New Faculty in Computer Science at UCSB
Phill Conrad joins UCSB
Phill Conrad, has joined our department as a Lecturer with Potential Security of Employment effective January 2008. Phill joins us with over a decade of teaching experience as a faculty member at Temple University in Philadelphia, and at the University of Delaware. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Delaware in 2001. His Ph.D. dissertation investigated Partial Order and Partial Reliability Transport protocols for Multimedia Applications. Conrad participated in the IETF Transport Area Working Group, and is a co-author on a standards-track Internet RFC (RFC3758, Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) Partial Reliability Extension) based on some results from his dissertation. Phill also brings industry experience as a Systems Analyst for the DuPont Company, where his assignments included software development for corporate supply chain management, and network management.
Phill's appointment is a joint appointment between the College of Engineering, and the College of Creative Studies, a "graduate school for undergrads". Phill will serve as a liaison between the CS department and the CS program in CCS. Phill's current projects include a web-based system to assist students and faculty members in preparing for exams in introductory programming courses.
Diana Franklin joins UCSB
Diana Franklin, an educator with an impressive teaching and research track record, has joined our department as a Lecturer with Security of Employment effective January 2008. Diana joins us after several years at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, most recently as an Associate Professor working in the field of computer architecture and in the application of gender studies to computer science education. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Davis in 2002, and an M.S. from UIUC before that. As an NSF Career Award Winner (2007), the IEEE Computer Engineering Best Advisor (2006-2007), Bert and Candace Forbes Professor (2002-present), IEEE Computer Engineering Professor of the Year (2002-2003), IEEE Outstanding Professor (2003),Tau Beta Pi Fellow (1997), and National Physical Science Consortium Fellow (1997-2002), her award-winning efforts will be very welcome at UCSB.
Her most recent architecture research explores the idea of allowing error in some calculations of multi-media and other applications that can tolerate inaccuracies in input data. She is looking at how to identify which data in a program is error-tolerant (i.e. programmer annotations or automated compiler) as well as how to squeeze more speed or use less power when calculating on this error-tolerant data. In the area of gender studies, she recently wrote an article identifying ways in which professors can identify promising female students in the face of gender differences and is very interested in tracking K-12 school science clubs to identify reasons for declining female participation post-elementary school.
Christopher Kruegel joins UCSB
Christopher Kruegel, a young leader in the field of computer security, will be joining the Department of Computer Science at UCSB, effective winter of 2008. Chris joins UCSB after several years as an assistant professor with the Secure Systems Lab at the Technical University Vienna. Before that, he was working as a post-doc for the Reliable Software Group at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and received his Ph.D. in computer science from the Technical University Vienna while working as a research assistant for the Distributed Systems Group.
His most recent projects aim to advance the state-of-the-art in binary analysis to improve software security. Binary analysis is the analysis of the machine code representation of an executable software program with the aim of understanding its design, functionality, and operations. The task of binary analysis is to identify and extract certain properties of interest, an approach with a wide range of security-relevant applications. Application areas include the detection of malware (i.e., malicious programs such as viruses and worms), rootkits (i.e., tools used by an intruder to hide from the system administrator) and Trojan horses. In addition, binary analysis can be used to analyze more general security properties such as the presence of buffer overflow or race condition vulnerabilities. An important advantage of binary analysis is that it can be used transparently on executable code. Thus, no access to source code is required. This allows one to perform analysis in cases where source code is not available or where the vulnerability is not visible in source code. However, working on machine code presents major research challenges. These challenges include the design of a robust disassembler in case of variable length machine instructions, a mix of code instructions with data elements, obfuscation and binary encryption. In addition, the lack of type information and higher-level semantic structures (e.g., loops) complicates the analysis.
