DECEMBER 2007
Kobsa elected to Lecture Notes in Computer Science editorial board
Alfred
KobsaInformatics professor Alfred Kobsa has been elected to the 15 member Editorial Board of the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS).
From its inception as a proceedings series in 1993, LNCS has evolved into an imprint of 16 sub-series and 7 journals covering the entire field of Computer Science.
All 150,000 articles from the 5,000 volumes published to date are available online and receive about 2 million worldwide downloads per year.
Professor Kobsa will specifically oversee the areas of Information Systems and Applications including Human-Computer Interaction.
Doctoral student named president of Apache Software Foundation
Justin
ErenkrantzInformatics doctoral student Justin Erenkrantz was recently appointed president of the Apache Software Foundation, one of the world's largest and most-respected open-source software organizations.
Erenkrantz, also an affiliate of the Institute for Software Research, is focusing his studies on software engineering.
In addition to serving as Apache Software Foundation president, Erenkrantz also is on the foundation's board of directors.
His forthcoming dissertation is titled "Architectural Dissonance and Harmony in REST-based Applications."
NOVEMBER 2007
Gillian R. Hayes joins Department of Informatics faculty
Gillian R. Hayes is an assistant professor in the Department of Informatics at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine.
Her research interests are in human-computer interaction and ubiquitous computing, specifically in the areas of record keeping and surveillance technologies, particularly in natural, unplanned and/or public settings.
She also focuses on the application and uses of ubiquitous computing technologies in the areas of education and healthcare. She earned a PhD in Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology and is a member of IEEE, ACM, and ACMSIGCHI.
Contact her at Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, University of California, Irvine, 5072 Donald Bren Hall, Irvine, CA 92697-3440; www.gillianhayes.com
Kay serves as Moot Court Judge
David G.
KayOn November 16 and 17, 2007, Senior Lecturer David G. Kay served as Chief Justice in three rounds of the National Entertainment Law Moot Court Competition.
Law students from across the country competed by making Supreme Court arguments in a hypothetical case involving copyright and trademark infringement on the World-Wide Web.
One party in the case hosted a web site with videos posted by users; a user posted a copyrighted video and the copyright owner wanted to hold the web site host responsible for the infringement.
Another issue was the use of a competitor's domain name in a metatag, and whether that constituted trademark infringement by diverting users away from the competitor.
Kay, who is a lawyer as well as a computer scientist, said, "Internet issues come up frequently in the entertainment industry, and those issues often have novel legal implications. It's useful for computer scientists to have an understanding of the legal system because increasingly, technologists and lawyers need to work together in the development of new products and services."
The Bren School has a long history of addressing these issues in its curriculum.
Informatics 131, Social Analysis of Computerization, and Informatics 269, Computer Law, are two courses on this theme. A general education course on technical issues in public policy is also planned for the 2008-09 academic year.
OCTOBER 2007
Graduate students win award at OOPSLA 2007 for Eclipse plugin
Informatics students Sushil Bajracharya and Joel Ossher, and Brazilian visiting student Otavio Lemos, all in professor Crista Lopes lab, have won the Student Research Competition at the Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA) 2007 with their work on CodeGenie.
CodeGenie is an Eclipse plugin that uses test cases as the interface for searching existing open source code on the internet.
With this award, Sushil, Joel and Otavio have been selected for the final of the prestigious ACM Student Research Competition.
Eclipse is an open universal platform for tool integration - an open extensible Integrated Development Environment (IDE), and an open source community.
The Eclipse community creates royalty-free technology as a universal platform for tools integration. Eclipse-based tools give developers freedom of choice in a multi-language, multi-platform, multi-vendor supported environment supported by multiple vendors.
The operating system platforms that Eclipse has been targeted to includes Windows, Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, and Mac OS. In addition, Eclipse provides a unique environment for members of the academic community to build new tools for teaching, research, and further growth of the Eclipse community.
Lee awarded NSF Grant to study cyberinfrastructure development
Charlotte
P. LeeCharlotte P. Lee, a research scientist in the Department of Informatics, has been awarded a $449,000 grant from the National Science foundation to study collaboration in the development of cyberinfrastructure.
Recent years have seen the rise of new forms of cyberinfrastructure which are large-scale distributed scientific enterprises supported primarily through advanced technological infrastructure such as supercomputers and high speed networks.
One of the primary goals of cyberinfrastructure is to transform scientific and engineering practice, yet the nature of these transformations are poorly understood.
Lee's research will systematically study the transformations that cyberinfrastructure is created to engender.
Using ethnographic methods, she will investigate:
- existing scientific and engineering practices
- how scientific and engineering practices are collaboratively transformed in the creation of cyberinfrastructure
- patterns of collaboration (e.g. social networks, communication strategies, management strategies) and relate those patterns to organizational and scientific outcomes.
This research will make empirical and conceptual contributions to ongoing research in areas such as computer supported cooperative work and science and technology studies.
Furthermore, this research will stimulate and support the development of future cyberinfrastructures.
More about Lee is available on her website.
SEPTEMBER 2007
Patterson awarded NSF grant to develop context aware IM client
Donald
PattersonAssistant professor of informatics Donald Patterson has been been awarded a grant of over $400,000 from the National Science Foundation to develop a context aware Instant Messaging (IM) client.
Although computers have access to many embedded sensors, like GPS, automated assistance for alleviating
inappropriate IM interruptions remains elusive.In a world in which users are available for some purposes, but not for others one indication of interruptibility no longer fits the needs of users.
Patterson's research aims to explore ways to close the semantic gap between what computers can sense and what people can understand by developing, deploying and testing a context-aware IM client, Nomatic*Gaim.
Rather than attempting to determine context directly, it attempts to keep the human in the loop, so that IM communications are more efficient in an increasingly always online world.
Ultimately the goal is for computers to treat context as more than a parameter to a program, so that in this way, users and their devices can come to a shared understanding of the world, which then has implications for the behavior of both device and user.
Lopes and colleagues awarded $1.1 million NSF grant to develop trustable cyberinfrastructure for water management
Crista
Lopes
Michael
GoodrichAssociate professor of informatics Crista Lopes, professor of computer science Michael Goodrich, professor of chemical engineering and materials science Stanley Grant and Roberto Tamassia from Brown University have received a $1.1 million NSF grant to create a more open version of the California Sustainable Watershed Information Manager (CalSWIM) website.
Currently, CalSWIM, which provides access to stream monitoring data and relevant GIS geospatial data, is a closed cyberinfrastructure, with updates controlled by a small number of individuals, and any changes to it requiring the intervention of web-knowledgeable professionals.
The updated website will utilize a wiki that will allow watershed stakeholders – scientists, regulators, and the general public - the ability to update the site directly, without requiring them to have web programming knowledge.
The aim is to create a publicly updatable encyclopedia of “all things watershed” that includes all watersheds in California.
By transforming CalSWIM into an Open Collaborative Information Repository, in the form of a wiki, the researchers will enable it to become a sustainable, expandable, outreaching, and continually up-to-date resource.
The researchers will also focus on developing a trust management component based on a mixture of access control systems, reputation management systems, and data integrity algorithms that will minimize the existence of poor-quality information and also minimize the effect of malicious information manipulation.
The researchers hope the trust management component developed in this project can be applied to a variety of Collaborative Information Repositories that share the properties of CalSWIM — namely, data-based collaboration between scientists, regulatory agencies, and the general public.
AUGUST 2007
Professors receive NSF grant to study modular software design
Crista
Lopes
Pierre
BaldiCrista 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
Kobsa publishes cover article in the Communications of the ACM
Alfred
KobsaInformatics professor Alfred Kobsa just published a cover article on Privacy-Enhanced Personalization in the most recent issue of the Communications of the ACM.
Personalized human-computer interaction can be at odds with privacy since it requires the collection of considerable amounts of personal data.
Kobsa's article presents human-computer interaction strategies, policy measures and software architectures that can contribute to reconcile personalization with privacy.
The Communications of the ACM is the flagship publication of the ACM with an audience of more than 80,000 readers in over 100 countries.
It addresses predominantly professionals in the fields of Computer Science, Informatics and Information Systems working in academia, industry and government.
The aim of its bi-monthly cover articles is to "dig deeper, exploring a particular topic from many angles as well as interpreting the implications for the entire IT community".
Professor Kobsa will also deliver the keynote address at the 4th International Conference on Trust, Privacy and Security in Digital Business (TrustBus 2007), about the same topic.
Professors look into the games people play
Bonnie
Nardi
Bill
TomlinsonResearch into computer gaming conducted by the California Institute of Technology (Calit2) and the Bren School of ICS at UC Irvine indicates that games offer far more than mere entertainment value to children and adults; they are being used as tools for learning, socialization, business, and even improvement of the world.
Certain researchers believe computer games help nurture socialization skills by rewarding collaboration and linking people of diverse cultural backgrounds, and Informatics professor Bonnie Nardi says the World of Warcraft massively multiplayer online game prepares participants for the cultivation of relationships and collaboration with strangers through the mastery of various tasks or quests.
She notes that the game's community-based operating principles are "actually the opposite of what traditional culture does, which is cut us off from people who are different from us."
Informatics professor Bill Tomlinson and UCI professor Lynn Carpenter have designed a computer game that educates children about restoration ecology by enabling them to virtually eradicate species to determine extinction's ecological impact.
"One wonderful possibility for games is the ways in which they can be used to change the world," notes Tomlinson. "They can help bring communities together, and help people learn about new concepts and engage with new topics in new fields."
To learn more about this research, see the Calit2 article.
JUNE 2007
Orange Lounge to feature ACE student projects
The Orange Lounge at South Coast Plaza, 3333 Bear St., Costa Mesa, will be featuring works by four students and one graduate of the UC Irvine Arts Computation Engineering (ACE) program. All five installation pieces, part of the Playtech exhibition, employ digital technologies and require human participation.
Simon Penny, founder and co-director of the program and professor of arts and engineering and a joint appointment in the Bren School Department of Informatics, said that the five artists come from China, Korea, Mexico, Canada and the U.S. He described the program as "a radically interdisciplinary program prepping people for new careers in digital cultures."
The exhibition is especially unique because many of the student projects produced in the UCI program are not conducive to being displayed in a gallery setting, Penny said. But these pieces helped bridge the gap between technology and art.
The ACE program consists of three masters level degrees of six quarters (two years) duration: MS Engineering concentration; ACE MFA Fine Arts concentration; ACE MS Information & Computer Science concentration; ACE A Double Masters ACE (MS and MFA).
To learn more about the projects and exhibit, see the Daily Pilot article.
UCI Libraries laud Professor Kobsa's HCI students
Alfred
KobsaA recent article by the UCI Libraries acknowledges the valuable contributions of students from informatics professor Alfred Kobsa's undergraduate and graduate classes in Human-Computer Interaction to the gradual improvement of the Library web pages over the past few years.
During that time, Kobsa's HCI students interviewed hundreds of undergraduate and graduate students and dozens of UCI faculty and staff regarding their online information needs.
The students developed numerous alternative designs and software prototypes and tested them in small user experiments. The Libraries adopted many of the central recommendations that students made.
In other past projects, Kobsa's HCI students worked on UCI's Electronic Educational Environment, and the web pages of UCI's Distance Learning Center as well as the Bren School's Student Affairs and External Relations offices.
The next graduate HCI class is scheduled for the Fall quarter of 2007.
Professor develops publications-based ranking framework for computing graduate programs
Richard
TaylorCiting the limitations of purely publications-based rankings processes of computing graduate programs, Jie Ren, a software engineer at Google and Informatics professor Richard Taylor, developed a framework that facilitates automatic and versatile publication-based ranking.
The rankings framework, explained in the authors article, "Automatic and Versatile Publications Ranking for Research Institutions and Scholars", uses publications data from 1995 to 2003 to rank computing graduate programs automatically and objectively.
One of the most well-known rankings, the U.S. News and World Report ranking includes both objective indicators and subjective polls.
For the complete article, see Communications of the ACM, Volume 50, Number 6 (2007), pages 81-85
View students' Human Computer Interaction projects
Donald
PattersonEight teams of students in Informatics professor Donald Patterson's Human Computer Interaction Project Course, produced Web 2.0 applications with an optional Nokia cell phone component.
Each of the teams presented their work in an American Idol style format called "Anteater Idol". The audience voted on the best applications and the best teams received a small prize for their efforts. The overall best team received an automatic 100 percent grade.
The projects ranged from a sports media aggregator to a music media portal. All projects can be viewed at the class Web site.
U.S. DOE awards Redmiles with GAANN Award
David
RedmilesProfessor of informatics David Redmiles and professor of computer science Gene Tsudik 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.
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.
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.
MAY 2007
Kobsa publishes book on Web Personalization
Alfred
KobsaInformatics professor Alfred Kobsa published the book "The Adaptive Web: Methods and Strategies of Web Personalization" together with two colleagues from the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Hanover, Germany.
The 24-chapter 760-page volume provides an in-depth overview of current research on personalized interaction on the World Wide Web.
Kobsa contributed two chapters, on Generic User Modeling Systems and on Privacy-Enhanced Web Personalization.
Other contributors include former Bren School professor Mike Pazzani (now Vice Provost of Research at Rutgers University) and UCI graduate Daniel Billsus (now with Ebay).
The book is available from Springer Verlag, both in print and online.
Van der Hoek receives Hewlett Packard grant
André
van der
HoekInformatics professor André van der Hoek has received a 2007 HP Technology for Teaching grant, which is designed to transform teaching and improve learning in the classroom through innovative uses of technology. The award is one of 42 throughout the United States and Puerto Rico.
Profesor van der Hoek will use HP wireless Tablet PCs to enhance learning in computer science.
Van der Hoek's research lies in the fields of configuration management and software architecture, focusing on two research questions: (1) how to better coordinate the activities of multiple, geographically distributed developers and (2) how to better leverage higher levels of abstraction in designing and implementing software systems.
He also researches software engineering education and explores how simulation can aid students in learning more about the software engineering process.
MARCH 2007
Tomlinson awarded NSF CAREER grant for collocation research
Bill
TomlinsonBill Tomlinson , assistant professor of informatics, has received a $500,000 National Science Foundation CAREER grant in support of his project entitled "CAREER: An Agent-Based Approach to Human-Computer Interaction for Systems of Collocated Devices".
The grant will fund Tomlinson's research into ways in which several collocated devices (i.e. PDAs, mobile phones) may be enabled to work together as a system and take advantage of the unique characteristics of collocation.
Specifically, the research seeks to explore and evaluate the use of embodied mobile agents (EMAs) -- animated agents that can transfer seamlessly among different devices -- as one potential solution to the problem of multi-device interaction.
The applications of collocated device systems could reach into many facets of society, from industrial applications that provide people with contextual information about their work flow, to entertainment systems that integrate both the real and the virtual world, to educational systems that help people learn about complex content domains such as environmental restoration.
The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards in support of the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who most effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their organization.
FEBRUARY 2007
Lopes' paper in top 25 of most cited articles in Computer Science
Crista
LopesTen years after its publication, the first paper on Aspect-Oriented Programming, co-authored by Informatics professor Crista Lopes is currently the #23 most cited paper in all Computer Science publications indexed citeseer.
Unlike Object Orientated Programming (OOP), the programming paradigms of aspect-oriented programming (AOP) attempt to aid programmers in the separation of concerns, specifically cross-cutting concerns, as an advance in modularization.
The paper, co-authored by Gregor Kiczales, John Lamping, Anurag Mendhekar, Chris Maeda, Jean Marc Loingtier, and John Irwin, contained some of the ideas in Lopes' Ph.D. thesis, and is considered a seminal paper in software design research.
Alumnus publishes book on cross-layer design
Raja
JurdakRaja Jurdak, a former graduate student of professors Crista Lopes and Pierre Baldi, and now a post-doctoral fellow at the University College, Dublin, has recently published a book entitled "Wireless AdHoc and Sensor Networks -- A Cross-Layer Design Perspective."
The purpose of the book is to expose researchers and graduate students to state-of-the-art advances in cross-layer design for wireless ad hoc and sensor networks. It explores the optimization potential of cross-layer design approaches for wireless ad hoc and sensor network performance.
The book consists of two main parts: (1) a theoretical section that provides an overview of design issues in both strictly layered and cross-layer approaches for ad hoc and sensor networks; and (2) a practical section that builds on these issues to explore three case studies of diverse ad hoc and sensor network applications and communication technologies.
This book, published by Springer, comes in the sequence of his doctoral work at the Bren School and is now available at Amazon.
NSF funds development of educational software engineering tool
Andre van
der HoekInformatics professor Andre van der Hoek and research scientist Emily Navarro have been awarded $450,000 from the National Science Foundation to expand their educational software engineering tool.
SimSE, an innovative educational tool, provides students the opportunity to practice managing software engineering processes in a simulated environment.
The tool includes several realistic components, such as random events, large teams of people, and critical decision-making.
A proof-of-concept version of SimSE has already been developed and is currently being used in classrooms around the world.
The three-year project focuses on expanding SimSE from a proof-of concept into a comprehensive classroom approach for educating students in software processes.
Proposed activities include broadening SimSE's technical features, creation of SimSE course modules, comprehensive evaluation across multiple institutions, and continued national dissemination.
Taylor's paper most cited in software engineering articles
Richard
TaylorProfessor Richard Taylor's paper "A Classification and Comparison Framerwork for Software Architecture Description Languages" has been identified by Information and Software Technology as the most cited article in software engineering articles for the year 2000.
Over the last 20 years, the paper ranks fourth as most cited. The paper was co-authored by Nenad Medvidovic.
Taylor's research is focused on design — the issues, techniques, and agents involved in creating and evolving software artifacts and processes. Specific emphases include:
» Software architecture: means for designing, organizing, and
describing distributed and decentralized applications.» Architecture-based software development environments: tools to support the conceptual approach, ranging from design-time tools to implementation to run-time dynamic adaptation. A full version of the paper is available online.
JANUARY 2007
Patterson to study context-aware networks in Africa
Donald
PattersonUC Irvine's Academic Senate Council has awarded Donald Patterson, assistant professor of informatics, $3,500 in travel funding to study context-aware networking routing algorithms in Africa.
Context-aware networking algorithms allow users to transmit data even when the local network infrastructure has been destroyed
For example, if a natural disaster destroyed an area’s local network infrastructure, aid workers with mobile data devices on the ground would still be able to transmit data back to headquarters for coordinating logistics.
By creating a routing system that knew which device belonged to the "coordinator" and which device belonged to a "field nurse" it could make better decisions about which direction to push data when the devices come in contact.
The coordinator's device could offload data to the Internet when it returns to a location with established infrastructure.
Patterson, working with two non-governmental health organizations, will be surveying two sites in South Africa and Zambia.
Patterson plans to evaluate work flow and movement patterns of participants in the organizations to develop an architecture which routes on the basis of contextual clues, but is also helpful to the organizations on the ground.
Patterson’s areas of research interest lie at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and Ubiquitous computing and he has applied this work to transportation and activity assistance.
Nardi's paper on blogging ranked most downloaded
Bonnie
NardiAssociate professor of informatics Bonnie A. Nardi’s article entitled " Why We Blog" was recently ranked as the most popular paper downloaded from the Association for Computing Machinery’s magazine and computing surveys articles.
The paper, co-authored with Diane J. Schiano, Michelle Gumbrecht and Luke Swartz was originally published in December 2004 for Communications of the ACM.
Professor Nardi's research interests include theory in human-computer interaction and computer-supported collaborative work; computer-mediated communication technologies; and studies of scientific collaboration.
She specializes in the use of ethnographic methods to study technology. Her theoretical orientation is activity theory. Current research includes a study of blogging and an investigation of scientific collaboration among ecologists.
Tomlinson's project puts environmental data at your fingertips
Bill
TomlinsonZDNet.com blogger Ryan Stewart (read the full article here) discusses A.U.R.A. , a project out of Microsoft Research that aims to "annotate the planet" .
The A.U.R.A. application is a bar code reader that uses the built in camera on most phones to take a snapshot of the bar code and then decipher what it is. By default from the application you can then look up the item on Amazon (using the mobile web interface) and find out price information about it.
Stewart describes using GreenScanner.org, something put together by informatics professor, Bill Tomlinson, that brings back environmental data on an item. By typing in a UPC code users can see what people think about a product (1 is bad, 5 is good). Users can also add comments of their own.
"GreenScanner will help shoppers decide what to buy before they reach the checkout counter," said Tomlinson. "It will be a quick, portable way for them to learn more about a product if, for instance, they are trying to decide between two brands of laundry detergent."
The project is based on a publicly available database of more than 600,000 products, each with its own UPC code. Examples of products that have been reviewed include Horizon Organic 1% Milk, UPC number 742365264108, and Poland Spring bottled water, UCP number 075720008513.
"Many people are excited to contribute information to sites online -- posting reviews on Amazon.com and writing articles for Wikipedia," Tomlinson said. "Contributors to GreenScanner can help give other people a little more information that might help them make a decision about what to buy."
Tomlinson named the project GreenScanner because he is concerned about how commercial products affect the environment. He wants shoppers familiar with a product's environmental impact -- how the item is made, delivered or packaged -- to add their knowledge to the database.
Tomlinson is also a researcher in the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology and teaches in the Arts Computation Engineering graduate program.
Before coming to UCI in 2003, Tomlinson received a doctorate in media arts and sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a master's in experimental animation from the California Institute of the Arts and a bachelor's in biology from Harvard College.
His research focuses on computer graphics, human-computer interaction, computer games, interactive animation, environmental education and multi-device systems.
