News Archive

CS Newsletter, Winter 2017 The latest newsletter from the Department of Computer Science features profiles of new faculty members, highlights of faculty awards and honors, interviews with accomplished CS undergraduates, and more. To view the full newsletter, please click here.

The Office of Naval Research (ONR) has awarded a grant to Professor Tobias Höllerer for his project titled "View Management and User Interface Optimization for Wide-Area Mobile Augmented Reality." ONR coordinates, executes, and promotes the science and technology programs of the United States Navy and Marine Corps.

The National Science Foundation has provided Professor Elizabeth M. Belding with a grant to support Student Travel for the 2017 ACM Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications (HotMobile). HotMobile is the premiere event for presenting innovative and significant research of mobile systems, applications and services.

The National Science Foundation has awarded a grant to Professor Giovanni Vigna for support of a project titled, "Educating the Security Workforce through On-Demand Live Competitions." 

At the 36th IARCS Annual Conference on Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science (FSTTCS 2016), Professor Tevfik Bultan presented a keynote talk titled, "Side Channel Analysis Using a Model Counting Constraint Solver and Symbolic Execution."  The conference was held at the Chennai Mathematical Institute in Chennai, India from December 13–15, 2016.

UCSB Computer Science graduate Gang Wang accepted a position with Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) as Associate Professor beginning Fall 2016. Earlier, he received a PhD Dissertation Fellowship from UC Santa Barbara (2015), and a Best Practical Paper Award from ACM SIGMETRICS (2013). His co-advisors at UCSB were Professor Ben Y. Zhao and Professor Heather Zheng.

The Intelligent User Interface (IUI) steering committee decided in 2016 to acknowledge past IUI papers that had the most impact and highest visibility since being published. The seminal paper, Trust in Recommender Systems by John O’Donovan and Barry Smyth, will be honored with the newly established IUI-Most-Influential-Paper-Award in 2017, during IUI 2017 in Limassol, Cyrus.

At the 2016 International Computer Symposium, held December 15-17, 2016 in Chiayi, Taiwan, Professor Emeritus Teofilo Gonzalez will give the opening keynote presentation titled, "Approximation Algorithms: Methodologies, Applications and Empirical Evaluation." The biennial symposium provides a forum for researchers, educators, and professionals to exchange their discoveries and practices, and to explore future trends and applications in computer technologies.

Our annual CS holiday party took place December 6, 2016 at Mosher Alumni House on campus. The informal get-together attracted Department of Computer Science faculty, staff, and their family members to enjoy good food and good company as the year draws to a close. Big thanks to CS Business Officer Greta Carl-Halle for organizing this event!

This talk was originally presented at UCSB's Hatlen Theater and hosted by the Office of Summer Sessions

This collaborative project aims to bridge the theoretical and practical aspects of designing efficient and robust solvers for linear systems with Laplacian matrices of graphs. Prof. Gilbert and his team plan to develop code packages that have good practical performance as well as provable guarantees in the worst case. 

Addressing the Science and Engineering Council of Santa Barbara, Inc. on October 12, 2016, Professor Matthew Turk gave a presentation titled “Beyond Pokémon Go: Augmented Reality for the Real World.”

At The 5th International Workshop on Complex Networks and their Applications in Milan, Italy, Professor Ben Y. Zhao will present a keynote talk on November 30, 2016 titled, "An Empirical View of Link Prediction in Social Networks."  The workshop brings together researchers from different scientific communities working on areas related to complex networks.

A New York Times article titled "Stepping Up Security for an Internet-of-Things World" (October 16, 2016, Technology section), includes comments by UCSB's Yan Shoshitaishvili, a Department of Computer Science PhD candidate. Read the full article here.

At the 7th Chinese Conference on Pattern Recognition (CCPR) in Chengdu, China, Professor Matthew Turk will present a keynote talk on November 6, 2016 titled, "Being There: Augmented Reality for Remote Collaboration." CCPR provides a forum for academic exchange and to promote development, research, and applications for pattern recognition in China.

Juan Zepeda was supervised by Dr. Yinghui Wu and Prof. Xifeng Yan on "Building a Server-Client Frameework: Visualizing Social Grahs and Querying Human Relations," during his UCSB internship. 

UC Santa Barbara's Department of Computer Science congratulates Professors Giovanni Vigna and Heather Zheng on their respective research awards from Google, Inc. Prof. Vigna's unrestricted gift is towards "2016 Security, Privacy and Anti-Abuse." Prof. Zheng's unrestricted gift is towards "60GHz Mobile Imaging Radar."

Computers may be made to "blink," offering a way to more tightly secure information from attack.

Associate Professor Wim van Dam was awarded a $200,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to investigate the benefits of quantum annealing for solving computational problems. The project titled "Strengths and Weaknesses of Simulated Quantum Annealing" explores the extent to which quantum computers will outperform classical ones by comparing the capabilities of quantum algorithms to the power of the best possible classical algorithms.

Congratulations to Dr. Çetin Koç on receiving an NSF award for his project entitled, "Cyber Physical Systems Security Education Workshop."

What's in a game? That question is addressed by an article in The UCSB Current newlsetter titled "Catch 'em All," which explores the popular, viral online mobile game Pokémon Go. Players must provide location and, in some cases, personal information (when signing in through a Google account, for example), which creates the very real potential for leaked information. What’s more, hackers seeking to cash in on the phenomenon have created fake companion apps or launched an attack on the servers.

CS Professor Tevfik Bultan is serving as General Chair of the Organizing Committee for the 2017 ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis.

Professor Matthew Turk has been named Program Co-Chair for the 2017 IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), the premier forum for computer vision researchers working on systems and algorithms effective for real-world applications of imaging and pattern recognition. The conference covers all areas of computer vision and will be held from March 24-31, 2017 at the Hyatt Vineyard Creek Hotel, Santa Rosa, CA.

Capital Press, the West's ag website, features an interview with Professor Chandra Krintz about her SmartFarm project that aims to help growers use data and technology to make their operations more efficient. Said Krintz in the article, "It's Amazon.com for ag. “Amazon was the first example of a smart shop...We want to do something analogous to that with SmartFarm." Read the full article here.

Theodore Georgiou has received back-to-back honors for Computer Science teaching excellence.  Congratulations to Theodore Georgiou on being named Outstanding Teaching Assistant in the Computer Science Program for 2015-2016. His selection was made by the graduating seniors in the program, based upon teaching excellence. The award was presented at the annual College of Engineering Senior Send-Off ceremony in June 2016.

SmartFarm uses computer technology with the goal of making farmers, and farms, more productive and more sustainable. Chandra Krintz grew up with parents and neighbors who tended crops and animals. Today, Professor Krintz is taking her engineering expertise out of the computer lab and onto the farm, sharing it with growers and ranchers in a long-range push toward food sustainability. Read more.

The 2016 ACM SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes Award was presented to Computer Science Professor Tim Sherwood, "for contributions to novel program analysis advancing architectural modeling and security." This annual award acknowledges an outstanding contribution to computer architecture made by an individual in the first 20 years of their career, and is named after Sir Maurice Wilkes -- creator of the world's first practical stored program computer in 1949. Sherwood joins an impressive list of prior SIGARCH award winners, including Stanford Professor William Dally (now Chief Scientist at NVIDIA); Stev

We congratulate the Computer Science Class of 2016

For the Computer Science Graduating Class of 2016, hard-earned MS and PhD diplomas are in hand and mortarboard tassels are tossed. We wish you every success in your professional pursuits. Enjoy these commencement photos...and Go Gauchos!

Congratulations to CS graduates Christo Wilson and Xia Zhou 

With an increasing average number of citations and a growing percentage of scientific papers belonging in the most frequently cited publications, UC Santa Barbara remains among the top 10 universities worldwide for research impact, as listed by the 2016 Leiden Rankings. UCSB’s scientific publications — which include papers in the areas of life, biomedical, mathematics, engineering, computer, natural and social sciences and humanities — are cited an average of 11.72 times. Read more here.

Computer Science graduating seniors have chosen CS Professor Rich Wolski as “Outstanding Faculty Member.” In addition to teaching the department's Operating Systems course here at UCSB, Dr. Wolski is co-founder of Eucalyptus Systems, Inc.  He received his M.S. and Ph.D.

In recognition of his outstanding efforts as an educator at UC Santa Barbara, Computer Science Assistant Professor Stefano Tessaro has earned the 2016 Northrop Grumman Excellence in Teaching Award. The award recognizes early-career faculty for their contributions and dedication as undergraduate educators, reflected in part by feedback from students.

Congratulations to Professor Heather Zheng, on her 2016 Google Faculty Research Award. This unrestricted gift will be used towards Prof. Zheng's research on 60GHz mobile imaging radar, and is part of Google's growing efforts to support excellent research in academia.

Professors Matthew Turk and Tobias Höllerer host local engineering and computer academy high school students.

In a Santa Barbara Independent article on May 23, 2016 about Bitcoin titled, "Computer Expert Raises New Concerns for Bitcoin Users," CS grad student Cetin Sahin was quoted as saying, “It's just not trustworthy right now.”

The Commencement Ceremony for Department of Computer Science graduates is set for 1:00pm on Saturday, June 11, 2016 on the Faculty Club Green.

Undergraduates mix it up with faculty and staff on the soccer field