Curiosity about the world and a commitment to solving problems are the passions that drive ICS faculty. Their research in the information and computer sciences are applicable to many scholarly and scientific fields. But our faculty don't do it alone, students work side-by-side with nationally renowned professors to advance knowledge and improve lives.
The dominant research theme in our group is algorithm design, studied from several diverse viewpoints: combinatorial optimization; approximation, online, randomized and parallel algorithms; graph algorithms; and algorithmic game theory. A second theme is computational complexity theory, with an emphasis on studying new complexity classes, such as those used for establishing intractability of economic and game-theoretic solution concepts. Other areas of theory studied include computational geometry, data structures, geometric graph theory, quantum computing, spectral graph theory, theory of deep learning, cryptography, and online and matching-based market design.
Primary Faculty
- Pierre Baldi
- Mike Dillencourt
- David Eppstein
- Michael Goodrich
- Dan Hirschberg
- Sandi Irani
- Stanislaw Jarecki
- Milena Mihail
- Ioannis Panageas
- Amelia Regan
- Vijay Vazirani
Affiliate Faculty
Research in AI is concerned with producing machines to automate tasks requiring intelligent behavior. Examples include computer vision, bioinformatics, constraint-based problem solving, text understanding, data mining and smart sensor networks.
- Pierre Baldi
- Rina Dechter
- Charless Fowlkes
- Alexander Ihler
- Richard Lathrop
- Marco Levorato
- Stephan Mandt
- Eric Mjolsness
- Ioannis Panageas
- Babak Shahbaba
- Sameer Singh
- Padhraic Smyth
- Hal Stern
- Erik Sudderth
- Xiaohui Xie
- Jing Zhang
Affiliate Faculty
Involves the use of techniques from applied mathematics, informatics, statistics, and computer science to solve biological problems. Current areas of research at the Bren School include medical information access and knowledge representation for health-care guidelines.
Computer architecture research studies various aspects of computer system definition, design and optimization. Computer Science faculty conduct research on multiple topics in this area, including processor and memory hierarchy micro-architecture, interplay between compilers and other system software and architecture, optimization for performance, power, and other constraints, heterogeneous computing using FPGAs and GPUs, architecture for emerging technologies including non-volatile memory, architectural aspects of computer security, concurrency and parallelism. Faculty in this area also design and build computer systems.
Primary Faculty
Affiliate Faculty
The field of visual computing deals with generating/capturing, representing, rendering, and interacting with synthetic and real-world images and video. Virtual and augmented reality that involves a different presentation and interaction media, as well as combining real and synthetic worlds are also core aspects of visual computing. Interactive Graphics and Visualization (iGravi) faculty work on end-to-end solutions from capturing of images and geometry; representing large geometric, image, and video data sets; geometry, image, and topology processing; interactive rendering of large visual data sets; algorithms for building large area immersive displays for presentation of visual content; and virtual and augmented reality including spatially augmented reality using projectors, cameras, and interaction devices. Examples of projects include deep learning algorithms for geometry representation, appearance modeling and rendering, medical image processing for 3D reconstruction and topological analysis of anatomical parts, and augmented reality on dynamic surfaces using projector camera systems.
iGravi Core (Primary) Faculty
iGravi Core (Secondary) Faculty
Information technologies bring people together -- through social networking, through collaborative systems, through digital media, and through communications. Informatics has been a long-term leader in the study of social engagement through information systems. Topics include distance collaboration, workflow and process-based systems, multi-user gaming, and cultural engagements.
Computer vision at UCI focuses on developing algorithms and systems for understanding images and video. Research spans from theoretical questions of perception and representation to practical applications including 3D reconstruction, human activity recognition, and biomedical image analysis.
Primary Faculty
Affiliate Faculty
Focuses on research related to architectures, index structures, algorithms, models, and performance evaluation of a variety of next-generation databases and information systems and technologies for data mining.
Focuses on issues relating to embedded systems, a special-purpose system in which software and hardware computing elements are completely encapsulated by the device or environment it controls. Unlike a general-purpose computer, such as a personal computer, an embedded system performs pre-defined tasks, usually under very specific constraints (e.g, low power) and requirements (e.g., reliability).
Humanity is currently facing a range of significant environmental challenges such as global warming, species extinction, pollution, and overpopulation. Informatics tools and techniques can help facilitate responses to these challenges, and assist with planning for future environmental issues.
HCI research at UCI stretches from the architecture of novel interactive systems to the social and cultural considerations of information technology adoption and use. We employ laboratory, ethnographic, and prototyping techniques to understand how people adopt, adapt, and respond to information systems. Recent research has investigated privacy issues in mobile systems, tangible interfaces for group awareness, interactive animation, and visualization of location information.
This topic concerns the development and application of information systems to healthcare. Information systems have a critical role to play in contemporary health and wellness programs. This includes technology in hospital settings but also persuasive technologies for healthy living, health care in the home and in the community, and in the interactions between partners in the health care system.
Multimedia computing started receiving attention more than a decade ago. Naturally, early systems dealt with very limited aspect of multimedia. With progress in technology, several computing addresses important issues in creation, communication, storage, access, and presentation of information and experiences. In our department, we are addressing research issues in fundamentals of multimedia systems and their advanced applications.
Researchers investigate various issues in the design and analysis of high-speed networks for multimedia applications. They are actively involved in research on computer networks and distributed systems, with the goal of designing, analyzing and implementing communication systems that allow high-speed transport of multimedia information between end-users.
Our research focuses on a broad range of topics related to performance, security and reliability of operating systems. We are interested in both development of clean-slate operating system architectures and on a practical evolution of de facto industry standard operating system kernels towards hardware, software, and security requirements in the age of mobile and warehouse-scale computing. Our research covers areas of operating system security, support for heterogeneous hardware, low-latency datacenter networking and storage, virtualization, access control, and software verification. Also, we work on a range of topics where operating systems interface with computer architecture, networking, programming languages, distributed systems, and databases.
Primary Faculty
Affiliate Faculty
Bren School research in this area includes cooperation awareness and privacy, privacy as a design requirement for personalized systems, and privacy through pseudonymity in user-adaptive systems.
Programming Languages and Software Engineering faculty in Computer Science investigates new tools, runtime systems, compilers, program analysis techniques and languages with the goal of making software faster, more secure, easier to develop, more reliable, more energy efficient and optimized for new architectures. Our research includes practical implementations that test the concepts developed. CS faculty have made contributions in multiple sub-areas, including systems security, parallelism, program analysis and optimization, just-in-time compilation, verification, testing and memory management.
Primary Faculty
Refers to the application of computers to scientific problems, from astrophysics to zoology. The mode of application can be system modelling, data analysis and mining, or visualization. The focus can be on developing new computational techniques, such as parallel algorithms or new data mining ideas, or on the novel application of existing techniques to new scientific problems.
Our research spans a broad range of timely and important topics in security, privacy and cryptography. It covers numerous traditional as well as emerging themes, including:
- malware mitigation
- internet security & privacy
- wireless, ad hoc, mobile & vehicular network security
- OS, distributed systems & middleware security
- hardware, IoT, embedded & cyber-physical systems security
- usable security & privacy
- genomic security & privacy
- theoretical & applied cryptography
- database security & privacy
- security algorithms & social engineering
- secure compilation, language & software security
- security & privacy in machine learning
Primary Faculty
- Ardalan Amiri Sani
- Anton Burtsev
- Qi Alfred Chen
- Brian Demsky
- Michael Franz
- Michael Goodrich
- Ian Harris
- Stanislaw Jarecki
- Sharad Mehrotra
- Gene Tsudik
Affiliate Faculty
UC Irvine is an acknowledged center for the study of social informatics, which incorporates the social and cultural aspects of information technology development and use. Social informatics employs techniques and theories from social sciences and cultural studies to understand the shaping and applications of digital media and their organizational, political, historical, and economic contexts. This topic links information system analysis with design.
Software research at UCI is aimed at creating new software technology and solutions, furthering the information revolution. The central goal of this research is improvement in software development, evolution, deployment, quality, understandability and cost-effectiveness.
Software Systems at UCI focuses on the design and implementation of software across the system stack, from embedded devices all the way to large-scale distributed systems. Instead of concentrating on individual layers of the stack, we are particularly interested in cross-cutting concerns such as how to achieve end-to-end security or quality of service or how to partition critical functions of a complex computer system between hardware and software and between clients and servers while pursuing multi-modal goals such as minimizing latency and overall costs while maximizing user privacy and energy efficiency. We are interested in virtualization techniques at all levels, from hypervisors to high-level language runtimes, both from the perspective of designing such virtualization layers as well as deploying them in software architecture. Our research also incorporates topics from areas that traditionally have been called “Software Engineering” and “Trustworthy Computing.”
Primary Faculty
- Michael Franz
- Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi
- Ardalan Amiri Sani
- Brian Demsky
- Sharad Mehrotra
- Marco Levorato
- Alex Veidenbaum
- Nalini Venkatasubramanian
Affiliate Faculty
Researchers at UCI are concerned with developing and studying methods for collecting, analyzing, interpreting and presenting empirical data. Statistical principles and methods are important for addressing questions in public policy, medicine, industry and virtually every branch of science.
Ubiquitous computing builds upon and unites virtually all of the current research strengths in the Bren School. Researchers are addressing issues such as context-aware computing, whereby mobile computing responds to one's current context.
ICS Research Areas
Curiosity about the world and a commitment to solving problems are the passions that drive ICS faculty. Their research in the information and computer sciences are applicable to many scholarly and scientific fields. But our faculty don't do it alone, students work side-by-side with nationally renowned professors to advance knowledge and improve lives.
