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UC San Diego Renames Research Unit in Honor of Qualcomm Support

The University of California is giving Qualcomm Inc. a nod in thanks for more than a decade of support.

It is renaming UC San Diego’s branch of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology after the company.

Now it will simply be known as the Qualcomm Institute.

Qualcomm helped establish the institute. In the last dozen years, the company and its foundation have made almost $26 million worth of gifts to the research unit.

With Qualcomm’s help, the university has been able to take on several innovative projects.

Funding Attracts Talent

For example, Qualcomm funds helped the university attract Yuanyuan Zhou from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Zhou, who goes by the nickname YY, now holds the Qualcomm Endowed Chair in Mobile Computing.

Her research focus is something that hits every business, no matter what size: computer failure. Zhou’s research is about making computer systems crash less often.

One of the questions she has pursued is whether a computer might be able to see a failure coming, “call home” to the factory, and fix itself. In such a scenario, the computer user might never know there was a problem.

Keeping sensitive data private is another timely technological puzzle. What business owner is not concerned about the issue?

UCSD computer sciences professor Kamalika Chaudhuri does research on privacy protection algorithms.

Not too long ago, Chaudhuri was a postdoctoral fellow at UCSD’s Information Theory and Applications Center, part of the Qualcomm Institute.

No Strings Attached

The research center was set up using Qualcomm funds, and Chaudhuri’s fellowship was essentially underwritten by the company.

Chaudhuri went on to get a faculty job at UCSD. She also does research into artificial intelligence, and teaches an introductory class on the subject.

University spokesman Doug Ramsey noted that Qualcomm gives the university funding with no strings attached, and that university leadership spends the money in ways it feels most appropriate.

The Qualcomm-UCSD relationship goes back decades. Qualcomm founders Irwin M. Jacobs and Andrew Viterbi were professors at UCSD.

UC San Diego has served as a test bed for Qualcomm technology. An early 3G cell phone technology, which went by the name CDMA2000 1x EV-DO, was tested on campus beginning in 2001. At the time it was called HDR, for high data rate.

Ramesh Rao, director of the Qualcomm Institute, said that financial support from Qualcomm has allowed the institute to engage with more than two dozen departments on the UCSD campus.

Diverse Disciplines

The institute does not just cater to engineers. Indeed, part of its job is to get people out of their silos. Academics from disciplines as diverse as visual art, music, linguistics and biological sciences work with the telecom institute.

The Qualcomm Institute is part of a two-campus research organization. With its counterpart at UC Irvine, the twin research units are collectively known as the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, called Calit2 for short. Larry Smarr directs the two-campus operation.

A celebration to mark the name change is scheduled for May 24.

Qualcomm makes microchips for mobile communications and licenses intellectual property related to the same. The company reported net income of $6.1 billion on revenue of $19.1 billion last year. The company’s Nasdaq ticker symbol is QCOM.

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