News Archive

The department’s annual Graduate Student Workshop on Computing (GSWC 2013) will be held on Friday, October 4th in Corwin Pavilion. This is an important and exciting event in the life of the department, and all students, faculty, and visitors are invited to attend. The workshop is free and open to all. The workshop will include talks and posters by UCSB graduate students, an industry panel, and a keynote talk by Mike Brzozowski of Google on “Beyond Big Data: Understanding Users at Scale.”

Is the world’s first commercial quantum computer the real deal or not? An October article in Wired Science sought Prof. Wim van Dam’s opinions on a new quantum computer by D-Wave Systems. Read the article here.

UCSB COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT PRESENTS DISTINGUISHED LECTURE: FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2013 10:30 AM – 11:00 AM Reception 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM Talk Engineering Sciences Building, Room 1001 HOST: Subhash Suri SPEAKER: Daphne Koller Professor of Computer Science, Stanford University; Co-Founder and co-CEO, Coursera Title: The Online Revolution: Learning without Limits Abstract:

UCSB COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT PRESENTS: Wednesday, October 30, 2013 3:30 – 4:30 PM Room 1132 Harold Frank Hall HOST: Amr El Abbadi SPEAKER: David Lomet Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research Title: LLAMA: A Cache/Storage Subsystem for Modern Hardware (joint work with Justin Levandoski and Sudipta Sengupta) Abstract:

PhD student Byungkyu Kang, Research Scientists John O’Donovan, and Professor Tobias Hollerer received a Best Paper Award at the 2013 ASE/IEEE International Conference on Social Computing (SocialCom 2013) for their paper entitled “Understanding Information Credibility on Twitter” (PDF).

A Popular Science article reports on UCSB’s Security Lab: Schools across the country are offering courses where students learn how to stop malicious hackers. Step one: learn their ways.

Prof. Diana Franklin received an Undergraduate Research Mentoring award from the National Center for Women and Information Technology. The annual NCWIT Undergraduate Research Mentoring Award recognizes American Academic Alliance representatives for their outstanding mentorship, high-quality research opportunities, recruitment of women and minority students, and efforts to encourage and advance undergraduates in computing-related fields.

UCSB has been ranked as the U.S. university with the third highest earning potential for Computer Science majors, according to a new report from PayScale. According to their data, the median mid-career pay for a CS major from UCSB is $120,000. For more information, follow this link.

Prof. Diana Franklin has been selected to take part in the National Academy of Engineering’s fifth Frontiers of Engineering Education (FOEE) symposium, to be held October 27-30 in Irvine, California.

According to a new study on the economic value of college majors, computer science is one of the top few majors in terms of highest median earnings. See a short article here and the published study here.

Dr. Aydin Buluç, who received his PhD in 2010 with advisor John Gilbert, has received a Department of Energy Early Career Research Award. This article describes Dr. Buluç’s research at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory that aims to develop new data-mining algorithms to discover new biofuels.

The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the College of Engineering at the University of California at Santa Barbara is seeking applications for a tenure-track, assistant professor position in the field of Computer Engineering with a start date of Fall quarter, 2014. For more information please visit here.

Dr. Stacy Patterson’s article, coauthored with B. Bamieh, M.R. Jovanovic, and P. Mitra, entitled “Coherence in Large-Scale Networks: Dimension-Dependent Limitations of Local Feedback” has been selected as the recipient of the 2013 George S. Axelby Outstanding Paper Award. This award is the most prestigious best paper award in the discipline of control science, given for the best paper in the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.

Dr. Stacy Patterson Dr. Stacy Patterson’s article, coauthored with B. Bamieh, M.R. Jovanovic, and P. Mitra, entitled “Coherence in Large-Scale Networks: Dimension-Dependent Limitations of Local Feedback” has been selected as the recipient of the 2013 George S. Axelby Outstanding Paper Award. This award is the most prestigious best paper award in the discipline of control science, given for the best paper in the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.

It is with deepest regret that we announce Roger C. Wood, professor emeritus, passed away peacefully on July 17, 2013, at his home in Santa Barbara. (continued) Some pictures of Roger have been collected at the College of Engineering’s Facebook page.

Research by PhD student Petko Bogdanov and his colleagues in the Bioinformatics and Database Lab, directed by Professor Ambuj Singh, is reported on by the MIT Technology Review in an article entitled What’s Your Social-Media Genotype?

Prof. Chandra Krintz has been selected as one of Forty Women to Watch Over 40 in 2013 – “women who are reinventing, and disrupting, and making an impact.”

Dr. Huijia (Rachel) Lin

The Department of Computer Science is pleased to announce that Dr. Huijia (Rachel) Lin will join our faculty in November 2013. Rachel received her PhD from Cornell University in 2012. Her research interests are in the field of cryptography and its interplay with computer science.

Dr. Janet Kayfetz Congratulations to Dr. Janet Kayfetz, who was awarded the UCSB Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award!

Professor Kevin Almeroth has received a $100,000 gift from Cisco Systems, Inc., to support his research in Packet Scheduling Using IP Embedded Transport Instrumentation.

Dr. Stefano Tessaro The Department of Computer Science is pleased to announce that Stefano Tessaro will join our faculty in November 2013. Dr. Tessaro’s research is in the area of cryptography, particularly in solving problems motivated by the practical deployment of cryptographic systems. He received his PhD from ETH Zurich in 2010 and was a postdoctoral scholar at UC San Diego from 2010 to 2012. He is currently a research scientist at MIT.

Hex Pistols Team with CS 189 instructor Professor Tim Sherwood and Dr. Janet Kayfetz

Professors Ambuj Singh, Tobias Höllerer, and Xifeng Yan have received a grant from the US Army of approximatey $1M/year to continue their ongoing research on network dynamics. For more information, see the College of Engineering announcement.

Dr. Sudipto Das, who received his PhD from the Department of Computer Science in 2011, has received the 2013 ACM SIGMOD Jim Gray Doctoral Dissertation Award for his dissertation entitled “Scalable and Elastic Transactional Data Stores for Cloud Computing Platforms.” The citation of the award announcement notes that the work was “remarkable for its breadth of scope, its comprehensive implementation and thorough performance evaluation.”

Dr. Aydin Buluç, who received his PhD from the Department of Computer Science in 2010 working with Professor John Gilbert, has been awarded a 2013 Department of Energy (DOE) Early Career Award for his work on energy-efficient parallel graph and data mining algorithms. Dr. Buluç works at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Computational Research Division.

Prof. Ben Hardekopf has been selected to receive an Excellence in Teaching Award from Northrop Grumman, which is awarded to recognize great teaching along with the institutions that supply the company with many new employees each year. The award honors junior faculty members who demonstrate a commitment to high teaching standards. Congratulations, Ben!

Congratulations to Computer Science staff members Tiffany Sabado and Elizabeth Streeper, who each received a 2012-13 Staff Citation of Excellence Award. The awards, which include a cash award and a special recognition plaque, acknowledge and celebrate outstanding achievements and meritorious service of career UCSB staff. As everyone in the department can attest to, these are very well deserved!

PhD students Adam Lugowski and Kevin Deweese and Professor John Gilbert, from the department’s Combinatorial Scientific Computing Lab, were awarded a second place prize of $13,000 in the YarcData Graph Analytics Challenge, which showcased the increasing use of graph analytics to discover unknown relationships in Big Data.

Computer Science student Xia Zhou will join Dartmouth College in July as a tenure-track Assistant Professor. Ms. Zhou is part of the LINK Lab and is advised by Prof. Heather Zheng. Her research focuses on designing network systems to handle the volume and unpredictable nature of data traffic. Congratulation and best wishes in your new position!

Congratulations to Dr. Yinghui Wu, PhD student Shengqi Yang, and Prof. Xifeng Yan, who received a Best Poster Award at the 29th Annual Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2013) for their research work, “Ontology-based Subgraph Querying.”

Prof. Tevfik Bultan will give the keynote talk at the 2013 IFIP Joint International Conference on Formal Techniques for Distributed Systems (33rd FORTE / 15th FMOODS), a forum for fundamental research on theory, models, tools, and applications for distributed systems. The joint conference is the result of merging the conference FMOODS (Formal Methods for Open Object-Based Distributed Systems) and FORTE (Formal Techniques for Networked and Distributed Systems).

Congratulations to Computer Science PhD students Chris Sweeney and Morgan Vigil, who have been awarded National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships. The Fellowships provide each student with a stipend of $30,000 a year for three years plus tuition and travel support.

Prof. Chandra Krintz has received a grant in the amount of $50,000 from the National Science Foundation for a project entitled “I-Corps: AppScale – Spurring Innovation through Cloud Application Portability.”

Prof. Chandra Krintz has been named a Cloud Computing Pioneer by Information Week. Of course, we already knew that!

Congratulations to Prof. Linda Petzold, who has been selected to receive the 2013 SIAM/ACM Prize in Computational Science and Engineering. The award will be announced on February 26 at the SIAM Conference on Computational Science and Engineering (CSE13) in Boston, MA, and awarded during the SIAM Annual Meeting in July, held in San Diego, CA.

Prof. Ted Kim (MAT and CS) has received a five-year $508,658 grant from the National Science Foundation for research on “Enabling Efficient Non-Linearities in Biomechanical Simulations.” This comes from the NSF’s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program. The abstract of the award can be found here.

Congratulations to the following recent PhD graduates in the Department of Computer Science: Chris Bunch Dissertation: Automated Configuration and Deployment of Applications in Heterogeneous Cloud Environments Chris worked under the advisement of Prof. Chandra Krintz as part of the Lab for Research on Adaptive Computing Environments (RACELab).

COMPUTER ENGINEERING and Electrical & Computer Engineering presents: Friday, February 1, 2013 10:00 – 11:00AM ROOM CHANGE: Harold Frank Hall (HFH), Rm 1132 – CS Conference Room SPEAKER: Christoph Studer, Rice University TITLE: “Wideband Analog-to-Information Conversion: From Theory to VLSI Circuits”

Each year a committee of industry experts and faculty chooses 10 papers from the top computer architecture conferences to highlight in the annual “Top Picks” issue of IEEE Micro. This year UCSB Computer Engineering student Jonathan Valamehr, Computer Science and Engineering Professor Tim Sherwood, and thier collaborators from Microsoft, had their work “Inspection Resistant Memory Architectures” selected for this prestigious publication.