News Archive
Prof Rich Wolski and others who founded Eucalyptus Systems Inc., a company that builds private, cloud-based systems, have been recently highlighted by President Obama’s CTO, Aneesh Chopra (Wall street Journal).
Christopher Kruegel Recognized by MIT Technology Review’s Prestigious TR35 Listing of the World’s Top Young Innovators for 2010
Making Three-dimensional Imaging a Reality using Mass-Market Digital Cameras, Camcorders and Phones (A short movie of a 3D head model built by Visualsize is available at http://www.visualsize.com/3ddemo/videos/amr/amr.htm.)
UCSB COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT PRESENTS: Tuesday, Aug 17. 2010 11:00 – 12:00 PM Computer Science Conference Room, Harold Frank Hall Rm. 1132 HOST: Amr El Abbadi SPEAKER: Haixun Wang Microsoft Research Title: Probase: Building a Probabilistic Ontology from the Web Abstract:
Visiting student Rémi Paucher and Professor Matthew Turk received a Best Paper Award at the IEEE International Workshop on Mobile Vision in San Francisco on June 18, 2010, for their paper entitled “Location-based augmented reality on mobile phones.” The paper described research on determining the precise 3D location and orientation of a smart phone in a known environment, using the device’s camera and other internal sensors, to enable the accurate overlay of augmented visual information in the scene – e.g., for use in touring a museum, exploring a historical building, or navigating throu
Three faculty from UCSB have been awarded a highly-competitive award from the National Science Foundation’s Broadening Participation in Computing Program. Principal Investigator Diana Franklin and Co-Principal Investigator Phillip Conrad, both from the Department of Computer Science, worked with Co-Principal Investigator Gerardo Aldana from Chicana/o Studies to develop a program that attracts under-represented groups to Computer Science.
Professor Divy Agrawal, PhD Student Sudipto Das, and Professor Amr El Abbadi will be presenting an advanced tutorial on the topic of “Data Management Challenges in Cloud Computing” in the 2010 International Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB) in Singapore, in September 2010.
Diana Franklin joined the faculty in Winter 2008 and was voted by this year’s graduating seniors to be the Outstanding Faculty Member of 2010. She was hired as part of a department push to focus more on undergraduate education. She has worked with undergraduates and under-represented groups in various capacities, including faculty advisor for the newly-created WISH (Women in Software and Hardware) club, advisor for ACM tutoring, and in classes ranging from introductory programming through advanced computer architecture.
Prof. Subhash Suri will deliver a Keynote Lecture at the DCOSS ’10, the 6th Annual International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems. The conference, which will be held in Santa Barbara during June 21-23, 2010, focusses on distributed computation in large-scale networked sensor systems, including algorithms, applications, design techniques, and signal and information processing.
The Department of Computer Science at UCSB announced the recipients of the 2010 Outstanding Graduate Student Award, Dissertation Year Fellowship, and P1 Graduate Student Fellowship.
UC Santa Barbara has received a $500,000 gift from alumnus Huican Zhu and two anonymous donors to establish the Glen and Susanne Culler Chair in Computer Science. The endowed professorship will support the teaching and research of a leading scientist in the discipline that Glen Culler helped shape.
Santa Barbara Summit on Energy Efficiency Presented by the Institute for Energy Efficiency (IEE) at the University of California, Santa Barbara May 12-13, 2010 Four Seasons Biltmore Hotel, Santa Barbara, CA Website: http://iee.ucsb.edu/sbsee2010 Contact: Whitney Wegener (805) 893-5496 whitney@iee.ucsb.edu The Santa Barbara Summit on Energy Efficiency will bring together global leaders and stakeholders in energy efficiency technology,
The Computer Science Department at UCSB includes a leading group of researchers in the area of “cloud computing.” Cloud computing has received significant attention lately because of its potential to revolutionize the way that the Internet works. With cloud computing, the Internet becomes the super highway that connects users to vast compute, storage, and networking resources.
Professor John Gilbert has been named a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). He was honored by SIAM “for contributions to the development and analysis of algorithms for sparse matrix problems.“ Prof. Gilbert’s research is in combinatorial and numerical algorithms, high-performance computing, mathematical software, numerical linear algebra, and scientific computation. He directs the Combinatorial Scientific Computing Lab at UCSB, and is a Professor of Computer Science and a member of the interdepartmental Program in Computational Science and Engineering.
Professors Richard Kemmerer and Giovanni Vigna, and associate professor Christopher Kruegel from UCSB received a Chamber of Commerce Business Star Award at Santa Barabara. This award is traditionally presented to an individual who has made a significant innovative contribution to positively impacting our world. Past winners include university chancellors, Nobel laureates, architects, researchers and inventors. This quarter’s Innovation award is presented to Professors Richard Kemmerer and Giovanni Vigna, and associate professor Christopher Kruegel from UCSB.
Dr. Cheng-Wen Wu, a UCSB alumni, was recently appointed Director of Institute of Information and Communication Research of the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), Taiwan. ITRI is the largest government-sponsored research institute in Taiwan, with over 6,000 employees engaging in R&D in six diverse areas: Communication and Optoelectronics, Precision Machinery and MEMS, Materials and Chemical Engineering, Biomedical Technology, Sustainable Development, and Nanotechnology.
The computer security group at the University of California, Santa Barbara has been actively working on improving the safety and security of the Internet. Two of their research projects have made recent news headlines.
Title: Prof. Wim van Dam chairs TQC 2010 Prof. Wim van Dam is serving as Program Chair for the Fifth Conference on the Theory of Quantum Computation, Communication and Cryptography, which will be held on April 13th – 15th, 2010 at the University of Leeds, UK. Predicted attendance for this conference is around 100.
Online social media has brought the digitization of our lives to new heights in just a few short years with the explosion of tools like Facebook and the adoption of Internet-ready smart-phones. But all of this information sharing comes at a price: privacy. Prof. Ben Zhao joined hosts Levi Maaia and Tim Grigsby on UC Santa Barbara’s morning radio show on KCSB 91.9FM to discuss privacy issues in the world of web 2.0, and some of his recent projects that showcase the positive and negative sides of online social networks.
Prof. Xifeng Yan received the 2009 National Science Foundation Early Career Development (CAREER) award. CAREER awards, given to future academic leaders, are NSF’s most prestigious grants for young scholars. The award provides support for research in the amount of 495K dollars over a five-year period. Prof. Yan becomes the 18th NSF CAREER Award winner in our department.
Google Research Award: Automated Verification of the Native Client
GOOGLE AWARDS $1 MILLION FOR UNIVERSITY RESEARCH EFFORT TO SLASH ENERGY CONSUMPTION IN INTERNET DATA CENTERS
In January, 2010, IBM selected Prof. Chandra Krintz to be a recipient of the 2010 IBM X10 Innovation awards. These awards recognize “a select group of academic research and curricular development activities in the area of computing at scale on cloud computing platforms based on the X10 programming language”[1]. The 2010 awardees consist of 18 top academics in the area of programming languages world-wide.
UCSB Computer Science Prof. Wim van Dam describes latest progress in quantum algorithms. In the February 2010 issue of Communications of the ACM, UC Santa Barbara’s Wim van Dam and Dave Bacon of the University of Washington give an overview of the recent progress in the design of new quantum algorithms. Unlike our current computers, the behavior of a quantum computer cannot be described by classical physics and therefore also require non-classical algorithms.
Santa Barbara, California, February 2, 2010—A team of UCSB computer scientists is leading a consortium funded by the US Army Research Office as a part of its Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) Program to investigate ways of monitoring cyber attacks on networks like the Internet. The cyber security multi-campus collaborative effort is led by UCSB and also includes UC-Berkeley and Georgia Tech. The total effort will be funded at approximately $6.2 million.
Feature: Oscar H. Ibarra, Computer Scientist Par Excellence The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) lists Dr. Oscar H. Ibarra as one the most highly cited researchers of our time – one of the “top influential researchers from 21 broad subject categories in life sciences, medicine, physical sciences, engineering, and social sciences who have contributed to the progress of science through their insight and accomplishments”.
Professor Teofilo Gonzalez from the Department of Computer Science at the University of California at Santa Barbara was inducted as an IASTED Fellow for his contributions to Multicasting Dissemination Algorithms for Parallel and Distributed Computing, as well as for his decade long commitment to PDCS and IASTED. Award Link.
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 Science students Mohit Tiwari, Xun Li, Hassan Wassel, Bita Mazloom, and Shashi Mysore along with their advisors Fred Chong and Tim Sherwood had their work on Tracking Information Flow at the Gate-Level for Secure Architectures selected for this prestigious publication.
Prof. Tevfik Bultan and M.S. student Zachary Stengel identified a flaw in a novel operating system developed by Microsoft Research called Singularity. Although Singularity operating system has been developed with the goal of improving dependability, due to this flaw, Singularity processes were vulnerable to deadlocks.
On December 4th, 2009 the largest hacking competition ever carried out was held at UCSB. The competition included 56 teams from North America, South America, Europe, Russia, India, and Australia.
UCSB faculty Matthew Turk, Tobias Höllerer, Chandra Krintz, and Rich Wolski, along with Media Arts and Technology professor JoAnn Kuchera-Morin, have received $1.25M in infrastructure funding from the National Science Foundation to equip the first generation AlloSphere, a large, three-story spherical environment for synthesis, manipulation, exploration and analysis of large-scale data sets, with applications in science, design, art, and entertainment. For more information on the AlloSphere, visit http://www.allosphere.ucsb.edu.
A team of UCSB computer scientists is part of a consortium chosen to establish an Information Networks Academic Research Center (INARC) by the US Army as a part of its Network Science Collaborative Technology Alliance (NS CTA). The information networks multi-campus collaborative effort is led by the University of Illinois, and also includes IBM and City University of New York. The total effort will be funded at about $16.75 million, of which the UCSB team will receive approximately $3.6 million.
Prof. Divyakant Agrawal is serving as Program Chair for SIGMOD 2010, which will be held on June 6-11, 2010 in Indianapolis, USA. The annual ACM SIGMOD conference is the most prestigious international conference for database researchers, practitioners, developers, and users to explore cutting-edge ideas and results, and to exchange techniques, tools, and experiences.
The Summit is composed of a “dream team” of computer security experts gathered to develop “game-changing” national IT strategies for the Obama administration.
A research team lead by Prof. Kevin Almeroth, Christopher Kruegel, and Giovanni Vigna, at the University of California at Santa Barbara hijacked the Mebroot botnet for about a month and used it to study drive-by downloading. Drive-by downloading involves hacking into a legitimate site to covertly install malicious software on visitors’ machines or redirect them to another site.
The Department of Computer Science Women in Computer Science (WiCS) group hosted its third annual Fall potluck in October 2009 to welcome its new female graduate students. The Department of Computer Science’s graduate program is currently almost 24% female, well above the national average of about 20%. Welcome to all of our new students and we encourage you to check out the WiCS homepage!
Prof. Christopher Kruegel and Prof. Xifeng Yan are the first scholars appointed to the Eugene Aas Endowed Chair and the Venkatesh Narayanamurti Endowed Chair in Computer Science. A special inaugural celebration will be held October 22, 2009. Details are available on our Endowed Chairs webpage.
UCSB COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT PRESENTS: WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 14, 2009 3:30 – 4:30 Computer Science Conference Room, Harold Frank Hall Rm. 1132 HOST: Subhash Suri SPEAKER: GEORGE VARGHESE Computer Science, UC San Diego Title: Getting an Edge at High Speeds: Randomized Algorithms and Networking Hardware Abstract:
To deal with the complexities of modern software, computer scientists are increasingly reliant on special software tools such as data-race detectors, memory bounds checkers, and data flight recorders. However, these tools can make the programs being tested run hundreds to thousands of times slower than normal. In their paper on “Quantifying the Potential for Program Analysis Peripherals”, UCSB students Mohit Tiwari and Shashidhar Mysore, along with their advisor Professor Tim Sherwood, show that significant