Awards

June 10, 2008

Undergraduate Capstone Project Award goes to “Picard”

The capstone project gives Computer Science and Computer Engineering students the opportunity to put their education into practice. Students, working in small teams, design and engineer innovative hardware and software systems using techniques from robotics, distributed systems, circuit design, networking, and real-time systems to tackle problems “donated” from local industry.

The prize this year for the “Computer Engineering Capstone Project Presentation Day Best Computer Science Project” award went to “Picard”. Team members Jonathan Kupferman, Jeff Silverman, John Morse, Frank Jones, and Jesse Wang took home the $500 award for their project at the June 5th event. By leveraging the power of new, large scale computing systems and programming technologies they attempted to tackle the Netflix Prize. They built a fully distributed data mining application using MapReduce, and running it on Amazon’s EC2 through RightScale’s server management environment, and they explored how these emerging technologies can be used in concert to solve challenging new data-intensive problems at scale. You can read more about this projects and the other amazing work at the Computer Science and Engineering Capstone page.

June 5, 2008

ACM Student Chapter Wins Award for Progressive Use of Technology

Michael Rosengarten

Every year, UCSB recognizes outstanding student leaders as well as student organizations for their contributions to campus life during that particular academic year. The Activities Awards Selection Committee reviews hundreds of nominations for several different individual and organizational awards and determines those who are most deserving. This year our Student Chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), lead by President Michael Rosengarten, won the Progressive Use of Technology Award. As one of several new awards, this award seeks to promote and encourage the use of technology to aid us in our values of scholarship, leadership, and citizenship. The UCSB ACM has, through the tireless work of it’s student leaders, grown leaps and bounds over the last few years. This professional organization provides guidance, tutoring, and community building activities to the entire department, and has grown to become an important part of the department.

June 2, 2008

Prof Krintz Receives the Prestigous Borg Early Career Award for 2008

Chandra Krintz

The Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRA-W) has announced that the recipient of the Prestigous Borg Early Career Award for 2008 is our own Professor Chandra Krintz.

The award honors the late Anita Borg, who was an early member of CRA-W and an inspiration for her commitment in increasing the participation of women in computing research. This award is given annually by CRA-W to a woman in computer science and/or engineering who has made significant research contributions and who has contributed to her profession, especially in the outreach to women. This award recognizes work in areas of academia and industrial/government research labs that has had a positive and significant impact on advancing women in the computing research community and is targeted at women that are relatively early in their careers.

Chandra Krintz has been an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) since 2007. She joined the UCSB faculty in 2001 as an Assistant Professor after receiving her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of California, San Diego. Chandra’s research area is programming language implementations, and her work focuses on automatic and adaptive compiler, virtual runtime, and operating system techniques that improve performance (for high-end systems) and increase battery life (for mobile, resource-constrained devices). Chandra’s research has been published in a number of ACM venues including ASPLOS, CGO, ECOOP, LCTES, OOPSLA, PACT, PLDI, TACO, TPDS, has been funded by grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Intel, and Microsoft, and has been recognized with an NSF CAREER award (in 2006). Chandra has also been recognized for teaching excellence with the senior-selected, 2008 co-award for outstanding Faculty Member in Computer Science. Moreover, Chandra has contributed significantly to the outreach, support, and encouragement of women in the field. In particular, Chandra has been instrumental in her department’s diversity-aware curriculum efforts, plays an active role as (elected) vice-chair of the Executive Committee of the ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages (SIGPLAN) to oversee the organization of the SIGPLAN conferences and to improve diversity and participation of women in the community, and has implemented multiple, novel, curricular directions that facilitate retention of female computer science undergraduates and that expose young girls to the opportunities and potential of computer science. Specifically, Chandra has implemented courses in which computer science and engineering students use their computer skills (of different levels) to help others in the community (e.g., non-profit organizations) with technology and to introduce other young people to the potential of computer science (e.g., local high school students). Since 2007, Chandra has partnered with Microsoft Research (MSR) and Girls Incorporated, a nationwide non-profit organization dedicated to inspiring young girls to be strong, smart, and bold. Chandra and her students teach Girls Inc. classes (for girls of ages 9-10) that introduce the girls to and engage them with the field of computer science, and that show them how fun computer programming can be — with the help of a computer game from MSR and only a game controller.

Prof Sherwood selected for Northrop Grumman Excellence in Teaching award

Timothy Sherwood, Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science, along with Jeffrey Moehlis, Associate Professor in Mechanical Engineering, have been selected as the co-recipients of this year’s Northrop Grumman Excellence in Teaching Award. The award honors junior faculty who have demonstrated a commitment to high teaching standards, reflected in part by feedback from the students, and it is Northrop Grumman’s way of simultaneously recognizing the importance of great teaching as well as the institutions that support it. This is the first year that the award has been bestowed upon a faculty member at UC Santa Barbara.

May 1, 2008

Professor Ibarra elected to Academia Europaea

Professor Oscar Ibarra was recently elected a Foreign Member of the Academia Europaea in the Informatics Section. Academia Europaea is a non-governmental association of scientists and scholarswho collectively aim to promote learning, education and research.Founded in 1988, the organization’s more than 2000 members include leading experts from the physical sciences and technology, biological sciences and medicine, mathematics, the letters and humanities, social and cognitive sciences, economics and law. The Informatics Section (IS) is one of 17 sections of the Academia. As of 2007, IS had 73 members of which 7 are Foreign Members. Professor Ibarra now joins this elite group.

Department of Computer Science

University of California, Santa Barbara