Andrew Kahng was named to the 2010 class of IEEE Fellows for his contributions to the design for manufacturability of integrated circuits, and the technology roadmap of semiconductors.   Andrew joins existing CSE fellows Walt Burkhard (2000), Larry Carter (2000), CK Cheng (2000), Bill Howden (2001), Rajesh Gupta (2004), Jeanne Ferrante (2005), Andrew Chien (2007) and Dean Tullsen (2009). More information and a full listing of this year's awardees can be found at the IEEE Fellow Program.

A study by University of Washington researchers led by doctoral student Tamara Denning (B.S. 2007) calls attention to the possibility of household robots being hacked by malevolent parties and reprogrammed for nefarious purposes. Such purposes could include psychological attacks, spying, and vandalism. Denning, Yoshi Kohno (Ph. D. 2006) and their colleagues examined three commercially available household robots, and discovered that all three had the potential of being hijacked.   "It's very similar to computer security, the way that users of desktop computers have to worry about spam and malware," Denning says. "One possible trajectory is that people will have to think about security with their home robots, as well."  Click here for the link to the MSNBC article and Security and privacy of future household robots.

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.

UC San Diego computer scientists have built a software program 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." Professor Savage presented this work on October 30 at ACM's Conference on Communications and Computer Security (CCS) 2008, one of the premier academic computer security conferences. The keys used in the most common residential locks in the United States have a series of 5 or 6 cuts, spaced out at regular intervals. The computer scientists created a program in MatLab that can process photos of keys from nearly any angle and measure the depth of each cut. String together the depth of each cut and you have a key's bitting code, which together with basic information on the brand and type of key you have, is what you need to make a duplicate key. The chief challenge for the software system, called "Sneakey", is to adjust for a wide range of different angles and distances between the camera and the key being captured. To do so, the researchers relied on a classic computer vision technique for normalizing an object's orientation and size in three dimensions by matching control points from a reference image to equivalent points in the target image.

Bioformatics Ph.D. student Noah Zaitlen has been awarded a Microsoft Research Fellowship! The award will support his research into the development of methods to better understand the genetics of common human diseases. Zaitlen is advised by CSE professor Eleazar Eskin, and is currently undecided about pursuing a career in academia or the private sector. Begun in 1997, Microsoft Research's Graduate Fellowship program provides outstanding graduate students with tuition and fees, a TabletPC, a stipend, and a conference allowance. The program is open to students at U.S. and Canadian universities who are pursuing studies in the fields of computer science, electrical engineering, or math. Each year, the award is given to approximately 12 students for a two-year period, and may be extended for a third. More information about the Fellowship program is available here. Congratulations, Noah!

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has recognized CSE's Alin Deutsch 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." Deutsch is a member of CSE's database group, and his research focuses on providing infrastructure for publishing and consuming data on the Web, particularly by exploiting the Extended Markup Language (XML). Deutsch's Sloan award is the second in as many years given to CSE researchers; Serge Belongie was honored last year. The full press release is available here, and the complete list of this year's awardees can he found on the Sloan website. Congratulations, Alin!

Full-time lecturer Rick Ord was recently named Outstanding Faculty of the Year by our campus chapter of Tau Beta Pi, a nation-wide engineering honor society. The award will be given at the Jacobs School of Engineering's Recognition Banquet on May 19, and also announced at Tau Beta Pi's end-of-the-year banquet. Ord is a popular professor who is also a three-time winner of the Jacobs School of Engineering Teacher of the Year award for the CSE department, the most recent being last year (2004-2005). Way to go, Rick!

Postdoc Ben Raphael, along with CSE's Pavel Pevzner, has developed algorithms to understand how a cancer genome breaks apart and gets put back together. The undertaking is a joint venture with the UC San Francisco Cancer Center, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Amplicon Express, Evrogen JSC, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the Joint Genome Institute. Raphael's technique is called End Sequence Profiling (ESP), and exploits the fact that the mutagenetic processes that result in a tumor are similar to that of evolutionary genomic rearrangements, except they occur on a vastly expedited timescale. ESP determines some of a tumor's DNA base pairs and infers the missing pieces from comparisons with the unchanged genome. These data then suggest areas of the genome that UCSF Cancer Center researchers should examine more closely. You can read more about Ben Raphael's research, which is published in this month's Genome Research here.

Professor Geoff Voelker has been honoroed with the Chancellor's Associates 2006 award for excellence in undergraduate teaching. The selection committee chose Voelker for his "fresh teaching approach, tireless advocacy for student efforts and exceptional contributions" to the CSE department. Voelker has consistently received outstanding student reviews, especially from those who participate in his wildly popular Software System Design and Implementation course. CSE 125 teams seniors in their final quarter on projects to build a multi-player, networked computer game over the course of ten weeks. Voelker's award was one of five bestowed on faculty members for their scholarship and overall contributions to the University and the community. Follow a link for more information about the Chancellor's Awards or to read the press release.

The National Science Foundation has awarded fellowships to three CSE graduate students. Current student Michael Vrable and entering students Krista Davis and Qing Zhang were each given fellowships that include three years of financial support. Additionally, current Ph.D. candidate Justin Ma and soon-to-be CSE student Nathan Bales were chosen for Honorable Mention awards. A total of 61 fellowships were awarded to U.S. students in the category of Computer and Information Science and Engineering for 2006; a full list of the winners is available here. Congratulations!

Undergraduate students Khawaja Shams, Son Dinh, and Darren Dao have been awarded one of two Best Poster awards at the Pt. Loma Nazarene Undergraduate Computer Science Conference. The poster highlighted the students' creation of InstaSEE, a process that allows instructors to automatically return paper documents via email through a scanner and paper-association process. With a prototype already built, and the students hope to offer the procedure to teaching assistants for the spring quarter. The conference's website can be found here.

CSE has been honored with one of 40 Technology for Teaching grants from HP. The award will provide expansion support for Ubiquitous Presenter (UP), a tablet-based educational technology system developed by professor William Griswold and lecturer Beth Simon. The $69,000+ gift will provide wireless equipment, other HP products, and a faculty stipend. These new resources will allow for the development of UP Note Blogger, a project that will explore the idea of treating traditional student note-taking in the classroom as blogging. Click here for the full press release.

CSE's Systems & Networking group authored five of the thirty-seven papers to appear at this year's ACM SIGCOMM -- the premiere networking research conference. The papers cover a range of topics including network modeling, high-speed traffic processing and large-scale analysis of wireless network activity.