News Archive

Want to be an entrepreneur? Don’t go to Wharton or Harvard. Instead, grab your surfboard and head to UC Santa Barbara.... Click to see full article at Forbes.com

Eucalyptus Systems, which was started in 2009 by Professor Rich Wolski, UCSB Computer Science researchers Chris Grzegorczyk, Daniel Nurmi, Graziano Obertelli, Neil Soman, Dmitrii Zagorodnov, and local entrepreneur Woody Rollins, has agreed to be acquired by Hewlett Packard.

UCSB Professor Divy Agrawal was a featured keynote speaker at the 40th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB 2014) in Hangzhou, China. The keynote address was structured as a joint talk comprising an industrial and academic speaker. The industrial speaker with Dr. Agrawal was Dr. Shivakumar Venkataraman, Vice President of Advertising Infrastructures from Google. The two of them spoke on the topic of datacenters as a new architecture from an engineering perspective and from a database research perspective.

Buggy software is as annoying as it is a waste of both time and money. With more web-based software being downloaded into more devices every day — as opposed to native software dedicated to specific machines — the potential for stalls and diminished functionality grows. Additionally, bugs can leave devices vulnerable to security breaches. And, they’re just aggravating.

UC Santa Barbara computer science professor Matthew Turk has been elected Fellow by the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR). He is cited by IAPR for his "contributions to computer vision and vision-based interaction." Turk was chosen from a select group of IAPR members: Only .25 percent of the organization’s membership is eligible for election to Fellow in any given two-year period. He received his award at a ceremony of the International Conference on Pattern Recognition in Stockholm, Sweden.

Professors Matthew Turk and Tobias Höllerer of the Four Eyes Lab were awarded a $477,428 National Science Foundation grant for a project titled "Crowd-Sourcing the World: Scalable Methods for Dynamic Structure from Motion.

Around 400 of the best cryptology researchers met at UCSB this past week for CRYPTO 2014, one of the world's premiere cryptology conferences. For five days, attendees were immersed in talks and presentations on campus, both formal and informal, on a dizzying array of topics related to cryptology: random number generation, cipher models, security and attacks, password protection, new technologies and trends in the digital world, just to name a few.

UCSB alumnus Aydın Buluç is working on energy-efficient parallel graph and data mining algorithms as part of a 2013 DOE Early Career award grant at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. In recent years technological advances have led to an explosion of data that is being generated faster than it can be analyzed. Graph abstractions provide a natural way to represent relationships among these large data sets, but existing algorithms consume too much energy per operation. Dr.

From flash mobs at the local mall to trending activist hashtags, social networks have quickly integrated themselves into modern human life and become a tool for instantaneous global communication. Every day, an estimated 700 million people (out of billions of registered users) worldwide are weighing in on the top social networking sites, swaying others, making decisions and forming relationships in a constant torrent of information.

Prof. Fred Chong is co-principal investigator with Prof. Ken Brown (GATech) on a new $480K National Science Foundation research grant to study quantum error correction schemes. The main challenge for building a quantum computer is that quantum components are prone to error. Chong and Brown will investigate surface codes, a new class of error correction codes for quantum computers. Surface codes are ensemble codes that more efficiently code redundancy into large collections of quantum bits.

PayScale recently ranked colleges based on the earning potential of computer science graduates and UCSB ranked #3. Rankings were based on the median staring salaries and mid-career salaries of computer science alumni. The top 20 list can be found in the Network World article here.

In the era of Internet and social media, where much of our communication happens online, it’s easy to take our privacy for granted and to trust that the messages we send and transactions we perform are kept unreadable to prying eyes. But according to UC Santa Barbara cryptologist Stefano Tessaro, even the most widely used standardized cryptographic algorithm, the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), could be only a break-in away from being catastrophically compromised.

Recently KCLU's Lance Orozco interviewed Prof. Giovanni Vigna to discuss a recent National Science Foundation grant to study trust violations in smartphones. The adoption of smartphones has steadily increased in the past few years, and smartphones have become the tool with which millions of users handle confidential information, such as financial and health-related data.

Forbes recently ranked the most entrepreneurial universities in the US based on the percentage of alumni who became business founders and owners and this year UCSB came in at #20. The full list can be found here.

Dr. Martin Holoien passed away on July 18, 2014. Marty had a long association with the Department. He joined as a Lecturer back in early 80's when the department consisted of only eight faculty members. He moved from Minnesota after a distinguished career as Chair of the Department of Computer Science at Moorhead State College (now Moorhead State University) and Director of its Computer Center. He published several computer science textbooks and taught many different courses at UCSB including introductory courses for computer science and for engineering students.

You’re on your smartphone, browsing through Facebook. In a fit of productivity, you search for, say, a project management app to help you use your non-Instagram and cat video time more effectively. You download and install the first one you come across … only to find that it doesn’t do anything. No reminders, no calendar, no clock, nothing. Oh, well. You exit the app and go back to Facebook.

Professor Tevfik Bultan recently received a National Science Foundation grant for a project titled "Data Model Verification". The three-year, $499,888 grant will seek to develop innovative approaches to software verification, particularly focusing on code that manipulates and updates the data in modern software systems.

Professor Ambuj Singh has been appointed the new Chair of the Department of Computer Science, effective July 1, 2014. Singh takes over the reins from Prof. Subhash Suri, who is returning to full time research and teaching after serving as Chair for the past three years.

Each year a committee of industry experts and faculty chooses 10 papers from the top conferences to highlight in the annual "Top Picks" issue of IEEE Micro — and UCSB yet again has a paper on the list. This year the paper is titled "SurfNoC: A Low Latency and Provably Non-Interfering Approach to Secure Networks-On-Chip" and represents a collaboration between UC Santa Barbara, UC San Diego, and the Naval Postgraduate School.

A team of researchers at UCSB, led by Prof. Ben Zhao have explored a practice they've coined "crowdturfing" in which organizations create a false positive reputation on social networks such as Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter.  They've discovered that much of the activity on crowdsourcing websites involves asking workers to follow or like particular social network posts. In an effort to identify crowdturfing they have developed machine learning software which can detect crowdturfers on China's version of Twitter with 95 to 99 percent accuracy.

The National Science Foundation has awarded more than $1 million to a project led by Prof. Giovanni Vigna to model trust between users and smartphones. The model will explore how cybercriminals can take advantage of users' misplaced trust and will consider ways to secure these weaknesses. See the full announcement here.

Outstanding Graduate Student: Aaron Elmore Outstanding Publication: Ivan Bocic, Madhukar Kedlaya ​Outstanding Dissertation: Gianluca Stringhini, First Place                                 Muath Alkhalaf, Honorable Mention                                 Steffen Gauglitz, Honorable Mention

Paul Schmitt, a second year PhD student in CS, received the UCSB Dean's Fellowship for 2014-15. Paul is a member of the MOMENT Lab where he is advised by Prof. Elizabeth Belding. His research is focused on developing wireless network solutions to provide or improve Internet connectivity and performance in under-resourced regions.

ShadowMaps, the team that created a cloud-based service software, including Computer Science PhD student Danny Iland, took home the grand prize in the recent New Venture Competition at UCSB, sponsored by the Technology Management Program. Congratulations, Danny and the ShadowMaps team! For more information, see the Noozhawk article here.

Congratulations to the following students who plan to graduate in 2014 with a Master's degree from the CS department: Nadav Caspi Leah Chatkeonopadol Christopher Coakley Siladitya Dey Angus Forbes Vivek Goswami Erdinc Korpeoglu Smruthi Manjunath Sivabalan Narayanan Yifan Shen Zhe Song Yilei Wang Nazli Dereli Geoffrey Douglas Shivapriya Hiremath Christopher Horuk Kyle Macnamara Sean Maloney Alex Morales Mock Suwannatat Bo Yang Liang Xia

Congratulations to the following students who have graduated over the past year with PhD degrees from the CS department: Nan Li Hebatallah Saadeldeen Hassan Wassel Aaron Elmore Jaideep Nijjar Maha Alabduljalil Muath Alkhalaf Adam Doupe Kyle Klein Gianluca Stringhini Hakan Yildiz Adam Lugowski Wei Zhang Zengbin Zhang Steffen Gauglitz ​Jeff Browne Arijit Khan Bita Mazloom Lara Deek

Congratulations to the following students who plan to graduate with a bachelor's degree in Computer Science in 2014:

Prof. Diana Franklin was a Program co-Chair for two recent key computing conferences: the Southern California Celebration of Women in Computing that took place in the San Diego area in April, and the ACM International Conference on Computing Frontiers that took place ths week in Cagliari, Italy.

Dr. Jonathan Ventura, who received his PhD from the department in 2012, is joining the Department of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs (UCCS) as an Assistant Professor. Dr. Ventura was a member of the Four Eyes Lab, advised by Prof. Tobias Hollerer, and his dissertation topic was "Wide-Area Visual Modeling and Tracking for Mobile Augmented Reality." He also received his BS and MS degrees in Computer Science at UCSB.

Ted Kim, a professor in Media Arts and Technology with a joint appointment in Computer Science, is the recipient of the 2014 Harold J. Plous Award. Prof. Kim will give his Plous lecture, entitled “Visual Effects in the 21st Century,” on Monday, May 12, beginning at 4 pm, in the McCune Conference Room, 6020 Humanities and Social Sciences Building. It is free and open to the public.

In the Department of Computer Science, and all across campus, Teaching Assistants are pivotal to the success of our undergraduate students. Each quarter we recognize those TAs who went above and beyond to support our students and faculty by presenting them with the Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award. The recipients of the Outstanding TA Award for Winter 2014 are:

The Third Edition of the Computing Handbook Set, edited by Professor Teo Gonzalez and colleagues, has just been published by Chapman&Hall/CRC. The two-volume handbook contains 3816 pages.

Professor Tao Yang’s paper, “PYRROS: static task scheduling and code generation for message passing multiprocessors,” co-authored with Rutgers Professor Apostolos Gerasoulis, is one of 35 papers that were selected for inclusion in the retrospective volume publication 25 Years of the International Conference on Supercomputing.

A recent article from Dartmouth College describes Prof. Xia Zhao’s research agenda to improve smartphone network connectivity. Prof. Zhao received her PhD in CS at UCSB in June of 2013, advised by Prof. Heather Zhao.

Professor Chandra Krintz has been named to Connected World Magazine’s Women of M2M List, which features some of the most powerful women in the technology sector. Those selected will be honored at a dinner near Chicago on April 10. M2M (Machine to Machine) refers to technologies that allow both wireless and wired systems to communicate with other devices of the same type.

Prof. Matthew Turk is quoted in a recent New York Times story and a​ Wired article on automatic facial expression analysis, commenting on a recently published study on detecting real vs. fake facial expressions.

As Winter quarter comes to a close, and the 2013-2014 academic year continues to fly by faster than any of us can hope to keep up with, the Graduate Affairs Committee would like to take a moment to look back and recognize those students who were truly exceptional in their positions as Teaching Assistants in Fall quarter 2013: Daniel Kudrow: Daniel was nominated by Bryce Boe for his standout efforts in CS 24 Sourav Medya: Sourav was nominated by Ambuj Singh for his dedication to students in CS 130A

Prof. Ben Hardekopf has been awarded a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (NSF CAREER) Award for his research on static analysis of dynamic languages. The CAREER Award is one of the NSF’s most prestigious awards in honor of exceptional junior faculty and will support Prof. Hardekopf’s research with a $500,000, five-year grant. Prof.

UC Santa Barbara scholars dissect the popular — and polarizing — digital currency. See more at http://www.news.ucsb.edu/2014/014010/pure-speculation-bitcoin-or-bust#sthash.IzwZVk4H.dpuf

UCSB Four Eyes Lab PhD student James Schaffer, researcher John O’Donovan, professor Tobias Höllerer, and colleagues at SA Technologies, the US Army Research Lab, and Carnegie Mellon University have received the Best Paper Award at the IEEE International Inter-Disciplinary Conference on Cognitive Methods in Situation Awareness and Decision Support (CogSIMA 2014), which took place in San Antonio, TX on March 3-6, 2014.