News Archive

Prof. Tim Sherwood and several students from the UC Santa Barbara College of Engineering took some time to leave their mark, in the form of the new waterwheel at Anisq ‘Oyo Park in Isla Vista. “The waterwheel had been broken for years — decades,” said UCSB professor Tim Sherwood, who oversaw the group of mostly mechanical engineering students who tackled the project over the winter and spring quarters. To read the full article by Sonia Fernandez, go here.

By Rich Kildare Capstone 2015 top prizes were announced at the Capstone poster presentions held on June 4th, 2015, at UCSB. Best Computer Engineering CS189A/B Capstone Project Struct By Lightning: smart assistant integrated with video-conferencing that observes the stream and provides real-time assistance and info. Team: Trevor Frese (lead), Evan Crook, Britt Christy, Kevin Malta

CS Prof. Matthew Turk recently delivered the opening keynote presentation at the 2015 IEEE Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition, held May 4-8, 2015 in Ljubljana, Slovenia, providing an overview and historical perspective of face processing by computers. In addition, Prof. Turk gave a separate invited talk on his 10-year vision for the community, entitled “Building the Prosopagnosic Computer.”

The Department of Computer Science recently hosted a two-day Advisory Board visit April 26-27, 2015. This advisory board, consisting of eight distinguished scientists and leaders from academia and industry, has the principal mission of providing guidance and strategic feedback to the department as it continues to build on its progress and accomplishments and to address the challenges ahead.

CS graduating seniors have chosen Professor Phill Conrad as “Outstanding Faculty Member.” Phill Conrad joined the faculty of the CS Department in January 2008, and in July 2012 was promoted to Lecturer (SOE), a career-oriented position focusing on undergraduate education.  Dr. Conrad's focus is the lower-division curriculum, and he is the faculty undergraduate advisor for CS majors. Professor Conrad received the “Faculty Senate Distinguished Teaching Award” in 2011 and has twice before, in 2012 and 2013, been chosen “Outstanding Faculty Member” by graduating seniors.

The 2015 UC Santa Barbara Technology Management Program’s New Venture Competition featured CS students in four of the six teams in the finals. The six teams that won the finals came from an original pool of about 20 teams that entered the eight-month TMP tech entrepreneurship program and competition. The winning teams involving CS students:

UC Santa Barbara has once again placed among the top 10 in Leiden University’s annual rankings of the 750 best major universities in the world, in terms of impact in the field of the sciences. UCSB took the No. 7 spot overall. To read the full article, please visit The Current website.

Google announced on its cloud platform blog that it is teaming up with AppScale to allow more flexibility for its App Engine. AppScale is a startup company born out of a UCSB Computer Science research project.

Elizabeth Belding, a UC Santa Barbara Computer Science professor, has received a Nokia 2014 University Donations Program Award for her “HybridCell: Proactive dense cellular network offloading” research. For more information about her research, please see her website.

By Rich Kildare Below is an interview about the IGERT program at UCSB, which is focused on Network Science. Click on the image for the video. For the text alternative, see the video transcript below...

Nevena Golubovic and Kyle Jorgensen from the RACELab led a technical team in the inaugural "Apps for Ag" Hackathon — an event designed to focus computer science research on the problems of sustainability, resource conservation, and food safety in agriculture.

By Rich Kildare The FixIT hackathon, presented by Google Anita Borg Scholars, was a great success. The event — an intense computer science competition in which a large number of collaborators develop projects, usually over the course of several days — was held to encourage Latina involvement in the field of computer science.

Mohit Tiwari, a 2011 Computer Science Phd graduate from UCSB, will receive the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation. Prof. Tiwari is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Texas. Prof. Tiwari is being awarded for his research on “Exo-Core: An Architecture to Detect Malware as Computational Anomalies.”

By Rich Kildare

Computer Science professor Ben Zhao has been recognized for his contributions in the area of Internet research and technology development with the inaugural Early Career Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Internet Technical Committee. Read the entire article at the UCSB College of Engineering website here.

Rich Wolski, a UC Santa Barbara Computer Science professor, was recently interviewed about his pioneering efforts in cloud computing. Professor Wolski oversaw the development of Eucalyptus, an open source infrastructure for cloud computing on clusters. The professor gives his thoughts on the current state of cloud computing and current, popular cloud platforms. Read the full ostatic.com article here.

Heather Zheng, a UC Santa Barbara Computer Science professor, has received a Google Faculty Research Award for her “Outdoor 60GHz Picocells for High-Bandwidth Communications” research. For more information about her research, please see this article. For more information about the Google Faculty Research Award, go here.

By Rich Kildare   Over the Jan. 30-Feb. 1 weekend, over 500 participants gathered at UCSB’s Corwin Pavilion and surrounding areas to compete for prizes in the SB Hacks challenge. During this first iteration of SB Hacks, the annual event attracted students from all over California. Teams worked the entire weekend to create impressive solutions for a variety of problems. Here are the winning teams:

As reported in the latest issue of “The Current,” UCSB has a new Center for Digital Games Research. The newly established center takes a multidisciplinary approach to the study and design of digital media and games. Take, for example, Computer Science Professor Matthew Turk’s Four Eyes Lab.

Elizabeth Belding, a Computer Science Professor at UCSB, received a new NSF award, joint with Penn State and other universities. The award funded a research planning trip to the Za’atari refugee camp in Jordan.  Together with two of her Ph.D. students, Prof. Belding is studying the Internet and wireless connectivity resources and needs of camp residents, and working with UNHCR officials to improve wireless availability.  As a result of the award, the team had an exciting and informative trip to Za’atari in January 2015.

A new wireless protocol known as “60 gigahertz” and “WiGig, is more than 10 times faster than current WiFi connectivity. The technology is so fast it may eradicate the need for cable connections between devices such as monitors and printers.

Computer Science Graduate Student Yibo Zhu (http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~yibo) has been awarded the Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship 2015. Yibo is a member of the SAND Lab (http://sandlab.cs.ucsb.edu/), co-advised by Professors Heather Zheng and Ben Zhao. He has been actively working on projects related to data center networks, wireless and mobile systems, as well as social networks.

By Rich Kildare The "ICDT 2015 Test of Time Award" will be presented to Professors Agrawal and El Abbadi during the EDBT/ICDT 2015 Joint Conference. The conference is held March 23-27 in Brussels Belgium. Both Professors work in the Department of Computer Science, UC Santa Barbara.

Tripping the Light Fantastic UCSB College of Creative Studies student Abe Karplus gets a major crowdfunding boost for his artsy-techy Kinetic glove. Read the full article here.

We are pleased to announce the Distinguished Alumni Achievement Award presented to Professor Linda Petzold. The UC Santa Barbara Computer Science professor was recognized at the CS @ ILLINOIS Awards Banquet held October 24, 2014. The University of Illinois Department of Computer Science annually recognizes alumni who have made professional, technical, educational, or service contributions that bring distinction to themselves, the department, and the university.

UCSB computer security Professor Giovanni Vigna was recently interviewed by the Santa Barbara Independent to discuss his views on the recent hack of Sony Pictures. Professor Vigna shared why he doesn't believe North Korea is responsible for the attack and what this means for our digital privacy. The full interview can be found here.

Prof. Matthew Turk gave a keynote presentation at the 17th International Conference on Computer and Information Technology (ICCIT 2014) in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on December 22nd. The conference was held at Daffodil International University near Dhaka, the bustling capital city of Bangladesh.

Congratulations to UCSB CS Professor Tim Sherwood, who was recently named an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Distinguished Member. This year the ACM selected 49 scientists, engineers, and educators from universities, corporations, and research institutions for their significant contributions to the field of computing. ACM President Alexander Wolf hailed these ACM members as “drivers of the advances and inventions that are propelling the information revolution in new directions.

The ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction has awarded Prof. Matthew Turk the inaugural ICMI Community Service Award, presented at the ICMI conference banquet on November 13th, for his contributions to the multimodal interaction research community.

Haitao (Heather) Zheng, Professor of Department of Computer Science, University of California, Santa Barbara, has been named an IEEE Fellow (class of 2015, effective 1 January 2015). She is being recognized for contributions to dynamic spectrum access and cognitive radio networks.

Congratulations to UCSB CS Master's student Nevena Golubović on receiving the 2014 Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship!

UCSB Professor Ben Zhao was recently interviewed for an LA Times article regarding user privacy and tracking concerns of Whisper, a social media application where users post anonymous confessions. Location privacy is an issue as Whisper uses location information to customize user experiences, though not all users consent to the company knowing their exact location. Prof. Zhao contacted the company in the spring when his research group found a security flaw which allowed the exact location of a Whisper user to be identified.

Journalist and blogger Marin Gazzaniga recently asked PhD student Yan Shoshitaishvili for advice on commonly heard ways to prevent hacking attempts. He suggests tweaks on commonly heard advice such as using long, easy to read passphrases instead of short strings of jibberish. The full post can be found here.

UCSB Professors Matthew Turk (Dept. of Computer Science) and Danielle Harlow (Gevirtz School) have received a $40,791 grant from the National Science Foundation titled "US-Finland Planning Visit: Transformed Social Interaction and Telecollaboration for Collaborative Learning." The grant supports a short visit to Finland for several UCSB faculty and students in order to catalyze a new innovative research program aimed at developing new technologies for collaborative education and learning.

UCSB Department of Computer Science faculty Linda Petzold is one of three leading international scientists appointed to receive an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University next January.

A paper co-authored by Professor Tevfik Bultan titled Automatic Verification of Interactions in Asynchronous Systems with Unbounded Buffers received the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at the 29th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2014).

UCSB Department of Computer Science Professors Heather Zheng and Ben Zhao have received a 3-year grant from the NSF EARS program (Enhancing Access to the Radio Spectrum). The EARS program seeks to identify bold new concepts with the potential to contribute to significant improvements in the efficiency of radio spectrum utilization. This project will develop efficient spectrum monitoring and enforcement systems to detect and locate unauthorized spectrum users.

Department of Computer Science Professor Ben Hardekopf is one of three UCSB faculty to receive the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award. “An NSF CAREER award makes it possible for an assistant professor in science or engineering to launch an ambitious research program,” said Michael Witherell, UCSB vice chancellor for research. “We are extremely pleased that two of our engineering faculty and one of our physics faculty have won these extremely competitive awards.”

Want to be an entrepreneur? Don’t go to Wharton or Harvard. Instead, grab your surfboard and head to UC Santa Barbara.... Click to see full article at Forbes.com