News Archive

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.