Fall 2020

The goal of this seminar is to help senior PhD students prepare for the job application process, whether it’s in academia or industry. The seminar will go over the writing, speaking, and interview skills you need to prepare a stellar job application package. More specifically, we will discuss how to give great job talks (online or in-person) and write good research statements. We will also talk about what to look for in a potential workplace, what sorts of questions to ask during your interview, how to negotiate and more.

CS 595J will be taught concurrently with Bren School's ESM 595AL
An interdisciplinary seminar focusing on sustainable food systems research from a variety of disciplinary and cross-cutting perspectives. Students critically read papers prior to the bi-weekly seminar and engage actively with the speaker. Speakers rotate each meeting of the class and include UCSB faculty, other UC faculty (remote seminars), and senior PhD students.

With the increasing diversity and complexity of computers and their applications, the development of efficient, reliable software has become increasingly dependent on automatic support from compilers and other program analysis and translation tools.

This course covers advanced topics on information retrieval, web search, and related scalable information systems. The topics include search engines, classification, indexing and data serving, ranking and recommendation, user behavior analysis, privacy, and system support for large-scale online services/data processing.

This course will revolve around the following topics: (1) quantum attacks against classical cryptographic primitives, (2) new cryptographic tools using quantum tools and, (3) performing quantum computations securely. Prerequisites: (1) Basic familiarity with cryptographic and quantum concepts, (2) Mathematical maturity (ability to understand and debug proofs) and, (3) Solid background in linear algebra. Course evaluation: One or two assignments along with a research project.

This graduate course will cover topics in discrete mathematical methods and combinatorics with applications to the solution of problems in computer science. We will consider topics in classical combinatorial methods and algorithms for selected problems in Algorithmic graph theory, classes of trees, enumeration methods, Lagrange inversion, number theory and primality testing, dynamic and fractional programming, FFT, Markov chains and random generation.

This course is a comprehensive introduction to solver-aided reasoning for software with a bit focus on program synthesis: an emerging area that sits at the intersection of systems, programming languages, HCI, and artificial intelligence. The goal of program synthesis is to generate programs automatically from high-level, potentially informal and incomplete descriptions.

The course covers all aspects of cryptocurrencies, including distributed consensus, blockchains, smart contracts and applications. We will focus in detail on Bitcoin and Ethereum as case studies.