News Archive

Dr. Stacy Patterson Dr. Stacy Patterson’s article, coauthored with B. Bamieh, M.R. Jovanovic, and P. Mitra, entitled “Coherence in Large-Scale Networks: Dimension-Dependent Limitations of Local Feedback” has been selected as the recipient of the 2013 George S. Axelby Outstanding Paper Award. This award is the most prestigious best paper award in the discipline of control science, given for the best paper in the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.

Dr. Stacy Patterson’s article, coauthored with B. Bamieh, M.R. Jovanovic, and P. Mitra, entitled “Coherence in Large-Scale Networks: Dimension-Dependent Limitations of Local Feedback” has been selected as the recipient of the 2013 George S. Axelby Outstanding Paper Award. This award is the most prestigious best paper award in the discipline of control science, given for the best paper in the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.

It is with deepest regret that we announce Roger C. Wood, professor emeritus, passed away peacefully on July 17, 2013, at his home in Santa Barbara. (continued) Some pictures of Roger have been collected at the College of Engineering’s Facebook page.

Research by PhD student Petko Bogdanov and his colleagues in the Bioinformatics and Database Lab, directed by Professor Ambuj Singh, is reported on by the MIT Technology Review in an article entitled What’s Your Social-Media Genotype?

The Department of Computer Science is pleased to announce that Dr. Huijia (Rachel) Lin will join our faculty in November 2013. Rachel received her PhD from Cornell University in 2012. Her research interests are in the field of cryptography and its interplay with computer science.

Prof. Chandra Krintz has been selected as one of Forty Women to Watch Over 40 in 2013 – “women who are reinventing, and disrupting, and making an impact.”

Dr. Huijia (Rachel) Lin

Dr. Janet Kayfetz Congratulations to Dr. Janet Kayfetz, who was awarded the UCSB Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award!

Professor Kevin Almeroth has received a $100,000 gift from Cisco Systems, Inc., to support his research in Packet Scheduling Using IP Embedded Transport Instrumentation.

Dr. Stefano Tessaro The Department of Computer Science is pleased to announce that Stefano Tessaro will join our faculty in November 2013. Dr. Tessaro’s research is in the area of cryptography, particularly in solving problems motivated by the practical deployment of cryptographic systems. He received his PhD from ETH Zurich in 2010 and was a postdoctoral scholar at UC San Diego from 2010 to 2012. He is currently a research scientist at MIT.

Hex Pistols Team with CS 189 instructor Professor Tim Sherwood and Dr. Janet Kayfetz

Professors Ambuj Singh, Tobias Höllerer, and Xifeng Yan have received a grant from the US Army of approximatey $1M/year to continue their ongoing research on network dynamics. For more information, see the College of Engineering announcement.

Dr. Sudipto Das, who received his PhD from the Department of Computer Science in 2011, has received the 2013 ACM SIGMOD Jim Gray Doctoral Dissertation Award for his dissertation entitled “Scalable and Elastic Transactional Data Stores for Cloud Computing Platforms.” The citation of the award announcement notes that the work was “remarkable for its breadth of scope, its comprehensive implementation and thorough performance evaluation.”

Dr. Aydin Buluç, who received his PhD from the Department of Computer Science in 2010 working with Professor John Gilbert, has been awarded a 2013 Department of Energy (DOE) Early Career Award for his work on energy-efficient parallel graph and data mining algorithms. Dr. Buluç works at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Computational Research Division.

Prof. Ben Hardekopf has been selected to receive an Excellence in Teaching Award from Northrop Grumman, which is awarded to recognize great teaching along with the institutions that supply the company with many new employees each year. The award honors junior faculty members who demonstrate a commitment to high teaching standards. Congratulations, Ben!

Congratulations to Computer Science staff members Tiffany Sabado and Elizabeth Streeper, who each received a 2012-13 Staff Citation of Excellence Award. The awards, which include a cash award and a special recognition plaque, acknowledge and celebrate outstanding achievements and meritorious service of career UCSB staff. As everyone in the department can attest to, these are very well deserved!

PhD students Adam Lugowski and Kevin Deweese and Professor John Gilbert, from the department’s Combinatorial Scientific Computing Lab, were awarded a second place prize of $13,000 in the YarcData Graph Analytics Challenge, which showcased the increasing use of graph analytics to discover unknown relationships in Big Data.

Computer Science student Xia Zhou will join Dartmouth College in July as a tenure-track Assistant Professor. Ms. Zhou is part of the LINK Lab and is advised by Prof. Heather Zheng. Her research focuses on designing network systems to handle the volume and unpredictable nature of data traffic. Congratulation and best wishes in your new position!

Congratulations to Dr. Yinghui Wu, PhD student Shengqi Yang, and Prof. Xifeng Yan, who received a Best Poster Award at the 29th Annual Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2013) for their research work, “Ontology-based Subgraph Querying.”

Prof. Tevfik Bultan will give the keynote talk at the 2013 IFIP Joint International Conference on Formal Techniques for Distributed Systems (33rd FORTE / 15th FMOODS), a forum for fundamental research on theory, models, tools, and applications for distributed systems. The joint conference is the result of merging the conference FMOODS (Formal Methods for Open Object-Based Distributed Systems) and FORTE (Formal Techniques for Networked and Distributed Systems).

Congratulations to Computer Science PhD students Chris Sweeney and Morgan Vigil, who have been awarded National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships. The Fellowships provide each student with a stipend of $30,000 a year for three years plus tuition and travel support.

Prof. Chandra Krintz has received a grant in the amount of $50,000 from the National Science Foundation for a project entitled “I-Corps: AppScale – Spurring Innovation through Cloud Application Portability.”

Prof. Chandra Krintz has been named a Cloud Computing Pioneer by Information Week. Of course, we already knew that!

Congratulations to Prof. Linda Petzold, who has been selected to receive the 2013 SIAM/ACM Prize in Computational Science and Engineering. The award will be announced on February 26 at the SIAM Conference on Computational Science and Engineering (CSE13) in Boston, MA, and awarded during the SIAM Annual Meeting in July, held in San Diego, CA.

Congratulations to the following recent PhD graduates in the Department of Computer Science: Chris Bunch Dissertation: Automated Configuration and Deployment of Applications in Heterogeneous Cloud Environments Chris worked under the advisement of Prof. Chandra Krintz as part of the Lab for Research on Adaptive Computing Environments (RACELab).

Prof. Ted Kim (MAT and CS) has received a five-year $508,658 grant from the National Science Foundation for research on “Enabling Efficient Non-Linearities in Biomechanical Simulations.” This comes from the NSF’s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program. The abstract of the award can be found here.

COMPUTER ENGINEERING and Electrical & Computer Engineering presents: Friday, February 1, 2013 10:00 – 11:00AM ROOM CHANGE: Harold Frank Hall (HFH), Rm 1132 – CS Conference Room SPEAKER: Christoph Studer, Rice University TITLE: “Wideband Analog-to-Information Conversion: From Theory to VLSI Circuits”

Each year a committee of industry experts and faculty chooses 10 papers from the top computer architecture conferences to highlight in the annual “Top Picks” issue of IEEE Micro. This year UCSB Computer Engineering student Jonathan Valamehr, Computer Science and Engineering Professor Tim Sherwood, and thier collaborators from Microsoft, had their work “Inspection Resistant Memory Architectures” selected for this prestigious publication.

Ted Kim, a professor of Media Arts and Technology with a joint appointment in Computer Science, has been awarded an Academy Award in Technical Achievement by The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The award will be presented to Prof. Kim and his colleagues on February 9 for their invention of the simulation method known as wavelet turbulence and for the resulting contribution to filmmaking. Congratulations, Ted!

Congratulations to Professor Matthew Turk, who has been named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for his distinguished contributions to computer vision and perceptual interfaces. For more information about this prestigious award, see this announcement.

Professor Ben Zhao delivered a keynote talk on December 1, 2012 at the IEEE International Performance Computing and Communications Conference in Austin, TX. His talk was entitled “A Double-edged Sword: Implications of Crowdsourcing for the Future of Web Security.”

Prof. Gustavo Alonso from ETH Zurich, who received his MS and PhD in Computer Science at UCSB in 1992 and 1994, has recently been named an ACM Fellow for his contributions to distributed systems, middleware, and data management. The ACM Fellows Program was established by Council in 1993 to recognize and honor outstanding ACM members for their achievements in computer science and information technology and for their significant contributions to the mission of the ACM. Congratulations!

UCSB Researchers Take Next-Generation Augmented Reality Apps ‘Anywhere’ UC Santa Barbara computer scientists are changing the face of augmented reality by modeling user experience and adding dynamic crowdsourced data NEWS RELEASE Augmented reality applications for mobile devices could become smarter and more sophisticated, thanks to two recent grants awarded to UC Santa Barbara computer science professors Matthew Turk and Tobias Höllerer. (Click for full article.)

Congratulations to Professor Amr El Abbadi, who has been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for his distinguished contributions to the field of distributed data management and systems. For more information about this prestigious award, see this announcement.

Diana Franklin (CS) and Danielle Harlow (Education) have received a grant from the National Science Foundation to develop computer science curricula geared toward children in grades 2 through 6. For more information, see this announcement.

Gianluca Stringhini

PhD students Steffen Gauglitz and Chris Sweeney, recent PhD graduate Jonathan Ventura, and professors Matthew Turk and Tobias Höllerer received the Best Paper Award at the 2012 International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR), held in Atlanta, GA on November 5-8, 2012. ISMAR is the premier international conference on research into the science, technology, applications and uses of Mixed and Augmented Reality.

In the 2012-2013 Payscale College Salary Report, Computer Science is listed as one of the Top 10 majors with respect to highest salaries for mid-career employees with a bachelor’s degree.

A UCSB Convergence article discusses Prof. Elizabeth Belding’s research on new wireless network technologies that aim to bring the communities of rural Africa up to internet speed: People of rural Africa understand the Internet can open doors for community building, health care, and education. To fix sluggish connections in remote areas, UCSB researchers are designing wireless network technology that uses castoff radio frequencies in a new way.

Prof. Amr El Abbadi will give a keynote presentation at the Brazilian Symposium on Database (SBBD 2012) which takes place in São Paulo, Brazil on October 15-18. SBBD is the official database event of the Brazilian Computer Society and the largest venue in Latin America for presentation and discussion of research results in the database domain. His talk will be on “Delivering the Promise of Scalable and Elastic Data Management in the Cloud.”