OCTOBER 2009
Fowlkes, Ramanan and Desai awarded Marr Prize in Kyoto, Japan
Charless
Fowlkes
Deva
RamananA paper entitled "Discriminative models for multi-class object layout" by PhD student Chaitanya Desai and Assistant Professors Deva Ramanan and Charless Fowlkes received the Marr Prize at the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) held the first week of October in Kyoto, Japan.
The prize is awarded to the best paper at ICCV and is considered one of the top honors in computer vision. The award is named after David Marr, a theoretical neuroscientist who made profound contributions to the theory of both human and machine vision in the 1970's.
The paper describes research on a new approach to modeling contextual relations between objects in an image (e.g. bottles are often seen resting on top of tables but not the other way around). The system automatcially learns these relations from example images and uses this information to outperform existing approaches to object detection.
Fowlkes' research is in computational vision, both in understanding the information processing capabilities of the human visual system and in developing machine vision systems. He is also interested in applying computer vision techniques to automating the analysis of biological data and developing algorithmic tools for understanding morphology and spatial aspects of gene expression.
Ramanan's research interests span computer vision, machine learning, and computer graphics. His past work focused on the analysis of human movement from video, including tracking people and recognizing their actions. Current interests include object recognition, large-scale image/video processing, structured-prediction approaches to learning, and activity recognition.
SEPTEMBER 2009
Eppstein wins best paper award at WADS
David
EppsteinA paper by computer science professor David Eppstein and former ICS student Kevin A. Wortman, "Optimal Embedding into Star Metrics," has received the best paper award from the 11th Algorithms and Data Structures Symposium (WADS), held this August in Banff, Canada.
Their research concerns algorithms for choosing the location of a central facility such as an airline hub in order to minimize the increase in distance caused by traveling through the hub instead of taking a direct route. The WADS best paper award was announced on the conference web site after the conference was held, and comes with a prize of 500 Euro in books from Springer-Verlag.
Eppstein's research interests are varied and include geometric optimization, finite element mesh generation and mesh improvement, information visualization and graph drawing, robust statistics and estimation of web-graph properties, graph theory and graph algorithms, exponential-time algorithms for NP-hard problems, and cellular automata and combinatorial games.
Franz receives $600,000 NSF CyberTrust Grant
Michael
FranzMichael Franz, Professor of Computer Science, has received a $600,000 grant from the National Science Foundation's CyberTrust program. His project with co-PI Cormac Flanagan from UC Santa Cruz will investigate next-generation infrastructure for trustworthy web applications.
Many services traditionally performed by stand-alone programs running on desktop computers are being migrated to "Web 2.0" applications, remote services that reside "in the cloud" and are that accessed through a browser. This migration process offers a unique opportunity to re-engineer the way that software is constructed, adding some extra capabilities that reduce the vulnerability of the global information infrastructure to problems such as viruses, cyber-attacks, loss of privacy, and integrity violations.
With this goal in mind, this project designs and implements a next-generation infrastructure for trustworthy web applications. It evolves the existing Web 2.0 technologies into a more trustworthy "Web 2.Sec" version by introducing information-labeling and strong information-flow controls pervasively at the service provider, at the user's end, and on all paths in between.
A key feature of the new Web 2.Sec architecture is that all application programs are executed on top of a virtual machine (VM) rather than directly on physical hardware. Hence the VM retains full control over the data at all times, allowing it to enforce information-þow policies that guarantee conÞdentiality and integrity. Even a malicious or faulty program running on top of the Web 2.Sec VM cannot cause any action that would violate these policies.
Franz is an expert on virtual machines, mobile-code security, and dynamic compilation. He is the co-inventor (with a graduate student) of the Trace Compilation method that now drives JavaScript performance in Mozilla's Firefox browser. He has graduated 13 Ph.D. students, been awarded more than $7 Million in competitive Federal research funding as Principal Investigator, and has published more than 90 refereed papers.
Goodrich, Kobsa and Tsudik awarded $300,000 NSF grant to study Usable Location Privacy
Michael
Goodrich
Alfred
Kobsa
Gene
TsudikComputer Science Professors Michael Goodrich, Alfred Kobsa and Gene Tsudik have been awarded $300,000 by the National Science Foundation for research on Usable Location Privacy in Geo-Social Networks.
The project will explore the usability, feasibility, and scalability of preserving privacy and securing location-aware geo-social networking platforms on mobile devices, such as Google Latitude. The research group is basing their project on a belief that security and privacy can best be incorporated with usability at the beginning of its design.
The research will focus on the usability of privacy-agile secure location-based communication and supporting protocols that scale to large numbers of users and accommodate various privacy levels suitable for different application domains.
This project envisions a wide range of future applications, with three unifying factors: (1) geo-social undertone, i.e., applications that combine social groups and locality, (2) lack of, or need to avoid using, fixed infrastructure facilities, and (3) need for both security and privacy.
Goodrich's research is directed at the design of high-performance algorithms and data structures for solving large-scale problems surrounding the increased demands of computer graphics, information visualization, scientific data analysis, information assurance and security, and the Internet. He also is interested in computer science education, specifically ways of more effectively teaching data structures and algorithms.
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.
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.
AUGUST 2009
Professor Jordan receives $500,000 NSF grant for Internet architecture and public policy integration
Scott
JordanProfessor of Computer Science Scott Jordan has received a $500,000 National Science Foundation grant to incorporate telecommunications policy and economics into the Internet architecture.
“As a result of technical, economic and public policy forces, the Internet's original design principles – layering and end-to-end – are increasingly violated,” says Jordan.
Currently, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are deploying quality of service mechanisms, but only allowing their use for certain applications sold to their own subscribers. Some ISPs have used deep packet inspection techniques to implement traffic management practices that throttle or block peer-to-peer applications.
Professor Jordan hopes to counteract this deterioration by proposing an interdisciplinary approach that updates the Internet architectural principles to account for telecommunications policy and economics.
The project will identify the flaws of the end-to-end and layering models that are not withstanding the technical, economic, and legal forces upon networking. The project aims to modify these models so that they promote good technical design, respond appropriately to economic pressures, and encourage societally beneficial outcomes.
To validate these new models, Professor Jordan plans to illustrate their potential use by applying them to three case studies – net neutrality, traffic management, and Quality of Service.
Professor Jordan is also developing an undergraduate course on “The Internet and Public Policy”. This research will help bridge the gulf that exists between communication lawmakers and networking researchers by informing staff members in the United States Congress about the technical aspects of telecommunication issues, and by developing an architectural framework for the networking research community to help them consider impacts of network economics and law.
Professor Jordan’s research interests currently include pricing and differentiated services in the Internet, resource allocation in wireless multimedia networks, and telecommunications policy.
Franz, Tsudik take part in National Cyber Leap Year Summit
Michael
Franz
Gene
TsudikProfessors of Computer Science Michael Franz and Gene Tsudik took part in the National Cyber Leap Year Summit (NCLY), organized by the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program. Tsudik served as the co-chair of the Digital Provenance group, which addressed the issue of basing trust decisions on verified assertions. The summit was held August 17-19 in Washington, D.C.
NITRD is the Nation's primary source of Federally funded revolutionary breakthroughs in advanced information technologies such as computing, networking, and software.
The National Cyber Leap Year initiative is the result of the call from The White House Office of Science and Technology to secure our nation's cyber infrastructure. NCLY take a complementary approach to the traditional methodology of solving cybersecurity problems, which researches better solutions to current issues. Instead, NCLY attempts to change the cybsersecurity game to shift focus onto new problems that are on the horizon.
Franz is an expert on virtual machines, mobile-code security, and dynamic compilation. He is the co-inventor (with a graduate student) of the Trace Compilation method that now drives JavaScript performance in Mozilla's Firefox browser. He has graduated 13 Ph.D. students, been awarded more than $7 Million in competitive Federal research funding as Principal Investigator, and has published more than 90 refereed papers.
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.
JULY 2009
Dutt, Nicolau and Veidenbaum Receive Best Paper Award at IJCNN 2009
Nikil
Dutt
Alexandru
Nicolau
Alexander
VeidenbaumComputer Science Professors Nikil Dutt, Alexandru Nicolau, and Alexander Veidenbaum have been recognized with a Best Paper Award at the 2009 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN).
An interdisciplinary collaboration, the paper entitled “Efficient Simulation of Large-Scale Spiking Neural Networks Using CUDA Graphics Processors” was also co-authored by Computer Science Ph.D. students Jayram Moornikara and Assistant Professor of Cognitive Science Jeffrey Krichmar.
The paper describes new techniques for parallelization of spiking neural network models of the brain and their efficient realization on emerging graphics processor platforms. This will enable close-to-real-time simulation of realistic networks of nerve cells and could have many practical applications.
IJCNN is the premier international conference in the area of neural networks theory, analysis and applications.
Dutt is a Chancellor’s Professor whose research interests lie in the area of embedded systems and computer-aided design, with a specific focus on the exploration, evaluation and design of domain-specific embedded systems spanning both software and hardware. Other projects within his group include low-power/low-energy compilation and synthesis, validation and verification of embedded systems, software/hardware interfaces for distributed embedded systems, memory architecture exploration for embedded systems, and brain-inspired architectures and computing.
Nicolau's work is in the design and implementations of a system of program transformations that support the semi-automatic (and eventually fully-automatic) exploitation of substantially all the parallelism available in a given program. Nicolau is also interested in developing a tool for the rigorous study and development of parallelizing compilers.
Veidenbaum's research is in the areas of computer architecture, embedded systems, and compilers. He investigates new ways to build faster processors and systems and to reduce their power consumption and cost.
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.
APRIL 2009
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.
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.
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.
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.
