>> Narrator: From the Computer Museum in Mountain View, California, it's theCUBE. Covering AGC Silicon Valley GROW! Awards. Brought to you by ACG Silicon Valley. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. The program is just about to begin here at the ACGSV GROW! Awards, 14th Annual. We're excited to be here for our third year. 300 people are going to be giving out some hardware here shortly. But, before we do that we're excited to have Alex Wolf, all the way up from Santa Cruz. He's the dean of the Baskin School of Engineering at UC Santa Cruz. Welcome, Alex. >> Thank you very much, it's great to be here. >> Absolutely. So, what do you think of this organization? How did you get involved? >> Well, it's been great for us. We've been drawn in by some great alumni who have been involved with the organization, and they're interested in helping Santa Cruz UC Santa Cruz School of Engineering, and partnering with ACG is just a perfect way to do it. >> Excellent. So, I was doing a little homework, obviously, before you came on. I was looking through the curriculum of the school, the engineering school, and you've got CS and E, and all the normal stuff, but two things jumped out to me, biomolecular engineering and computational media. >> That's right. >> What are those disciplines? >> Well, let's start with biomolecular engineering. That's where we are doing a lot of work in health and life. Santa Cruz is famous for one particular thing that happened a number of years ago, which was the sequencing of the human genome. Now, Santa Cruz played a huge role in that. This was the place where we were able to assemble the human genome for the first time, and publish it on the web. >> What year was that? >> That was 2003. >> And back then it took massive amount of computer, massive amount of time. >> Lots of time, millions and millions of dollars. This was a project that was run by the government. Many partners and Santa Cruz researchers in School of Engineering were able to crack that nut and get this genome sequenced. >> And now we can do it-- Now, it's getting cheaper and cheaper, we've got researchers who've been working on that, we've spun out a bunch of companies that have worked on less and less expensive, faster and faster sequencing techniques. >> Really, with the goal to get to individualized medicine, right, to get to individualized treatment. >> That's right, personalized medicine, precision medicine, that's the goal. It's amazing what you can do if you know the genome history, if you can apply that to the drug treatments, it's fantastic. >> I think medical science is so interesting, because from whatever point you are, you look back 10 years and it looks like bloodletting. No matter what we do today, in 10 years from now, we're going to look back >> It's true at cancer treatment, like we give people poison until they almost die, >> That's right. >> that's the way we treat 'em? >> That's right, and the genome will tell you so much about that cancer treatment. We're doing other things too, in stem cell and nanopore technology, so there's just a wonderful set of technologies that people are inventing in the school. >> Great, now what about computational media? >> Computational media is a rather different thing. That is a concept where we're looking at how media can be generated through algorithms, and this has very interesting applications in the game industry, in journalism, in many parts of our interaction with humans. It's great to be able to have a computer that really understands how to generate meaningful, realistic text. >> What is the main benefit in some of the early research that you see, because we've seen some really simple versions of this out there, straight little app that kids play sports, you know, you finish the game, you hit the game over, and it generates a nice little article for you. >> Absolutely. You know, you mentioned personalization before. It's the same thing with computational media. You can get a game to be much more personalized to the player. It can understand that experience, understand the interests of the game player, and then tailor itself to that player. >> So, how much do you work with the psychology department in this world, because it's so much human factors, right? >> Absolutely. We have a great collaboration with psychology. That's really, really important. You know, the computational media department is actually going to be growing into Silicon Valley. You see Santa Cruz has recently opened a campus in Silicon Valley. >> Where? >> It's in Santa Clara, and we're right now hiring faculty into that campus. >> So, is it open then, or when will it be open? >> The facility is open. We held an ACG event there in January. We're going to be holding more of them there. It's a great location. >> Excellent. All right, well, maybe we'll have to come by and do a field trip >> Please do. when you get it all outfitted. >> Absolutely, absolutely. >> All right, well, unfortunately, we have to leave it there. They're going to pull everybody into the keynotes, but thanks taking a few minutes. >> I'm looking forward to it. Thank you very much. >> All right, he's Alex, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE from ACGSV, Mountain View, California. Thanks for watching. (techy music)