The CSE Department received the prestigious "Partners in International Education" Award from the UCSD International Center. The UCSD Programs Abroad office nominated us to "recognize the Computer Science Department for their excellent, extensive, and continued efforts to promote and encourage study abroad for all of their undergraduate student". People explicitly recognized in the award were CSE/Math student Michael Nekrasov, CSE Undergraduate Student Affair Advisors Viera Kair and Patricia Razcka, Professor Joseph Pasquale, and Professors Rick Ord, Geoff Voelker, Dana Dahlstrom, George Varghese, Ryan Kastner, and Scott Baden.

The Department is deeply saddened to announce the death of former PhD student Alan Nash in a tragic bicycle accident on November 15, 2009. Alan earned his PhD at UCSD in 2006, under the direction of co-advisors Jeff Remmel, Russell Impagliazzo, and Victor Vianu. This Ph.D. was awarded by both the department of Mathematics and the department of Computer Science and Engineering.  He was the first UCSD student to earn a multi-departmental PhD.

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!

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.

CSE Graphics Faculty leave conference goers in a "fog". Professors Henrik Wann Jensen, Matthias Zwicker, and Ph.D student Wojciech Jarosz presented improved "photon mapping algorithms" at Eurographics 2008 in Crete, Greece on April 17. They have created a fog and smoke machine for computer graphics that cuts the computational cost of making realistic smoky and foggy 3-D images, such as beams of light from a lighthouse piercing thick fog. This new work is part of a shift in the computer graphics, film, animation and video game industries toward greater realism through the use of "ray tracing algorithms." Much of the realism in ray tracing technologies comes from calculating how the light in computer generated images would behave if it were set loose in the real world and followed the laws of nature. The full JSOE press release can be found here.

The world is a little more beautiful these days thanks to CSE's David Kriegman and Satya Mallick's new startup company www.taaz.com. Anyone with a digital photograph can now apply more than 4,000 makeup products with the click of a mouse. The computer scientists invented an algorithm for separating gloss from non-gloss in digital images - a technical feat crucial for taaz.com's patented approach to applying photorealistic makeup to images. It is also useful for more traditional computer vision applications like face recognition and endoscopic enhancement. For more information click here.

Two individuals' dissertations have been chosen for submission for the 2007 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Competition by the CSE graduate committee. PhD graduate Rakesh Kumar's dissertation is entitled "Holistic Design for Multi-Core Architectures." Rakesh is now an Assistant Professor at UIUC. Nuno Bandeira's dissertation is entitled "Spectral Networks Algorithms for De Novo Interpretation of Tandem Mass Spectra." Nuno is currently a CSE Postdoc, transitioning to Project Scientist.

The CSE department is excited to welcome Hovav Shacham and Ryan Kastner who have both accepted faculty positions. Hovav has broad interests in computer security and is one of the pioneers in using pairings --- computable bilinear maps --- to construct cryptographic systems and other security systems. Hovav joins us from the Weizmann Institute where he was a postdoctoral scholar after getting his Ph.D. at Stanford under Dan Boneh. Ryan's interests span embedded and reconfigurable computing, with recent applications to underwater sensor networks, security and radiolocation. Ryan joins us from UC Santa Barbara's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering where he was an associate professor.

UCSD's 2007 ACM Programming Team earned second place in the ACM Southern California Regional Programming Contest. Four teams from UCSD entered and competed in a field of 63 teams from schools like CalTech, Harvey Mudd, USC, UCLA, UCSB, UNLV, and UCI. They did extremely well, placing second and fifth. UCSD was the only school to have two teams place in the top five. Complete results can be found here.

Congrats to two CSE students, Manmohan Chandraker and Sameer Agarwal, for being recognized with the David Marr Prize Honorable Mention at the International Conference on Computer Vision this year. The paper, "Globally Optimal Affine and Metric Upgrades in Stratified Autocalibration," also written by David Kriegman and Serge Belongie, describes techniques to recover the three dimensional structure of a scene using only its images, acquired from cameras whose internal settings and spatial orientations are unknown. Potential uses span a diverse range of applications, including augmented reality walkthroughs of a building or a city, online alignment of a camera network, and 3D navigation through a collection of photographs.

The CSE Fiscal Affairs Manager, Dr. Tim Truitt, has earned his Ph.D in Business Administration with a concentration in Financial Management from Northcentral University, Prescott, AZ. His dissertation, entitled "Exploring Effects of Innovation Management: A Selective Study of Non-Profit Managers' Perceptions," focuses on how innovation can be influenced by a manager's actions and establishment of the work environment. "Managers cannot control innovation, but they can greatly influence the probability that innovation may occur. Managers can orchestrate events, be prepared for unseen factors, and act with an openness to multiple possible plans of action for desired results," writes Dr. Truitt. Tim earned his MBA in Leadership, Strategic Management from Baker College of Graduate Studies and his B.A. in Business Administration/Accounting and a minor in International Economic Development from Long Island University's World Program, Southampton, NY. Congrats, Tim!

Serge Belongie is working with a team to create computer software with common sense. Using the tool called Google Sets, Serge has developed an image labeling system that can identify objects in photos based on the context of each photo. "In some ways, Google Sets is a proxy for common sense. In our paper, we showed that you can use this common sense to provide contextual information that improves the accuracy of automated image labeling systems," said Belongie. Serge's paper was presented at ICCV 2007. For more information, click here.

Serge Belongie leads a team that has developed a system for labeling objects for videos or photos using distributed human effort. The "Soylent grid," as they call it, embeds these labeling tasks in CAPTCHAs used today by Internet sites to bar access to automated agents. Their first application is to the existing GroZi project that helps visually-impaired shoppers find their groceries. "Soylent Grid: it's Made of People!" was presented at ICCV 2007. The complete article can be found here.

Online ListenGame will allow players to help label songs which will be used to feed a music search engine. This will make it easier for those who aren't music experts to find the songs they desire by using natural language. Doug Turnbull, Gert Lanckriet, and Luke Barrington have written and presented three papers which demonstrate these innovative ideas. Connecting meaningful words to the songs will enable users to better find songs by searching under common language, such as "high energy with female vocals" or "funky guitar solos." More information can be found here.

Pavel Pevzner and Evan Eichler lead an interdisciplinary team which has discovered the ancestral origins of two thirds of human DNA duplications. In an effort to determine which parts of the repeated DNA in the human genome came first and which are duplicates, Pavel and his team uncovered fourteen core duplications which are responsible for recent genetic innovations in the human genome. They intend to use this information to help explain how the human genome has evolved. More information can be found here.

Students competed individually in the Fall 2007 Programming Contest to solve traditional algorithmic problems. Keliang (Kevin) Zhao took first place by solving four problems, Timothy Bollman came in second with three problems, and Kei Shun Ma placed third with three problems solved. The first place prize was $1000, provided by The Dini Group. The goal of the contest was to create teams to represent UCSD in the ACM Programming Contest in November. This contest was run by Professor Michael Taylor and lead student organizer Michael Vrable. The full results and more details can be found here.

CSE Ph.D. students Barath Raghavan, Kashi Vishwanath, and Sriram Ramabhadran have received the best student paper award at this year's ACM SIGCOMM Conference. Their work, together with Ken Yocum and Alex Snoeren, is inspired by the emergence of Web-based services that are not hosted in one location, but are distributed to data centers across the Internet cloud. The authors have developed a mechanism for globally allocating bandwidth to the service itself, rather than managing each data center's needs independently. More information can be found here and in the paper itself.

CSE graduate Yoshi Kohno has been named one of the top innovators under 35 by MIT's Technology Review magazine. Yoshi was selected to join the annual list of 35 awardees for his work on systems-oriented provable security --- the topic of his doctoral dissertation. He received his Ph.D. in 2006 under Professor Mihir Bellare, and is now an assistant professor himself at the University of Washington's Computer Science and Engineering department. Yoshi joins CSE grad student Sumeet Singh (2006), and CSE professors Serge Belongie (2004) and Lawrence Saul (1999) in being so honored. More information can be found here.

CSE Ph.D. student Wojciech Jarosz, along with postdoc Craig Donner and professor Matthias Zwicker and Henrik Wann Jensen, have developed a technique for efficiently rendering "participating media" such as smoke or fog. The results, recently presented at the ACM SIGGRAPH conference, exploits the locality in how light changes within a scene and allows intermediate results to be cached and reused -- potential reducing overhead by multiple orders of magnitude. More information can be found here.

A new UC San Diego computer graphics model capable of generating realistic milk images based on the fat and protein content will likely push the field of computer graphics into the realms of diagnostic medicine, food safety and atmospheric science, according to a new study. "Computer graphics is no longer just about pretty pictures and realism for the sake of aesthetics. We have harnessed the math and physics necessary to generate realistic images of a wide range of natural materials based on what they are made of. With our approach, computer graphics can contribute to a handful of pressing problems," said Henrik Wann Jensen, a UC San Diego computer science professor and Academy Award winning computer graphics researcher. Jensen created the model with two colleagues from the Technical University of Denmark -- Niels Jorgen Christensen The whole story

Computer scientists from UC San Diego have found striking differences between the infrastructure used to distribute spam and the infrastructure used to host the online scams advertised in these unwanted email messages. This discovery should aid in the fight to reduce spam volume and shut down illegal online businesses and malware sites. Using new Internet monitoring approaches developed at UCSD, the computer scientists studied a spam feed over the course of a week. They analyzed spam-advertised Web servers hosting online scams that either offer merchandise and services (e.g., pharmaceuticals, luxury watches, mortgages) or use malicious means to defraud users (e.g., phishing, spyware, rootkits). The researchers followed the URLs embedded in spam back to the hosting servers, probed the servers and analyzed the Web pages advertised in the spam. A given spam campaign may use thousands of mail relay agents to deliver its millions of messages, but only use a single server to handle requests from recipients who respond. A single takedown of a scam server or a spammer redirect can curtail the earning potential of an entire spam campaign, write the UCSD computer scientists in their paper accepted for publication at USENIX Security 2007 conference.

Douglas Turnbull, a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego, developed a game for classifying music. People supply text descriptions of brief passages for later use in a program intended to help with musical recommendations. Two other game-based efforts are going to be discussed at an upcoming convention of music researchers, he said. The whole story

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. Professor Hu joined UCSD's Applied Electro-Physics Department in 1974, after a faculty position at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received his B.S. in Engineering from the National Taiwan University, M.S. in Engineering from the University of Illinois, and Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Brown University. During his career, Dr. Hu performed research in the fields of combinatorial algorithms, mathematical programming and operators, and computer-aided design. His most significant scientific contribution is the Gomory-Hu Tree, an algorithm that transforms a graph into a tree, which represents the maximum flows between any two nodes on that graph.

Music 87 (Beginning Ukulele), taught this past spring quarter by CSE department chair Keith Marzullo, recently showcased all that they've learned with a casual recital. The kanikapila, or gathering of musicians to play Hawaiian music, was held in the Engineering quad and included a Mexican buffet for students and audience. Music 87 is a one-unit freshman seminar, a program designed to expose students to new subjects in a small-class setting. During the 10-week course, students learned how to tune their instrument, and various chords and strums to play both traditional Hawaiian and contemporary "western" songs.

On a beautiful San Diego day, the CSE department capped off another academic year with a BBQ. Students, faculty, and staff enjoyed hamburgers, veggie bugers, vegan-friendly patties, hot dogs, marinated pork ribeye, and strawberry shortcake in the Engineering quad. Once everyone was satiated, Chair Keith Marzullo rounded up staff and students for an impromptu ukulele concert. Have a great summer; see you in the fall!

A pink and black butterfly and its reflections within drops of water won the grand prize at this year's graphics contest. The competition is the culmination of Henrik Wann Jensen's Rendering Algorithms class (CSE 168). Iman Sadeghi, a first-year grad student who created the winning image, drew inspiration from his amazement with a water drop's geometry and his affinity for nature. More details about the contest, as well as some stunning pictures, are available here. Congratulations to all participants.

The Jacobs School of Rock (JSOR) concert series kicks off Friday, June 8 at 6 PM at Porter's Pub on the UCSD campus. CSE professor Serge Belongie conceived of the idea to showcase the Jacobs School's musical talents after realizing several people in his research group performed in bands. Belongie will be performing with his band SO3 (which includes CSE alumnus Mike Artamonov). Also on the lineup are: Island Style (with CSE chair Keith Marzullo); Random Play including CSE grad student Carolina Galleguillos on lead vocals); Audition Lab; and The Contrapositives. Along with CSE, the concert will include students and faculty from the ECE and Bioengineering departments.