News Archive

After four years of tremendous service, Linda Petzold is ending her tenure as department chair, a position to be filled by Amr El Abbadi starting July of 2007. In August 1987 Professor El Abbadi joined UC Santa Barbara, where he has become a world leader in information management and distributed systems. Over his career to this point he has co-authored more than 200 research papers and graduated 11 Masters and 24 PhD students, placing many in top industry and academic institutions. In 2007 Professor El

The Security Group at UCSB recently completed an analysis of the Sequoia electronic voting system as part of a “Top-to-Bottom Review” of the electronic voting systems used in California. The study was commissioned by California Secretary of State Debra Bowen.

Ben Zhao, Assistant Professor at the Computer Science Department, has been selected for ComputerWorld magazine’s “40 under 40″ list of top IT innovators for his work on developing structured peer-to-peer overlay networks. A profile of him and his research is published in the July print and web editions of ComputerWorld magazine. The list, which honors 40 top innovators under the age of 40, said Zhao’s work in large-scale networks made him among the “people to watch” in the coming years.

Professor Ibarra received the 2007 Blaise Pascal Medal for Computer Science from the European Academy of Sciences. Blaise Pascal Medal was established by the European Academy of Sciences to recognize outstanding and demonstrated personal contributions to science and technology and the promotion of excellence in research and education.

Matthew Allen, a PhD candidate in Computer Science Department, will be recognized with two awards in the commencement ceremony this year. Matthew will receive the University Award of Distinction which is presented to students who have made an outstanding contribution to a particular area of UCSB student life. This award recognizes in-depth or focused involvement and significant achievement in campus or community activities.

UCSB Computer Science Department is ranked 16th according to a recent study on U.S. Computing Graduate Programs. The ranking is based on publication data from 1995 to 2003. The data was collected from the INSPEC bibliographic database. The article describing the study was published in Communications of the ACM (June 2007, vol. 50, no. 6).

The team of Ben Foxworthy and Brendan Blackwood took home the $1000 award for their project CleverContacts at the Google sponsored event. The group (which originally included Alan Savage, Brian, Stewart and Matt Brinza) developed a tool that uses CallWave’s Internet Answering Machine and Plaxo’s Web Sync services to implement electronic identity management. For more information about the project go to http://www.uweb.ucsb.edu/~herak/clevercontacts/

The paper " Approximate Isocontours and Spatial Summaries for Sensor Networks" by graduate student Sorabh Gandhi and Professor Subhash Suri (co-authored with research colleague Dr. John Hershberger from Mentor Graphics) is awarded one of two best paper awards at the 6th Annual IPSN ’07, the premier conference on theoretical and systems aspects of sensor networks.

The paper "A General Framework for Clearing Auction of Wireless Spectrum", by students Sorabh Gandhi, Chiranjeeb Buragohain, Lili Cao, and Professors Zheng and Suri, has been awarded one of two best student paper awards at IEEE DySPAN 2007, the leading forum for academia and industry research on dynamic spectrum allocation and cognitive radios. Sorabh Gandhi is currently a Ph.D. student under Prof. Suri, Lili Cao is a Ph.D. student under Prof.

The Department of Computer Science received the Departmental Graduate Mentorship Award for the 2006-2007 academic year. This award is given by the UCSB Graduate Council and Graduate Division and the decision is based on data provided by the Department, results of the Doctoral Exit Survey and statistics on median time to degree, graduation rates and number of degrees conferred. The following is an excerpt from the award citation for the Departmental Graduate Mentorship Award for Computer Science:

Professor Kevin Almeroth received the 2006-2007 UCSB Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award. The purpose of this award is to encourage and reward excellence in teaching at UCSB. This award is a great addition to the long list of awards Kevin has already received for his teaching. Kevin has won the Computer Science Faculty Teaching Award four times (1998, 1999, 2000, and 2005) and also earned a UCSB Spotlight on Excellent Award in 2001 for his teaching. Kevin’s outstanding contributions to teaching at UCSB include:

Professor Amr El Abbadi received the 2006-2007 UCSB Academic Senate Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award. The goal of this award is to encourage and reward excellence in mentoring graduate students on the Santa Barbara campus. Amr has been one of the key architects of the impressive growth in our graduate programs, both in terms of numbers and, perhaps more importantly, in terms of quality. Throughout his academic career at UCSB, Amr excelled in every aspect of graduate mentorship by:

On March 21st, 2007, Professor Krintz’s new outreach class on Information Technology and the Community (CS193) held its awards ceremony. Thanks to support from Microsoft, three awards were available for extraordinary mentoring, leadership, and technological contribution by three undergraduates in the class.

Lamia Youseff’s paper, recently presented by Lamia, at the 2006 Workshop on XEN in HIgh-Performance Cluster and Grid Computing, was selected as one of two papers to receive the best paper award. Lamia is a PhD student in Prof. Rich Wolski’s MAYEM lab and investigates cutting edge solutions to using software virtualization to effectively enable high-performance computing. Lamia’s paper is called Paravirtualization for HPC Systems and her co-authors are Prof. Rich Wolski, Brent Gorda (from Lawrence Livermore

CS193 is a new course offering implemented by Prof. Chandra Krintz for Winter Quarter 2007. This class for everyone who can use a computer that wants to make a difference and have a positive impact on the lives of others in our community. Prof. Krintz has formed a number of partnerships with local non-profits and area high-schools to enable you to help them with their efforts as part of your UCSB educational process. This class will enable UCSB students (in groups consisting of students of different backgrounds and expertise levels), to work

Team “Bender” (composed of undergrads Bryce Boe, Adam Doupe, and Scott Bonebrake), took 5th place and some cool cash in the regional programming contest Saturday Nov 11th. Organized by undergrad Matt Hielscher and Professor Tim Sherwood, the ACM programming teams keep getting better each and every year. This year, team bender proved to be a nearly unstoppable programming machine — able to solve 5 of 7 problems, besting all the teams from UCSD, UCLA, and many of the other programming contest

The CS 172/189A and 189B courses will be restructured this year. Students enrolled in these courses form teams and develop significant software projects. The outcome of the first course (172/189A) is a prototype for the project, and the second course (189B) ends with a presentation day in which the completed projects are demonstrated publicly. This year, we will establish partnerships between student project teams and companies which will provide challenge problems to the students based on the challenges they face

Each year, a panel of 30 senior computer architects chooses 10 of the year’s most significant research publications for publication in a special issue of IEEE Micro. For the 3rd Year in a row, a paper from UCSB Computer Science is present: Introspective 3D Chips by Shashi Mysore, Banit Agrawal, and Sheng-Chih Lin, Navin Srivastava, Kaustav Banerjee, and Timothy Sherwood from ASPLOS 2006. To deal with the complexity of modern systems, software developers are increasingly dependent on specialized

Prof. Fred Chong , along with Profs. Zhendong Su and Felix Wu (UC Davis), have been awarded a $750,000 NSF grant on malware defense, titled “A Vertical Systems Framework for Effective Defense against Memory-based Attacks”. Abstract:

September 8, 2006—Ben Zhao, an innovator in the field of computer networking is included in the annual 2006 TR35 list, published in new issue of MIT’s Technology Review magazine. The list features 35 of the top innovators in science and technology under the age of 35.

Workshop on Multiscale Biological Imaging, Data Mining & Informatics will be held at UCSB, September 7-8 2006. The workshop brings together interdisciplinary researchers to identify problems and present answers to multiscale bioimage data mining and informatics using cutting edge imaging technology (including fluorescence imaging, electron microscopy imaging, etc.) and quantitative analysis methods (including image data analysis, computer vision, data mining, machine learning, as well as other informatics

Nokia Visiting Fellow scholarships are granted to distinguished foreign professors or experts to work in Finland. Professor Ibarra will spend three months at the University of Turku and work with colleagues in the areas of discrete and algorithmic mathematics, theory of computation, and biologically motivated models of computing.

Professor Petzold was elected as a Fellow of The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). AAAS is an international non-profit organization dedicated to advancing science around the world by serving as an educator, leader, spokesperson and professional association. Election as a Fellow of AAAS is an honor bestowed upon members by their peers. Fellows are recognized for meritorious efforts to advance science or its applications.

The paper titled “Profiling over Adaptive Ranges” received the best paper award at CGO ’06 (4th Annual ACM International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization), which was held in New York during March 26-29. The paper describes a new geometry-based scheme to summarize the huge number of events processed by a modern computer system. The compact summary, called RAP, adaptively and dynamically zooms onto event ranges of interest, thus creating a profile of the program behavior which can then be used for processor optimization.

Frédéric G. Gibou, an assistant professor of computer science and mechanical engineering is among this year’s 116 national winners of prestigious Sloan Research Fellowships from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The new Sloan Research Fellows were selected from among hundreds of highly qualified scientists in the early stages of their careers on the basis of their exceptional promise to contribute to the advancement of knowledge. In the 50 years that the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has been awarding research fellowships, 34 former

Professor Zheng’s research into cognitive radios and dynamic spectrum networks has caught the attention of MIT Tech Review, a highly respected magazine focusing on technology with current circulation around 300,000. The article by Neil Savage can be found in the current issue of Technology Review (March/April), or online at their website: http://www.technologyreview.com/special/emerging/index.aspx

Two young faculty members, Chandra Krintz and Ben Zhao, received the National Science Foundation Early Career Development (CAREER) award in 2006. CAREER awards, given to future academic leaders, are the foundation’s most prestigious grants for young teacher-scholars. The awards provide support for research in the amount of $400K-$480K for a five-year period.

Graduate Program Assistant Amanda Hoagland received the Citation of Excellence Award and Computer Systems Manager Richard Kip was honored as an excellent employee by the UCSB Staff Assembly this year. The purpose of these awards is to acknowledge and celebrate outstanding achievements and meritorious service of career staff. The excellent job performances of Amanda Hoagland and Richard Kip are best explained by the following quotes from the nomination letters written by the faculty.

UCSB Foundation Trustee Mark Bertelsen and his wife, Susan, have made a major gift to establish an endowed chair in computer science at UC Santa Barbara. The Bertelsens, both UCSB graduates, have chosen to name the chair in memory of Susan Bertelsen’s father, Eugene Aas. The Eugene Aas Chair in Computer Science will be used to attract and support the research of a leading junior faculty member working in the forefront of the discipline.

Trade group reports that domestic increase in technology jobs offsets the work being sent overseas. Hiring demand in the field of information technology is now higher than during the .com era. Read more from CNN here.

Karl and Pamela Lopker and the Lopker Family Foundation have made a major gift to help establish the first endowed chair in computer science in UCSB’s College of Engineering (COE). The endowed professorship will support the teaching and research activities of a distinguished scholar recruited to fill the position. The donors have named the chair in honor of Venkatesh “Venky” Narayanamurti, a dynamic leader and distinguished physicist who served as COE’s dean from 1992 until 1998. He left to become Harvard University’s dean of engineering and applied sciences.

The paper titled “Application of Design for Verification with Concurrency Controllers to Air Traffic Control Software” received the best paper award and the ACM SIGSOFT distinguished paper award at the 20th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2005). The paper presents an experimental study on the application of the design for verification approach developed by Professor Tevfik Bultan and his student Aysu Betin-Can to a safety critical software system.

Haitao Zheng, an assistant professor of Computer Science at UC Santa Barbara, has been named one of the nation’s top 35 innovators under age 35 by MIT’s Technology Review magazine. The magazine recognized Haitao, 30, and other chemists, biologists, software engineers, and chip designers for gravitating to “the most interesting and difficult scientific and engineering problems at hand, and arrive at solutions no one had imagined. They take on big issues.”

We are pleased to announce that the UCSB team, called “Shellphish”, won the “Capture The Flag” competition at DEFCON. The team was led by Professor Giovanni Vigna from the Department of Computer Science and was mostly composed of Computer Science graduate students.

The Computer Engineering Program is soliciting applications for a faculty position in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department. Details may be found here.

Tim Sherwood, an Assistant Professor in Computer Science, received the early Career award from the National Science Foundation to fund his research on high speed architectures for online security analysis. The research focus is in building specialized computer processors that are engineered to sort through suspicious packets, and developing new algorithms for hardware string matching.

Along with HP Labs, Princeton, George Mason U. and U. C. Berkeley and industrial partners, Assistant Professor Ben Zhao received a DARPA funding for a proposal to improve reliability of TCP/IP in rugged and lossy environments. The project includes both hardware and software routing components, where the software routing layer is based on Ben’s ongoing work on resilient routing using peer-to-peer overlay networks. With options, the proposal lasts for 3.5 years with total funding of $6.5M. HP Press release here.

Assistant Professor Chandra Krintz was one of ten top compiler and programming language researchers world-wide selected by Microsoft Research as a funded participant in the Microsoft Phoenix Project. As part of the project, Chandra and her research group, the RACELab, will investigate state-of-the-art program profiling and adaptive compiler and runtime optimization for the Microsoft .Net Framework.