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 2009.
Be sure to subscribe to the Bren School's RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed to get noteworthy news, press releases and articles about the Bren School delivered directly to your desktop!
Awards, grants and other honors can be sent to icsnews@ics.uci.edu to be considered for publication.
JUNE 2009
Jarecki awarded Distinguished Assistant Professor Award for Research
Stanislaw
JareckiStanislaw Jarecki, assistant professor of computer science, has been awarded the annual UC Irvine Distinguished Assistant Professor Award for Research. It is the first time a Bren School professor has received the award.
The recipient of the award must be nominated by his or her peers and have made significant contributions through research and/or other creative activity that has had a major impact on their field, either through a career-long record of contributions, or as a result of a major contribution.
The award includes a $3,000 prize and an invitation to give a campuswide lecture on his research topic in the fall quarter.
Jarecki’s research in cryptography and computer security has attracted funding from a variety of sources including the very selective National Science Foundation (NSF) Cybertrust Program as well as from the Intelligence Advance Research Funding Agency (IARPA).
In 2008, Jarecki received a $450,000 Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award from the NSF for his proposed research, Secure Multi-Party Protocols, from Feasibility to Practice, which has a goal of designing cryptographic algorithms for a variety of secure tasks. The CAREER award is the NSF's most prestigious award for newer faculty. The program supports early career development of teacher-scholars who are most likely to become the academic leaders of the future.
Congratulations 2008-09 Bren School Honors recipients!
Students on this list received awards for latin honors, Phi Beta Kappa, Campuswide Honors, Outstanding Contribution to Research and others. Final latin honors recipients will be determined once Spring quarter grades are processed in to the final g.p.a. calculation.
Note for students on this list: please pick up your cord and/or stole from Neha at the ICS Student Affairs Office.
MAY 2009
Tomlinson received Environment Institute Grant, Support from Urban Water Research Center
Bill
TomlinsonBill Tomlinson, Professor of Informatics, along with Professors Brett Sanders and Robin Keller have received a $38,000 grant from the Environment Institute at UC Irvine to support a new project entitled “Using IT to Compress Perceived Time and Space in How People Think About Global Change: A Step Towards Behavioral Change”.
This interdisciplinary research collaboration is also being supported in part from a $10,000 contribution from the Urban Water Research Center at UC Irvine. Sanders and Keller are respectively professors at The Henry Samueli School of Engineering and The Paul Merage School of Business.
The research collaboration will study the difficulties people have in engaging with environmental issues, in part because global change occurs on scales of time and space that are relatively large compared to the usual scope of human decision making. People respond enthusiastically to fast-acting disasters such as fires and earthquakes, but less so to issues that occur more gradually over many years, even when the consequences are far greater.
To date, there has been little research on how to connect long-term global environmental change to human scales of time and space in a systematic way, thereby enabling behavioral change. Tomlinson et al’s research will focus on the science and public perception of sea level rise.
Tomlinson's research deals with the social impacts of information technologies, in particular regarding environmental issues and interactive education systems. His previous contributions to informatics and computer science are significant in human-computer interaction, interactive animation, autonomous agents, and multi-device systems.
More about the Environment Institute at UC Irvine: http://environment.uci.edu/
More about the Urban Water Research Center at UC Irvine: http://www.uwrc.uci.edu/
Olson gives keynote talks on Scientific Collaboration and Science Collaboratories
Gary
OlsonGary Olson, Bren Professor of Information and Computer Sciences will give two keynote talks at the University of Siegen in Germany, and the 2009 International Symposium on Collaborative Technologies and Systems.
Earlier this month, Olson gave a keynote entitled "Scientific Collaboration on the Internet", at the conference on Enhancing Humanities: Potentials of Media and ICT in the Humanities, held at the University of Siegen in Germany.
In 1989 a small group of pioneering thinkers, led by Joshua Lederberg and William Wulf, sketched out a vision of what has come to be known by various names, such as collaboratories, eScience, and cyberscience.
In the several decades since then many such projects have emerged in almost all areas of science. But there has been a complex pattern of success and failure in such efforts. Olson and his colleagues have spent nearly a decade studying these projects, trying to figure out what accounts for the pattern of success and failure in them. In his talk he reviewed lessons learned, and where he hopes to go with further research in the area.
The current understanding from this investigation was recently summarized in a book entitled "Scientific Collaboration on the Internet" (MIT Press, 2008).
This week in Baltimore, Olson will give a keynote entited "The Next Generation of Science Collaboratories". Olson will also talk about how the changing technical scene opens new opportunities for the next generation of collaboratories, as well as the sociotechnical factors that distinguish successful from unsuccessful collaboratories.
Collaboratories to support scientific research have been around for at least two decades, and have emerged as an important form of cyberinfrastructure to enable ever more ambitious geographically distributed research projects. A broadened view of what a collaboratory is suggests there are a variety of kinds of functions they could support.
Early collaboratories were often rather narrow in focus, but some have broadened to mimic fully-functional laboratories. Furthermore, will almost all early collaboratories were in the physical and biological sciences, by now they have emerged as serious research infrastructure in most domains, including the social sciences and humanities.
Olson’s latest research focuses on how to support small groups of people working on difficult intellectual tasks, particularly when the members of the group are geographically distributed. This research has involved both field studies of groups attempting to do such work and lab studies that evaluate specific technologies. He is one of four Donald Bren Professors of Information and Computer Sciences at the Bren School.
Dourish in Taiwan for Service Science Workshop on Qualitative Field Research in Organizations
Prof. Fu-Ren Lin, director of the Institute for Service Science at National Tsing Hua University, Calvin Morrill (UCI, Sociology), Martha Feldman (UCI, Planing Policy and Design), Prof Chintay Shih, Dean of the College of Technology Management, National Sting Hua University, and Paul Dourish (UCI, Informatics).
Paul Dourish, Professor of Informatics, along with UCI Professors Calvin Morrill (Sociology) and Martha Feldman (Planning, Policy, and Design) were recently in Taiwan presenting workshops at National Tsing Hau University in Hsinchu, and at National Sun Yat-Sen University in Kaohsiung.
The three-day workshop presentsed exemplars and strategies for doing qualitative field research in organizations. The activities of the workshop were divided into three areas: 1) introducing the background and roles of qualitative methods in the research of workshop leaders and participants; 2) introducing methodological issues and exercises in qualitative field research; and 3) discussion and feedback on workshop participants’ qualitative research experiences and goals.
Dourish's primary research interests are in the areas of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, Human-Computer Interaction, and Ubiquitous Computing. He is especially interested in the foundational relationships between social scientific analysis and technological design. More about Dourish can be found on the Web.
APRIL 2009
Judy Olson gives talk on social ergonomics at CHI 2009
Judy
OlsonJudy Olson, Bren Professor of Information and Computer Sciences, gave the plenary opening at Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) 2009. Olson's talk, Even Small Distance Matters: Social Ergonomics in Collocated and Remote Teams, focused on the study of social ergonomics, the design of workplaces and systems that fit the natural social capabilities and inclinations of workers and users.
Olson reviewed some of the highlights of what is known about natural social capabilities and inclinations, showed how they play out in both “radically collocated” teamwork and remote teamwork before finishing with a set of guidelines for everyone to use when having to work either collocated or remotely.
CHI is the premier worldwide forum for exchanging information on all aspects of how people interact with computers. CHI 2009 ran from April 4-9, in Boston, MA offering two days of pre-conference workshops and four days of dynamic sessions that explored the future of computer-human interaction with researchers, practitioners, educators and students.
More than 2000 professionals from over 40 countries attended this year's conference, which marked 27 years of research, innovation and development of the Computer-Human Interaction community.
Olson has published about 110 peer-reviewed research articles and is best known for her work on distance collaborations and has achieved international acclaim for her studies that compared office workers in geographically distributed organizations to those working in the same location.
Tsudik to give keynote on secure device pairing at IPSEC 2009
Gene
TsudikProfessor of Computer Science Gene Tsudik will be giving an invited keynote talk entitled "Secure and Usable Device Pairing" at the 5th Information Security Practice and Experience Conference (ISPEC 2009) to be held April 13-15, 2009, in Xi’an, China.
“Secure Device Pairing” is the process of bootstrapping a secure channel between two or more previously unassociated personal devices over a (usually wireless) human-imperceptible communication channel. Lack of prior security context and absence of common trust infrastructure open the door for so-called "Man-in-the-Middle" (or "Evil Twin") attacks. Mitigation of these attacks requires user involvement in the device pairing process.
Tsudik’s talk will summarize notable secure device pairing techniques, comparing and contrasting their advantages, shortcomings and limitations, followed by the first comprehensive and comparative evaluation of these methods.
ISPEC is an annual conference that brings together researchers and practitioners to provide a confluence of new information security technologies, their applications and their integration with IT systems in various vertical sectors. More information about ISPEC can be found at the Conference Web site: http://www.ispec2009.net/.
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.
DuBois awarded National Defense Science and Engineering Fellowship
Christopher
DuBoisChristopher DuBois, a first-year PhD student in the Department of Statistics, has been awarded a 3-year National Defense Science and Engineering (NDSEG) Graduate Fellowship.
NDSEG Fellowships are awarded based on a national competition, with approximately 200 fellowships awarded each year in the United States to graduate students across a broad range of fields of study in the sciences and engineering.
DuBois will use his fellowship funding to pursue his Ph.D. research on statistical modeling of large dynamic social networks, such as email communication networks between individuals, working with professor Padhraic Smyth in the Departments of Computer Science and Statistics and professor Carter Butts in the Department of Sociology.
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.
Clarity Labs
Ron Villalon, Niraj Desai, Manjot Bhuller
Mentors: Professor Chen Li, Arie Shen
A product that leverages television viewers interest in the products on their favorite TV shows (clothing, props, etc.) and gives these viewers access to information through tag placement in interactive videos.
Event Viz
Pinaki Sinha, Hamed Pirsiavash, Mingyan Gao
Mentors: Ramesh Jain, Janell SoWeb-based software that organizes isolated events and related information, such as documents, photos, audio and video, and creates an organized multimedia chronicle to visualize, access, search, and create customized stories.
Olepta
Nathan Esquenazi and Thomas Shafer
Mentors: Professor Andre van der Hoek, TJ ThinakaranA relationship management product that provides end-to-end management for communication with patients, and allows doctors and patients to have a continuous relationship using modern communication technologies.
The final competition placing and prizes will be awarded in early June at the ICS Awards Ceremony and Project ICS Showcase.
hITEC is the cornerstone of the Bren School entrepreneurship program. This year, the program was sponsored with generous donations from: Northwind Ventures, Printronix and Ted and Janice Smith.
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.
MARCH 2009
Jain to give talk at the final conference of the European CHORUS
Ramesh
JainBren Professor Ramesh Jain will be the opening speaker at the final conference of the European CHORUS project on Multimedia Search Engines (MMSE). Jain will speak about state of the art multimedia search technology and its future during a session entitled, "Chorus Roadmap and International perspectives".
CHORUS is a European Coordination Action which aims at creating the conditions of mutual information and cross fertilisation between the European projects dealing with Multimedia Content Search Engines. National and international initiatives are also included in CHORUS action.
Jain is an active researcher in multimedia information systems, image databases, machine vision, and intelligent systems.
CHORUS will be held May 26- 28, 2009 in Brussels, Belgium. More information can be found on the conference Web site.
Carey and Li awarded seed money from UC Discovery Grant and eBay
Michael
Carey
Chen
LiComputer Science professors Michael Carey and Chen Li have been awarded a total of $132,000 in seed funding in support of their research entitled ASTERIX: A Scalable Platform for XML Information Analysis. The funding is made in part from the UC Discovery Grant ($52,000) and eBay ($80,000).
ASTERIX, which stands for “Active, Scalable, Transactional Enterprise Repository for Information in XML,” is a new effort to develop a scalable semistructured information management system, based on XML and XQuery technologies, targeting very large shared-nothing compute clusters.
A Bren Professor in Information and Computer Sciences, Carey’s research interests are in database systems, information integration, service-oriented computing, middleware, distributed systems, and computer system performance evaluation.
Li's research interests are in the fields of database and information systems, including data integration and sharing, data warehouses, data cleansing, data privacy, and information management on the Web.
Suda named IEEE Distinguished Lecturer
Tatsuya
SudaComputer Science Professor Tatsuya Suda has been named IEEE Communications Society Distinguished Lecturer with a term effective through December 2010. Suda will be lecturing on:
(1) Molecular Communication: New Paradigm for Communication Among Nano-Scale Biological Machines
(2) The Bio-Networking Architecture: A Biologically Inspired Approach to the Design of Computer Networks and Network Applications
(3) New Research Directions in Networks: from Sociology to Biology
The IEEE Distinguished Lecturers are selected to provide a pool of technical experts for lectures by IEEE Chapters and sections. A complete list of Communications Society Distinguished Lecturers are available online.
Suda's research is in computer networks and distributed computing systems; his interests span the entire spectrum from the design and performance evaluation of these systems to their actual implementation.
His current research focuses on applications of biological principles and large complex system principles onto networks, high speed networks, next generation Internet, ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Model) networks, object-oriented distributed systems, and multimedia applications.
Vaisenberg receives first prize at IEEE Percom'09 Ph.D. Forum
Ronen
VaisenbergThird year computer science Ph.D. student, Ronen Vaisenberg has been awarded the first prize at the IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications' (IEEE Percom '09) Ph.D Forum.
The Ph.D. Forum Committee evaluated research projects based on a submitted extended abstract, poster, and discussion at the poster session. Vaisenberg's research was also recognized as the most innovative and/or most promising interdisciplinary research project.
Under the monitorship of Professor Sharad Mehrotra, Vaisenberg's Ph.D dissertation deals with the issues related to the data management support for sentient systems, motivated by real-world emergency-response application needs which are funded by NSF’s ITR-Rescue (RESponding to Crisis and Unexpected Events) and DHS’s Safire (Situational Awareness for Firefighters).
More about Vaisenberg and his research can be found on his Web site.
Chloe Azencott awarded IBM Ph.D. Fellowship
Chloe
AzencottChloe Azencott, fourth year Ph.D. student in computer science has been awarded an IBM Ph.D. Fellowship program for the 2009-2010 academic year. The award which covers tuition and mandatory fees, also comes with a $17,500 stipend.
Azencott's, research interest lies in the areas of machine learning applied to the life sciences, more particularly chemistry and chemoinformatics.
Under the mentorship of faculty advisor Pierre Baldi, Azencott's research topic is entitled Statistical Machine Learning and Data Mining for Chemoinformatics and Drug Discovery.
The IBM Ph.D. Fellowship Awards is an intensely competitive program which honors exceptional Ph.D. students in many academic disciplines and areas of study.
IBM pays special attention to an array of focus areas of interest to IBM and fundamental to innovation, including technology that creates new business value, innovative software, new types of computers and interdisciplinary projects.
Lewis and Tomlinson featured in inaugural issue of International Journal of Learning and Media
Bill
TomlinsonUndergraduate student Lauren Lewis and ICS Professor Bill Tomlinson, along with Education professor Rebecca Black, are currently featured in the inaugural issues of the International Journal of Learning and Media, a MacArthur Foundation/MIT Press journal.
“Let everyone play: An educational perspective on why fan fiction is, or should be, legal” makes a theoretical, legal, and moral proposition that fan fiction, a form of derivative writing based on existing media and popular culture, be considered fair use of copyrighted materials under U.S. copyright law.
Lewis is a second year Computer Science major and helped co-author the publication in the summer of 2008 as a participant in Calit2's Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship in Information Technology (SURF-IT) program.
Tomlinson's research deals with the social impacts of information technologies, in particular regarding environmental issues and interactive education systems. His previous contributions to informatics and computer science are significant in human-computer interaction, interactive animation, autonomous agents, and multi-device systems.
The complete publication can be found online.
Baldi awarded the Grant in Chemical Sciences to support development of Reaction Explorer
Pierre
BaldiChancellor's Professor Pierre Baldi has been awarded a grant in the Special Grant Program in Chemical Sciences by the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation.
The grant is in support of the development of Reaction Explorer, a new interactive electronic tutorial system for teaching organic reactions, reaction mechanisms, organic synthesis and retrosynthesis at the undergraduate level.
Reaction Explorer is an interactive tutorial system for organic chemistry reactions, which enables students to learn about reactions in ways previously unrealized.
With the Reaction Explorer project, Baldi, together with MD/PhD graduate student Jonathan Chen, aim to provide a richer learning experience including: dynamic generation of customized multi-step synthesis design problems; context-specific feedback messages; and support for inquiry-based learning through experimentation and interactive dialogue with the system.
Baldi’s research focuses in several areas of AI, data mining, machine learning, bioinformatics, and chemoinformatics. Projects in his group include understanding and predicting protein structures, analyzing and modeling gene expression data and regulatory networks, and building expert systems for chemistry and drug discovery.
The purpose of the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation, Inc., is to advance the science of chemistry, chemical engineering and related sciences as a means of improving human relations and circumstances.
Established in 1946 by chemist, inventor and businessman Camille Dreyfus as a memorial to his brother Henry, the Foundation became a memorial to both men when Camille Dreyfus died in 1956. Throughout its history the Foundation has sought to take the lead in identifying and addressing needs and opportunities in the chemical sciences.
FEBRUARY 2009
Li receives NSF award to study large-scale data cleaning
Chen
LiChen Li, associate professor of computer science, has
received an award for $221,730 from the NSF CluE program to support his research on large-scale data cleaning
using cloud computing.In addition, his team will also use software and services on a Google-IBM cluster to explore innovative research ideas in data-intensive computing.
The project will study research challenges to support efficient data-cleaning queries on large text repositories using the MapReduce/Hadoop parallel computing paradigm.
Supporting such queries is becoming increasingly more important in applications that need to deal with a variety of data inconsistencies in structures, representations, or semantics.
The techniques developed in this project will have a broad impact on many information systems that need to support approximate query processing on large data sets, such as Web search, enterprise search, data integration, and query relaxation.
Li's research interests are in the fields of database and information systems, including data integration and sharing, data warehouses, data cleansing, data privacy, and information management on the Web.
Carey awarded Google Research Award
Michael
CareyMichael Carey, Bren Professor of Information and Computer Sciences, has been awarded a Google Research Award for $70,000 for his research entitled, “A Declarative and Open Source Data Mapping Tool for OpenII.”
Carey’s research is tackling the need for large organizations to effectively access and analyze data coming from disparate sources, including multiple databases, legacy information stores, applications and data stores published via Web services, XML files, and CSV files.
This project aims to produce a declarative and open source data-mapping tool for incorporation into the OpenII initiative. The Google OpenII initiative aims to enable such repositories to be put together much more easily than they can be today, creating better quality data that can then be (re)surfaced on the Web and made available to everyone. Areas of potential impact include medical informatics, biology research, and access to many public data sets that are currently disparate.
Carey's research interests are in database systems, information integration, service-oriented computing, middleware, distributed systems, and computer system performance evaluation.
A National Academy of Engineering member, Carey is acknowledged as one of the 50 most influential computer scientists in the world. He is an ACM Fellow and in 2005, he received ACM’s SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award.
He has also has earned two of the most esteemed research publication awards in the field: the Very Large Data Base (VLDB) Conference’s 10-Year Best Paper Award in 1996, and the 2004 Test of Time Paper Award at the ACM SIGMOD International Conference.
Dutt appointed to the ACM Publications Board
Nikil
DuttNikil Dutt, Chancellor's Professor of Computer Science, has been appointed to the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Publications Board for a 3-year term.
ACM is the largest international professional computing society representing the educational and scientific computing community.
ACM provides the computing field's premier Digital Library and serves its members and the computing profession with leading-edge publications, conferences, and career resources.
The ACM Publications Board is responsible for setting publication policy, approving new publications and appointing the Editors-in-Chief of the premier ACM journals and transactions.
Dutt's research interests are in embedded systems, with topics that are at the intersection of compilers, architectures and computer-aided design. His specific focus is on the exploration, evaluation and design of domain-specific embedded systems that span research issues in hardware, software, networked, and ubiquitous systems.
Other projects in his group include brain-inspired computing platforms, low-power/low-energy compilation and synthesis, embedded system validation and verification, and memory architecture exploration for embedded systems.
