Thanks to all the UCSB Computer Science alumni who joined us this weekend at our first 2024 Computer Science Alumni event in Palo Alto, CA. We enjoyed sharing with you the latest news from the department and learning about your many successes in the field. We look forward to many more of these events in the future!
The National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health sent a video crew to Santa Barbara recently to highlight the work Michael Beyeler, an assistant professor in UCSB’s Computer Science Department. The result is a fascinating preview of a transformative technology that could one day have a big impact.
“There’s up to six million people worldwide who live with profound blindness,” Beyeler explains in the newly released video, “and the idea of a visual prosthesis is to replace lost functionality with an implant. Even though these devices are already out there, the vision they provide is rather limited.”
Professor William Wang has been selected for the 2023 IEEE Signal Processing Society’s 2023 Pierre-Simon Laplace Early Career Technical Achievement Award, which honors individuals who have made significant technical contributions within their field early in their career. The award recognizes Professor Wang for “contributions to the development of scalable algorithms in natural language processing.”
UC Santa Barbara Computer Science is set to make a strong showing at this year’s Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) annual meeting, with 20 papers accepted at the prestigious conference. With contributions from professors William Wang, Yu-Xiang Wang, Shiyu Chang, and Michael Beyeler on topics as wide-ranging as text-to-image evaluation, privacy, and predictive models of visual cortex neural activity, UCSB’s efforts mirror the broad scope of the conference itself.
Congratulations to Misha Sra, assistant professor in the Computer Science Department, for being one of nine UCSB faculty recipients of the 2023-24 Hellman Fellowship. The award is designed to support early- to mid-career faculty who have shown a capacity for great distinction in their work. Also honored this year is affiliated faculty member Nina Miolane of the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering.
Congratulations to UCSB’s Logic Wardens team for taking second place in the CSAW’23 Logic Locking Competition at NYU!
The CS departments’ committee on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion has announced the launch of the PhD Application Support Program (ASP). This student-led, volunteer-driven initiative offers a pre-application review service, aiming to support aspiring CS scholars from underserved backgrounds. The PhD ASP provides mentorship and application review, where current PhD students or postdocs from the CS department offer feedback on resumes, CVs, and statements of purpose. All volunteers undergo specialized training to ensure applicants receive insightful advice.
Congratulations to UCSB's GauchoChat team for taking first place overall and $250,000 in Amazon's Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge 5!
The Broadening Participation in Computing demonstration project, a collaboration between California State University Chico and UC Santa Barbara, has been awarded a National Science Foundation grant of $300,000. Led by UCSB’s associate teaching professor Richert Wang and Chico’s associate professor Kevin Buffardi, the project team will focus on improving representation, relevance, and equity in computer science by framing high school instructional practices from the perspectives of women and Hispanic students.
Congratulations to George Tzimpragos for the ACM SIGARCH/IEEE CS TCCA Outstanding Dissertation Award!
summit.cs 2023 took place last Wednesday, March 15th. TRANQUILITEA (partner: WellHealth) placed first, while FAT STACKS (partner: Allthenticate) placed second. Finally, OVERSEA (partner: NavSea) landed third place. Congratulations!
CS Professor Jonathan Balkind received a $630,000 NSF Early Career award, to further his work in cloud computing application development. Congratulations!
CS Professor William Wang has been awarded the 2023 CRA-E Undergraduate Research Faculty Mentoring Award by the Computing Research Association (CRA).
CS Professor Elizabeth Belding's 1999 article on Ad hoc On-Demand Vector (AODV) has reached 30,000 citations. Congratulations!
PhD student Zichen Chen received the Innovative Application of AI award from the AAAI for her paper, “Efficient Training of Large-scale Industrial Fault Diagnostic Models through Federated Opportunistic Block Dropout”.
Congratulations to William Wang, who received the prestigious Karen Spärck Jones Award. Professor Wang will officially accept this award and deliver a lecture in Dublin in April 2023.
A paper coauthored by Professor Arpit Gupta has been awarded the Applied Networking Research Prize (ANRP) by the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF). This work also received the Best Paper Honorable Mention at ACM CCS in 2022.
Anisha Kabir received Honorable Mention for the Computing Research Association's (CRA) 2023 Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award.
A UCSB led team was one of the eight teams selected by DARPA for the Hardening Development Toolchains Against Emergent Execution Engines (HARDEN) program.
A paper coauthored by Professor Arpit Gupta has received the Best Paper Honorable Mention Award at the 2022 ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS).
A paper by Udit Paul, Jiamo Liu, Professor Arpit Gupta and Professor Elizabeth Belding was awarded the Best (Long) Paper Award at the ACM Internet Measurement Conference 2022 (IMC 2022).
Congratulations to Yimeng Liu, who was named a finalist for the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship. Yimeng was nominated for her joint-project on ultra-low bitrate compression with Stanford student Pulkit Tandon.
Professor Xifeng Yan will lead UCSB GauchoChat in the Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge 5. UCSB GauchoChat is one of nine teams selected to represent their universities and compete.
PhD student Sharon Levy has been invited to the esteemed Electrical Engineering Computer Science (EECS) Rising Stars program. This workshop empowers female scientists and engineers striving for academic careers in electrical engineering, computer science, and AI and decision making.
Congratulations to CS PhD Alumnus Wenhu Chen, who was named Canada CIFAR AI Chair. He is among 8 researchers across Canada creating a leading AI research ecosystem, particularly in AI for health, AI for energy and the environment, the fundamental science of AI, and the responsible use of AI.
Congratulations to PhD Student Fuheng Zhao, who received the esteemed Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship. This fellowship aims to recognize and empower the future of computing research talent.
Assistant Professor Michael Beyeler has received a $1.5 million NIH Director's New Innovator grant, to further his work on smart bionic eye vision. Michael aims to bring to the mainstream an AI-powered bionic eye that can generate artificial vision, in an effort to increase the quality of life for patients who are blind or visually impaired.
source: Santa Barbara News-Press
CS doctoral student Atieh Taheri was featured in the Santa Barbara News-Press for her research in spinal muscular atrophy, with the goal of helping others with her condition!
Congratulations to Shlomi Steinberg, Pradeep Sen, Ling-Qi Yan for receiving Best Paper Honorable Mention for their paper, "Towards Practical Physical-optics Rendering" at SIGGRAPH 2022!
The CS Dept. congratulates Professor Emeritus John Gilbert and Professor Emeritus Wim van Dam on their retirement, after prestigious careers at UCSB.
Congratulations to Marianne Arriola (CCS Computing) for becoming a 2022 recipient of the prestigious Barry Goldwater Scholarship, back in March.
Congratulations to CS Associate Professor William Wang, who was named 2022 AI 2000 Most Influential Scholar Honorable Mention in Natural Language Processing, back in March.
As society increases the use of technology to manage daily life, so does the need for professionals to help advance technological progress. Luckily, new findings from Glassdoor identified that the top jobs are in computing technology.
Undergraduate and graduate students in UC Santa Barbara’s Computer Science Department have received numerous prestigious accolades from top academic conferences and organizations in the past few months, ranging from best-paper awards to highly competitive fellowships. Department leaders see the national recognitions bestowed on their students as confirmation of the interdisciplinary, supportive, and solutions-driven efforts of the faculty and staff in computer science, the College of Engineering, and the university.
Congratulations to fourth-year Ph.D. candidate Yuke Wang, selected as one of the 10 recipients (globally) of the prestigious NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship 2022-2023. NVIDIA is the inventor of the Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) and the world's leading company in computer graphics, scientific computing, and artificial intelligence. Yuke Wang works with Professor Yufei Ding at the CS department of UCSB.
Congratulations to third-year Ph.D. student Sanjay Chandrasekaran, selected as one of the three recipients (globally) of the prestigious M-Lab Research Fellowship. M-Lab is an open Internet measurement lab led by Google Inc. and Code for Society and Sciences teams. Sanjay works with Professor Arpit Gupta at Systems and Networking Lab, UCSB.
The NLP Group researchers Aesha Parekh was named the 2022 CRA’s Outstanding Researchers Award Finalist (Top-10 Nationally) and Samhita Honnavalli was named Honorable Mention.
First-year Ph.D. student Gyuwan Kim was awarded Best Paper in November 2021 for his paper titled, "Length-Adaptive Transformer: Train Once with Length Drop, Use Anytime with Search" at SustaiNLP 2021 Workshop at EMNLP 2021, along with his co-author Kyunghyun Cho, Associate Professor for Computer Science and Data Science at New York University.
UCSB Assistant Professor Misha Sra, along with collaborators from MIT Media Lab and Osaka University, recently published a paper titled, "AI-generated characters for supporting personalized learning and well-being" in Nature Machine Intelligence. This paper was also featured in MIT News.
UCSB's Assistant Professor Lei Li was awarded the Best Paper at the ACL (Association of Computational Linguistics) in August 2021.