underwrite robotics R&D and recruit scientists and engineers across a range of disciplines. While the report says the initiative would enable UC San Diego to join the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon University “among the ranks of the nation’s top robotics programs,” it’s becoming increasingly clear that robotics is emerging as one of the next big things in technology—and San Diego has a lot of catching up to do to match the clusters of diverse robotics industries already proliferating in Silicon Valley, Pittsburgh, and Boston.
As the primary corporate benefactor, Qualcomm also would undoubtably want to align the new robotics institute’s research objectives with its own priorities, which consist mostly of building out the ecosystem for its proprietary wireless technologies.
The U-T report includes a Q&A with Ramesh Rao, director of the UC San Diego division of Calit2, the California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology (and an Xconomist), who is helping to pull the project together.
Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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