Gaucho Gossip

UCSB is proclaiming its collection of 70,000 documents and 700 audio recordings relating to U.S. presidents as the definitive online compendium of such primary sources. Collected by Professor John Woolleychair of the university’s political science departmentand grad student Gerhard Peters, the American Presidency Project (www.presidency.ucsb.edu) includes inaugural addresses, executive orders, televised debates, and other presidential history artifacts. Woolley commissioned the project in 1999 for use as a teaching resource.

UCSB Professor Alan Heeger was awarded Italy’s prestigious Eni Italgas Prize for his research on energy and the environment in connection with his work on a new way to create solar energy cells. Rather than build the large silicon-based installations commonly seen on rooftops, Heeger seeks to create a much thinner and cheaper solar panel which could be created in a process much like printing. The hope is that such panels, while not as energy-efficient as traditional panels, would be far cheaper to manufacture and easier to install.

UCSB’s College of Engineering will receive $2.3 million of a $12.5 million Department of Defense grant to study Robust Uncertainty Management. According to Professor Igor Mezic, who is leading a UCSB research team, the study will seek ways to calculate the maximum amount of time it would take to find a lost soldier or other “object of interest,” and then calculate ways to reduce that time. The funding is from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which also spearheaded the development of transistors and the Internet.