DECEMBER 2008
Tsudik named Editor-in-Chief of ACM Journal TISSEC
Gene
TsudikGene Tsudik, computer science professor and managing director of the Secure Computing and Networking Center, has been named Editor-in-Chief of the Association of Computing Machinery's Transactions on Information and Systems Security (TISSEC) by the ACM Publication Board.
TISSEC is a scholarly scientific journal that publishes original research papers in all areas of information and system security, including technologies, systems, applications, and policies. It is the top archival publication in the field.
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.
NOVEMBER 2008
Newman receives $40,000 Google Research Award for topic mapping
David
NewmanDavid Newman, a research scientist in computer science, has received $40,000 from Google to research how topic mapping (topic modeling + mapping) can be used in conjunction with Google Maps interfaces to improve the ways users browse huge text collections.
A linear list of search results inhibits a user's ability to browse returned documents and leaves the user with little sense of the range of subject matter contained in the returned documents.
Newman will investigate novel ways of improving browse to allow users to find interesting, relevant and useful documents. Newman will combine state-of-the-art statistical topic modeling with multidimensional scaling and visualization techniques to create a Google Maps-type interface for browsing huge text collections.
Using two huge collections of text documents (PubMed abstracts and books from the Open Content Alliance) Newman will investigate how to construct intuitive and meaningful layouts of documents to help users better find useful documents, and improve their overall browse experience.
Newman's research interests include machine learning, data mining and text mining. His research is marked by a commitment to combining theoretical advances with practical applications in ways that widen access and use for individuals and communities, and ultimately improve the way people find and discover information.
Tsudik to give invited keynote talk at AINTEC in Bangkok, Thailand
Gene
TsudikComputer Science professor Gene Tsudik will give an invited keynote talk entitled "Security and Privacy in Unattended Sensor Networks" at the Asian Internet Engineering Conference (AINTEC) 2008 being held November 18-20 in Bangkok, Thailand.
In recent years, sensors and sensor networks have been extremely popular in the research community. One of the most exciting aspects of sensor networks research is the confluence of diverse areas, such as databases, networking, distributed systems and security. In particular, security issues in wireless and sensor networks (WSNs) have received
a lot of attention.In this talk, Tsudik will discuss in detail a number of security challenges in unattended WSNs. The goal of the address is to bring the problem to light and engender interest from the research community to investigate it further.
AINTEC provides an international technical forum for experts from industry and academia, especially aiming at addressing issues pertinent to the Asia and Pacific region with vast diversities of socio-economic and networking conditions while inviting high quality and recent research results from the global Internet research community. The conference proceedings will be published by the ACM Digital Library.
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.
Givargis and Nicolau receive 2008 CASES Best Paper Award
Tony
Givargis
Alexandru
NicolauComputer Science professors Tony Givargis and Alexandru Nicolau, along with Ph.D. student Mohammad Ali Ghodrat have been awarded the 2008 CASES Best Paper Award for their submission entitled "Control Flow Optimization in Loops using Interval Analysis".
The paper was presented in Atlanta, Georgia at the International Conference on Compilers, Architecture, and Synthesis for Embedded Systems (CASES) last month.
The work presents a novel loop transformation technique, particularly well suited for optimizing embedded compilers, where an increase in compilation time is acceptable in exchange for significant performance increase. The transformation technique optimizes loops containing nested conditional blocks.
The full paper can be downloaded online.
The CASES conference provides a forum for emerging technology in embedded computing systems, with an emphasis on compilers and architectures for embedded systems.
CASES is a common forum for researchers with an interest in embedded systems to reach across vertically integrated communities and to promote synergies. As evident from the past CASES meetings, several emerging applications are critically dependent on these interactions for their sustained growth and evolution.
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.
Nicolau's work designs and implements a system of program transformations that supports 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.
OCTOBER 2008
Majumder invited panelist at PROCAMS panel
Aditi
MajumderComputer science professor Aditi Majumder was recently invited to serve as a panelist at the IEEE/ACM Workshop on Projector-Camera Systems (PROCAMS).
Majumder talked about exploting a wireless computational projector-camera unit as the fundamental unit to deploy pixels in an ubiquitous manner.
The goal of her research is to instrument a workspace with a distributed network of these projector-camera units creating displays whose scale, resolution and form factor can be changed on demand; displays that are no longer a passive interface between the user and the machine, but can serve as an medium of interaction between multiple users and/or multiples machines.
According to Majumder, "the future would thus see the emergence of truly ubiquitous displays that can be deployed literally anywhere and in any fashion."
Jarecki, Tsudik awarded $430,000 for cryptographic research
Stanislaw
Jarecki
Gene
TsudikComputer science professors Stanislaw Jarecki and Gene Tsudik have been awarded a $430,000 contract from IARPA's (Intelligence Agencies Research Project Agency) National Intelligence Community Enterprise Cyber-Assurance Program for a project titled "Practical Privacy-Preserving Information Transfer (PPIT)".
The project aims to design and demonstrate innovative and efficient cryptographic techniques that allow mutually protective parties to exchange information in a way that preserves both privacy of, and authorized access to that information.
A real-world example of such an exchange can be when a government agency wants to compare an airline passenger manifest with its terror watch-list. Neither the airline nor the agency may want to reveal its list to the other.
PPIT techniques will solve the apparent impasse by using state-of-the-art efficient cryptographic tools to share only the necessary information that match the two lists.
SEPTEMBER 2008
El Zarki receives D-Link Systems gift for studying wireless video sensor networks
Magda El
ZarkiAssociate Dean for Research Development and Professor of Computer Science Magda El Zarki has received five 5 D-Link Wireless Pan/Tilt Internet Cameras from D-LInk Systems.
The cameras will be used in research that will investigate schemes that enable scientists to create dynamic network topologies that provide the networking resources for the sensors to transmit their data to an outgoing gateway.
Most wireless networks don't have the bandwidth to carry multiple video streams. In tracking applications, sensors are not all active at the same time, thereby allowing the pooling of resources to areas where there is current activity. As the action moves, the network changes to migrate the resources to where they are needed.
This research will involve novel routing mechanisms, adaptive media sharing strategies and workload distribution schemes.
El Zarki's work focuses on multimedia transmission and the impact of provisioning for quality of service networks. Her recent work has been in wireless communications.
El Zarki's research in real-time video transmission focuses on the impact of bandwidth control on quality degradation and use of objective quality-assessment techniques for video quality evaluation whose applications include video conferencing and low-bit rate Web video.
Newman and collaborators awarded $750,000 for topic modeling
David
NewmanComputer science researcher David Newman and co-investigators at Yale University and University of Michigan have been awarded $750,000 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Newman and his collaborators will study how topic modeling can be used to improve search and discovery of digital resources.
Newman and the team will investigate how topic modeling -- a state-of-the-art machine learning technique -- can be used to improve the ways users search, discover and find items in increasingly large digital collections. They will apply topic modeling to three important classes of digital library resources: full-text books, images, and tagged objects.
"I am excited to deploy advanced machine learning techniques that may positively impact the general public, and address the increasingly universal challenge of providing better access to huge collections of digital objects," says Newman.
In the research, topic modeling will be used on text metadata to better organize large collections of images; on library collections that contain millions of electronic volumes to go beyond keyword search; and social tags and contributed content to better categorize this increasingly widespread type of descriptive textual metadata.
The team will then build prototypes of user interface applications that use topic modeling, to assess the value of topic modeling for users.
Newman's research interests include machine learning, data mining and text mining.
His research is marked by a commitment to combining theoretical advances with practical applications in ways that widen access and use for individuals and communities, and ultimately improve the way people find and discover information.
Tsudik and Kobsa awarded $460,000 NSF Cybertrust grant
Gene
Tsudik
Alfred
KobsaProfessor of Computer science Gene Tsudik and Professor of Informatics Alfred Kobsa have been awarded a $460,000 collaborative grant from the NSF Cybertrust program for a project titled "User-Aided Secure Association of Wireless Devices".
The cybertrust project is being conducted in collaboration with Nitesh Saxena, an ICS Ph.D. alum, and Assistant Professor at NYU Polytechnic Institute.
The popularity of personal gadgets opens up many new services for ordinary users. Many everyday usage scenarios involve two or more devices "working together" – for example, sensors and personal RFID tags. Before working together, devices must be securely "paired" to enable secure communication.
The human-imperceptible nature of wireless communication prompts the very real threat of Man-in-the-Middle (MiTM) attacks.
Another challenge arises due to the lack of a global security infrastructure. Consequently, traditional cryptographic means alone are unsuitable, since unfamiliar devices have no prior security context and no common point of trust.
Therefore, some human involvement in secure device pairing is unavoidable. At the same time, most devices have limited hardware and/or user interfaces, thus complicating human involvement.
Since device pairing is one of the very few areas where security directly involves and affects the average user, the greatest impact of proposed research is expected to be the broader participation in security practices and better appreciation of security and its benefits. The project also emphasizes industry outreach and technology transfer by working with manufacturers and industrial consortia.
The project’s end-goal is to construct a set of user-friendly, scalable and secure methods for sensor initialization.
Students taking part in the project are expected to acquire skills that uniquely interact at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction and Cybertrust.
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.
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.
He is the editor of "User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction: The Journal of Personalization Research", edited several books and authored numerous publications in the areas of user-adaptive systems, human-computer interaction and knowledge representation.
Goodrich, Eppstein awarded $400,000 for graphic research
David
Eppstein
Michael
GoodrichComputer science professors David Eppstein and Michael Goodrich have been awarded $400,000 from the National Science Foundation for their study on Algorithms for Graphs on Surfaces.
The research concept with applications to Geographic Information Systems and Computer Graphics includes methods for speeding up the modeling algorithms used by Disney Animation Studios in rendering characters featured in 3D animated features.
The research, which is a collaboration with Roberto Tamassia at Brown University, studies algorithms for embedding graphs on surfaces, algorithms for graphs embedded on surfaces, and applications of such algorithms.
"I am very excited to be exploring a topic like this, which impacts so many other areas, including networking, graphics, and theoretical computer science,” says Goodrich.
Technologies used on the Internet, as well as in navigation systems, are often based on algorithms for geometric graphs. Thus, additional work on such algorithms has a potential for improving these and other environments that depend on geometric graphs.
In addition, at a time when computers and networks are being misused at a growing rate, applications of algorithms for graphs on surfaces to computer security has the potential for protecting the public at large.
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.
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.
AUGUST 2008
New compiler technology makes the Internet experience 7 times faster
Michael
FranzMozilla released the first alpha prototype of the next Firefox browser that incorporates a radically new compiler technology invented by professor of computer science Michael Franz and his former Ph.D. student Andreas Gal.
Franz and Gal invented a new method for building compilers that differs fundamentally from how compilers have been constructed during the previous 40 years. Key to the invention is a novel data structure called a "trace tree," that allows for building much smaller and faster compilers than previous approaches.
UC Irvine has filed for broad patent protection on this idea.
The new version of Firefox incorporates a new JavaScript compiler based on Franz and Gal's method that is up to 40 times faster than the previous version. Since Firefox is mostly written in JavaScript, the new compiler enables the browser's code to be optimized while it is running and more than doubles the speed of the browser.
Since typical Web 2.0 applications are heavily based on JavaScript, they will run about 700 percent faster than in the current browser and about 15 times faster than in Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
A version of the new Firefox can be downloaded from Mozilla's alpha site and it will become standard in Firefox 3.1, scheduled for release later this year.
Franz and Gal's research on trace-based compilation is supported by the National Science Foundation and by the California MICRO Program with industrial sponsor Sun Microsystems.
For more information about Franz and his research, visit his web site.
JULY 2008
Meenakshisundaram awarded $325,000 from NSF's Graphics and Visualization program
Gopi
MeenakshisundaramGopi Meenakshisundaram (M. Gopi), associate professor of computer science, has been awarded $325,000 from NSF for his project entitled "G&V: Compression Techniques for Direct Rendering".
Gopi will study efficient ways to represent, store, access, and render computer models of very large environments such as power plants, airplanes and public-buildings for interactive simulated user walk-throughs in graphics and virtual reality systems.
Interactive simulated walk-through of architectural models is one of the most important applications of interactive rendering in the high- end graphics.
The biggest challenge in this application is to process several million polygons representing the entire model in order to choose and render a fraction of them at approximately 30 frames per second.
This research will study various techniques to address data transfer bottleneck issue and process this hundreds of gigabytes of data at interactive rates for high fidelity walk-through rendering.
Gopi's research work focuses primarily on topics related to geometry and topology motivated by problems in Computer Graphics.
MAY 2008
Tsudik to give a keynote talk in Sevilla, Spain
Gene
TsudikProfessor Gene Tsudik will be giving a keynote talk entitled "Sensor Self-Defense: How to Withstand Mobile Adversary in Unattended Sensor Networks" at the 2008 Workshop in Information Security: Theory and Practices (WISTP).
WISTP will be held May 13-16 in Sevilla, Spain.
The workshop examines information security in a world where embedded systems are increasingly mobile and ubiquitous.
WISTP hosts researchers and practitioners in computer and embedded systems to encourage interchange and cooperation amongst research and industrial communities.
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.
Dutt authors on-chip communication architectures book
Nikil
Dutt
Sudeep
PasrichaChancellor's Professor Nikil Dutt and doctoral student Sudeep Pasricha have co-authored a book "On-Chip Communication Architectures: System on Chip Interconnect".
A comprehensive reference on concepts, research and trends in on-chip communication architecture design, the book provides readers with a comprehensive survey, not available elsewhere, of all current standards for on-chip communication architectures.
Dutt's research lies at the intersection of compilers, architectures and computer-aided design, with a specific focus on the exploration, evaluation and design of domain-specific embedded systems that span research issues in hardware, software, networked, and ubiquitous systems.
Other projects include low-power/low-energy compilation and synthesis, validation and verification of pipelined processors, software/hardware interfaces for distributed embedded systems, and memory architecture exploration for embedded systems.
Additional information about Dutt and his work can be found on his web site.
APRIL 2008
Jain gives keynote talk at World Wide Web Conference 2008
Ramesh
JainBren Professor Ramesh Jain will be giving a keynote talk entitled "Events in Web Science" at the Web Science Workshop to be held at the WWW2008 conference in Beijing, China. WWW2008 is the 17th annual World Wide Web Conference, organized in part by Sir Tim Berners-Lee (father of the WWW).
The Web Science workshop has invited researchers to present and explain their prediction of the future of the Web, to discuss how this evolution can be observed and influenced, and to reflect on why the Web has evolved to its current state.
Jain will also participate on a panel, “The Future of Online Social Interactions: What to Expect in 2020,” on Wednesday, April 23.
More on WWW2008 and the Web Sciences work shop are available at their respective web sites.
MARCH 2008
Jain's article on EventWeb featured in IEEE Computer Magazine
Ramesh
JainBren Professor of Information and Computer Sciences Ramesh Jain had his article EventWeb: Developing a Human-Centered Computing System featured in the February 2008 issue of IEEE Computer Magazine.
The article focuses on EventWeb, a human-centered computing system that will give users a compelling experience by combining quality content, carefully planned data organization and access mechanisms, and powerful presentation approaches.
The full text of the article (PDF, 1.6 MB) is available for download .
Jain is an active researcher in multimedia information systems, image databases, machine vision, and intelligent systems and is also involved with Seraja, an event-based computing and EventWeb web site.
Additional information about Jain and his work can be found on his web site.
IEEE Computer, the flagship publication of the IEEE Computer Society, publishes peer-reviewed technical content that covers all aspects of computer science, computer engineering, technology, and applications.
IEEE Computer is a resource that practitioners, researchers, and managers can rely on to provide timely information about current research developments, trends, best practices, and changes in the profession.
Smyth receives Google Research Award for Statistical Text Mining
Padhraic
SmythProfessor of computer science Padhraic Smyth has received a gift of $60,000 Google Research Award to support research on statistical text mining of very large document collections using parallel computing.
Statistical text mining is valuable in that it can discover underlying topics and trends that are otherwise hidden in very large data sets, like PubMed, a public digital library
containing approximately 16 million research papers published in the biomedical literature.Using existing algorithms would take several months of computer time to analyze the 16 million documents on a single computer - but the Smyth group has recently developed new techniques using multiple distributed processors that reduce the time for this analysis to about 1 day.
The Google Research Award will enable Professor Smyth and his research group to explore and develop newer and faster text mining algorithms, with potential applications in Web search, digital libraries, new types of browsers for
medical text data, and so on.Other researchers involved in this work include Professor Max Welling and Dave Newman (Computer Science), Professor Mark Steyvers (Cognitive Sciences), and Computer Science Ph.D. students Arthur Asuncion, Chaitanya Chemudugunta, and America Holloway.
FEBRUARY 2008
Jarecki receives NSF CAREER Award
Stanislaw
JareckiStanislaw Jarecki, assistant professor of computer science, has been awarded a $450,000 NSF CAREER research award entitled "Secure Multi-Party Protocols, from Feasibility to Practice".
The goal of the proposed research is to design cryptographic algorithms for a variety of secure multi-party tasks, including private authentication schemes, aggregate signatures, group key agreement schemes, and threshold and proactive cryptosystems.
Such algorithms have applications to secure networking, enabling reliable and privacy-protecting operation of systems ranging from fault-tolerant services to group-wide trust in ad-hoc mobile networks and peer-to-peer groups.
Tsudik to give invited talk at ASIACCS '08
Gene
TsudikGene Tsudik, professor of computer science and Managing Director of the Secure Computing and Networking Center, will be giving an invited talk entitled "Confronting a Mobile Adversary in Unattended Sensor Networks" at ASIACCS in Tokyo, Japan next month.
ASIACCS is the ACM Symposium on InformAtion, Computer and Communications Security, and was created by the ACM Special Interest Group on Security, Audit, and Control (SIGSAC) in 2005.
Tsudik's research interests are mainly in computer/network security, privacy and applied cryptography. His recent work focuses on privacy in Internet services, RFID systems and mobile ad hoc networks, as well as security in sensor networks and storage systems.
His research also covers secure group communication, in particular, group key agreement, group signatures and group access control. He also is interested in database security and public key cryptography.
JANUARY 2008
Franz receives $50,000 gift from Google
Michael
FranzComputer science professor Michael Franz has been awarded an unrestricted gift of $50,000 from Google.
"I am very grateful to Google for this donation," said Franz. "This money will help to make our research at UCI even more
competitive."Professor Franz is an expert on virtual machines and mobile-code security. In his 11 years at UCI, he has graduated 11 Ph.D. students and been awarded more than $7 Million in competitive Federal research funding as Principal Investigator.
For more information about Franz and his research, visit his web site.
Majumder chair of recent ACM VRST conference
Aditi
MajumderAssistant professor of computer science, Aditi Majumder recently hosted the Association for Computing Machinery's Virtual Reality Software and Technology (ACM VRST) in Newport Beach, CA. Co-chairs included Larry Hodges from UNC Charlotte and Daniel Cohen-Or from Tel Aviv University.
In its 14th year, VRST is an annual conference devoted to the technical aspects of virtual reality. The recent conference yielded the highest attendance in the posters and panels track in the last ten years.
Majumder's research addresses how to produce a seamless image on a large-scale tiled display - an important problem to both the scientific and entertainment fields.
Majumder has developed a suite of mathematical models, methods and software to correct the geometric, chromatic and luminescent variations that arise when tiling multiple projection displays.
Franz to be keynote speaker at Cyber Security and Information Intelligence Research Workshop
Michael
FranzComputer science professor Michael Franz and professor Richard Kemmerer of UC Santa Barbara have been invited as keynote speakers to the Cyber Security and Information Intelligence Research (CSIIR) Workshop that will be held in May at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
CSIIR brings together key researchers and decision makers from the national intelligence community, academia, and industrial research labs with a focus on cyber infrastructure protection.
Franz is the Principal Investigator on several competitive grants totaling almost $5M. His current research focuses on security and efficiency aspects of mobile code.
For more information about Franz and his research, visit his web site.
Majumder receives $70,000 to study tractability of seas projectors and cameras
Aditi
MajumderAssistant professor of computer science, Aditi Majumder has received $70,000 in seed funding from NSF to analyze the tractability of using a sea of projectors and cameras for providing all-pervasive displays that can render pixels anywhere and everywhere, both as information carriers and interaction agents.
The project aims to identify the aspects of the problem, if any, that are theoretically intractable as against those that are limited by current technology, under various conditions of known and unknown display and device (projectors and cameras) parameters.
Majumder's research addresses how to produce a seamless image on a large-scale tiled display - an important problem to both the scientific and entertainment fields.
Majumder has developed a suite of mathematical models, methods and software to correct the geometric, chromatic and luminescent variations that arise when tiling multiple projection displays.
Newman utilizes supercomputer to research text mining
David
NewmanResearch scientist David Newman has been awarded 325,000 hours on the supercomputer at San Diego Supercomputing Center to research text mining of huge text collections.
Collections such as the National Library of Medicine's PubMed, Wikipedia and New York Times contain millions of publications and/or articles.
The supercomputer resources will aid Newman to find ways to go beyond simple word searches to better help users retrieve information from these collections.
Topic models on this scale are computationally intensive to train and require huge amounts of memory, thus they can only be computed using terascale resources. The allocation at the Center will allow the research group to tackle important text data sets that are well-beyond current capabilities.
Newman's research is highlighted in a recent Orange County Register article.
Majumder publishes book on practical multi-projector display design
Aditi
MajumderAditi Majumder, assistant professor of computer science has recently published a book "Practical Multi-Projector Display Design". Publisher A.K. Peters released the book at Siggraph 2007.
This is the first book that provides all of the tools and techniques needed to create your own large-area-multi-projector display that is both affordable and flexible.
It covers the current projection technologies, techniques for achieving geometric alignment and color seamlessness, and image rendering using PC clusters. It also gives the details of an advanced distributed multi-camera-based calibration system.
Majumder's research addresses how to produce a seamless image on a large-scale tiled display - an important problem to both the scientific and entertainment fields.
Majumder has developed a suite of mathematical models, methods and software to correct the geometric, chromatic and luminescent variations that arise when tiling multiple projection displays.
