| Frontiers of Technology |  Award Funds Research into Blind Assistance
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.
|  |  Finding New Ways to Connect
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.
| |  Environmental Research Piques Girls' Interest
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.
| |  A Million Little Pieces
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.
| |  Gary Cottrell Founds $3.5M Science of Learning Center
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.
| | | CSE Department News |  Undergraduates Forge New Area of Bioinformatics
| |  NSF Awards $12M to Temporal Dynamics Learning Center
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 Propose New Data Center Architecture Based on Commodity Network Elements
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.
| |  New Algorithm Significantly Boosts Routing Efficiency of Networks
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."
| | Undergraduates Forge New Area of Bioinformatics
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.
| |  CSE Majors deliver "The Byte" at the 2008 Junkyard Derby
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.
| |  CSE Gets New AAAI Fellow
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!
| |  Digital Fog Machine
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.
| |  Computer Makeover
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.
| |  Dissertations Chosen for 2007 ACM Competition
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.
| |  New Faculty
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.
| | Two UCSD Teams in Top 5 at ACM Programming Contest
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.
| |  3D Recovery
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.
| |  Paging Dr. Truitt
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!
| |  Computers with Common Sense
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.
| |  Using CAPTCHAs for a Good Cause
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.
| |  Name That Tune
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.
| | Unlocking the Human Genome
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.
| |  UCSD Fall 2007 Programming Contest
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.
| |  SIGCOMM Award Paper for CSE Students
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 named top young innovator
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.
| |  Smoke and Fog on the Cheap
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.
| |  Computer Graphics Spills from Milk to Medicine
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
| |  UC San Diego Computer Scientists Shed Light on Internet Scams
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.
| |  Games Used to Solicit Human Help
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
| |  CSE Founder Retires
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.
| |  From Computer Cords to Music Chords
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.
| |  Summer's Here!
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!
| |  2007 Graphics Competition
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.
| |  College Pep Bands They Are Not
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.
| |  Faculty Promotions
Congratulations to five CSE professors who were promoted in this year's academic review.
Vineet Bafna and
Serge Belongie both received tenure and are now Associate Professors.
Yannis Papakonstantinou and
Amin Vahdat were each promoted to full Professor.
Larry Smarr was promoted to Professor, Above-scale with the
honorary title of "Distinguished Professor." Thanks to the Academic Personnel staff who processed these files.
| | | UCSD & Jacobs School News |  A Reinvented Internet
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.
| |  World-class
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.
| |  Jacobs School Research Expo
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.
| |  24th Annual Jacobs School Research Expo, February 25, 2005
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.
|
| | | Faculty and Student Accomplishments |  CSE Tutor Reunion a Success!
"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
| | CSE Founder Retires
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.
| |  CSE Professors Win Two of Five Campus-wide Awards
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.
| |  Athena Educator Pinnacle Award Goes to Jeanne Ferrante
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.
| |  Internal Fellowship Funds Student "Collaboratory"
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.
| |  Best Paper Award
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.
| |  Grad Student Wins NSF Fellowship
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.
| |  Internet Pioneer Honored
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.
| |  CSE Grad Student's Research Wins Best Paper Award
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.
| |  CSE eTutor Team Member Wins UC-wide Presentation Award
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.
| |  Grad Student Wins Symantec Fellowship
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.
| |  CSE Professors Snatch Top Honors
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.
| |  Undergrad Honored in Annual CRA Awards
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.
| |  Students Give Ingolf Krueger Top Honor
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.
| |  Fantastic Four
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.
| |  Geoff Voelker Snatches Inaugural Fellowship
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.
| |  NSF Recognizes Steve Swanson with CAREER Award
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 Chosen for Teaching Fellowship
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.
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