Veljko Pejovic

Curriculum Vitae

You can download a pdf version here.

Email

veljko [at]
cs [dot] ucsb [dot] edu

Courses completed at UCSB

Computer science

• CS276 - Advanced Topics in Networking (prof. Ben Zhao)
  About the course: The course covered advanced networking topics from routing protocols to Internet stability and peer-to-peer networking. The full details are on the course website.
  Course Project: Our project was PlanetLab Deployment and Analysis of Network Coordinate Systems. We compared the two popular network co-ordinate systems Vivaldi and GNP. Here is our paper and the final project presentation. Special thanks to the folks at Harvard who provided the Pyxida implementation of Vivaldi.
  
  
• CS284 - Mobile Computing (prof. Elizabeth Belding)
  About the course: In this course we covered different approaches towards networking in mobile wireless networks, as well as specific applications and uses of these networks. This course was a survey of the state of the art in mobile computing, and as such covered protocols which are currently being deployed for wireless networks, as well as many which are still in the research stages.
  Course project: We designed an energy efficient MAC protocol for long distance wireless networks. [final_report]
  
  
• CS290f - Intelligent Wireless Systems (prof. Heather Zheng)
  About the course: This course studied the state of the art in intelligent wireless systems such as cognitive radio.
  Course project: Analysis of large scale network traces, experimenting with voice and video flows over the wireless medium and, based on the derived results, designing a packet scheduler for a TDMA-like MAC layer protocol. [final_report]
  
  
• CS290d - Data Mining (prof. Xifeng Yao)
  About the course: In this course we covered different approaches towards networking in mobile wireless networks, as well as specific applications and uses of these networks. This course was a survey of the state of the art in mobile computing, and as such covered protocols which are currently being deployed for wireless networks, as well as many which are still in the research stages.
  Course project: We evaluated various data mining techniques as means for network traffic prediction. [final_report]
  
  
• CS290f - Online Social Networks (prof. Ben Zhao)
  About the course: Technical issues surrounding online social networks, including but not limited to: measurement studies, social networking applications, cloud computing, security and privacy in OSNs, social graph anonymization.
  Course project: Locality of interaction in online social networks. [workshop_paper] (presented at GSWC, UCSB, October 2009)
  
  
• CS279 - Network Security and Intrusion Detection (prof. Giovanni Vigna)
  About the course: Security analysis of network protocols and network vulnerabilities. Analysis of scanning, spoofing, hijacking, and denial-of-service attacks. Authentication and access control in computer networks. Firewalls and network monitoring tools. Intrusion detection techniques.
  
  
• CS270 - Advanced Operating Systems Topics (prof. Rich Wolski)
  About the course: Discussing the structure and design principles inherent in different "successful" operating systems.
  Course Project: For our final project we developed a UNIX-like file system which resides on distributed volatile storage servers. The complete code was written in C. The design description can be found here.
  
  
• CS271 - Advanced Topics in Distributed Systems (prof. Amr El Abbadi)
  About the course: Course covers the fundamental problems in distributed systems and the various tools used to solve them. Topics include event ordering, clocks, global states, agreement, fault tolerance, and peer-to-peer systems.
  Course Project: We built a distributed, fault tolerant voting system, a brief explanation of the system design can be found here.
  
  
• CS235 - Computational geometry (prof. Omer Egecioglu)
  About the course: Algorithms and lower bound techniques in computational geometry; decision tree models of computation; geometric searching; point location and range search; convex hull and maxima of a point set; proximity algorithms; geometric intersections.
  
  
• CS230 - Approximations, NP-Completeness and Algorithms (prof. Teofilo Gonzalez)
  About the course: Epsilon approximations, PTAS and FPTAS. Techniques for the design of approximation algorithms. P, NP, NP-complete problems, polynomial transformations, Turing reductions, strong NP-completeness, NP-hardness and inapproximability results. Topics in algorithms include: amortized analysis, advanced graph algorithms and data structures.

Sociology

• SOC146 - The Internet and Communication Technologies (prof. Jennifer Earl)
  About the course: The course is focused on social impacts of the Internet. Topics like the digital divide and its effects, online political activism, intellectual property on the Internet, building of social capital online and similar are explored. The course also strives to explain some social implications of technical decisions made in the early days of computer networking.
  Course Project: For the final presentation I examined social and technical aspects of introducing the Internet in the developing world. [presentation_slides]
  
  
• SOC294 - Internet and Social Movements (prof. Jennifer Earl)
  About the course: Social movements and the Internet, along with other new media. Readings from multiple disciplines, with a greater balance of readings oriented toward sociology.
  

Media Arts and Technology

• MAT200a - Art and Technology (prof. George Legrady)
  About the course: The course introduces a number of issues specific to an arts and engineering interdisciplinary program. The course begins by formulating artistic practice as a research activity, a form of prototyping of ideas that address the synthesis of personal perspective with conceptualization, materials, systems, processes, structure, content and iterative prototyping.
  Course Project:We propose metadome, an interactive structure that facilitates human-metamaterial interaction, and serves both as a piece of art as well as a research platform. Our final demonstration included an interactive Processing animation along with a csound controlled sound component.[website]
  
  
• MAT258 - Art & Science of Aerospace Culture (prof. Marko Peljhan)
  About the course: The course is comprised of elements of aerospace design history, critical cultural history of space exploration, the space complex aesthetics, cinema and space intersections, earth and deep space observation paradigms, imaging and telecommunications, human space flight history, reduced and alternating gravity experimentation, introduction to space systems design and utilization and space systems analysis.Social movements and the Internet, along with other new media. Readings from multiple disciplines, with a greater balance of readings oriented toward sociology.
  

Seminars

• CS595G - New Media and the Reading Experience: New Approaches to Textual Forms, Interfaces, and Social Interactions
  About the course: This instance of the seminar focused loosely on the mutation of text and reading in digital, multimedia, and networked information environments. Hardware innovations (such as "e-ink" or flexible OLED displays); new text visualization and interface designs; adaptive text aggregation systems (such as inform.com); tools for online reading and annotation; research in digital literacy and reading practices; text-archiving, -scanning, and -searching initiatives; blogs and social-networking systems; collective reading practices; wireless text-messaging; text-encoding; and the relation between the history and future of the book.
  Course Project: Online security Phishing – Read behind the lines. [presentation_slides]
  
  
• CS595F - Network Security and Anonymity
  About the course: Recent advances in network security and anonymity.
  
  
• CS595F - Networking Seminar
  About the course: Discussing hot networking topics, readings from major networking conferences (MobiCom, SIGCOMM, Infocom, Mobisys, NSDI, etc).