|
Table of Contents
When UC Irvine computer science
students arrive on campus for
Fall quarter, they will find several major
changes-from new faculty to upgraded computer labs-reflecting a
heightened commitment to high-quality computing programs.
The improvements come as the ICS Department
Science (ICS) prepares for its biggest influx of freshmen. The number
of freshmen entering ICS this fall will grow by 61 percent-from 122 in
1997 to 196 in 1998. UCI already has the largest number of
undergraduate majors of any ICS program in the UC system, and the
third-highest number of ICS majors of any school west of the Rockies.
"Companies and students alike are seeing that UCI is the place to go
for an information and computer science education that helps people
develop the foundation they'll need in the next decade," said Michael
Pazzani, chair of the ICS department. "We can provide students with
the knowledge and the framework to develop their own ideas in the next
generation of computing technology and push the technology forward.
And now, with our new computers, instructors and other resources,
we're an even stronger program."
Undergraduates will be able to use 130 new Pentium 400 MHz personal
computers and 35 PCs upgraded to Pentium 400 MHz, for programming
assignments and research projects.
More than a dozen computing companies, most from Orange County,
donated part of the cost of the computers-$185,000 of a total of more
than $400,000. The rest was covered by UCI's portion of a UC-wide
high-tech education initiative launched by Gov. Pete Wilson and the
Legislature. The governor and legislators appropriated $6 million in
the 1998-99 budget to increase the number of computer science and
engineering faculty and boost computer resources at UC campuses. That
will allow campuses in the system to significantly increase enrollment
of computer science students to help alleviate the state's shortage of
high-tech workers.
In addition, Microsoft Corp., the Redmond, WA-based leader in
software for personal computers, donated $687,000 worth of software-a
total of 1,650 software licenses-to ICS as part of a special grant
program.
ICS Graduate student Mac Casale won the Best Student
Paper Presentation award at the 1998 International
Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology
held in Montreal in June 1998.
The prize included a signed framed certificate
Dnd a cash prize of $500 donated by Glaxo-Wellcome, presented at the
Conference banquet.
The student paper presentations were judged independently
by a committee of five senior scientists based
on both talk content and presentation and the choice was unanimous.
The paper authors (in addition to Mac) were
Richard Lathrop (associate professor in ICS),
Douglas J. Tobias, J. Lawrence
Marsh, and Leslie Thompson, and the paper was title
`Modeling Protein Homopolymeric Repeats: Possible
Polyglutamine Structural Motifs For Huntington's Disease.'
The paper describes a prototype software system for assisting an
expert user in modeling protein repeats.
The system was applied to the polyglutamine (Poly-Q) repeat in the first
exon of huntingtin, the gene implicated in Huntington's disease.
The results in the paper
suggest that there may be several plausible aggregation structures for
the intranuclear inclusion bodies which have been found in diseased
neurons, and may help in the effort to understand the structural basis
for Huntington's disease.
The ICS department is very pleased to welcome three new
assistant professors to its faculty ranks this quarter:
-
Professor Wanda Pratt recently
completed her PhD at Stanford University and her
research focuses on
developing knowledge-based methods to improve access to medical information
including information access, information retrieval, text categorization, knowledge-based systems, human-computer interaction, and medical informatics.
-
Professor Sharad Mehrotra joins ICS
from the University of Illinois. His research interests include
database management, information retrieval, distributed systems and transaction processing, including current large-scale projects in
multimedia information retrieval and database managament.
-
Professor Nalini Venkatasubramanian
recently completed
her PhD degree at the University of Illinois and has
worked at Hewlett Packard on the implementation and performance evaluation of multimedia servers, ATM
networking and object-oriented databases.
Her research interests include
Resource Management in Open Distributed Systems,
Distributed Multimedia,
Networks,
Concurrency,
Quality of Service and Economic Theories,
Performance Evaluation, and
Digital Dance and Choreography.
National high-tech magazine PC Week
has named UC Irvine one of the nation's top 10 universities for
information technology education.
PC Week chose UCI along with Harvard,
Columbia, Stanford and six other nationally recognized universities as
the campuses best preparing students for a career in information and
computer science. UCI was one of only two public universities
included in the listings, which highlight programs that are preparing
students to fill the nation's shortage of information technology
workers.
PC Week focused on UCI's Department of Information and Computer
Science (ICS) and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in
its analysis of programs.
"UC Irvine's information and computer science curriculum, faculty and
resources are getting attention across the country," said Michael
Pazzani, chair of the ICS department. "Industry members-from large
corporations outside the state to local start-up developers-are
seeking to hire UCI graduates. They're also working with ICS to form
partnerships and offer opportunities for students to learn as
interns."
Professor
Rajesh Gupta
and Professor
Alex Nicolau
have been awarded a multi-year $2.2 million
award from the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA).
The project is entitled
"Coordinated Compile-time and Runtime Reconfiguration
with Safe Execution and Continuous Validation of Adaptive Computing Systems."
The goal of the project is to build an Adaptive Memory Reconfiguration & Management (AMRM) architecture that demonstrates 100X improvement in the memory system performance, in terms of latency and available bandwidth. This performance gain is achieved by using application-adaptive architectural mechanisms, hardware-assisted blocking, prefetching and dynamic cache structures that optimize movement and placement of application data through the memory hierarchy. Specifically,
the project seeks to address MoM radar cross-section modeling and NAS conjugate-gradient codes to achieve at least an order of magnitude gain in performance.
Another important goal of the project is to demonstrate that such gains in memory system performance are achievable across a range of applications using standard processing and application development platforms.
Professors
Dennis Kibler,
Michael Pazzani
and
Padhraic Smyth
were awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation
to develop an online repository of large data sets for
benchmark use in data mining, applied statistics, and
machine learning. The ICS department has been home to
the well-known "UCI Machine Learning Repository" since
1988, a widely-cited benchmark collection of data sets,
primarily for classification problems. This new data library
will involve a considerable expansion of the existing
respoitory to encompass
the types of massive and more complex data
which are currently encountered in business, finance,
medicine, and science data analysis, including remotely-sensed
image data, protein sequences, economic time series,
face recognition data sets, atmospheric and ocean
measurements to name but a few. The data library will allow
algorithm researchers and developers to access and
use the online data sets for the purposes of developing
new techniques and tools for exploration and analysis
of massive data sets.
UC Irvine is the nation's eighth best public university, up from number nine last year, according to U.S. News & World Report's annual ranking of
America's leading public and private universities.
UCI also was ranked number 36 overall among the nation's top 50 public and private universities, up from 41st in last year's "America's Best Colleges" guidebook.
In a two-way tie, U.S. News & World Report named UC Berkeley and the University of Virginia as the nation's top public universities. And in a three-way tie, Harvard,
Princeton and Yale universities were ranked the best national universities among all public and private universities.
The magazine ranks the nation's more than 1,400 four-year accredited colleges and universities based on 16 indicators of excellence, from academic reputation and student
retention to graduation rate performance, faculty resources and alumni giving rates.
"To be moved up the national ranking ladder feels great, but it's no surprise," UCI Chancellor Ralph J. Cicerone said. "Whether it is major research developments or the impressive
achievements of our graduates, UCI continues to excel, and these factors are reflected in the latest U.S. News rankings."
The new rankings from U.S. News & World Report are the latest among several top rankings UCI has received from the magazine this year. In February, several graduate
programs were ranked among the top programs nationwide. They were English (16), history (tied for 36 with three other universities), the Graduate School of Management (43) and
engineering (49).
U.S. News & World Report did not rank programs in arts or physical, biological and computer sciences for 1998. Between 1995 and 1997, the following UCI programs in those
areas were ranked: chemistry (28), biology (29), physics (31), computer science (34), arts (45) and mathematics (48). The following UCI specialties were ranked: critical theory (2),
creative writing (6), organic chemistry (10), drama/theater (12), photography (15) and cell biology/developmental biology (21). The graduate rankings were based on surveys in which
scholars rated schools' reputations for scholarship, curriculum and the quality of the faculty and graduate students.
In the new rankings, UCI tied with the University of Wisconsin as the 8th best public university, and it tied with Tulane University in Louisiana and the University of Wisconsin as
the 36th best university among the top 50 public and private universities.
Private support to UCI reached an all-time high of $38.8 million in fiscal year 1997-98-a 29 percent increase over the previous year.
This is the third year in a row of double-digit increases, and private support for the university has nearly doubled over the past five years.
Foundations and other non-profits provided $13.6 million in donations in 1997-98; corporations, $12.3 million, and individuals, $12.9 million. Many of the individual donors are
Orange County residents who have been longtime supporters of the university-including a number of alumni.
Private donations to the university during the past fiscal year reflect a strong interest in supporting the life sciences.
The greatest share of donations-$21.7 million, or 56 percent of the total-went to the College of Medicine, the Irvine Biomedical Research Center, the Beckman Laser Institute and
Medical Clinic, the School of Biological Sciences and UCI Medical Center.
Donors designated nearly $17 million to support academic departments campuswide. In addition, $10.9 million was designated for research, $3 million for student support, $2.9
million for campus improvements and $2.4 million for unrestricted purposes.
Another $2.6 million was designated for other purposes.
-
Professor David Rosenblum
has been appointed to the Editorial Board of
the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. In
addition he has been named Program Chair
of the ACM SIGSOFT 2000 Eighth International
Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering.
-
Ranjit Iyer, a graduating ICS senior in June, and
this Fall a new graduate student in ICS, was
awarded "Best Student Research Presentation" at
the annual ACM Southeast Conference in summer 1998.
Ranjit's presentation centered
around a novel approach to the treatment of HIV-infected patients.
Along with Professors Michael J. Pazzani, Darryl See, and Richard
Lathrop, Ranjit has been working on a rule-based expert system, CTSHIV
(Customized Treatment For HIV), that monitors mutations in the HIV
virus and recommends treatment for patients.
-
Professor Padhraic Smyth was interviewed
on National Public Radio for a short segment during
the Morning Edition program on current research
in data mining and its impact in business and science.
The
audio is available online using RealAudio.
-
Professor Michael Pazzani
was awarded a grant by the National Science Foundation
for a research project entitled
'From Computer Data to Human Knowledge:
A Cognitive Approach to Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining.'
The grant is for $435,000 for 3 years split between UCI ($240K)
and Professor Dorrit Billman at Georgia Tech ($195K).
The goal of the project is to investigate algorithms for providing
insight into some phenomenon by analyzing a database of examples of
that phenomenon. The specific focus will be to
constrain and bias algorithms for creating models of data so that
these models are understandable and coherent to users of knowledge
discovery and data mining systems.
Previous Issues
|
