CSE News

There is a long literature identifying vulnerabilities in electronic voting machines, but critics of these results argue that such attacks are unrealistic because the researchers had access to proprietary source code, design documents or extended physical access to the machine's being attacked. To rebut this argument, CSE's Stephen Checkoway and Hovav Shacham, along with colleagues from the University of Michigan and Princeton, have recently demonstrated techniques to completely subvert the behavior of the AVC Advantage voting machine. In addition to operating without source code or design documents, they also used Shacham's new "return-oriented programming" technique to overcome a security feature of the AVC that restricts the processor from executing instructions from its Read Only Memory. The resulting attack is embedded in an AVC voting cartridge that can be used by anyone with short-term access to the machine and does not require any technical know-how to use.

In a paper presented at the IEEE Reconfigurable Architectures Workshop in Rome, Italy, on May 25, CSE Graduate student  Bridget Benson and Associate Professor Ryan Kastner are working on digital signal processing challenges, Jacobs School undergraduates are hard at work on analog portions of the underwater communications project, including the transmitter power amplifier and receiver low noise amplifier.

CSE Associate Professor Ryan Kastner and PhD candidate Bridget Benson are teaming up with Calit2 to develop an autonomous craft to collect data on the environmental conditions in the world's coral reefs. As part of this project CSE is developing underwater transducer modems that would transmit data from underwater sensors to the Reefbot.

UCSD's Teams in Engineering Service (TIES) program has awarded CSE undergrad Alex Pastel a summer leadership scholarship/internship. The scholarship allows Pastel to further his work on GroZi, a research project that is developing a grocery shopping assistant for the visually impaired. With the help of private-sector donations, TIES pairs engineering students with local nonprofit organizations to find solutions for their engineering problems. The original JSOE press release about GroZi is available here.

Lecturer Beth Simon is featured in a San Diego Union-Tribune article about technology's place in the collegiate classroom. In analyzing current trends in university education, the article includes a software program Simon has developed. Called Ubiquitous Presenter, the tool allows students to write instant responses to questions in class and submit them using a Web browser or cell phone. The program is estimated to be in use by 45 professors around the world.

Pavel Pevzner, with Ph.D. student Mark Chaisson and colleagues, continues to chart new evolutionary territory with the development of a software tool. Known as InvChecker, the program detects microinversions, or extremely short strings of inverted nucleotides (tens to thousands of base pairs), with unprecedented accuracy. Microinversions are a relatively new discovery, one that can provide insight into the divergent relationships of multiple species, and has the potential to detect base pair differences between humans. The findings are forthcoming in PNAS online, and the full press release is available here.

The National Science Foundation has funded the Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center, a research initiative that will investigate the importance of time in learning with the hope of improving teaching techniques. The Center is multi-disciplinary--pulling researchers from such far-flung fields as machine learning, psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, molecular genetics, biophysics, mathematics, and education--and will involve over 40 scientists from the U.S., Canada, and Australia. The Center's organization is taking a cue from its subject matter; rather than having researchers report their findings to one another, scientists will be assembled into one of four interdisciplinary teams to study the same questions using different methods, skills, and expertise. Hypotheses and findings in the area of teaching techniques will be deployed at UCSD's Preuss School, a middle and high school for motivated, low-income students located on the UCSD campus. You can read more about the Center and its planned research by clicking here.

The CSE department is excited to welcome Yuanyuan Zhou.  She joins the Computer Science and Engineering Department as the first holder of the Jacobs School’s Qualcomm Endowed Chair in Mobile Computing. Zhou works in one of the most important areas of computer science: making software systems more reliable. Her research covers three distinct sub-disciplines: computer systems, programming languages/software engineering, and computer architecture. Related to the challenge of making software systems more reliable, Zhou pioneered new techniques for tolerating certain errors in programmer code, rather than the currently impractical goal of eradicating all errors. Zhou brings a software engineering and systems focus to her computer architecture research. Some of her recent architecture work has focused on the difficult problem of identifying potential concurrency-related bugs.

Two computer scientists at the University of California, San Diego’s Center for Networked Systems (CNS) are among 60 professors worldwide to receive awards as part of HP’s 2009 Innovation Research Program, which is designed to create opportunities for colleges, universities and research institutes around the world to conduct breakthrough collaborative research with HP. Amin Vahdat and Geoffrey Voelker, professors in UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering, were granted awards as part of this year’s competitive open call for proposals.

CSE Professor Pavel Pevzner and CSE researchers have invented computational tools to decode and rapidly determine whether natural compounds collected in oceans and forests are new—or if these pharmaceutically promising compounds have already been described and are therefore not patentable.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has recognized CSE's Alex Snoeren with a prestigious research Fellowship! The distinction is one of 116 given annually to young U.S. and Canadian faculty who show "the most outstanding promise of making fundamental contributions to new knowledge." Snoeren is a member of CSE's systems group and received the award for his ground-breaking work on Decongestion Control, Secure and Policy-Compliant Source Routing, and Cloud Control with Distributed Rate Limiting.

CSE Graduate students Laura Grupp and Ross Tate have won the 2008 Microsoft Research Graduate Women's Scholarship and Microsoft Research and Live Labs PhD Fellowship. Laura's work focuses on technology modeling and management of advance non-volatile storage technologies such as flash memory solid state disks. Her goal is to understand how computer systems can best exploit these technologies to accelerate existing applications and enable new ones. Using effects, Ross hopes to enable domain-specific language extensions while still enabling the compiler to optimize these extensions. In the long run, he hopes to blur the line between imperative and pure functional languages, providing the programmer and the compiler with the best of both worlds. Another Graduate Woman's Scholarship winner was CSE Alumna Tamara Denning.

CSE Associate Professor Ryan Kastner and PhD candidate Bridget Benson are teaming up with Calit2 to develop an autonomous craft to collect data on the environmental conditions in the world's coral reefs. As part of this project CSE is developing underwater transducer modems that would transmit data from underwater sensors to the Reefbot.

Dean Tullsen was named to the 2009 class of IEEE Fellows for his "contributions to the architecture of multithreaded and high-performance processors". Dean joins a existing CSE fellows Walt Burkhard (2000), Larry Carter (2000), CK Cheng (2000), Bill Howden (2001), Rajesh Gupta (2004), Jeanne Ferrante (2005) and Andrew Chien (2007). Our alumnus, Kevin Fall (Ph.D., 1994) was also named a fellow. More information and a full listing of this year's Fellow awardees can be found at the IEEE Web site.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is carrying out an open contest, the Cryptographic Hash Algorithm Challenge, to solicit the sucessor to existing variants of the Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA). Recently they named 51 submissions as being viable first round candidates and these include two with significant UCSD authorship: SWIFFTX from a team led by Daniele Micciancio and Skein from a team including Mihir Bellare and alumn Yoshi Kohno. Best of luck to both teams!

Grad students Diwaker Gupta, Sangmin Lee (now at UT) and Michael Vrable, along with a gaggle of CSE faculty Stefan Savage, Alex Snoeren, George Varghese, Geoff Voelker, and Amin Vahdat) received the innagural Jay Lepreau Best Paper Award for their work Difference Engine: Harnessing Memory Redundancy in Virtual Machines presented at this week's 8th Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI).

As part of Beth Simon's CSE8a intro to programming course, students used their new-found programming skills to create ditial artworks four weeks into the quarter. You can read more about this new twist on CS education and the art show they subsequently produced in this Jacbobs School press release.

UC San Diego computer scientists have built a software program work that can perform key duplication without having the key. Instead, the computer scientists only need a photograph of the key. The bumps and valleys on your house or office keys represent a numeric code that completely describes how to open your particular lock. If a key doesn't encode this precise "bitting code," then it won't open your door. "We built our key duplication software system to show people that their keys are not inherently secret," said Stefan Savage, the computer science professor from UC San Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering who led the student-run project. "Perhaps this was once a reasonable assumption, but advances in digital imaging and optics have made it easy to duplicate someone's keys from a distance without them even noticing."

Two graduate students from UC San Diego's computer science department--Erik Buchanan and Ryan Roemer--have just published work showing that the process of building bad programs from good code using "return-oriented programming" can be automated and that this vulnerability applies to RISC computer architectures and not just the x86 architecture (which includes the vast majority of personal computers). Last year, UC San Diego computer science professor Hovav Shacham formally described how return-oriented programming could be used to force computers with the x86 architecture to behave maliciously without introducing any bad code into the system. However, the attack required painstaking construction by hand and appeared to rely a unique quirk of the x86 design.

UC San Diego is ranked by Kiplinger's Personal Finance magazine in the top 10 among the best values for public colleges and universities in the United States. The school was ranked 10th in value for in-state costs and seventh for expenses for students from out of the state. The editors said they took into account academic quality, admission rates, student-faculty ratios, graduation rates, costs and availability of financial aid.

While general wisdom says that you look at the eyes first in order to recognize a face, UC San Diego computer scientists now report that you look at the nose first. The nose may be the where the information about the face is balanced in all directions, or the optimal viewing position for face recognition, the researchers from Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center propose in a paper recently published in the journal Psychological Science. The researchers showed that people first look just to the left of the center of the nose and then to the center of the nose when trying to determine if a face is one they have seen recently. These two visual fixations near the center of the nose are all you need in order to determine if a face is one that you have seen just a few minutes before. Looking at a third spot on the face does not improve face recognition, the cognitive scientists found.

Researchers from UC San Diego and Microsoft presented a paper last week that explores how the next generation of cell phones or computer games might employ new forms of "vibrotactile feedback" to improve communications between people and machines. "People don't go around vibrating each other. We have a much larger tactile vocabulary for human-to-human communications, which we think can be expanded to devices," said Kevin Li, 26, a doctoral candidate in UCSD's department of computer science and engineering and lead author of the paper "Tapping and Rubbing: Exploring New Dimensions of Tactile Feedback with Voice Coil Motors."

UC San Diego engineers and scientists have received a five-year $4.94M grant from the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR), a part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to develop algorithms and software for deciphering all the proteins that are present in biological samples. This "proteomics" work promises to revolutionize routine blood tests, vaccine development, cancer diagnostics, and many other important biomedical challenges, says Pavel Pevzner, the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering computer science professor leading the project. The new grant will also support development of the software infrastructure required to share these cutting edge computational mass spectrometry tools with researchers around the nation and the world. This effort will combat a global computational bottleneck that is currently holding back the field of proteomics, which by definition strives to glean biological insights from looking at all the proteins present in biological samples. While there are traditional tools to do some of this proteomics work, they are time consuming and expensive, and have contributed to the computational bottleneck.

Researchers at the University of Washington and the University of California, San Diego have created a laptop theft-protection tool that will help you locate your lost or stolen laptop while at the same time ensuring that no third party can use the system to monitor your whereabouts. The tool, named Adeona, works by using the Internet as a homing beacon. It will help you find the location of a lost or stolen laptop, but only after someone connects it to the Internet. Cryptographic safeguards built into the system prevent anyone but you from monitoring your whereabouts. The primary creators of Adeona are Thomas Ristenpart, a doctoral student at UC San Diego, who worked on this project as a UW visiting student in summer 2007; Gabriel Maganis, who recently received his UW undergraduate degree in computer engineering; Tadayoshi Kohno, a UW assistant professor of computer science and engineering who received his computer science PhD from UCSD; and Arvind Krishnamurthy, a UW research assistant professor of computer science and engineering. Unlike commercial systems, in which users surrender their location information to a company, Adeona scrambles the information so it must be deciphered using a password known only by the person who set up the account. If the laptop is stolen, only the original owner can access the location data. The owner can then bring this information to the police to aid in tracking down the stolen machine. Even if the free OpenDHT storage network was hacked, the information would remain private. Named Adeona after the Roman goddess of safe returns, the system can be downloaded for free at the Adeona website.

Join Yahoo! web experts including Rasmus Lerdorf, the creator of PHP, Parand Darugar, Director of Architecture, Kevin Haas, Senior Engineering Manager, and Matt Plummer, Director of Engineering and UCSD CSE Alumnus, for a week of learning, hacking and fun October 13 thru 17! You'll hear interesting tech talks, hacking tips and lessons, and get hands-on coding workshops where you'll work with cutting-edge technology. The week's events will culminate with our University Hack Day competition --a 24 hour day-long festival of coding, camaraderie, demos, awards, food, music and jollity (it's a real word, look it up). It's not about perfect code, just your creativity, a cool idea and a working prototype. You'll have access to tons of APIs and tools in the Yahoo! Developer Network (check out Pipes, the YUI Library, SearchMonkey and BOSS just to name a few). No rules or limitations - just show up and hack for your opportunity to win cool prizes, a spot in the gallery, street cred and the chance to represent your school at the University Hack Showdown in California in next spring. This is your shot to develop something that will revolutionize the industry, make the world a better place or at least make the judges laugh (trust us, that goes a long way!). See you there!? There is plenty of great stuff to read about past university hacks. The competing institutions are UIUC, University of Waterloo, Stanford, CMU, and UC Berkeley.

The Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center, founded at UC San Diego in 2006 as one of six National Science Foundation Science of Learning Centers, has just been awarded an additional $12 million for the next three years to expand its important work studying the role of time and timing in learning. More than 40 researchers, working closely together through a unique "network of research networks" collaboration, are focused on the role of time in learning across multiple time scales -- from the exquisite sensitivity to firing time between neurons that causes them to link together more tightly, through the timing of social interactions between teachers and students that leads to effective teaching, to the scale of months in spacing effects in learning.

Computer scientists at the UC San Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering have proposed a new way to build data centers that could save companies money and deliver more computing capability to end-users. "Large companies are putting together server farms of tens of thousands of computers - even approaching 100-thousand, and the big challenge is to interconnect all these computers so that they can talk to each other as quickly as possible, without incurring significant costs." said Amin Vahdat, a professor of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) in UC San Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering. "We are proposing a new topology for Ethernet data center connectivity." The innovation is outlined in a paper, titled "A Scalable, Commodity Data Center Network Architecture," presented at the annual meeting of SIGCOMM, the Special Interest Group on Data Communications. SIGCOMM is the premier academic conference for researchers in the fields of communications and computer networks. Vahdat, who also directs UCSD's Center for Networked Systems (CNS), co-authored the paper with two CSE graduate students, Mohammad Al-Fares and Alexander Loukissas.

In a paper submitted to SIGCOMM Kirill Levchenko, Geoff Voelker, Mohan Paturi and Stefan Savage presented a new link-state routing algorithm called Approximate Link state (XL) the algorithm increases network routing efficiency by suppressing updates from parts of the system -- updates which force connected networks to continuously re-calculate the paths they use in the great matrix of the Internet. "Routing in a static network is trivial," say the authors in their paper, which was presented at ACM SIGCOMM conference. "But most real networks are dynamic -- network links go up and down -- and thus some nodes need to recalculate their routes in response. The traditional approach, said Stefan Savage, a computer science professor from the Jacobs School, "is to tell everyone; flood the topology change throughout the network and have each node re-compute its table of best routes -- but that requirement to universally communicate, and to act on each change, is a big problem."

Under project organizer Pavel Pevzner a group of undergraduate students from the University of California San Diego have forged a new area of bioinformatics that may improve genomic and proteomic annotations and unlock a collection of stubborn biological mysteries. Their work will be published in the July issue of the journal Genome Research. The new area of bioinformatics is called "comparative proteogenomics," and as the name implies, sits at the intersection of the fields of "comparative genomics" and "proteomics" -- which is the study of all of an organism's proteins. "Our bioinformatics undergraduates have shown that you can simultaneously analyze multiple genomes and proteomes, and use this information for scientific discovery," said Pevzner, who put together the Bioinformatics Undergraduate Research Consortium in Comparative Proteogenomics at UCSD.

This year brought triumph to CSE majors Cameron Esfahani, Bhishan Hermajani, Tamir Husain, Le Shu, Bryant Chou and Trent Tai in the 2008 Junkyard Derby. Their winning entry "The Byte" took first place amongst over 50 other competitors. Sponsored by Yahoo! and the UC San Diego Triton Engineering Student Council, this tournament challenged competitors by having each team transform junk into a functional boxcar. In less than 40 hours teams were released among a campus parking lot full of junk. From a collection of items like old bicycles, rusty wheel chairs, broken toys, old kayaks and wood palates, teams made a frantic dash to collect the garbage and transform it into a vehicle. Despite the rain, teams battled for the triumph of having the fastest mode of junk-transportation that stays upright through the finish line. Hundreds of fans cheered the contestants as they drove their motley collaboration down the slope between Peterson Hall and Geisel Library. This is the first time for Computer Science students to take top prize at the Derby, which began 5 years ago.

Professor Yoav Freund has been elected as a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). The AAAI Fellows Program was started in 1990 to recognize individuals who have made significant, sustained contributions--usually over at least a ten year period--to the field of artificial intelligence. Yoav was elected Fellow in recognition of his significant contributions to machine learning, including the development of practical boosting algorithms. He is the first UCSD professor to be elected as AAAI Fellow. Congratulations, Yoav!

Jacobs School computer science professor Rajesh Gupta has been appointed an Associate Director in the UC San Diego division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2). He says he hopes to do for the institute overall what he has been doing in his chosen field of wireless and embedded systems all along: reach out to industry.

CSE Associate Professor Ingolf Krueger has been appointed Director of the new Bernard and Sophia Gordon Engineering Leadership Center The Center's mission is to educate and train effective engineering leaders who create new products and jobs that benefit society.

Assistant Professor Alex Snoeren presented research at the Center for Networked Systems' latest Research Review that argues against the Internet's standard Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). Snoeren envisions a radically remade Internet where, even if some packets are dropped, all the information makes it from sender to receiver. This would be done via "erasure coding," where portions of information are duplicated on multiple packets. If senders no longer had to be mindful of losing packets, they could transmit more quickly, which would likely increase throughput rates. Click here for more information about Snoeren's research.

UC San Diego is the world's ninth best university for engineering/technology and computer sciences, according to a new subject-specific ranking from the Academic Rankings of World Universities (ARWU). This university ranking project is run by the Institute of Higher Education at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China. In 2006, the ARWU placed UC San Diego thirteenth among the world's top 1,000 universities. The top-ten list and a full press release is available here.

Titled "Igniting Innovation," the expo will feature a poster session, technical breakout sessions, and remarks by Alan Eustace, VP of Research and Systems Engineering at Google. February 22, 2007, 8:30AM - 2:00PM. More details (including information on how to register for the event) are available here.

On Friday, February 25, 2005, the Jacobs School of Engineering and the Corporate Affiliate Program (CAP) hosted the 24th annual Research Expo. The morning started with breakfast hosted by Raytheon and the chance to view over 200 research posters by Jacobs School graduate students. Plenary guest speakers included Professor Pavel Pevzner of the Computer Science Engineering department of the Jacobs School of Engineering at UCSD and Dr. Judith L. Swain, of Stanford University speaking on the California's Stem Cell Initiative. In the afternoon Technical Breakout sessions were presented by each of the five academic departments of the Jacobs School. CSE break out sessions included presentations by CSE faculty on Community-based Information Exchange, Data Mining, High-Performance Chip Multiprocessor Architectures and The Structure of Human Genetic Variation.

CSE Professor Stefan Savage has been appointed as Associate Director of the Center for Networked Systems.  His research includes the study of high-availability Internet systems, intelligent network traffic analysis and efficient self-configuring wireless networks.  Stefan joined the Jacobs School Computer Science and Engineering faculty in January 2001 and has been central to much of the activity in CNS.

Fox Harrell, UCSD Computer Science and Engineering alum (Ph.D., 2007), has received an NSF CAREER Award for his project "Computing for Advanced Identity Representation." The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is the National Science Foundation's "most prestigious award" in support of tenure-track faculty. His distinction is accompanied by a grant for $535,000, awarded through the NSF's Human-Centered Computing Division. Dr. Harrell is Assistant Professor of Digital Media at Georgia Tech where he is director of the Imagination, Computation, and Expression Lab.

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the IEEE Computer Society (IEEE-CS) will jointly present the inaugural Ken Kennedy Award to Dr. Francine Berman for her leadership in building national-scale cyberinfrastructure, the environment that supports rapidly expanding computing and information services over  networked resources, including the Internet.  Berman, former professor  in CSE, was the director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) from 2001 until August 2009.  She  was named one of the 10 top women in Technology by Business Week in 2004, and one of the 15 national leaders in Science and Technology by Newsweek in 2006.  In 2008, she was named a “Digital Preservation Pioneer” by the Library of Congress. ACM and IEEE-CS co-sponsor the Kennedy Award, which was established in 2009 to recognize substantial contributions to programmability and productivity in computing and significant community service or mentoring contributions. It was named for Ken Kennedy, the founder of Rice University’s nationally ranked computer science program, who was one of the world’s foremost experts on high-performance computing.  Click here for the full article.

The inaugural Yahoo! Excellence Awards were presented to four outstanding undergraduate students for their Excellence in Teaching, Leadership, and/or Research. The four recipients this year are Hourieh Fakourfar (nominated by Serge Belongie), Lisa McCutcheon (nominated by Rick Ord), Ankur Jain (nominated by Rick Ord), and Sarah Esper (nominated by Gary Gillespie). Each student received a newly designed Yahoo! Excellence trophy and a $250 cash award. Special thanks to Yahoo! and Don McGillen for their generous support for Excellence in our undergraduate program.

Amin Vahdat, Professor in the department of Computer Science and Engineering and CSE undergraduate Sarah Esper, have been awarded the Gordon Engineering Leadership Center’s Gordon Fellows.

The Gordon Center was established in January 2009 with the mission of educating and training effective engineering leaders who create new products and jobs that benefit society. In order to provide positive role models for students of engineering, the Gordon Center holds an annual awards ceremony to recognize exemplary engineers at the high school, undergraduate, graduate, and professional level. Recipients of the Gordon Fellows Medal not only must be outstanding engineers within their respective fields but must also have a proven record of leadership successes.

To learn more about the Gordon Center's mission and goals, please click here.

 CSE Alumni Ayse K. Coskun and CSE Professor Tajana Simunic Rosing win Best Paper Award at the VLSI-SoC 2009 conference.     Their paper “Modeling and Dynamic Management of 3D Multicore Systems with Liquid Cooling,” which includes co-authors Jose Ayala, David Atienza  received the top honor announcement Monday.  Click here for the conference link.

UCSD students competed head-to-head during the Fall 2009 UCSD Programming Contest, sponsored by Mike Dini and The Dini Group.  Students were given five hours to complete a set of problems.  Top honors and $1000 go to first-year CSE Graduate Student Do-Kyum Kim for solving 4 problems with a combined time of 616 minutes. Sophomore David Michon placed second, also solving 4 problems. Haoxi Fang, Jason Obenberger and Eric Levine rounded out the top 5.The top students will go on to compete in the ACM Southern California.  Click here for more information.

Professor of CSE, Serge Belongie will perform with his band SO3 on Saturday October 24th, 2009.  SO3 will play at the KickGas Festival at Qualcomm at approximately 6:30 p.m.

Students from UC San Diego and a handful of other universities spent two weeks in August getting intensive instruction and hands-on lab experience on projects well outside their areas of expertise. UC San Diego’s Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center (TDLC) provided this horizon-broadening “boot camp” to 19 intrepid electrical engineering, psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science, and computer science students.

The Database group consisting of Professors Alin Deutsch, Yannis Papakonstantinou and Victor Vianu, has been awarded two new NSF grants and funding from Yahoo, Google and IBM to support their work on data-centric workflows. The group's comprehensive research program in this area ranges from a platform for Web 2.0 Do-It-Yourself forms-driven workflow applications, where even non-programmers can quickly create applications that capture their business process needs, to data-centric workflow specification methodologies and tools for computer-aided verification and static analysis that guarantee the correctness of complex applications. The collaboration with industrial partners will further expand in the coming years, with likely impact on industrial practice in areas such as workflows for the development of business processes, do-it-yourself Web applications and cloud computing applications. In a related development, the NSF has awarded a $3M grant to the database groups at UCSD, UC Irvine and UC Riverside in support of their work on parallel evaluation of XML queries.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a five-year grant for $400,000 to CSE Alumni Jeannie Albrecht  for research on managing distributed applications on mobile computing platforms composed of cell phones, vehicles, and embedded sensors. Albrecht earned her Ph. D. from UCSD in  2007 and is currently an assistant professor of computer science at Williams College.  Albrecht  will direct the project, which is funded as a part of the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program, one of the most prestigious awards the NSF grants to young scholars that effectively integrate research into their teaching. Click here to see the full article.

Computer scientists have developed an inexpensive solution for diagnosing delays in data center networks as short as tens of millionths of seconds—delays that can lead to multi-million dollar losses for investment banks running automatic stock trading systems. Similar delays can delay parallel processing in high performance cluster computing applications run by Fortune 500 companies and universities. This work highlights a fundamental shift happening across the Internet. As computer programs—rather than humans—increasingly respond to streams of information moving across computer networks in real time, millionths of seconds matter. Algorithmic stock trading systems are just one example. Extra microseconds of delay can also mean slower response times across clustered-computing platforms, which can slow down computation-intensive research, such as drug discovery projects. Computer scientists from University of California, San Diego (George Varghese, Alex Snoeren, and Kirill Levchenko)  and Purdue University (Ramana Kompella) presented this work on August 20, 2009 at SIGCOMM, the premier networking conference. For the full article please click here.

University of California, San Diego computer scientists have created software that they hope will lead to data centers that logically function as single, plug-and-play networks that will scale to today’s massive data center networks. The software system—PortLand—is a fault-tolerant, layer 2 data center network fabric capable of scaling to 100,000 nodes and beyond. PortLand is fully compatible with existing hardware and routing protocols and holds promise for supporting large-scale, data center networks by increasing inherent scalability, providing baseline support for virtual machines and migration, and dramatically reducing administrative overhead. Critically, it removes the reliance on a single spanning tree, natively leveraging multipath routing and improving fault tolerance. The computer scientists (Radhika Niranjan Mysore, Andreas Pamboris, Nathan Farrington, Nelson Huang, Pardis Miri, Sivasankar Radhakrishnan, Vikram Subramanya, and Amin Vahdat) reported this advance in data center networking on August 18, 2009 at SIGCOMM, the premier computer networking conference. Click here for the article in Jacobs School of Engineering News   Click here for the articles in Network World (Article 1 and Article 2)

With the support of a multi-year funding award from the National Science Foundation, Assistant Professor Michael Taylor will work on the design of Stingray, a chip with many massively specialized, diverse kinds of processing cores, which is tuned for maximal energy efficiency in vision processing applications. The project explores these and other architectural challenges that arise in designing effective low power Stingray systems. The NSF's Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program aims to support the activities of leading young academics who successfully integrate research with education.

CSE faculty member Beth Simon is helping to change the dynamics of todays classrooms by developing high-tech options to help engage students.

Three current and former UC San Diego computer science students created TowerMadness, the cheat-resistant 3D game which challenges players to repel alien onslaughts by constructing defensive towers in strategic locations. A multi-touch interface allows TowerMadness players to zoom in and around the visually-detailed 3D action.

 CSE PhD Graduate Yuvraj Agarwal has created a plug-and-play hardware prototype for personal computers that induces a new energy saving state known as “sleep talking.” Normally PCs can be in either awake mode—where they consume power even if they are not being used—or in a low power sleep mode—where they save substantial power but are essentially inactive and unresponsive to network traffic.

Congratulations to CSE Ph.D. student Samory Kpotufe who will receive the Mark Fulk Best Student Paper Award for his single-authored paper, "Escaping the Curse of Dimensionality with a Tree-Based Regressor" at this year's Conference on Computational Learning Theory (COLT). 

Ronald Graham, a mathematician and computer science professor at the University of California, San Diego, has been selected as a member of the inaugural class of Fellows of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics ( SIAM ). Graham is the Chief Scientist of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology ( Calit2 ), a partnership of UC San Diego and UC Irvine. He also holds the Irwin and Joan Jacobs Endowed Chair in Computer and Information Science at UC San Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering, which he joined in 1999.

"On Friday evening, April 25, 2008, CSE Tutors , old and new, came together to be recognized by the CSE Tutor Reunion. The two hour event had almost 200 attendees including a dozen attending at Google in Mountain View participating via video teleconference. The catered event was filled with laughter and nostalgia through renewing connections made long ago. Faculty reconnected with their former tutors; alumni tutors reconnected with each other, and current tutors connected with alums to get a glimpse into their own futures. A program of brief yet touching speeches were given by CSE lecturers and alumni tutors telling of stories of CSE courses back in the day. The event announced the formation of SAGE (Students Achieving Guiding Enriching), a new student organization aimed to enable more students to have a tutoring experience. If you are interested in giving to the tutor program click here

After 34 years at UCSD, founding CSE professor T.C. Hu is retiring. At a party honoring his tenure, colleagues remembered Dr. Hu as a tireless researcher, and instrumental in the creation of the CSE department. Included in the audience was Dr. Hu's ballroom dance teacher of over 25 years, who danced a few steps with her long-time student. After lunch, a cake inscribed with one of Dr. Hu's favorite classroom dicta, "Let us start with the simplest non-trivial cases!!", was cut and served.

Joe Pasquale and Pavel Pevzner were each honored with a 2006-2007 Chancellor's Associates Faculty Excellence Award. Joe received the award for excellence in undergraduating teaching, while the one for excellence in research in science and engineering went to Pavel. Each year, a selection committee gives five awards to UCSD faculty who make important contributions to teaching, research, and community service. This is the first year that a single academic department has been recognized with awards for both teaching and research. A press release is online here.

CSE professor and JSOE Associate Dean Jeanne Ferrante has been recognized by Athena, a leadership organization for women executives in San Diego's technology, life sciences, and healthcare sectors. The 2007 Educator Pinnacle Award recognizes Ferrante's multifarious educational and research endeavors in the engineering field, which include founding Teams in Engineering Service (TIES). TIES is an innovative service-learning academic program that puts UCSD undergraduates and their technical and creative skills to work for San Diego non-profit organizations. Other activities include advising UCSD's Women in Computing group, and founding UCSD's Women's Leadership Alliance. Press release.

UCSD's Dean of Graduate studies has agreed to fund an interdisciplinary research project that will include CSE students Chih-Chieh Cheng and Kevin Li. The year-long, $15,000 stipends will fund their project, which is entitled "Assistive Listening Devices and Voice Processing Platforms for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing." More information about collaboratory funding is available here.

Chip Killian, James Anderson, Ranjit Jhala, and Amin Vahdat received the Best Paper award at the USENIX/ACM Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI) conference for their paper Life, Death, and the Critical Transition: Finding Liveness Bugs in Systems Code.

First-year grad student Diane Hu has been awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. The NSF makes annual awards to graduate students among the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines; each award provides three years of financial support. Hu's research interests lie at the intersection of machine learning and speech and audio processing. Honorable mentions went to Aaron Arvey, Natalie Castellana, Andrew Drucker, and Yonghahk Park.

IEEE has awarded its annual Tsutomu Kanai Award to CSE Professor and Calit2 Director Larry Smarr for his outstanding contributions to the area of distributed computing systems. Smarr coined the term "metacomputer" in 1988 for a user-created, virtual networked "computer" built out of components tied together by the Internet. Ten years later, he is generally credited with creating the name "Grid" for the middleware that now enables distributed computing. A press release about Smarr's award is available here.

The 2007 Theory of Cryptography Conference chose CSE's Saurabh Panjwani for their best student paper award. Panjwani's research findings, presented in the single-author paper "Tackling Adaptive Corruptions in Multicast Encryption Protocols," develop a new technique for the analysis of cryptographic protocols in the presence of powerful adversaries, which can dynamically corrupt honest participants during protocol execution. Panjwani is a member of CSE's Security and Cryptography group.

Morgane Botella was one of several UCSD undergraduates invited to present their research at UC's annual Louis Stokes California Alliance for Minority Participation in Science, Engineering and Mathematics (CAMP) Symposium. A second-year undergrad, Botella is a member of the eTutor team, which is developing a distance tutoring program that enables remote tutoring with the help of tablet PCs and VOIP. Botella was awarded one of four Special Merit symposium awards for presentations in the area of physical sciences and engineering. More info on CAMP is available here.

Justin Ma, a third-year Ph.D. student, will be spending this summer in Santa Monica, California, thanks to a Symantec Research Labs Graduate Fellowship. Justin will be working with Symantec researchers on issues of computer security, and is one of just three students in the nation to be honored. The fellowship also includes tuition and fees for the 2007-2008 academic year. As part of CSE's Systems and Networking group, Justin is currently involved in theoretical and empirical studies on the dynamics of Internet malware. Click here for more information about Justin's award and research.

The ACM has named Victor Vianu a 2006 Fellow, one of just 41 researchers world-wide to be awarded the prestigious distinction. Recognized for his long-time contributions to database management systems, Victor is a founding CSE faculty member who joined UCSD in 1983 with the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. The ACM Fellows Program, established in 1993, celebrates the exceptional contributions of leading members in the computing field. Andrew Chien was elected a 2007 Fellow by IEEE. The accolade is given for Andrew's contributions to high-performance cluster and grid computing software. Andrew is currently on leave from UCSD at Intel Research, where he is Vice President, Corporate Technology Group. IEEE bestows the honor of Fellow on a very limited number of Senior Members who have made outstanding contributions to the electrical and information technologies and sciences.

The Computing Research Association has chosen Tammy Denning, a senior in computer science and engineering, for an honorable mention in their 2007 Outstanding Undergraduate Awards. The annual awards program recognizes undergraduate students from North American universities who show outstanding research potential in an area of computing research. A leading member of the Ubiquitous Presenter research team, Tammy is currently applying to Ph.D. programs. Last year she received a Distributed Mentor Project fellowship from CRA's Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research.

The 2006 class of UCSD's Architecture-based Enterprise Systems Engineering (AESE) Leadership Program has selected Ingolf as the outstanding engineering faculty. Says AESE Director Harold Sorenson, "Ingolf is truly outstanding; he is clearly an expert in the material that he was asked to teach. His interaction with the class, all senior engineers with 10 or more years of experience, was stimulating, informative, and interactive. The success of the program was built upon Ingolf's virtuoso involvement." A joint venture of the Jacobs School of Engineering and Rady School of Management, AESE provides advanced business training for senior engineers and engineering managers.

The CSE department is soliciting a spare bookshelf on behalf of Lecturer Rick Ord, who will need the space for his fourth consecutive Jacobs School of Engineering's CSE Teacher of the Year award. The honor recognizes Rick's tireless dedication to the education of undergraduate students, and is well deserved.

Associate Professor Geoff Voelker has been selected as the Jacobs School's first Ericsson Distinguished Scholar for his work in the field of wireless communication. Along with recognition, the award includes $25,000 per year for five years to support Geoff's teaching, research, and service activities. The Distinguished Scholar program was created to recruit and retain outstanding faculty and students to the Jacobs School of Engineering. Further information is available here.

With the support of a multi-year funding award from the National Science Foundation, Assistant Professor Steve Swanson will develop a novel hardware/software system architecture called niche-based computing. Known for his work on WaveScalar, Swanson's new proposed system seeks to exploit the power and performance advantages of specialized computing elements to improve efficiency in general-purpose computations. The NSF's Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program aims to support the activities of leading young academics who successfully integrate research with education.

Cynthia Bailey Lee was one of 10 selected for UCSD's 2007 Summer Graduate Teaching Fellows Program to teach CSE 141, Computer Architecture. The award includes guidance from a faculty mentor (Cynthia will work with Lecturer Beth Simon), workshops prior to the beginning of the course, observation and feedback during the course, and post-course evaluation. The fellowship program was designed to provide valuable teaching experience to the campus's best graduate students.

CSE professor and JSOE Associate Dean Jeanne Ferrante has been recognized by Athena, a leadership organization for women executives in San Diego's technology, life sciences, and healthcare sectors. The 2007 Educator Pinnacle Award recognizes Ferrante's multifarious educational and research endeavors in the engineering field, which include founding Teams in Engineering Service (TIES). TIES is an innovative service-learning academic program that puts UCSD undergraduates and their technical and creative skills to work for San Diego non-profit organizations. Other activities include advising UCSD's Women in Computing group, and founding UCSD's Women's Leadership Alliance. Press release.