News Archive

Prof. Amr El Abbadi will give a keynote presentation at the Brazilian Symposium on Database (SBBD 2012) which takes place in São Paulo, Brazil on October 15-18. SBBD is the official database event of the Brazilian Computer Society and the largest venue in Latin America for presentation and discussion of research results in the database domain. His talk will be on “Delivering the Promise of Scalable and Elastic Data Management in the Cloud.”

In a list of the world’s top 200 universities released today by Times Higher Education, UCSB is ranked number 17 of the top 50 universities offering degrees in engineering and technology. Overall, the list ranks UCSB as #23 among U.S. universities and #35 in the world. See here for more details.

Prof. Tevfik Bultan was a keynote speaker at the 9th International Symposium on Formal Aspects of Component Software, held in Mountain View, CA on September 12-14.

PhD students Steffen Gauglitz and Cha Lee and professors Matthew Turk and Tobias Höllerer received Honorable Mention for Best Paper at the MobileHCI 2012 conference in San Francisco for their paper on Integrating the Physical Environment into Mobile Remote Collaboration.

The New York Times ran an article on September 16th on the state of smartphones and applications such as augmented reality (AR), quoting Prof. Tobias Höllerer.

The annual Computer Science Graduate Student Workshop in Computing (GSWC) will be held on Friday, October 5th in the Corwin Pavillion on the UCSB campus, from 8:00am to 3:10pm. The focus of GSWC is to highlight graduate student research, promote the exchange of ideas among students, faculty, researchers, and industry, and familiarize new graduate students with the research conducted within our department and the larger computer science community. The workshop is held and organized entirely by UCSB CS graduate students.

The Department of Computer Science is pleased to announce the recent promotion of faculty members, effective July 1, 2012: To Full Professor: Frederic Gibou Tobias Höllerer Tim Sherwood To Associate Professor with Tenure: Xifeng Yan To Lecturer with Security of Employment: Phill Conrad

Prof. Tevfik Bultan is the Program Committee Co-Chair of ACM SIGSOFT 2012, the 20th International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE). This is the flagship conference of ACM SIGSOFT and is one of the top two research conferences in the area of software engineering. The meeting will be held in Cary, North Carolina during November 11-16, 2012.

Mohit Tiwari, a 2011 Ph.D. graduate researching architectures for securing high assurance systems with Professor Tim Sherwood, will join Univ. of Texas at Austin ECE as an assistant professor in summer 2013. Currently, he is a post-doc in the EECS department at UC Berkeley, working with Professors Krste Asanovic and Dawn Song.

UCSB COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT PRESENTS: Monday, August 27, 2012 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM Room 1132 Harold Frank Hall HOST: Elizabeth Belding SPEAKER: Nigel Davies Professor, Lancaster University Title: A Communications Medium for the 21st Century : Towards Open Public Display Networks

The National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT) has announced the inaugural recipients of the annual Undergraduate Research Mentoring Awards. These awards are given to faculty from across the USA who, through their efforts with undergraduate students, have encouraged and advanced students who have conducted research under the guidance of the awardees. Dr. Diana Franklin is one of the four recipients for 2012.

Team NOCK with CS 189 instructors Profs. Krintz and Sherwood

Outstanding Dissertation Award (2 winners this year because both dissertations were truly outstanding!): Sudipto Das: Scalable and Elastic Transactional Data Stores for Cloud Computing Platforms Christo Wilson: Battling Spam and Sybils on the Social Web Outstanding Publication Award: Xia Zhou and Zengbin Zheng: Mirror Mirror on the Ceiling: Flexible Wireless Links for Data Centers

Professors Elizabeth Belding (Computer Science) and Lisa Parks (Film and Media Studies) have launched a large research project to bring Internet connectivity to Macha, Zambia, an African village of 130,000 residents. Read about it in the UC Santa Barbara TODAY magazine.

For $75, This Guy Will Sell You 1,000 Facebook ‘Likes’ by STEVE HENN and ZOE CHACE Looking to get more popular on Facebook? Alex Melen will sell you 1,000 “likes” for about $75. Melen runs an Internet marketing company. About six months ago, companies he worked with started coming to him more and more with a simple problem: They had created pages on Facebook, but nobody had clicked the “like” button.

Professors Melliar-Smith and Moser’s undergraduate researcher, Christopher Badger, receives the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research. Christopher Badger, a computer science student, has been selected to receive the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research. The award is bestowed upon one or more graduating seniors who have distinguished themselves as researchers.

COMPUTER ENGINEERING AND HP LABS PRESENTS: Monday, June 4 2:00 – 3:00pm Computer Science Conference Room, Harold Frank Hall, Rm. 1132 SPEAKER: Luis Ceze, Assistant Professor, Computer Science at the University of Washington TITLE: “Safe and General Energy-Aware Programming with Disciplined Approximation”

Christo Wilson, a 5th year PhD candidate in the Computer Science department working with Prof. Ben Zhao, will be graduating this summer and will join the faculty at Northeastern University as tenure-track Assistant Professor this fall. Prior to his PhD, he earned his MS in Computer Science at UCSB in 2007, and his BS in Computer Science at UCSB in 2006. His research interests include complex networks, online social networks, security and privacy, and networking protocols.

2012 Lancaster Dissertation Award in Mathematics, Physical Sciences, & Engineering

CONGRATULATIONS on Greta being selected to receive a PWA Unsung Heroine Award! The award recognizes special women who make a significantly positive impact to the campus by going above & beyond in contributions to their job, co-workers, campus, or community.

UCSB COMPUTER ENGINEERING AND COMPUTER SCIENCE PRESENTS: 2012 SENIOR CAPSTONE PROJECT PRESENTATION DAY THURSDAY, JUNE 7, 2012 TIME (full event): 9:00am to 4:00pm LOCATION: Engineering Science Building (ESB) — Room 1001, Room 2001, and Courtyard CS HOSTS: Chandra Krintz (CMPSC 189A) and Tim Sherwood (CMPSC 189B) CS SPEAKERS: Computer Science 189A/B Seniors — 9:00 to 1:00pm

recent article in UCSB’s student newspaper Daily Nexus discusses quantum computing research by professor Wim van Dam.

Award is given in recognition of Belding’s exemplary mentoring of graduate students in Computer Science. Elizabeth Belding, professor and vice-chair of the Department of Computer Science at UCSB, was recently awarded the Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award by the Academic Senate. The award for Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award is given in recognition of the contributions of faculty who offer exemplary mentoring of their graduate students, which is a vital component of the mission of a research university.

Professor Timothy Sherwood, an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at UCSB, was recently awarded the Distinguished Teaching Award by the Academic Senate. The award is given in recognition of the efforts of faculty members who have successfully united teaching and research. Nominees are judged by their fellow professors on their excellence in teaching and their contributions to the teaching mission of the University.

PhD student, Kyle Klein, has been awarded the prestigious NSF Graduate Research Fellowship! Kyle Klein, a doctoral student in Prof. Suri‘s Applied Algorithms Research Lab has been awarded the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship. The Fellowship provides a stipend of $30,000 a year for 3 years plus tuition and travel support. Kyle’s research is exploring algorithmic foundations of pursuit evasion and coordination in autonomous robot systems. Congratulations!

Two of Prof. Rich Wolski‘s papers have been selected as two of the 20 best papers in the last 20 years from the International ACM Symposium on High Performance and Distributed Computing (HPDC).

Feb 22, 2012 IBM Ph.D. fellowship is highly competitive and recognizes our students as well as the quality of our institution. Congratulations!

ELECTRICAL & COMPUTER ENGINEERING / COMPUTER ENGINEERING PRESENTS Friday, March 2, 2012 10:00 – 11:00am Electrical & Computer Engineering Conference Room (HFH 4164) SPEAKER: John Sartori University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign TITLE: Stochastic Computing: Embracing Errors in Architecture and Design of Processors and Applications

Divyakant Agrawal was named a 2011 ACM Fellow for his contributions to distributed data management systems. Divy was also named an IEEE Fellow for his contributions to large-scale data management in distributed and networked systems. Linda Petzold was named a 2011 ACM Fellow for her contributions to computational science. Subhash Suri was elected as a Fellow of AAAS for distinguished contributions to the field of computational geometry, networks, and computational economics.

A Wireless Road Around Data Traffic Jams

A dark force, unleashed online By Gareth Cook at Boston Global, January 08, 2012 THERE IS a new kind of threat gathering online.

Bouncing Data Would Speed Up Data Centers A plan to bounce signals off the ceilings inside data centers could solve a major performance bottleneck. TUESDAY, DECEMBER 20, 2011 BY DUNCAN GRAHAM-ROWE (via MIT Technology Review) Inside the huge data centers operated by Internet companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook, information is processed at blistering speed, but it still has to be moved between different machines through relatively slow wiring.

UCSB COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT PRESENTS DISTINGUISHED LECTURE: FRIDAY, JANUARY 20, 2012 10:30 AM – 11:00 AM Reception 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM Talk Engineering Sciences Building, Room 1001 HOST: Subhash Suri SPEAKER: Maria M. Klawe President, Harvey Mudd College Title: From 10% to 40% Female CS Majors: The Harvey Mudd College Story Abstract:

Prof. Divy Agrawal invited as William Mong Visiting Fellow by the Faculty of Engineering at the Hong Kong University, Hong Kong. (Dec 12, 2011)

Hidden Industry Dupes Social Media Users Paying people to influence discussions in social media is big business in China and the U.S. MONDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2011 BY TOM SIMONITE (MIT Technology Review) A trawl of Chinese crowdsourcing websites—where people can earn a few pennies for small jobs such as labeling images—has uncovered a multimillion-dollar industry that pays hundreds of thousands of people to distort interactions in social networks and to post spam.

University of California at Santa Barbara Computer Science professor Divyakant Agrawal was named a 2011 ACM Fellow for his “contributions to distributed data management systems.” University of California at Santa Barbara Computer Science professor Linda Petzold was named a 2011 ACM Fellow for her “contributions to computational science.”

Prof. Yan receives IEEE ICDM 10-Year Highest Impact Paper Award for his research paper, “gSpan: Graph-Based Substructure Pattern Mining.” (Google Scholar) The work was co-authored by Xifeng Yan and Jiawei Han and it was Xifeng’s first paper in his Ph.D. study. Congratulations!

Hackers Battle for Global Spoils UCSB Hosts Ninth Annual International Capture the Flag Competition Wednesday, December 7, 2011 by ERIN LENNON (via Santa Barbara Independent)

Prof. Subhash Suri is elected as an AAAS fellow (The American Association for the Advancement of Science). Congratulations!

Prof. Divyakant Agrawal has been named an IEEE Fellow for the class of 2012. Divy was selected for his “contributions to large-scale data management in distributed and networked systems.” Congratulations!