News Archive
Last month, UCSB hosted Grad Slam, an award-winning campus-wide competition for the best three-minute talk by a graduate student.
In collaboration with the College of Creative Studies, the Computer Science department was proud to invite Dr. Anna Patterson to share her perspective as an entrepreneur and speak about trends in AI on April 22, 2019 as the seventeenth talk in the Array of Talks lecture series.
UCSB’s ArchLab, under the direction of Dr. Timothy Sherwood of UCSB’s Computer Science Department, recently received the Best Paper Award at the 24th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS).
UCSB Assistant Professor, Arpit Gupta, received an Honorable Mention at the ACM SIGCOMM Doctoral Dissertation Awards
Hosted by UCSB’s Department of Computer Science, the 2019 CS Summit event was held on Wednesday, March 13, 2019 at Corwin Pavilion and the Lagoon Plaza.
Prof. Diba Mirza piloted UCSB's Computer Science Undergraduate Tutor program in 2017 which has now doubled in size since its debut. She took to the opportunity to visit Brown University to discuss best practices with Prof. Andy van Dam who had started the UTA program at Brown CS in the 1960s and is still part of it.
The RockStar Award is SIGMOBILE's early career award. The Award recognizes an individual who has made recent outstanding research or product contributions to the field of mobile computing during the early part of his or her career.
UCSB Computer Science Ph.D student, Sujaya Maiyya was recently quoted in a U.S. News and World Report article about U.S. Computer Science degrees. Professor and Department Chair, Matthew Turk, is also featured in this article.  
Google received 910 proposals covering 40 countries and over 320 universities. After expert reviews and committee discussions, they decided to fund 158 projects. Of those projects, Computer Science professors William Wang and Tao Yang received this prestigious award!
Computer Science Alumni, Christo Wilson, currently an assistant professor at Northeastern University, has been awarded the prestigious Sloan Research Fellowship this year. 
With a heavy heart, the Computer Science department announces the passing of one of our alumni, JoAnne Holliday. 
Professor William Wang was interviewed by Scientific American about an algorithm that can spot when people lie to the police!   
A new textbook titled "Kernelization, Theory of Parameterized Preprocessing" co-authored by our very own Daniel Lokshtanov, together with Fedor V. Fomin, Saket Saurabh and Meirav Zehavi has now been published by Cambridge University Press. 
Professor Tevfik Bultan will give a distinguished talk at UC Irvine on January 18th as part of the Institute for Software Research Distinguished Speaker Series.
The sixth Annual NSA Competition for Best Scientific Cybersecurity Paper recognized the best scientific cybersecurity paper published in 2017. One paper was selected for recognition from the 28 nominations received. The winning paper is How Shall We Play a Game? A Game-theoretical Model for Cyber-warfare Games by Tiffany Bao, Yan Shoshitaishvili, Ruoyu Wang, Christopher Kruegel, Giovanni Vigna, and David Brumley.
Check out Professor Rich Wolski in his interview with Hill.TV's "Boundless" series as he talks about smart farming and 5G technology making it easier for farmers to bring food to customers.
UCSB Computer Science PhD student, Semih Yavuz, in Prof. Xifeng Yan's group received the Best Paper Award at NeurIPS 2018 Workshop titled "Conversational AI: Today's Practice and Tomorrow's Potential". This NeurIPS workshop focuses on conversational systems and natural language interfaces (such as Siri, Google Now, Cortana, and Alexa) which have become commonplace in the span of only a few years.
The Computers and Humans Exploring Software Security (CHESS) program aims to develop capabilities to discover and address vulnerabilities of all types in a scalable, timely, and consistent manner. 
The Institute for Energy Efficiency announced this year’s Peter J. Frenkel Foundation fellows. This award is made possible through the generous support of The Peter J. Frenkel Foundation and is granted to two advanced doctoral candidates in recognition of their outstanding research contributions to the field of energy efficiency.
UCSB NLP Group receives a generous gift from Tencent AI Lab to work on "Cross-Lingual and Open-World Task-Oriented Dialogue Schema Induction and Generation". This builds on their previous Tencent AI Lab Rhino-Bird Gift Fund project "XL-NBT: A Cross-lingual Neural Belief Tracking Framework", led by UCSB NLP Group PhD student Wenhu Chen.   
Intel AI has agreed to donate a new gift funding of $200,000 via its Corporate Research Council (CRC) to support our Natural Language Processing research (nlp.cs.ucsb.edu) at UCSB's Computer Science Department. The Intel Faculty Grants include two projects for $100K each.
UCSB Computer Science alumnus, Gianluca Strnghini, currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Boston University, received Best Paper award at IMC 2018! The 2018 Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) is a three-day event focusing on Internet measurement and analysis. The conference is sponsored by ACM SIGCOMM. IMC 2018 is the 18th in a series of highly successful Internet Measurement Workshops and Conferences. Title: On the Origins of Memes by Means of Fringe Web Communities
Professor Tevfik Bultan is the sole Principal Investigator of a recent half million dollars, three year NSF grant titled "Differential Policy Verification and Repair for Access Control in the Cloud."  Due to the ubiquitous use of software services, protecting the confidentiality of private information stored in compute clouds is becoming an increasingly critical problem. Incorrect specification of access control policies in cloud storage services can cause millions of customers' private data to be
To celebrate National Cyber Security Awareness Month Dr. Vigna will discuss how AI is used in security and the (little understood) pitfalls of adversarial machine learning.
The 13th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation seeks to present innovative, exciting research in computer systems. OSDI brings together professionals from academic and industrial backgrounds in a premier forum for discussing the design, implementation, and implications of systems software. The OSDI Symposium emphasizes innovative research as well as quantified or insightful experiences in systems design and implementation.
Computer Science alumni Mariya Zheleva and Petko Bogdanov with UAlbany Researchers secure $1.5 million grant from National Science Foundation to improve broadband access in rural areas.
Prof. Tevfik Bultan is serving as the Program Committee Co-Chair for the 2019 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE).
Prof.  Xifeng Yan is serving as program co-chair of the 2019 SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM19), which will be held in Calgary, Canada between May 2 and 4, 2019.  The conference is sponsored by the SIAM Activity Group on Data Mining and Analytics and held in cooperation with the American Statistical Association.
CS Professor Elizabeth Belding is the Principal Investigator of a recent $2 Million, three year NSF grant titled "PuebloConnect: Expanding Internet Access and Content Relevance in Tribal Communities".  The project is a collaboration with Marisa Duarte (Arizona State), Morgan Vigil-Hayes (Northern Arizona University), Ellen Zegura (Georgia Tech) and Jennifer Nevarez (Community Learning Network).  Prof. Vigil-Hayes is a 2017 Ph.D. graduate of UCSB, who worked in Prof. Belding’s research group.
UCPath Comes to UCSB September 27th, 2018. Go-live activities are underway!
UCPath go-live activities are underway at UCSB.
(Santa Barbara, Calif.) — Two of UC Santa Barbara’s junior engineering faculty members have received the prestigious Young Faculty Award from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). William Wang, in the College of Engineering’s Department of Computer Science, and Jonathan Klamkin, in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, join 34 other up-and-coming researchers for 2018.
Prof. William Wang receives 2018 IBM Faculty Award. This builds on their existing collaboration with IBM for a prior award in 2017. In a prior collaboration, they have pushed the boundaries of reinforcement learning optimization and knowledge graph reasoning. The results were published at IJCAI 2018 and EMNLP 2018.
Professor William Wang has received a prestigious 2018 DARPA Young Faculty Award! William was presented the award in Washington, D.C. In the past two years, William has successfully grown the Natural Language Processing Lab into one of the most prolific NLP groups in the world. CSRankings.org ranks UCSB #3 in NLP in 2018.
Keynote by Professor Chandra Krintz, UCSB on `SmartFarm: IoT Systems That Simplify and Automate Agriculture Analytics’
The Princeton Review lists Computer Science as the #1 college major in their recent list of Top Ten College Majors. The list is based on research covering job prospects, alumni salaries, and popularity. Here's what they say about CS:
ACM UMAP is the premier international conference for researchers and  practitioners working on systems that adapt to individual users, to  groups of users, and that collect, represent, and model user information. The title of their paper is "Easy to Please: Separating User Experience from Choice Satisfaction."
Together with UC Berkeley's Vice Chancellor of Research and EECS Prof. Randy Katz, UC Santa Barbara Computer Science Prof. William Wang gave a presentation on the Past, Present, and Future of Artificial Intelligence in the Governor's room at the California State Capitol on Wednesday 06/20, 2018. This is a part of the bigger effort of UC Legislative Roundtable chaired by Senator Hannah-Beth Jackson.