UCSB faculty Matthew Turk, Tobias Höllerer, Chandra Krintz, and Rich Wolski, along with Media Arts and Technology professor JoAnn Kuchera-Morin, have received $1.25M in infrastructure funding from the National Science Foundation to equip the first generation AlloSphere, a large, three-story spherical environment for synthesis, manipulation, exploration and analysis of large-scale data sets, with applications in science, design, art, and entertainment. For more information on the AlloSphere, visit http://www.allosphere.ucsb.edu.

Prof. Divyakant Agrawal is serving as Program Chair for SIGMOD 2010, which will be held on June 6-11, 2010 in Indianapolis, USA. The annual ACM SIGMOD conference is the most prestigious international conference for database researchers, practitioners, developers, and users to explore cutting-edge ideas and results, and to exchange techniques, tools, and experiences.

A research team lead by Prof. Kevin Almeroth, Christopher Kruegel, and
Giovanni Vigna, at the University of California at Santa Barbara hijacked
the Mebroot botnet for about a month and used it to study drive-by
downloading. Drive-by downloading involves hacking into a legitimate site
to covertly install malicious software on visitors’ machines or redirect
them to another site.

Prof. Christopher Kruegel and Prof. Xifeng Yan are the first scholars appointed to
the Eugene Aas Endowed Chair and the Venkatesh Narayanamurti Endowed Chair
in Computer Science. A special inaugural celebration will be held October
22, 2009. Details are available on our Endowed Chairs webpage.