Congratulations to Yanick Fratantonio, who will be joining EURECOM as an Assistant Professor beginning September 2017. Currently, Yanick works in the UCSB Computer Lab with Professors Christopher Kruegel and Giovanni Vigna. His research spans various aspects of mobile security, such as malware detection, vulnerability analysis, characterization of emerging threats, and development of novel protection mechanisms.
Congratulations to Yan Shoshitaishvili on his faculty appointment at Arizona State University. Focused on advancing the state of the art of binary analysis, Yan currently works in the UCSB Computer Security Lab with Professors Christopher Kruegel and Giovanni Vigna.
For the second consecutive year (2017 and 2016), Arizona State University has ranked #1 in the U.S. for innovation on the U.S. News & World Report "Best Colleges" list.
A paper titled "Ramblr: Making Reassembly Great Again" received the Distinguished Paper Award at the 2017 Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) held in San Diego. Congratulations to graduate students Ruoyu Wang, Yan Shoshitaishvili, Antonio Bianchi, Aravind Machiry, John Grosen, Paul Grosen, and professors Christopher Kruegel and Giovanni Vigna.
NDSS fosters information exchange among researchers and practitioners of network and distributed system security.
Reprising his keynote talk from the IEEE Virtual Reality 2017 Conference in March, Professor Tobias Höllerer will present "Notes on Virtual and Augmented Reality" at VRLA Expo 2017 on Friday, April 14.
Can computer science help stave off world hunger?
During the IEEE Virtual Reality 2017 Conference this March in Los Angeles, California, Professor Tobias Höllerer gave the Opening Keynote titled "Notes on Virtual and Augmented Reality." IDG publication Network World provided further exposure for Professor Höllerer's remarks in a March 27 article "Advanced technologies that are ready to make AR a consumer reality," available ">
Congratulations to Joseph E. McMahan, on winning the inaugural Distinguished Graduate Student Presentation Award for his talk at summit.cs 2017. Titled “Software Like a Bridge,” McMahan’s presentation addressed formal methods in systems and architecture.
McMahan is a PhD candidate for computer architecture, working in the ArchLab with his advisor, Professor Tim Sherwood.
Prof. Elizabeth Belding and Graduate Student Morgan Vigil-Hayes receive Best Paper Honorable Mention
For their paper titled "#Indigenous: Tracking the Connective Actions of Native American Advocates on Twitter," Professor Elizabeth Belding and CS graduate student Morgan Vigil-Hayes received a Best Paper Honorable Mention at the 20th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2017).
Congratulations to CS undergraduate student Hyun Bum Cho, on receiving a $1,000 scholarship from DiscoverE – a coalition of engineering professionals. Hyun is one of three, UC Santa Barbara engineering undergraduate students chosen for their work to receive the award.
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.