room that i take care of”

A complex, natural system interconnected by wind sits on the opposite end of the gallery from García’s work.

web.ae.unrealunity.3.KM.jpg — Exhibit "a room that I take care of," created by graduate student Julian Stein, is an interconnected system that uses a sensor to waver the force of the wind moving through it. (Kanishka Mehra/Daily Bruin)

Graduate student Julian Stein said his artwork, “a room that i take care of,” explores the subtle and sometimes imperceptible connections in different natural systems.

In Stein’s rendition of a natural system, a sensor moving along a skewer is able to change the force of the wind, and the motion of strands of grass can change the rate at which cogs rotate.

These cogs made from plaster and cement produce sound when they rub against wood or other materials in the system. This friction-driven noise imitates stridulation – the process through which crickets create sound waves when they rub their legs together.

He said each element in a natural system is perturbed by another and then continues on its path. Stein said capitalism is an example of this complex interconnectivity in a social setting. He said individuals themselves cannot fully understand these large-scale systems. Thus, it is difficult to imagine alternatives or solutions to their problems.

“There are some very powerful systems (in society) that are not necessarily understandable,” Stein said. “The idea of this is, by making systems physical, perhaps we can understand them, by materalizing them.”

Alumna delivers lecture on role the arts play in environmental awareness

Pinar Yoldas challenged her gallery attendees to an interactive yoga session in a dark, hot room.

The necessary heat radiated from a glowing red sign reading “GLOBAL WARMING.”

Alumna and artist Yoldas discussed her 2016 installation, “Global Warming Hot Yoga Studio,” in UCLA’s Counterforce Now lecture series Thursday entitled, “Causality is Broken: Can We Fix It With Art and Design?” Her installations use sensory experiences to highlight the relationship between everyday behavior and environmental harm, she said. Yoldas said art helps physically and emotionally reconstruct the cause-and-effect mechanism between an individual’s actions and climate change, as people often aren’t aware of their impact.

“If we use our power (as artists) to manipulate human perception and work with human emotion, … we can find the ways in which people can feel the things as if they are happening to them,” Yoldas said.

Yoldas’ passion for ecologically focused artwork grew from her knowledge of multiple disciplines, she said. In addition to earning a master’s degree in design media arts, Yoldas explored fields such as computer science, architecture, chemistry and cognitive neuroscience.

Neuroscience particularly informed her understanding of how personal decision-making affects the environment, Yoldas said, as she researched the mental pathways connecting perception, emotion and choices. It is easy to ignore the long-standing environmental influence of a daily decision – such as using a to-go cup instead of a reusable water bottle – because the effects are not immediately perceptible, she said.

“Most of our decisions are only informed by our immediate environment, by our modal physical space,” Yoldas said. “This could’ve been perfect if you lived in a jungle a thousand years ago, … but the scale has stretched. You can’t even conceive the scale of climate change.”

Yoldas said news about climate change can often be difficult to absorb, and her artwork instead aims to involve individuals in an immersive experience. “Global Warming Hot Yoga Studio” compelled participants to collectively practice hot yoga while confronted by her “GLOBAL WARMING” sign, as bodily movement leads to a more immediate and thoughtful impact for the individual, she said. A yoga instructor read a script that guided the meditation but reminded participants of the harms on environmental degradation – for example, encouraging them to “feel the particulate matter” upon inhaling.

A separate exhibit of Yoldas’, 2014’s “Ecosystem of Excess,” showed the possible long-term impacts of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch on marine organisms, she said. Presented as a science lab with creatures suspended in water, Yoldas’ installation features over 30 fictitious species that could evolve due to plastic pollution. “Ecosystem of Excess” may seem like a science fiction concept, Yoldas said, but imagining the new organisms – like a turtle that evolved from eating colorful balloons – helps establish the causality between our everyday plastic use and today’s sea creatures.

“Through (the organisms), I tell stories,” Yoldas said. “I used this twisted sense of humor, a little bit of dystopia, because everyone else is gone for these creatures to emerge.”

Rebeca Méndez, the director of Counterforce Lab and a professor in the design media arts department, said Yoldas’ experimental artwork reveals the development of the Anthropocene through art and design. The Anthropocene era, Méndez said, is our current geological time period, in which humanity’s presence is negatively changing the composition of our planet.

“Many students feel paralyzed knowing that the conversation out in the world is that there is not a future for them,” Méndez said. “My classes … focus on how to change this conversation and how to empower them to have a voice.”

Classes through the Counterforce Lab have students consider their own environmental impacts, such as assigning them to aesthetically photograph their waste, Méndez said. The Counterforce Now lecture series also focuses on the importance of design on environmental awareness, she said. Companies like Adidas – who make shoes from recycled plastic – have begun using sustainable materials to create products. The trend of considerate design practices, especially in the fashion industry, helps show the direct cause and effect of our consumerist society, even if these products are more expensive, Méndez said.

“If you knew that when you bought a cheap T-shirt you would actually be utilizing hundreds of gallons of water, … you would never buy it,” Méndez said. “Right now, we have not paid for what we have produced; the environment is dying and that is because of broken causality.”

Maru García, a graduate student and researcher for Counterforce Labs, said she helped organize the lecture due to her admiration for Yoldas’ advocacy. García, an ecological artist focused on exposing the loss of environmental biodiversity, said she hoped Yoldas’ lecture would cause attendees to engage in self-reflection, as sensory art has the ability to empower action.

Méndez said Yoldas’ multidisciplinary approach is crucial to advancing the discussion around climate change as artists, scientists and professionals in other fields should surpass their arbitrary divisions for collaboration. Artists have a vital role in communicating environmental complexity to make it understandable, Méndez said.

“The arts have a way of being able to to imagine new ways of existing as a humanity,” Méndez said. “We are able to share our imagination and really have the freedom to be playful in terms of speculative ideas (for change).”