Bren School faculty, students and research initiatives are some of the most well regarded successes on the UC Irvine campus. We are pleased to announce the following noteworthy achievements for 2008.
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Awards, grants and other honors can be sent to icsnews@ics.uci.edu to be considered for publication.
MAY 2008
Dutt authors on-chip communication architectures book
Nikil
Dutt
Sudeep
PasrichaChancellor's Professor Nikil Dutt and doctoral student Sudeep Pasricha have co-authored a book "On-Chip Communication Architectures: System on Chip Interconnect".
A comprehensive reference on concepts, research and trends in on-chip communication architecture design, the book provides readers with a comprehensive survey, not available elsewhere, of all current standards for on-chip communication architectures.
Dutt's research lies at the intersection of compilers, architectures and computer-aided design, with a specific focus on the exploration, evaluation and design of domain-specific embedded systems that span research issues in hardware, software, networked, and ubiquitous systems.
Other projects include low-power/low-energy compilation and synthesis, validation and verification of pipelined processors, software/hardware interfaces for distributed embedded systems, and memory architecture exploration for embedded systems.
Additional information about Dutt and his work can be found on his web site.
APRIL 2008
Student to attend European Consortium for Political Research social network analysis course
Yong
Ming KowYong Ming Kow, a first year Informatics graduate student, has been chosen to attend a two week course in social network analysis at Ljubljana University in Slovenia.
The course will take place in August and is sponsored by the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR).
The ECPR is an independent, scholarly association, established in 1970. It supports and encourages the training, research and cross-national co-operation of political scientists throughout Europe and beyond.
Kow's research focuses on the development of knowledge systems from their historical-cultural roots, based on a study of guilds in World of Warcraft (WoW) and inter-dependency of knowledge systems in information space and their implications to knowledge production based on a study of WoW gaming communities.
Jain gives keynote talk at World Wide Web Conference 2008
Ramesh
JainBren Professor Ramesh Jain will be giving a keynote talk entitled "Events in Web Science" at the Web Science Workshop to be held at the WWW2008 conference in Beijing, China. WWW2008 is the 17th annual World Wide Web Conference, organized in part by Sir Tim Berners-Lee (father of the WWW).
The Web Science workshop has invited researchers to present and explain their prediction of the future of the Web, to discuss how this evolution can be observed and influenced, and to reflect on why the Web has evolved to its current state.
Jain will also participate on a panel, “The Future of Online Social Interactions: What to Expect in 2020,” on Wednesday, April 23.
More on WWW2008 and the Web Sciences work shop are available at their respective web sites.
Finalists of hITEC entrepreneurship competition announced
Three teams advanced to the finals of hITEC, the Bren School's Technology Entrepreneurship Competition. The finalists also earned a spot in the Stradling Yocca Carlson and Rauth Business Plan Competition sponsored by the Paul Merage School of Business.
The final products, created by Bren School students, with the guidance of a faculty or corporate mentor, span a broad spectrum of uses.
VideoOnTheWall
Ajey Shah, Arjun Satish, Tommy Chheng, Avi Mehta, Ala KhalifehVideoOnTheWall gives everyday people the ability to become "news reporters" on the Internet.
Users capture footage via the camera functionality on a cell phone and transmit to our servers. These streaming news reports can be viewed by anyone on the Internet live.
The experience is interactive. A trusted network of viewers can send real-time messages to the reporters for instant feedback. The system ushers social web interaction to the next level.
Reporters can have their own personal page with all their previous video casts, which can spur a following for the most popular reporters, in the same way in which people follow popular bloggers.
Click2School
Ajay Mishra, Deepika Gandhi, Ajeet KumarClick2School aims to bridge the gap between the school edcuation and the Internet and provide a platform to use the Internet as an effective educational tool.
It aims to provide a rich and user friendly environment for learning, problem solving, information sharing, and social networking for school students.
It provides content filtering based on school grades (4th, 5th, etc.) and students' interests to cater to the needs of a specific age group.
Adball.com
Minas Gjoka, Karl Ring, Nayana, Wagle, Karim El Defrawy, Michael Sirivianos (Merage School)Adball is an online collaborative platform that creates content for advertising campaigns. It leverages the creativity of large and diverse online community of consumers themselves.
Adball empowers users to facilitate the collaborative creation of multi-media based advertising communications. From print advertisements, web banner ads, radio jingles, to videos for both television and the web, Adball gives corporate clients access to the creative power of their most powerful resource, their own consumers.
It has been said that successful marketers speak to consumers in the ways they want to be spoken to; Adball says why not let the consumers do the talking?
The final competition placing and prizes will be awarded on Wednesday, June 12, at the Project:ICS Showcase.
hITEC, formerly extreme computing, is the cornerstone of the Bren School entrepreneurship program. This year, the program was sponsored with generous donations from: Paul Mockapetris, Ph.D. '81, MIND Research Institute, Northwind Ventures, Nexvisionix and Printronix.
The competition is designed to foster a spirit of entrepreneurship among Bren School and UC Irvine students, and fuel the development of new technologies that have the potential to positively impact the marketplace.
Student receives fellowship to conduct research in Singapore
Jahmeilah
RichardsonJahmeilah Richardson, a first year graduate student in Informatics, received a National Science Foundation Fellowship in a program called the East Asia and Pacific Summer Institute.
The programs primary goals are to introduce students to East Asia and Pacific science and engineering in the context of a research setting, and to help students initiate scientific relationships that will better enable future collaboration with foreign counterparts.
The funds will enable her to spend eight weeks conducting research in Singapore this summer.
Richardson's research interests are in fieldwork and usability testing, specifically she is interested in the transition technology makes from the research setting into natural/real life settings. She is also interested in technologies to facilitate learning and communication across cultures.
Students to present poster at Mobile HCI 2008
Ruy Cervantes and Nithya Sambasivan, first year graduate students in Informatics, had a poster, "VoiceList: A User-generated Audio-based Mobile User Interface," accepted to the Mobile HCI 2008 conference in Amsterdam.
The conference provides a forum for academics and practitioners to discuss the challenges and potential solutions for effective interaction with mobile systems and services.
It covers the design, evaluation and application of techniques and approaches for all mobile and wearable computing devices and services.
Tomlinson awarded $200,000 NSF CreativeIT grant
Bill
TomlinsonProfessor of informatics Bill Tomlinson and Lindsey Richland, assistant professor of education have been awarded a $200,000 NSF CreativeIT grant.
This grant will support the dissertation research of Informatics doctoral student Eric Baumer, who contributed significantly to the grant.
The two year grant funds the project titled "Computational Metaphor Identification for Supporting Creativity in Science Education" and will focuse on analyzing the metaphors students use to understand and conceptualize material.
Identifying the metaphors that students use in their learning has previously been labor intensive, requiring a great deal of time and attention from a human instructor.
The work will develop a suite of computational techniques to enable and standardize the process of metaphor identification. The result will be a technological tool kit that supports human creativity by automatically identifying metaphors in bodies of text.
The tool kit will then be evaluated as a technology to foster creative learning in high school science students and combined with existing high quality, inquiry-based science instructional modules in the WISE system from UC Berkeley (SAIL software) so that the metaphors that it extracts may be presented and incorporated with other learning processes.
Tomlinson's research deals with environmental issues in information technology ("Green IT"), multi-device human-computer interaction, computer supported learning, multi-agent systems, and real-time animation.
Students receive NSF Graduate Research Fellowship
Lily
Irani
Julie
RicoLily Irani, a doctoral student in informatics and Julie Rico, an undergraduate informatics major, have each been selected for the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP), which provides students with three years of funding -- up to $121,500 -- for research-focused Master's and Ph.D. degrees in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields.
NSF Fellows are expected to become knowledge experts who can contribute significantly to research, teaching, and innovations in science and engineering.
Irani's research interests are everyday privacy strategies in collaboration, design for and in the "developing world," and gender issues in technology.
Rico conducts research in the Bren School's LUCI (Laboratory for Ubiquitous Computing and Interaction) Lab that focuses on the challenges of designing, using, and understanding the elements of a ubiquitous computing world.
Some of these different facets include computing in the face of mobile computers and mobile users, understanding and exploring new patterns of socio-technical behavior, and the design and construction of technology which supports ubiquitous computing.
MARCH 2008
Students awarded $10,000 Google Anita Borg Scholarship
Silvia
Lindtner
Gabriela
MarcuSilvia Lindtner, a doctoral student in informatics and Gabriela Marcu, an undergraduate informatics major, have been selected as winners of the Google Anita Borg Scholarship for women in computing.
Each student will receive a $10,000 scholarship from Google, and will attend the 2008 Google Scholars' Retreat held in April where they will be joined by recipients of the Google United Negro College Fund and Google Hispanic College Fund scholarship programs.
The networking retreat will include workshops with a series of speakers, panelists, breakout sessions and social activities.
Lindtner, a Long Beach native, was part of a team within a Siemens Research lab that developed an interactive computer game, Fish 'N' Steps, which links a player's daily footstep count to the growth and activity of animated fish.
Her team's idea was a twist on the Tamagotchi "digital pet" that created a sensation when manufacturer Bandai introduced it in 1996. The "health" and "happiness" of the handheld virtual creature depended on how well the user took care of it by responding to prompts for food, play and sanitation.
Marcu is a member of the first class of the new Informatics major in the Bren School and has helped spread the word about the new program by forming the Informatics Student Association, (INSA).
She is a member of the Women in Computer Science (WICS) group at UCI which helps and encourages women to pursue a college degree and a successful career in the Computer Science fields.
Marcu also provides community outreach to local high schools and community colleges through the Bren School's Student Ambassador where she encourages students to pursue a career in the information and computer sciences field.
The scholarship is named in honor of Dr. Anita Borg (1949 - 2003), who devoted her adult life to revolutionizing the way we think about technology and dismantling barriers that keep women and minorities from entering computing and technology fields.
Recipients are selected based on the strength of candidates' academic background and demonstrated leadership.
Jain's article on EventWeb featured in IEEE Computer Magazine
Ramesh
JainBren Professor of Information and Computer Sciences Ramesh Jain had his article EventWeb: Developing a Human-Centered Computing System featured in the February 2008 issue of IEEE Computer Magazine.
The article focuses on EventWeb, a human-centered computing system that will give users a compelling experience by combining quality content, carefully planned data organization and access mechanisms, and powerful presentation approaches.
The full text of the article (PDF, 1.6 MB) is available for download .
Jain is an active researcher in multimedia information systems, image databases, machine vision, and intelligent systems and is also involved with Seraja, an event-based computing and EventWeb web site.
Additional information about Jain and his work can be found on his web site.
IEEE Computer, the flagship publication of the IEEE Computer Society, publishes peer-reviewed technical content that covers all aspects of computer science, computer engineering, technology, and applications.
IEEE Computer is a resource that practitioners, researchers, and managers can rely on to provide timely information about current research developments, trends, best practices, and changes in the profession.
Smyth receives Google Research Award for Statistical Text Mining
Padhraic
SmythProfessor of computer science Padhraic Smyth has received a gift of $60,000 Google Research Award to support research on statistical text mining of very large document collections using parallel computing.
Statistical text mining is valuable in that it can discover underlying topics and trends that are otherwise hidden in very large data sets, like PubMed, a public digital library
containing approximately 16 million research papers published in the biomedical literature.Using existing algorithms would take several months of computer time to analyze the 16 million documents on a single computer - but the Smyth group has recently developed new techniques using multiple distributed processors that reduce the time for this analysis to about 1 day.
The Google Research Award will enable Professor Smyth and his research group to explore and develop newer and faster text mining algorithms, with potential applications in Web search, digital libraries, new types of browsers for
medical text data, and so on.Other researchers involved in this work include Professor Max Welling and Dave Newman (Computer Science), Professor Mark Steyvers (Cognitive Sciences), and Computer Science Ph.D. students Arthur Asuncion, Chaitanya Chemudugunta, and America Holloway.
FEBRUARY 2008
Tomlinson receives Sloan fellowship
Bill
TomlinsonProfessor of informatics Bill Tomlinson has been awarded a 2008 Sloan Research Fellowship, one of the most prestigious awards given to young researchers.
The Sloan Research Fellowship program, which began in 1955, will provide recipients with $50,000 over two years to pursue research of their choosing. Tomlinson is among 118 scientists at 64 colleges and universities to receive the honor this year.
The program supports the work of exceptional young researchers in a variety of fields, including physics, computer science, economics and mathematics. Nine UCI researchers have earned Sloan fellowships in the past five years.
Tomlinson, also an affiliate of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), is interested in the relationship between information technology and environmental issues, human-computer interaction and educational technology. He joined the UCI faculty in 2003.
“Both the Bren School of ICS and Calit2 have been incredibly supportive of my research over the last several years,” Tomlinson said. “This fellowship is an exciting external recognition from a major philanthropic institute, and helps give me the financial freedom to pursue other cutting-edge projects in the future.”
Tomlinson's primary research interests focus on the field of "Green IT" - looking at the ways in which information technology impacts global environmental issues.
He has several projects under way in this area, including an educational museum exhibit that helps children learn about restoration ecology, an online site that helps people engage in environmentally preferable purchasing, and a system that lets people track their own environmental impact.
His group conducts research in multi-device human-computer interaction, computer supported learning, multi-agent systems, and real-time animation.
Jarecki receives NSF CAREER Award
Stanislaw
JareckiStanislaw Jarecki, assistant professor of computer science, has been awarded a $450,000 NSF CAREER research award entitled "Secure Multi-Party Protocols, from Feasibility to Practice".
The goal of the proposed research is to design cryptographic algorithms for a variety of secure multi-party tasks, including private authentication schemes, aggregate signatures, group key agreement schemes, and threshold and proactive cryptosystems.
Such algorithms have applications to secure networking, enabling reliable and privacy-protecting operation of systems ranging from fault-tolerant services to group-wide trust in ad-hoc mobile networks and peer-to-peer groups.
Tsudik to give invited talk at ASIACCS '08
Gene
TsudikGene Tsudik, professor of computer science and Managing Director of the Secure Computing and Networking Center, will be giving an invited talk entitled "Confronting a Mobile Adversary in Unattended Sensor Networks" at ASIACCS in Tokyo, Japan next month.
ASIACCS is the ACM Symposium on InformAtion, Computer and Communications Security, and was created by the ACM Special Interest Group on Security, Audit, and Control (SIGSAC) in 2005.
Tsudik's research interests are mainly in computer/network security, privacy and applied cryptography. His recent work focuses on privacy in Internet services, RFID systems and mobile ad hoc networks, as well as security in sensor networks and storage systems.
His research also covers secure group communication, in particular, group key agreement, group signatures and group access control. He also is interested in database security and public key cryptography.
Dourish named member of CHI Academy
Paul
DourishPaul Dourish, professor of Informatics has been named one of six new members of the CHI Academy, and will be recognized at the 2008 SIGCHI Awards in Florence, Italy.
Throughout his career, Dourish has worked at the intersection of computer science and social science, with a focus on the domains of computer-supported cooperative work and ubiquitous computing.
From social science, he draws not only empirical and methodological considerations but also theoretical and conceptual frameworks that illuminate the role of technology in social and cultural production.
His recent work has focused in particular on problems of location and of privacy, considering how people achieve concerned social action with, around, and through mobile technologies and digital media.
ACM SIGCHI, the ACM's Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction, brings together people working on the design, evaluation, implementation, and study of interactive computing systems for human use.
ACM SIGCHI provides an international, interdisciplinary forum for the exchange of ideas about the field of human-computer interaction (HCI).
The CHI Academy is an honorary group of individuals who have made extensive contributions to the study of HCI and who have led the shaping of the field.
JANUARY 2008
Franz receives $50,000 gift from Google
Michael
FranzComputer science professor Michael Franz has been awarded an unrestricted gift of $50,000 from Google.
"I am very grateful to Google for this donation," said Franz. "This money will help to make our research at UCI even more
competitive."Professor Franz is an expert on virtual machines and mobile-code security. In his 11 years at UCI, he has graduated 11 Ph.D. students and been awarded more than $7 Million in competitive Federal research funding as Principal Investigator.
For more information about Franz and his research, visit his web site.
Majumder chair of recent ACM VRST conference
Aditi
MajumderAssistant professor of computer science, Aditi Majumder recently hosted the Association for Computing Machinery's Virtual Reality Software and Technology (ACM VRST) in Newport Beach, CA. Co-chairs included Larry Hodges from UNC Charlotte and Daniel Cohen-Or from Tel Aviv University.
In its 14th year, VRST is an annual conference devoted to the technical aspects of virtual reality. The recent conference yielded the highest attendance in the posters and panels track in the last ten years.
Majumder's research addresses how to produce a seamless image on a large-scale tiled display - an important problem to both the scientific and entertainment fields.
Majumder has developed a suite of mathematical models, methods and software to correct the geometric, chromatic and luminescent variations that arise when tiling multiple projection displays.
Franz to be keynote speaker at Cyber Security and Information Intelligence Research Workshop
Michael
FranzComputer science professor Michael Franz and professor Richard Kemmerer of UC Santa Barbara have been invited as keynote speakers to the Cyber Security and Information Intelligence Research (CSIIR) Workshop that will be held in May at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
CSIIR brings together key researchers and decision makers from the national intelligence community, academia, and industrial research labs with a focus on cyber infrastructure protection.
Franz is the Principal Investigator on several competitive grants totaling almost $5M. His current research focuses on security and efficiency aspects of mobile code.
For more information about Franz and his research, visit his web site.
Majumder receives $70,000 to study tractability of seas projectors and cameras
Aditi
MajumderAssistant professor of computer science, Aditi Majumder has received $70,000 in seed funding from NSF to analyze the tractability of using a sea of projectors and cameras for providing all-pervasive displays that can render pixels anywhere and everywhere, both as information carriers and interaction agents.
The project aims to identify the aspects of the problem, if any, that are theoretically intractable as against those that are limited by current technology, under various conditions of known and unknown display and device (projectors and cameras) parameters.
Majumder's research addresses how to produce a seamless image on a large-scale tiled display - an important problem to both the scientific and entertainment fields.
Majumder has developed a suite of mathematical models, methods and software to correct the geometric, chromatic and luminescent variations that arise when tiling multiple projection displays.
Newman utilizes supercomputer to research text mining
David
NewmanResearch scientist David Newman has been awarded 325,000 hours on the supercomputer at San Diego Supercomputing Center to research text mining of huge text collections.
Collections such as the National Library of Medicine's PubMed, Wikipedia and New York Times contain millions of publications and/or articles.
The supercomputer resources will aid Newman to find ways to go beyond simple word searches to better help users retrieve information from these collections.
Topic models on this scale are computationally intensive to train and require huge amounts of memory, thus they can only be computed using terascale resources. The allocation at the Center will allow the research group to tackle important text data sets that are well-beyond current capabilities.
Newman's research is highlighted in a recent Orange County Register article.
Majumder publishes book on practical multi-projector display design
Aditi
MajumderAditi Majumder, assistant professor of computer science has recently published a book "Practical Multi-Projector Display Design". Publisher A.K. Peters released the book at Siggraph 2007.
This is the first book that provides all of the tools and techniques needed to create your own large-area-multi-projector display that is both affordable and flexible.
It covers the current projection technologies, techniques for achieving geometric alignment and color seamlessness, and image rendering using PC clusters. It also gives the details of an advanced distributed multi-camera-based calibration system.
Majumder's research addresses how to produce a seamless image on a large-scale tiled display - an important problem to both the scientific and entertainment fields.
Majumder has developed a suite of mathematical models, methods and software to correct the geometric, chromatic and luminescent variations that arise when tiling multiple projection displays.
Hayes receives award from Autism Speaks to develop a visual schedule system
Gillian
HayesProfessor of informatics Gillian Hayes has received an $83,563 award from Autism Speaks for her proposal, "Technology Support for Interactive and Collaborative Visual Schedules".
Hayes work will focus on developing a digital repository and visual schedule system for use in schools and homes by individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).
Using visual schedules, such as words, images and tangible objects to represent activities that will take place (or have taken place) has been shown to reduce the symptoms associated with autism.
The proposed system will be more than just a digital version of current visual scheduling techniques.
Part of the system design will leverage the current use of visual schedules by replacing them with both large, mounted and small, portable interactive touch screens.
This will enable caregivers and individuals with ASD to more quickly and easily interact with the schedules, marking when activities are completed and rearranging schedule items with streamlined, simple interactions.
The system will also enable new modes of interaction, including greater communication and collaboration amongst caregivers.
Using the smart visual schedules system, caregivers can generate reports, share information with one another, and possibly even update an individual schedule at a distance as circumstances change.
Autism Speaks is a New York City-based advocacy organization, founded in February 2005 by Bob Wright, Vice Chairman of General Electric, and his wife Suzanne, to improve public awareness about autism and to promote autism research.
The Wrights founded Autism Speaks to help find a cure for autism spectrum disorders a year after their grandson, Christian, was diagnosed with autism.
Kobsa and Mark receive Google Research Awards
Alfred
Kobsa
Gloria
MarkTwo Informatics Professors were recipients of a 2007 Google Research Award, each in the amount of $50,000.
One award went to Alfred Kobsa to support his research on compliance with disparate privacy laws and user privacy preferences.
Kobsa's research lies in the areas of user modeling and personalized systems (with applications in the areas of information environments, expert finders, and user interfaces for disabled and elderly people), privacy, and in information visualization.
The other award went to Gloria Mark in support of her research on managing multi-tasking and Interruptions.
Mark's research examines the usability of leading edge collaborative technologies including a collaborative hypermedia authoring system, an electronic shared workspace, an application-sharing mechanism, and collaborative virtual environments.
