News Archive

Documentary explores the gender gap in computer science

Computer Science alum Amibabh Saran wins prestigious Electric Vehicles Award at IDTechEx 2016

Paul Schmitt, a fourth year Computer Science PhD student, has received a UCSB President’s Dissertation Year Fellowship for 2016-17. His research focuses on mobile network connectivity, problems related to dynamic spectrum and spectrum sensing, and connectivity in under-resourced areas.

Computer Science professor Elizabeth Belding has been named General Chair of ACM HotMobile 2017, the International Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications.

CS Professor Linda Petzold discusses the network of circadian neurons that communicate to re-establish synchronization 

In recognition of his commitment to fostering student success, CS Professor Tevfik Bultan wins the 2015-16 Academic Senate Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award.

Cisco Systems, Inc. has awarded a generous gift to CS Professor Tim Sherwood's Computer Architecture and Embedded Systems Lab to support research entitled, "Formally Analyzing Software Security on Naked Embedded Hardware."

Professor Ben Y. Zhao was recently selected as a 2015 Distinguished Member by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

Computer Science team receive Honorable Mention for Best Paper at 3DUI 2016

The department remembers Professor Emeritus Marvin Marcus, who passed away on February 20, 2016.

Professor Tim Sherwood will be joining the Office of Research as Acting Associate Vice Chancellor of Research, effective April 1, 2016.

Professor Linda Petzold was recently awarded the 2016 SIAM Prize for Distinguished Service to the Profession. The prize is awarded to an applied mathematician who has made distinguished contributions to the furthering of applied mathematics at the national level. The prize will be awarded at the SIAM annual meeting in July.

CS students attend MIT's Rising Stars in EECS Workshop.

Professor Teofilo Gonzalez will deliver the keynote entitled Approximation  Algorithms: Methodologies, Appications and Empirical Evaluation at  the Seventh Annual International Symposium on Parallel Architectures, Algoritms and Programming (PAAP 2015) to be held in Nanjing, China on Dec. 12-14, 2015. Professor Gonzalez will also pesent several Seminars during his visit in the cities of Nanjing and Guangzhou.

The Theia open source library for 3D modeling, written by UCSB PhD student Chris Sweeney, won first place in the Association for Computing Machinery Multimedia (ACM MM) Open Source Software competition. Finalists for the award gave presentations at ACM Multimedia where the award was announced. A photo of Chris presenting at the competition is featured above along with some photos of 3D models generated by the Theia library. More information about the contest can be found here.

Computer Science Professor Matthew Turk was recently awarded a $47,000 grant from the U.S. Navy entitled One+ Class Support Vector Machine Learning for Interactive Object Detection. The grant supports research in computer vision and machine learning focused on detecting objects in images and video.

Viet Tung Hoang, who is currently a postdoc in the cryptography laboratory at UCSB, and his co-authors, Professor Jonathan Katz and Ph.D student Alex Malozemoff (University of Maryland), received the Best Student Paper Award at the 2015 ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) taking place in Denver, CO. CCS is one of the top-tier conferences in the broad area of computer and network security.

UCSB Computer Science Professors Ben Zhao and Heather Zheng are working on a National Science Foundation funded project to model online user behavior. Using logs of online and smartphone user action, referred to as "clickstreams", the researchers hope to build natural, data driven models of human behavior. The full article in the UCSB Current can be found here.

Computer Science Professor Tevfik Bultan has been awarded a DARPA grant for his project “Integrated Symbolic execution for Space-Time Analysis of Code (ISSTAC)”.

U.S. News & World Report ranks UCSB number 8 among the country’s top public universities. See more at: http://www.news.ucsb.edu/2015/015866/cream-crop#sthash.AgRC4RsW.dpuf

A two-week boot camp for new graduate students kicks off right before the beginning of the academic year, introducing and refreshing skills around programming, software, and data. This project is supported by the Network Science IGERT through the National Science Foundation, and by the College of Engineering and the College of Letters and Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. To read more about the Boot Camp, please visit the IGERT site here.

Computer Science Professors Giovanni Vigna  and Christopher Kruegel have been awarded a grant for the project “Continuum: Finding Space and Time Vulnerabilities in Java Programs.” The Principle Investigator is William Robertson at Northeastern University. The Co-PIs are Engin Kirda at Northeastern University, and Giovanni Vigna and Christopher Kruegel, both at UCSB.

Computer Science Professors Ben Zhao and Heather Zheng have been awarded an NSF grant for their project “User Behavior Modeling and Prediction in Anonymous Social Networks”.

CS alumnus Dr. Muath Alkhalaf received the 2015 ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award for his dissertation titled: “Automatic Detection and Repair of Input Validation and Sanitization Bugs.” Dr. Alkhalaf’s dissertation focuses on input validation and sanitization errors in web application code. According to the OWASP’s Top Ten Project, which lists the top ten sources of vulnerabilities in web applications, these types of errors are the most common cause of security vulnerabilities.

UCSB was ranked #8 in a list of the top 20 universities most likely to get you a job in Silicon Valley. The list was compiled by Jobvite, a recruiting platform. Great job, UCSB! For an in-depth article on the subject, please see The Daily Nexus here. For the original article and complete list, go here.

by Rich Kildare

During the 40th anniversary celebration of the Theoretical Computer Science (TCS) journal, CS Professor Oscar Ibarra was noted as the most prolific author contributing to the computer science journal. TCS is published by the prestigious academic publishing company Elsevier and covers topics in theoretical computer science.

 

by Rich Kildare Computer Science Professor Chandra Krintz was named the UCSB Faculty Sustainability Champion for the 2015-2016 Academic Year.

CS Professor Elizabeth Belding has received the 2015 NCWIT Harrold and Notkin Research and Graduate Mentoring award at the organization’s summit, which took place in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina on May 19-21, 2015. The National Center for Women and Information Technology, or NCWIT, is a non-profit organization working to correct the imbalance of gender diversity in technology and computing.

In a recent Washington Post article entitled, “A disaster foretold — and ignored”, CS Professor Giovanni Vigna offered his insight on the state of internet security.

Last week, CS seniors were honored in a senior sendoff event at the Bren commons. The next day, June 13th, 2015, commencement was held for the seniors. Among the honorees at the senior sendoff event was Professor Phill Conrad, chosen as Outstanding CS Faculty Member. Keith Avery was chosen as the Outstanding Teaching Assistant for the Department of Computer Science. Bronwyn Agata Perry-Huston was chosen Outstanding CS Senior and was also honored with Computer Science Distinction in the Major.

The California Energy Commission has just funded a project whose collaborators include UC Santa Barbara, UC Davis and agricultural sustainability tech startup PowWow Energy. In a nutshell, the project, led by PowWow Energy, seeks to convert huge amounts of data captured by smart meters installed in agricultural fields in the state into information that could assist in better decision-making in agriculture.

The year-end Computer Science BBQ recently took place at Goleta Beach, with plenty of food and camaraderie. Five students were recognized at the event. Outstanding Publication: Luca Invernizzi Faisal Nawab Outstanding Dissertation:     Huan Sun     Alexandros Kapravelos Outstanding Student:

A multi-university team that includes three professors from the University of California, Santa Barbara, has been awarded a five-year grant, totaling more than $6 million from the Department of Defense’s (DOD) Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) program.