News Archive
On June 4th 2018, the year-end Computer Science BBQ recently took place at Goleta Beach, with plenty of food and camaraderie.
Panel On the Implications of the Meltdown & Spectre Design Flaws
Google I/O Extended events help developers from around the world take part in the I/O experience. This year, during Google I/O event, UC Santa Barbara Computer Science Professor William Wang gave a keynote speech at the Santa Barbara extended event (hosted by LogMeIn) on the topics of reinforcement learning and semi-supervised learning.
Computer Science Ph.D. student Tegan Brennan has received an honorable mention of the 2018 NCWIT Collegiate Award. The NCWIT Collegiate Award honors the outstanding computing accomplishments of undergraduate and graduate women. Conferred annually, the award recognizes technical contributions to projects that demonstrate a high level of innovation and potential impact. Tegan is advised by Prof. Tevfik Bultan.
Santa Paula High School visited UCSB in May to learn about Computer Science Research with Prof. Chandra Krintz.
A consortium consisting of UC Riverside, UCLA, UCSD and UCSB along with Los Alamos National Laboratory, was awarded $3.6M for the three-year project "Securing smart campuses: a holistic multi-layer approach" through the 2018 UC Laboratory Fees Research Program. The vision for this project is to build security and privacy for “smart campuses”, that present a microcosm of smart cities and more generally of human cyber-physical systems.
As one of the country’s finest institutions of higher learning, UC Santa Barbara affords Regents Scholars many academic and pre-professional experiences, to ensure they reach their full intellectual and career potential.
On Saturday 04/14, Computer Science Faculty members Diba Mirza, Phill Conrad, Jianwen Su, John Gilbert, Yufei Ding, Giovanni Vigna, and Linda Petzold sat together with this year's Regent Scholars for a special lunch event and discussed courses and educational opportunities in Computer Science.
On April 12th, UCSB held the second Give Day event. In this year's event, the Computer Science Department has received a total donation of $376,595, which ranked at the top in the College of Engineering. Private gifts are a very important part of the university ecosystem. With this generous support from you, we are able to keep attracting the very brightest new faculty members, curious undergraduate and graduate students by offering state-of-the-art facilities and outstanding research opportunities.
Since 2016, computer science departments and universities in the Southern California region have heavily invested in Natural Language Processing (NLP) research, and several junior faculty members related to this area were hired across campuses. This includes Prof. William Wang (UCSB), Prof. Sameer Singh (UCI), Prof. Kai-Wei Chang (UCLA), Prof. Xiang Ren (USC), Prof. Vagelis Papalexakis (UCR), and Prof. Ndapa Nakashole (UCSD).
Professor Emeritus Teofilo Gonzalez has been appointed as a member of the ABET Computing Accreditation Commission (CAC) for the term starting July 2018 and ending July 2023. CAC overviews the ABET accreditation of about 100 computing programs (computer science, information systems and information technology) per year all over the world with the goal of improving undergraduate education. Professor Gonzalez has been an active participant as a Program Evaluator, Team Chair or Commissioner of the CAC accreditation process since 2004.
Prof. Tim Sherwood was recently named a Distinguished Lecturer at George Mason University's ECE Department, where he delivered a distinguished seminar on "Computer Architectures as an Instrument for Understanding the Nature of Practical Computation".
A team of UCSB Computer Science researchers just won the EDBT 2018 Best Demonstration Award at Vienna, Austria. The EDBT (Extending Data Base Technology) (http://edbticdt2018.at/) conference is a well-known conference in the area of databases and information systems.
UCSB Computer Science Assistant Professor William Wang receives an Adobe Faculty Research Award for his research on language and vision. Every year, Adobe funds a university faculty research program to promote the understanding and use of data science in the area of marketing. The goal is to encourage both theoretical and empirical development of solutions to problems in marketing.
UCSB Computer Science Ph.D. candidate Yu Su recently accepted a faculty position with Ohio State University (OSU) as Assistant Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department beginning Fall 2018. Currently, he is finishing up his Ph.D. with Dr. Xifeng Yan.
Yu's research covers a range of topics in the areas of natural language processing, and data mining, mostly from machine learning and data-driven perspectives. His current projects are focused on question answering, semantic parsing, and information extraction.
Congratulations to Yu on his new role!
In a recent report by the Brookings Institution, UCSB CS Prof. William Wang's research on automated fake news detection was discussed. The century-old American think tank discussed the challenges that fake news poses to journalism, and surveyed recent approaches to combat fake news and disinformation. In particular, Darrell West, the Vice President of Brookings Institution, quoted:
Computer scientists are tackling ecology — and helping ecologists — by bringing machine learning into nature to help identify wildlife
By Shelly Leachman
Wednesday, February 7, 2018 - 13:00
Santa Barbara, CA
Facing a daunting, digital pile millions of photographs high, how would you find the few images you need? Could you, even? It’s a classic needle-in-a-haystack conundrum, and it’s a blaring reality for ecologists, resource managers and farmers who use camera traps to track wildlife.
Every year the Undergrad Affairs Committee organizes an informational session about graduate school. This year the panel was moderated by Sierra Schwellenbach, a member of the undergraduate affairs committee and included Dr. Aishwarya Thiruvengadam, Professor William Wang, Jack Alexander and Maddie Foster.
CS Newsletter, Winter 2018
The latest newsletter from the Department of Computer Science features profiles of new faculty members, highlights of faculty awards and honors, accomplished CS students, and more. To view the full newsletter, please click here.
The Curie-osity Project is a collaborative effort between the McEnroe Reading Clinic and Girls Inc.(link is external), the Curie-osity Project introduces young women in grades 4 through 6 to the women scientists and engineers of the UC Santa Barbara community.
The students:
Prof. Tevfik Bultan was appointed as the Technical Program Committee Co-Chair of the 41st ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2019).
The Computing Research Association (CRA) has announced its 2018 Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award Winners. Congratulations to our undergraduates Andy Rosales, Dana Nguyen, and Ke Ni, who were selected for Honorable Mention.
Andy Rosales, Advisors: Chandra Krintz and Rich Wolski.
Dana Nguyen, Advisor: Elizabeth Belding.
Ke Ni, Advisor: William Wang.
Details: https://cra.org/2018-outstanding-undergraduate-researcher-award-winners/
Computer Science Researcher Dr. John O'Donovan collaborated with a team led by Dr. Jin-Hee Cho at Army Research Lab, and their paper titled "Modeling and Analysis of Uncertainty-based False Information Propagation in Social Networks," has recently received the GLOBECOM 2017 Best Paper Award in the Selected Areas in the Communications symposium track in Singapore this week. The paper was authored by Cho, Trevor Cook, also of ARL; Scott Rager, Raytheon BBN Technologies; John O'Donovan, University of California, Santa Barbara; and Sibel Adali, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Diba Mirza, a Lecturer PSOE in the Department of Computer Science, along with Susko Tyler, a Lecturer PSOE in Mechanical Engineering, have been selected as the co-recipients of this year’s Northrop Grumman Excellence in Teaching Award.
The Internet Society recently held an Indigenous Connectivity Summit focused on connecting Indigenous communities in North America to the Internet. Prof. Elizabeth Belding spoke on a panel titled “Advocating for Community Networks” about the work she has done with her Native American partner organizations to understand how Indigenous people use the Internet, and to build Internet access and architectural solutions that are more inclusive of Indigenous populations.
The Department of Computer Science would like to congratulate PhD students Victor Zakhary, Theodore Georgiou, Cetin Sahin, and Prof. Amr El Abbadi for 2nd Place Vision Paper at SIGSPATIAL 2017 for their paper "LocBorg: Hiding Social Media User Location while Maintaining Online Persona". Nice work!
Prof. Yinghui Wu, a former postdoc in Prof. Xifeng Yan's lab, receives the 2017 SIGMOD Best Paper Award. Prof. Wu spent three years as a postdoctoral research scientist during Aug 2011 - Aug 2014 at UCSB's CS Department, and then went on to become a professor in the School of EECS at Washington State University.
Sayan Ranu, a PhD graduate from Prof. Ambuj Singh's lab, is recently featured in the Hindu Business Line for his work that appears at the Bioinformatics journal. After graduated from UCSB's CS department, Dr. Ranu became a researcher at IBM Research Bangalore, and then an assistant professor at the renowned IIT Madras. Last year, Dr. Rano moved on to the CSE department at IIT Delhi.
This year marks the 10th anniversary of Apple's iPhone. It was the introduction of iPhone's Siri that for the first time in history, spoken dialogue systems were made widely available to the general public. Over the years, Siri has improved over time, and new intelligent assistants, such as Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and Cortana were also introduced to the market. But how are they now?
CS Prof. Wim van Dam was awarded a single-PI NSF grant of $450k for a three year period to work on the project "Quantum Data Structures and Algorithms".
CS Prof. Matthew Turk, who is widely known for his seminal work in face recognition and computer vision, gave an invited talk to the Santa Barbara City College Math Club (https://www.facebook.com/groups/sbccmathclub/) on Friday, September 29, on “Mathematics for Seeing,” discussing mathematical models and methods used in computer vision.
