Colloquium: Wednesday, Feb. 3, 3:30 pm, HFH 1132
Title: Software-inspired techniques for Hardware Security
Abstract: We have entered an era where new hardware flourishes at an unprecedented pace and with unseen diversity. We are also living in an era where security and safety are paramount, and where the potential impact of a single bug can be catastrophic. Hence, we urgently need foundations to detect as many hardware bugs as possible before their deployment. Hardware validation is universally recognized as complex, expensive, and tedious. Despite genuine best efforts, the last decade has shown that the industry is incapable of producing non-trivial bug-free hardware. What will then happen with the rise of open-source hardware? Without effective and easy-to-adopt solutions for validation, it is hard to believe that the open-source hardware community will be able to produce safe and secure hardware, despite its best intentions.
Interestingly, the exact same situation occurred in the software world some decades ago. Software was plagued with myriads of bugs and security issues, after which the software community developed a formidable set of tools and methodologies to detect bugs and security issues. Could we adapt some of these tools and methodologies to hardware?
Colloquium: Monday, Jan. 27, 3:30 pm
Host: Wenbo Guo
Zoom only: https://ucsb.zoom.us/my/wenboguo
Title: From Code Completion to Software Engineering: Advancing Code Intelligence with Language Models
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have broadly revolutionized programming and software development. In this talk, I will discuss my research on enabling LLMs to meet the real-world demands of software engineering. First, I will describe how we improve LLMs' code reasoning capabilities by training them with comprehensive program semantics, enhancing their effectiveness in code generation, runtime analysis, and self-debugging. Second, I will discuss how we adapt LLMs for the realistic programming practice, enabling these models to retrieve additional context, interact with symbolic tools to collect feedback, and iteratively refine their solutions. Third, I will introduce our efforts to develop code-embedding LMs that represent program functionalities with vectors to support non-generative tasks, such as code search, clone retrieval, and vulnerability detection. Finally, I will envision the future of AI systems for software engineering, which will achieve the next level of automation in a more reliable, intelligent, and cost-efficient way.
CS Talk: Friday, January 10, 2025, at 10 am in HFH 1132.
Title: Making Space for Students and Their Needs (on a Budget)
Abstract: As classes get larger, giving equitable individual attention to every student becomes nearly impossible without systems and policies that are carefully developed over time to maintain these relationships. One part of the equation that is often overlooked is the physical spaces that this attention occurs in.
In this talk, we describe our recent work developing a physical “computer science collaboration space” at Caltech. Our space serves as a nexus for undergraduate office hours, active learning classes, hybrid staff meetings and classes, and a place for undergraduates to meet up, socialize, and do collaborative work. In addition to a physical space renovation, we instrumented the space with important amenities, software, and hardware carefully chosen to encourage positive help-seeking behavior, office hours throughput, student satisfaction and learning, and feelings of safety and inclusion in all events held in the room. And we did it on a budget.
Lingqi Yan and Trinabh Gupta rise in the Computer Science ranks
Two junior faculty in the Computer Science Department, Lingqi Yan and Trinabh Gupta, have been promoted from the position of assistant professor to that of associate professor.
Yan, who earned his PhD at UC Berkeley, works in the area of computer graphics, and his research is aimed mainly at building theoretical foundations used to render ultra-realistic images reflecting real-world complexity. He has led the way in exploiting machine-learning approaches for such physically based rendering.
He says that, as a computer graphics researcher, his dream is to “present people with an interactive computer-generated world to live in, just as is done in such movies as The Matrix and Ready Player One.”
Gupta, who received his PhD in computer science from the University of Texas, Austin, came to UCSB in fall 2018, bringing industry experience gained during a year spent as a postdoctoral researcher in the Systems Security and Privacy research group at Microsoft Research.
Pursuing research in the area of computer systems, Gupta says that he especially enjoys taking theoretical constructs from the literature on cryptography (e.g., private information retrieval and homomorphic encryption) and applying them to build systems that provide strong security and user privacy.
Congratulations to the Computer Science Department's alumni awardees, honored at the 2024 Awards Ceremony.
Congratulations to the Computer Science Department's graduate awardees, honored at the 2024 Awards Ceremony.
Congratulations to the Computer Science Department's undergraduate awardees, honored at the 2024 Awards Ceremony.
Congratulations to UCSB’s Lei Li and Yu-Xiang Wang on their recent promotions from assistant professors to associate professors.
UCSB’s William Wang recently received a promotion from associate professor to professor in the Department of Computer Science. Professor Wang is the director of UCSB’s Natural Language Processing group and the founding director of UCSB's Center for Responsible Machine Learning.
The Computer Science Department is pleased to announce that Maryam Majedi is joining UCSB as an assistant teaching professor.
UCSB Computer Science, led by CS Professor Rich Wolski, joins an NSF funded Cyberinfrastructure for Sustained Scientific Innovation (CSSI) grant, to develop scalable data collaboration tools for multi-messenger astronomy.
Congratulations to our Alumni Awardees, who were honored for their accomplishments at the 2023 Award Ceremony.
On June 16th, 2023, we celebrated our graduate awardees at the CS Award Ceremony. Congratulations!
Congratulations to our 2023 CS Undergraduate awardees, who were recognized at the 2023 CS Award Ceremony this past Friday, June 16th.
Congratulations to UCSB team GauchoAI, who placed 2nd in the AlexaPrize SimBot Challenge. The team, led by Professor Xifeng Yan and Professor William Wang, was awarded $100,000 for their innovative work on the next generation of virtual assistants.
Please join us for a special lecture on tree decompositions by famous mathematician Maria Chudnovsky this Wednesday, June 7th, 2023, at 3:30 pm in Henley Hall 1010. There will be pizza served to all attendees!
Join us on Wednesday, May 31st, in HFH 1132 at 3:30 pm for Murphy Niu's talk, "Power of Machine Learning and Optimization in Quantum Computer Design". All are welcome to attend!
Join us in HFH 1132 on Wednesday, May 24th, at 3:30 pm, for Sanjukta's talk, "Machine learning meets graphs: developing scalable and efficient learning rules". Everyone is welcome to attend!
Come by HFH 1132 on Wednesday, May 17th, at 3:30 pm for Arijit's talk, "Building a Scalable bit-vector model counter". Everyone is welcome to join!
Under CS Professor Giovanni Vigna's leadership, UCSB will host the Institute for Agent-based Cyber Threat Intelligence and OperatioN (ACTION). This groundbreaking institute is funded by a $20M grant from NSF, and includes collaborators from UC Berkeley, Purdue University, and many more of the nation’s best computer scientists and engineers.
Come by HFH 1132 on Monday, April 24th at 3:30 pm, for Hrushikesh Mhaskar's talk, titled "Revisiting the Theory of Machine Learning". We hope to see everyone there!
Join us in HFH 1132 on Tuesday, April 18th at 3:30pm, for Xuan Zhang's talk, "Brain-Inspired AI Computing in the Analog Domain". All are welcome!
PhD Student Yujie Lu was awarded Best Paper at ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2023, for her paper titled "Breaking Out of the Ivory Tower: A Large-scale Analysis of Patent Citations to HCI Research", in a collaboration with Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon University.
CS student Marianne Arriola has been awarded the prestigious NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (GRFP).
Come by HFH 1132 on Wednesday, April 5th, at 3:30 pm for James Xi Zheng's talk, "Towards Robust Autonomous Driving Systems". Everyone is welcome to attend!
Congratulations to Professor Ömer Eğecioğlu, who recently published a new book: Fibonacci Cubes with Applications and Variations.
Stop by LSB 1001 on Friday, Feb. 24th at 1:00 pm for David Aldous’ talk, “Euler to Stellaris: New Variants of Random Walks”. There will be lots of pizza and lots of inspiration for getting involved in research.
UNDERGRADS:
This is a non-technical talk about random walks intended for you.
Join us in HH 1010 on Friday, February 24th at 3:00 pm for Hengrui Cai's talk, "Towards Causal Revolution: On Learning Heterogeneity and Non-Spuriousness in Causal Graphs". We hope to see everyone there!
This Friday, February 24th: Drop by HH 1010 at noon for Sameena Shah's NLP Seminar, titled, "Why Task Centricity Matters When You Build for Industry Applications".
Come by HH 1010 at 3:00 pm on Thursday, February 16th, for Cong Hao's talk, "Smart Reconfigurable Computing for GNN and Transformer". All are welcome!
Stop by HFH 1132 on Friday, February 10th, at 3:00 pm for Muhao Chen's talk, "Robust and Indirectly Supervised Information Extraction". All are welcome to join!
Due to illness, this Colloquium has been cancelled. We look forward to rescheduling this event in the future and wish the speaker a speedy recovery!
Join us in HH 1010 on Monday, January 16th, for Denny Zhou's talk, "Teach Language Models to Reason". We hope to see you there!
Tune in on Monday, December 5th, 2022, at 3:30 pm for Ang Li's talk, "Efficient, Programmable, and Manufacturable Hardware: The Case for Synthesizable FPGAs". Open this article for the Zoom link.
Stop by HFH 1132 on Wednesday, November 30th, at 3:30 pm for Leana's talk, "Predicting Performance of Distributed ML Systems". All are welcome!
Come by HH 1010 on Friday, November 18th at noon for Anupam Gupta's talk, "Algorithms for Uncertain Environments: Going Beyond the Worst-Case". There will be plenty of pizza!
Stop by HFH 1132 on Thursday, November 17th, at 2:00 pm for Mathias Payer's talk, "Tales of Program Crashes and Vulnerabilities". Everyone is welcome!
Stop by HFH 1132 on Wednesday, November 16th at 3:30 pm for Veljko Pejovic's talk, "No 100% accuracy - no problem! Make Mobiles do More with Approximation". Hope to see you all there!
Stop by HFH 1132 on Tuesday, November 15th, at 3:30 pm for Zahra Montazeri's talk, "Realistic Modeling and Rendering of Fabrics". Everyone is welcome!
Stop by HH 1010 on Monday, November 14th, at 3:30 pm for Ryan Tibshirani's talk, "Advances and Challenges in Conformal Prediction".