DECEMBER 2007
Tsudik Program Chair of Financial Cryptography and Data Security Conference
Gene
TsudikProfessor of computer science Gene Tsudik is serving as the Program Chair at the 12th annual Financial Cryptography and Data Security Conference to be held at the end of January in Cozumel, Mexico.
Financial Cryptography and Data Security is a major international forum for research, advanced development, education, exploration, and debate regarding information assurance in the context of finance and commerce.
The conference covers all aspects of securing transactions and systems. Submissions focusing on both theoretical (fundamental) and applied real-world deployments are solicited.
The goal of the conference is to bring security/cryptography researchers and practitioners together with economists, bankers, implementers, and policy-makers. Intimate and colorful by tradition, the FC program features invited talks, academic presentations, technical demonstrations, panel discussions as well as a research poster session.
Tsudik's research interests are 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.
Venkatasubramanian General Chair of Middleware 2007 conference
Nalini
VenkatasubramanianComputer science professor Nalini Venkatasubramanian recently led the ACM/IFIP/USENIX Middleware 2007 conference as General Chair.
The broad scope of the conference is the design, implementation, deployment, and evaluation of distributed systems platforms and architectures for future computing environments.
Venkatasubramanian's research focuses on enabling effective management and utilization of resources in the evolving global information infrastructue.
In the coming years, multimedia to the desktop and home is likely to become a pervasive technology.
The composition of multiple resource management services is necessary to guarantee safe, cost-effective Quality-of-Service (QoS) to global multimedia applications. She addresses the problem of composing resource management services in distributed systems.
Doctoral student wins two awards at RTSS 2007
Minyoung
KimMinyoung Kim, a doctoral student in Computer Science, received "Best System Architecture Award" and "Best Overall Idea Award" at the 2007 IEEE Real Time Systems Symposium (RTSS) PhD Forum held in Tucson, AZ.
Kim received the awards out of 30 participants, who were in turn selected from a field of international applicants.
The RTSS PhD Forum, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, is designed to discuss innovative research challenges and application ideas in deeply embedded real-time computing systems, encourage student involvement in new research directions, and reward the most innovative student ideas in an exciting emerging research field.
Kim's research focuses on power-aware distributed embedded systems, formal methods and multimedia systems.
She is co-advised by professors Nikil Dutt and Nalini Venkatasubramanian.
NOVEMBER 2007
Nikil
DuttThe Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has named Chancellor's Professor Nikil Dutt an IEEE fellow, one of the organizations highest honors.
The honor, for "contributions to architecture description languages and for the design and exploration of customized processors," recognizes Dutt's work 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.His research group has developed a novel architectural description language that facilitates rapid exploration of programmable embedded systems, as well as automatic generation of software toolkits supporting embedded systems development (including optimizing compilers and simulators).
Other projects within his group 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.
The IEEE Fellow designation is granted each year to a select group of the organization's 370,000 members for accomplishments that have contributed importantly to the advancement or application of engineering, science and technology.
IEEE is the world's leading professional organization and standards-setting authority for a wide range of high-tech fields, including electrical engineering, aerospace systems, computer engineering, telecommunications, biomedical engineering.
Networked Systems program ranked #1 by Academic Analytics
The Bren School's computer science program in Networked Systems has been ranked number one in new study by Academic Analytics, a for-profit company that partners with the State University of New York.
Also, in this year's study, Information Science/Studies at the UC Irvine's Bren School ranks fourth.
About Networked Systems
The Networked Systems program at the Bren School provides education and research opportunities to graduate students in the areas of computer networks and telecommunication networks.Networked Systems include telephone networks, cable TV networks, cellular phone networks, and the Internet, as well as other emerging networks.
Networked Systems are inherently interdisciplinary. By their design, they connect devices such as computer and phones using communications methods. Networked Systems therefore must address the combination of software, hardware, and communications.
As a result, the Networked Systems area spans traditional departmental boundaries. At a minimum, the area draws heavily from Computer Science, Computer Engineering, and Electrical Engineering.
At UCI, these areas are housed in two departments, ICS and EECS. The Networked Systems program unites the strengths of these two departments and provides more integrated M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in this area.
About Informatics (Information Science)
Informatics is the interdisciplinary study of the design, application, use, and impact of information technology. It goes beyond technical design to focus on the relationship between information system design and use in real-world settings.These investigations lead to new forms of system architecture, new approaches to system design and development, new means of information system implementation and deployment, and new models of interaction between technology and social, cultural, and organizational settings.
In the Bren School, Informatics is concerned with software architecture, software development, design and analysis, programming languages, ubiquitous computing, information retrieval and management, human-computer interaction, computer-supported cooperative work, and other topics that lie at the relationship between information technology design and use in social and organizational settings
Academic Analytics bases their ranking of doctoral programs on publications, citations of journal publications, federal research funding, and awards and honors.
For more information please view the Academic Analytics web site.
Graduate student wins prestigious ACM Award
Gabor
MadlGabor Madl, a PhD student in Computer Science at UC Irvine, received the 2008 ACM SIGBED/SIGSOFT Frank Anger Memorial Award at the 2007 Embedded Systems Week Conference held in Salzburg, Austria.
This award recognizes one student researcher from each of the professional societies (ACM SIGBED and ACM SIGSOFT), promoting the crossover of ideas between the embedded software and software engineering research communities.
Gabor's research focuses on applying formal methods to enable analysis and evaluation of embedded computer systems, and is a member of Professor Nikil Dutt's research group.
Dutt selected ACM Distinguished Scientist
Nikil
DuttChancellor's Professor Nikil Dutt has been selected as an ACM Distinguished Scientist.
The Distinguished Scientist award recognizes those ACM members with at least 15 years of professional experience and 5 years of continuous Professional Membership who have achieved significant accomplishments or have made a significant impact on the computing field.
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.
OCTOBER 2007
Suda awarded NICT grant for molecular communications
Tatsuya
SudaTatsuya Suda, professor of computer science, has received a $478,000 grant from the National Institute of INformation and Communications Technology (NICT) in Japan.
The NICT has awarded over $1.5 million in the past three years for Suda's research in molecular communications which investigates how to make biological nanomachines to talk.
In addition, Suda and his research group has been awarded two NSF grants for a project entitled "International: Collaborative Research for Designing Molecular Motor Communication Systems".
The NSF grants will sponsor international collaboration between Suda's group and researchers in Japan, as well as a workshop on molecular communication.
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.
Dechter receives 2007 ACP Research Excellence award
Rina
DechterComputer science professor Rina Dechter has received the 2007 Association of Constraint Programming Research Excellence award for her program of sustained high quality research in constraint processing, with numerous influential results and great impact on Artificial Intelligence.
Dechter's research centers on computational aspects of automated reasoning and knowledge representation including search, constraint processing and probabilistic reasoning.
The primary aim of her research is to devise efficient methods through the understanding and exploitation of tractable reasoning tasks.
Dechter is an author of the book "Constraint Processing" published by Morgan Kaufmann, 2003, and has authored over 100 research papers.
More on the Association for Constraint Programming and the Research Excellence award is available here.
Li receives NSF grant to study approximate keyword queries
using variable-length grams
Chen
LiAssociate Professor of computer science, Chen Li, has been awarded a $99,507 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study how to
support approximate string queries using grams of variable lengths.As textual information is prevalent in information systems, many applications (such as data cleaning, spellchecking, and query relaxation) have an increasing need to support approximate string queries on data collections.
Li's team recently developed a new technique, called VGRAM, that can significantly improve the performance of existing algorithms for answering approximate string queries.
With this new NSF grant, Li will study new research challenges related to deploying this technique in many information systems including databases and search engines.
More about Li and his research is available on his Web site.
SEPTEMBER 2007
Graduate students place first in IBM competition
Bren School graduate students Jayram Moorkanikara Nageswaran and Jeff Furlong and their counterparts Ashok Chandrashekar and Andrew Felch from the Dartmouth College have placed first in the first annual Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/B.E.)
Processor University Challenge sponsored by IBM. The competition was a part of the 2007 Power Architecture Conference held in Austin, TX.
In the winning project, a cluster of Sony PlayStation3's was used for large-scale modeling of the human brain.
Using the same technology that runs in today's video games, the team created a low-cost cluster able to support the complex algorithms used in brain research.
This study addressed issues of known difficulty in visual processing; for example, using standard processors, the complex computations needed to emulate the human brain's ability to rapidly and effortlessly recognize objects, was found to be slow and inefficient.
By exploiting Cell/B.E.'s parallel instruction set and extending it into low-cost clusters using Sony PS3s, the students were able to show a 100x performance boost over smaller clusters.
Nearly 80,000 students from 25 countries competed in the Challenge, which consisted of online trivia about Cell/B.E. -- originally designed by IBM, Sony Group and Toshiba Corp., for use in consumer devices such as Sony Computer Entertainment's PLAYSTATION3 -- followed by an opportunity to invent their own applications using this powerful processor.
"This contest provided a growth opportunity for students to gain real-life, multi-disciplinary skills to apply to their futures as they move from the classroom to the workforce," said Nick Donofrio, IBM executive vice president, Innovation and Technology. "This challenge also proved the true power, potential and promise of student innovations."
The global Cell Broadband Engine™ (Cell/B.E.) Processor University Challenge was co-hosted by IBM, with support from Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. and Toshiba Corp.
Is the outer Solar System chaotic?
Wayne
HayesNature Physics has published "Is the outer Solar System chaotic?", a paper by computer science professor Wayne Hayes.
The orbits of the inner planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars) are known to be practically stable in the sense that none of them will collide or be ejected from the Solar System for the next few billion years.
However, their orbits are chaotic in the sense that we cannot predict their angular positions those stable orbits for more than about 20 million years.
The picture is less clear for the outer planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune).
Again their orbits are practically stable, but in this paper we show not only that we may not be able to predict where the outer planets will be in the future, but also that we do not even know, at present, how long our predictions are accurate.
Our predictions may be accurate for 5 million years, or 5 billion, or anywhere in between.
Hayes' primary interest is currently in testing the reliability of large-scale physical simulations such as galaxy and cosmological n-body simulations as performed by astronomers.
More generally, he is interested in rigorous verification of numerical solutions of differential equation systems using validated interval arithmetic.
He is also interested in combinatorial graph theory, for example in bounding the Graph Ramsey Numbers.
View this short video to learn more about Hayes' research.
Franz receives $81,500 MICRO grant to study trace-based compilation
Michael
FranzProfessor of computer science Michael Franz has been awarded a $81,500 grant from UC Micro with industrial sponsor Sun Microsystems.
The grant will allow Franz to study trace-based compilation.
This new compilation technique, on which the University of California has filed a patent application, achieves 95 percent of the performance of previous techniques at less than 1 percent of the cost, making it ideally suitable for embedded and mobile applications such as cell phones.
In collaboration with Sun, Franz and his research group will study how this exciting new technology can be incorporated into Sun's next Java platform.
More about Professor Franz and his research is available on his Web site.
AUGUST 2007
Graduate student places third in data mining competition
Ph.D. candidate Christopher Wassman has placed third at the UC San Diego data mining competition in the graduate/postdoctoral category of the Refinance Prediction task.
A mean squared error of approximately 0.0003 separated 1st and 3rd place. There were a total of 34 teams including 22 graduate/post-doctoral teams.
The national contest is open to all undergraduates, graduate students and post-doctoral researchers studying full-time at an accredited college or university in the United States.
Wassman is a student of computer science professor Richard Lathrop. His concentration is in Informatics in Biology and Medicine.
Givargis awarded $200,000 NSF grant
Tony
GivargisProfessor of computer science, Tony Givargis, has been awarded a $200,000 NSF grant from the Division of Computer and Networks Systems for his project entitled " SGER: A Virtual Target For Next Generation Hardware Accelerated Multi-Core Systems."
As sole PI, Givargis will research virtualizing a multi-core system augmented with FPGA fabric, akin to the concept of virtual machines such as Java VM, provides an abstract and universal underpinning for design and verification of complex embedded software.
The research aims to explore and define a parametric virtualization layer providing an abstract view of hardware to the software subsystem and study technologies for configuration checkpointing/rollback and source level debugging support.
Givargis does research in the area of Software for Embedded Systems.
He is currently investigating issues related to Realtime Operating System (RTOS) synthesis, serializing compilers, and code transformations techniques for efficient software to hardware migration.
Graduate students win prestigious data mining competition
Chloe
Azencott
S. Josh
SwamidassChloe Azencott and S. Josh Swamidass, two graduate students in computer science professor Pierre Baldi’s lab, finished in first and second place respectively in the data mining competition "Agnostic Learning vs. Prior Knowledge" part of the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN) 2007 Conference, the premier conference in the field of neural networks.
The challenge revolved around 5 datasets from various domains, including marketing, ecology, text classification, handwriting recognition, and drug discovery.
Azencott and Swamidass focused on the chemoinformatics drug discovery HIVA dataset consisting of 42,678 compounds tested for activity against the AIDS HIV virus.
Of these compounds, 4,229 were labeled "active" or "inactive", forming the training set.
A total of 45 teams participated in the overall datamining competition, 30 of which participated in the HIVA portion of the contest.
A prerun of the competition was held from October 1st, 2006 to March 1st, 2007, while the final portion of the contest ran from March 1st, 2007 to August 1st, 2007. Final results were published online.
Azencott was invited to present her results at the IJCNN07 Agnostic Learning vs. Prior Knowledge Competition and Data Representation Discovery workshop, August 17th, 2007, in Orlando, Florida and was awarded a monetary prize.
The top results were obtained using Support Vector Machines, with 2D kernels specifically designed for small molecules in Baldi’s lab.
Azencott is entering her third year as a graduate student in ICS. Swamidass is an M.D./Ph.D. student who obtained his Ph.D. in ICS in June 2007 and is now in the process of completing his M.D. degree at UCI.
Tsudik awarded $1.1 million NSF award for Ph.D. fellowships
Gene
TsudikProfessor of computer science Gene Tsudik has been awarded $1.13 million by NSF for his project entitled "Defending Electronic Frontiers: Ph.D. Fellowships in Information Assurance".
The fellowships aim to attract, recruit, mentor and graduate talented domestic Ph.D. students in Information Assurance (IA) and foster their careers in the national service.
"In our increasingly electronic age, the well-being of our economy and leadership is predicated on being able to look ahead and solve challenging problems in the protection of electronic information and communication," says Tsudik.
Training students in IA addresses a need for talented highly-skilled professionals permeates the spectrum of IA topics from Cryptography and Formal Models, to Usable Security and Privacy and Secure Ubiquitous Computing).
Tsudik is currently a Fulbright scholar at the University of Rome. His primary interests lie in computer/network security and applied cryptography.
Much of his recent work is in secure group communication, in particular, group key agreement, group signatures and group access control.
Professors receive NSF grant to study modular software design
Pierre
Baldi
Crista
LopesCrista Lopes, associate professor of informatics, and Pierre Baldi, professor of computer science, have received a National Science Foundation grant of over $600,000 in support of their project entitled "Large Scale Empirical Validation of the Aspect-Oriented Design Hypothesis".
The research will focus on studying modular design within Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP). AOP attempts to aid programmers by breaking down a program into distinct parts that overlap in functionality as little as possible.
Throughout the history of technology, modular design has proven to be an effective way to deal with systems' complexity.
Modular design is an effective way to deal with a systems' complexity and is routinely applied to software-intensive systems.
By AOP, some modules called “aspects” directly address the crosscutting nature of some design concerns by modeling those concerns from outside the modules to which the local effects belong.
The researchers will conduct a large-scale empirical validation of the design hypothesis put forth by AOP, and leveraging it to derive principles for modular design.
The empirical validation of AOP will be enabled by an infrastructure called sourcerer, developed for collecting, searching, and analyzing software on the very-large scale of Open Source software available on the Internet.
JULY 2007
Tsudik awarded two Inter-Country program Fulbrights
Gene
TsudikComputer Science professor Gene Tsudik, who is currently at the University of Rome as a Fulbright Scholar, has been awarded two inter- country program awards by the Italian Fulbright Commission.
Tsudik will be collaborating at the Universidad de Malaga in Spain in the area of Security in Mobile Communications.
In addition, at University of Trento (northern Italy), he will be pursuing collaborative research activities in the framework of trust negotiation other security/privacy protocols for mobile and embedded systems (such as sensors and RFID tags).
At the University of Rome, Tsudik is conducting research, and lecturing on, computer and network privacy.
In collaboration with Italian colleagues, he is developing a graduate course on the same subject and will give a series of lectures on a range of relevant research issues, such as Internet privacy, wireless network privacy and privacy aspects of radio frequency identification tags.
He is also conducting privacy-related research with local collaborators and exploring electronic privacy priorities and technologies in the European Community.
The Fulbright Scholar Program is sponsored by the United States Department of State, with additional funding from participating governments and host institutions in the U.S. and abroad.
The nation's premier academic exchange program, the program selects U.S. and foreign scholars on the basis of academic or professional achievement and demonstration of extraordinary leadership potential in their fields.
JUNE 2007
Professor awarded grant to develop new seasonal climate prediction algorithms
Padhraic
SmythComputer Science professor Padhraic Smyth has been awarded a 3-year $250,000 grant to develop new machine learning algorithms that use historical records of climate data as a basis for making seasonal climate predictions.
The work will be funded by the US Department of Energy's Climate Change Prediction program as part of the SciDAC initiative (Scientific Discovery Through Advanced Computing).
The project involves collaborations with atmospheric scientists at UCLA, Columbia University, and the University of Wisconsin.
Among the techniques investigated will be the development of large-scale statistical time-series models for forecasting of seasonal rainfall patterns in regions such as India.
Making such forecasts more accurate is important from a variety of economic and societal viewpoints. Statistical machine learning algorithms provide a very useful way to automatically analyze historical data to build better predictive models.
Tsudik to give keynote lectures at three privacy and security conferences
Gene
TsudikProfessor of computer science Gene Tsudik will be giving three keynotes at upcoming privacy and security conferences in Europe.
The first keynote, entitled "On Privacy in Critical Internet Services" was delivered on June 6 at the Second Italian Workshop on Privacy and Security (PRISE'07).
Tsudik will also deliver keynotes entitled "Forward-Secure Aggregate Authentication" at the Second Conference on Security in Network Architecture and Information Systems (SAR-SSI'07) and "Privacy-Preserving Authentication" at the Fourth European PKI Workshop: Theory and Practice (EUROPKI'07).
Tsudik has been conducting research in internetworking, network security and applied cryptography since 1987. He obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from USC in 1991 for research on firewalls and Internet access control.
Over the years, his research interests included: routing, firewalls, authentication, mobile networks, e-commerce, anonymity, group communication, digital signatures, key management, ad hoc networks, as well as database privacy and secure storage.
U.S. DOE awards Tsudik with GAANN Award
Gene
TsudikProfessor of computer science Gene Tsudik and professor of informatics David Redmiles have each been awarded Graduate Assistance in Areas of National Need (GAANN) Program fellowships of over $383,000 from the U.S. Department of Education.
The GAANN will support several graduate students annually, over a three year period in the study of problems in the design, application, use and impacts of computer and information technology and issues in security and privacy.
The fellowships will be used to recruit and retain graduate students of superior academic qualifications, ones who aspire for eventual careers in research and teaching, and who have financial needs consistent with the federal standards.
Tsudik's research interests are mainly in computer/network security and applied cryptography. Much of his recent work is in secure group communication, in particular, group key agreement, group signatures and group access control.
Redmiles’ research combines the area of human-computer interaction and software engineering, focusing on the processes and technologies needed to develop and support useful and usable interactive software. The research conceptualizes evolutionary software development as a process of on-going communication.
MAY 2007
Franz receives $85,000 unrestricted gift from Mozilla
Michael
FranzProfessor of computer science Michael Franz has received an unrestricted gift of $85,000 from the Mozilla Corporation (developers of the FireFox Web browser).
The gift recognizes Franz's research accomplishments in Internet security.
Franz also received a $1 million grant as a sole PI from the federal government last week.
More about Professor Franz and his research is available on his Web site.
Franz recipient of grant from the National Intelligence Community
Michael
FranzProfessor of computer science Michael Franz is the recipient of a grant totaling more than $1 million (for an initial period of 18 months) from the National Intelligence Community. Out of more than 260 submitted, Franz's proposal was one of eleven projects funded. He is the sole principal investigator on the project.
This new award is in addition to two single-PI grants totaling $700,000 that Franz received from the National Science Foundation last year, and a further $312,483 active grant from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency (HSARPA). Altogether, Franz has over $2 Million in active funding as sole PI.
Among Professor Franz's numerous accolades, he was recently selected Outstanding Professor of the Year by the undergraduate class of 2007 and received the 2007 Dean's Award for Graduate Education.
APRIL 2007Goodrich named Chancellor's Professor
Michael
GoodrichMichael Goodrich, professor of computer science, was awarded the title of Chancellor's Professor, effective April 1, 2007.
The title is conferred for a five-year renewable term and recognizes scholars who have demonstrated unusual academic merit and whose continued promise for scholarly achievement makes them of exceptional value to the university.
Goodrich joins Professors Pierre Baldi and Nikil Dutt as Chancellor's professors in the Bren School.
Goodrich, also the director of the Center for Cyber-Security and Privacy, conducts research 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.
Pierre
BaldiPierre Baldi, Chancellor's Professor and Director of the Institute for Genomics and Bioinformatics, has been named a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).
Baldi is recognized for his significant contribution to statistical machine learning and the development of widely used algorithms/architectures to solve problems in the life sciences.
Each year the AAAI recognizes a group of individuals who have made significant, sustained contributions to the field of artificial intelligence through the continuation of its Fellows program. Fellows are recognized as having unusual distinction in the profession.
Dr. Baldi’s research focuses in several areas of artifical intelligence, data mining, machine learning, bioinformatics and communication networks.
Projects in his group include understanding and predicting protein structures, analyzing and modeling gene expression data and regulatory networks, developing a computer GO player, analyzing and designing communication networks (Internet, Ultra Wide Band Radio), and quantifying information.
About AAAI: Founded in 1979, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) (formerly the American Association for Artificial Intelligence) is a nonprofit scientific society devoted to advancing the scientific understanding of the mechanisms underlying thought and intelligent behavior and their embodiment in machines.
MARCH 2007
Jain gives keynote lecture at PerCom 2007
Ramesh
JainBren professor Ramesh Jain recently gave an invited keynote lecture at the Fifth Annual IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications conference (PerCom 2007) in White Plains, New York.
The well-received keynote address titled, "From Pervasive Computing to EventWeb," explored the growth of EventWeb as a natural next step in the evolution of the Web with rich multimodal sensory information.
Pervasive communications emergence is a natural outcome of the tremendous advances in wireless networks, mobile computing, sensor networks, distributed computing, and agent technologies.
PerCom is the premier international forum discussion between researchers, practitioners and students interested in the pervasive computing and networking.
Combining high-scientific quality with industrial relevance is the Percom mission.
Bren School to offer Master's degree part time in Naples, Italy
Alex
VeidenbaumThe Department of Computer Science will offer a Master of Science degree in Information and Computer Science with a concentration in Embedded Systems in collaboration with Italy’s Istituto di Cibernetica Eduardo Caianiello (of the Italian National Research Council) located in Naples.
The program starts in the summer 2007 and follows the standard graduate admissions process. It is open to both domestic and foreign students.
The joint program will help students master embedded system fundamentals, advanced computer architecture and compilers, networking, security, parallel and distributed processing, computer graphics, and includes a large embedded systems project and a Master’s thesis.
Students accepted into the program will study two quarters at the UC Irvine campus with three subsequent quarters spent in Naples, Italy.
As part of the experience, students will work on real-world research and development projects with European and U.S. high-technology companies.
According to program co-directors and Center for Embedded Computer Systems researchers – Professors Alex Nicolau and Alex Veidenbaum – this new type of program is the first in the University of California and gives UCI graduate students an opportunity to study abroad while getting a degree from one of the best public universities in the US.
For more information about the program please visit http://ms-es.cib.na.cnr.it.
FEBRUARY 2007
Soriente selected as IBM Ph.D. Fellow
Claudio
SorientePh.D. student Claudio Soriente, has been selected to receive the IBM Ph.D. Fellowship.
The IBM Ph.D. Fellowship program honors exceptional Ph.D. students worldwide. Fellows are matched with an IBM Mentor according to their technical interests, and they are encouraged to intern at an IBM research or development laboratory under their Mentor's guidance.
Soriente's research interests include digital broadcasting systems, network security, sensor networks, computer forensic and cryptography.
JANUARY 2007
Jain receives Best Paper Award at Multimedia Modeling Conference
Ramesh
JainRamesh Jain, Donald Bren Professor in Information and Computer Sciences, has been awarded the Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Multimedia Modeling, held in Singapore January 10-12.
The paper entitled Ontology-based Annotation of Paintings using Transductive Inference Framework, proposed a framework for ontology-based annotation of paintings with application-level concepts of art period.
Jain also gave a keynote talk, Event Web: The next disruptive evolutionary stage in WWW, at the International Conference on Intelligent Sensing and Information Processing, held in Bangalore December 16-18.
This interdisciplinary conference integrates several advanced research themes such as intelligent sensing and adaptive learning with a view towards solving problems in smart systems.
Dr. Jain is an active researcher in multimedia information systems, image databases, machine vision, and intelligent systems.
Additional information about Dr. Jain and his work can be found on his web site.
Przulj receives NSF CAREER grant for Protein-Protein Interaction project
Natasa
PrzuljNatasa Przulj, assistant professor of computer science, has received a $570,000 National Science Foundation CAREER grant in support of her 5-year project entitled "CAREER: Tools for Analyzing, Modeling, and Comparing Protein-Protein Interaction Networks".
The project proposes improvements in tools for analyzing and modeling of Protein-Protein Interaction (PPI) networks.
A PPI network is a mathematical representation of the physical interactions amongst proteins in a cell: it is a graph in which nodes represent proteins and edges between the nodes represent possible physical interactions between the corresponding proteins.
It is expected that the project will lead to better algorithms for various network comparison problems on PPI and other networks. Exploitation of a network model may significantly reduce the cost of characterizing the interactomes of various organisms.
Dr. Przulj is involved in training high school, undergraduate and graduate students, including two female students. This work is being included in various UC Irvine courses. The software will be provided as a free open-source toolkit for other researchers.
Tsudik discusses networking security on KUCI
Gene
TsudikProfessor of computer science Gene Tsudik will discuss networking security on the January 17 edition of KCUI's PrivacyPiracy program.
The show, which airs every wednesday from 5 to 6 p.m. Pacific Time on 88.9 FM in Irvine or via live audio streaming at www.kuci.org, focuses on how to protect your privacy in the Information Age.
Tsudik has been conducting research in internetworking, network security and applied cryptography since 1987. He obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from USC in 1991 for research on firewalls and Internet access control.
Before coming to UC Irvine in 2000, he was a Project Leader at IBM Zurich Research Laboratory (1991-1996) and USC Information Science Institute (1996-2000).
Over the years, his research interests included: routing, firewalls, authentication, mobile networks, e-commerce, anonymity, group communication, digital signatures, key management, ad hoc networks, as well as database privacy and secure storage.
In the Spring of 2007, he will be going to Italy as a Fulbright Scholar to lecture and conduct research at the University of Rome (La Sapienza) on the subject of electronic privacy.
