After four years of tremendous service, Linda Petzold is ending her tenure
as department chair, a position to be filled by Amr El Abbadi starting
July of 2007. In August 1987 Professor El Abbadi joined UC Santa Barbara,
where he has become a world leader in information management and
distributed systems. Over his career to this point he has co-authored more
than 200 research papers and graduated 11 Masters and 24 PhD students,
placing many in top industry and academic institutions. In 2007 Professor El

Ben Zhao, Assistant Professor at the Computer Science Department, has
been selected for ComputerWorld magazine’s “40 under 40″ list of top IT
innovators for his work on developing structured peer-to-peer overlay
networks. A profile of him and his research is published in the July
print and web editions of ComputerWorld magazine. The list, which
honors 40 top innovators under the age of 40, said Zhao’s work in
large-scale networks made him among the “people to watch” in the coming
years.

UCSB Computer Science Department is ranked 16th according to a recent study on
U.S. Computing Graduate Programs. The ranking is based on publication data from
1995 to 2003. The data was collected from the INSPEC bibliographic database.
The article describing the study was published in Communications of the ACM (June
2007, vol. 50, no. 6).

The team of Ben Foxworthy and Brendan Blackwood took home the $1000
award for their project CleverContacts at the Google sponsored event.
The group (which originally included Alan Savage, Brian, Stewart and
Matt Brinza) developed a tool that uses CallWave’s Internet Answering
Machine and Plaxo’s Web Sync services to implement electronic
identity management. For more information about the project go to
http://www.uweb.ucsb.edu/~herak/clevercontacts/