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.

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.

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.

The Jacobs School and San Diego Supercomputer Center are launching an environmental education initiative to keep middle school girls excited about science. The UCSD team will help San Diego county students monitor the air quality, solar radiation, and other environmental factors surrounding their own schools in an effort to make science applicable to them. Jeanne Ferrante, CSE professor and principal investigator on the project, says "One of the best ways to keep girls engaged is to show them how engineering and computing connects with issues in their own lives." Full article.

Nine graduate programs and 13 departments are collaborating in a new graduate educational program at the crucial interface of biology, medicine, and physical and engineering sciences. The curriculum will include six new hands-on graduate laboratory courses taught by interdisciplinary teams of faculty members who will introduce students to state-of-the-art techniques studying living systems. In CSE, professors Vineet Bafna and Pavel Pevzner will each be teaching courses for the program. UCSD is one of 10 universities that will use $1 million each provided over three years by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to initiate the new program. The Jacobs School press release can be found here.

Three Computer Science and Engineering graduate students play key roles in "Scalable City"--the high-profile interactive multimedia project led by Sheldon Brown, director of the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA). It opened August 29 at Ars Electronica, the world's top new-media conference and a permanent museum in Linz, Austria. CSE grad student Joey Hammer was the 'buildmaster' on Scalable City--making him responsible for tying the various subsystems into a single software framework. Erik Hill took an algorithm for plant growth and applied it to the road construction. The game physics were handled by Daniel Tracy. For more, click here.

CSE recently took part in Operation College Freedom, a disaster exercise on the UCSD campus that tested new technologies designed for first-responders. Coordinated by San Diego's Metropolitan Medical Strike Team (MMST), the drill was a cooperative effort between Calit2, UCSD's School of Medicine, law enforcement, and first-responders. WIISARD, or the Wireless Internet Information System for Medical Response in Disasters, was one of 12 primary technologies deployed during the exercise. A system for the tracking of mass casualties, triage, and managing all medical information, WIISARD combines state-of-the-art networking, data collection, display devices and database services to produce a consistent, real-time view of the disaster scene. For more information about the drill and the technologies utilized, click here.

Pavel Pevzner, together with JSOE colleagues Xiaohua Huang and Michael Heller, has been awarded a National Institutes of Health grant to create a breakthrough method that will radically streamline the way the human genome is sequenced. In order to sequence the 23 pairs of human chromosomes, its DNA must be cut into tens of million to hundreds of millions of pieces. Pevzner is developing techniques to computationally reassemble these chromosomes by piecing together the overlapping ends of all the fragments after they have been sequenced. The trio of researchers will attempt to simultaneously sequence more than 1 billion individual DNA molecules. You can read more about the research by clicking here.

Online DVD rental company Netflix has created a competition to improve their movie recommendation program and tapped CSE's Charles Elkan to help design the system. A veteran organizer of data mining competitions, Elkan consulted for Netflix to create a leader board, design the competition's timeline, and advocated for data segregation to discourage systems geared specifically to the training data. Click here to read the full article.

Associate Professor Lawrence Saul's work recently achieved the distinction of being in the top 1% of citations in the field of Engineering, according to Essential Science Indicators. Saul's interest is machine learning and his most frequently cited paper, published in Science in 2000, proposed a nonlinear approach to analyzing and visualizing high-dimensional data. in-cites, a website that provides commentary and analysis on the most influential modern-day scientific discoveries, recently interviewed Saul about the work that has proven so important.

Comparing the genomes of humans and seven other mammals, an international team of evolutionary sleuths has confirmed a theory put forward two years ago by UCSD scientists Pavel Pevzner and Glenn Tessler: that fragile regions exist in the human genome that break over and over again in the course of evolution. To read the full Jacobs School press release, click here. [Read More...]

CSE Professor Bill Griswold and Ph.D. candidate Neil McCurdy recently unveiled a new form of situational awareness where the viewer can navigate an integrated, interactive environment as if it were a video game. This new technique constructs a 3D virtual environment dynamically out of multiple live video streams. Though being currently tested for security and emergency response purposes, the technology has potential consumer uses such as virtual tourism or pre-drive instructions where you can 'fly' through the drive before doing it. Click here to read the full Jacobs School article.

CSE's Pavel Pezvner joined with 24 scientists to analyze the last 100 million years of mammal evolution. They compared the genomes of humans to cats, dogs, mice, rats, pigs, cows and horses, using a program developed by Harris A. Lewin and his colleagues at the University of Illinois, called the Evolution Highway. In the mid-1990's, Dr. Pevzner and Sridhar Hannenhalli of the University of Pennsylvania invented a fast method for comparing chromosomes from two different species and determining the fewest number of rearrangements that separate them. To read more click here.

CSE professor Eleazar Eskin and his graduate students, along with researchers at the International Computer Science Institute, have used a software algorithm to quickly break down large amounts of genetic information--from genotypes to haplotypes--in an attempt to more accurately study genetic differences. The research was conducted on the biotech repository of the National Center of Biotechnology Information (NCBI), and effectively resulted in the doubling of the repository's data. More information about these research findings can be found here.

In its coverage of Supercomputing 2003, HPCwire editor-in-chief Alan Beck interviewed CSE professor Andrew Chien about his role as system software architect of the OptIPuter project. Chien also talks about how BigBangwidth's LightPath Accelerator technology will fit into his storage research. [Read More...]

CSE graduate student Sameer Agarwal was recognized by the ISI Essential Science Indicators list as a co-author of a "Fast Breaking Paper". According to ISI, Fast Breaking Papers represent very recent scientific contributions that are just beginning to attract the attention of the scientific community. Updated bi-monthly; the lists reflects the top 1% of papers in each field. [Read More...]

In an article in Salon.com, CSE professor Serge Belongie talks about fingerprint and biometric recognition in today's society of high national security alerts and his experience presenting this technology to the public. Belongie was quoted as saying "Way back in 1993 when we started doing this stuff, I had no idea if it would succeed, but I could imagine people putting down a thumbprint to get on an airplane." [Read More...]

CSE Professor Bill Griswold has been participating as a key collaborator on a project titled the Wireless internet Information System for Medical Response in Disasters (WIISARD). This project utilizes the use of sophisticated wireless technology to coordinate and enhance care of mass casualties in a terrorist attack or natural disaster. It is the focus of a new federally funded research project at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). The project brings together broad-based participation from academia, industry, the military, and emergency responders from the City and County of San Diego. [Read More...]

During an internship with Google, CSE graduate student Yu-Chung Cheng worked on a project that has helped to create an open-source tool designed to better predict the effect on real-world Web site performance if changes are made to things like network infrastructure. Called Monkey, the tool first captures data from actual client sessions, inferring various network and client conditions -- what its creators call the "monkey see" portion of its work. It then attempts to emulate those conditions for server tests -- a process called "monkey do."<br/> "Monkey is aimed at helping to solve the dilemma of Web testing. Often trying out network or server changes on even a small portion of actual user traffic is risky, but simulations are often unrealistic because they don't accurately reflect users' network conditions" said Yu-Chung Cheng. To read the full article in Computerworld, click here. [Read More...]

The National Science Foundation has awarded a five-year $1.3 million Information Technology Research (ITR) grant to CSE Professor Fan Chung Graham to derive the analytical tools needed by organizations that rely on the Internet for eCommerce, database sharing, searching, or other activities broadly defined as interactive computing. Networked computers continually share information with one another, and users become aware of reliability issues only when systems fail. One of the most challenging problems that Graham will address is how to analyze networks that are changing dynamically while relying only on partial information. They hope to effectively model complex behaviors in a variety of ways, such as exploiting the discovery that realistic networks have power law degree distributions. The ITR grant to Graham is one of six totaling more than $9 million to UCSD faculty in 2004, the fifth and final year of the ITR program, which has committed a total of more than $1 billion to innovative, high-payoff research and education. To read the full Jacobs School press release, click here. [Read More...]

Tadayoshi Kohno, Ph.D. graduate student and computer security expert in CSE who has analyzed the software of one of the most popular touch-screen voting machines says election officials should regard any touch-screen machine that operates suspiciously on Tuesday as part of a "crime scene" to be investigated by computer forensics experts. Kohno testified in July before the U.S. House of Representative's Committee on House Administration that the current generation of paperless electronic voting machines should not be used in an election. A study by Election Data Services Inc., of voting equipment used by election jurisdictions across the United States found that as many as 50 million registered voters are expected to cast ballots on electronic equipment during Tuesday's election. To read the full Jacobs School press release, click here. [Read More...]

Experts in bioinformatics at UCSD have co-authored with other scientists the first large-scale comparison of mammal and bird genomes, published in the December 9 edition of Nature. The journal's cover story includes a draft sequence of the chicken genome assembled and analyzed by members of the International Chicken Genome Sequencing Consortium. The chicken genome provides several firsts: it is the first bird, the first agricultural animal, and the first descendant of the dinosaurs to have its genome sequenced. The consortium confirmed that humans and chickens share more than half of their genes, but their DNA sequences diverge in ways that may explain some of the important differences between birds and mammals. Says CSE Professor Pavel Pevzner whom has worked on the sequencing project, "We might infer that those that were most in common were probably there at some ancestral point". To read the full Jacobs School press release, click here. [Read More...]

CSE Professor Serge Belongie's co-developed computer vision method assists in authentication techniques to prevent computers from registering automatically at sites. New York Times Science writer Sara Robinson reports on efforts to develop authentication techniques to prevent computers from registering automatically at sites, and mentions work and computer-vision method co-developed by CSE's Serge Belongie. New York Times Story

CSE Professor Dean Tullsen's research on simultaneous multithreading (SMT) provides a revolutionary advance in computer processor performance. Intel unveiled its SMT-enabled (a.k.a "hyper-threading") Pentium 4 Xeon processor early this year. The new SMT-enabled processor will as much double a chip's processing power at a 5% hardware cost. Related articles can be found on UPI and Sign On San Diego.

A team of California researchers, including CSE's David Moore and Stefan Savage, recently released an analysis of the Sapphire worm that paralyzed portions of the Internet on January 25th. They determined that the worm infected 90% of susceptible hosts in less than ten minutes, with a peak scanning rate of more than 55 million hosts per second. This work has been widely reported, including articles in the San Jose Business Journal and Sign on San Diego. [Read More...]

CSE Professor Pavel Pevzner and Researcher Glenn Tesler have uncovered evidence that major evolutionary changes are more likely to occur in approximately 400 fragile genomic regions that account for only 5 percent of the human genome. The findings, reported in the June 24 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), undercut the widely held view among scientists that evolutionary breakpoints - disruptions in the order of genes on chromosomes - are purely random. Apart from its implications for evolutionary theory, the study could have major implications for medical research related to diseases such as leukemia, which are caused by clinical (rather than evolutionary) chromosomal breakpoints.

Genome scientists have confirmed a revolutionary new view of what happens in the human genome to cause dramatic evolutionary changes. Boinformaticians at UCSD -- who posited that 'fragile' regions exist in the human genome that are more susceptible to gene rearrangements -- are collaborating with biologists to see if their new theory can yield potentially life-saving insights into diseases such as breast cancer, in which chromosomal rearrangements are implicated. "It took only three months to go from theory to hard scientific evidence that there are regions of the genome that are subject to evolutionary 'earthquakes' over and over again," says CSE Professor Pavel Pevzner.

In a bylined article for the June 2003 issue, entitled "Microcosmos", CSE professor and Cal-(IT)2 director Larry Smarr writes about "the new space race...and the battle for more and more control over less and less." "I have seen the future, and it is small," he writes, and concludes that the scientists and engineers working in the nano arena of the future will be "masters of bioinfonanotech." [Read More...]

CSE faculty participated in force at the 30th anniversary of SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group: Graphics), the premier conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques, which took place from July 27-31, 2003. With an estimated 25,000 people attending the conference and concurrent trade show at the San Diego Convention Center, CSE faculty members Henrik Jensen, David Kriegman, Serge Belongie and Mike Bailey organized special courses, delivered papers and showcased new graphics techniques.

(Article published online in Wired Magazine), Oct. 16, 2003 - Engineers meeting this week at UbiComp 2003, a ubiquitous-computing conference in Seattle, believe that technology -- rather than isolating people within virtual spaces -- should be forming real-world connections amongst flesh-and-blood human beings. (Quotes by CSE Professor William Griswold included in article.) [Read More...]

With funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) will embark on eight new projects in the field of information technology (IT) including development of a new architecture for computer networks based on optical communications, and new ways to use IT in the study of earth sciences. Projects include: The OptIPuter Project, GEOscience Network (GEON), Network Framework, and The SEEK Project. [Read More...]

CSE Professor Pavel Pevzner, an expert in computational biology, and CSE Project Scientist Glenn Tesler have co-authored landmark papers appearing in Nature and Genome Research. The findings state that comparison of human, mouse genomes show more genomic rearrangements to account for 75 million years of evolution. Click here for the NIH news release.