The research at UC Santa Barbara does not only lead to articles in great conferences and journals, it also has real world impact. Recently, two projects carried out at the Computer Science Department at UCSB received wide-spread media attention.

One project is Eucalyptus, which stands for Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems. Eucalyptus is an open-source software infrastructure for implementing “cloud computing” on clusters, which allows applications to seamlessly scale and efficiently take advantage of distributed computing resources. According to Rich Wolski, director of the Eucalyptus project, the goal is to develop a platform that is easy to use, maintain, and modify. The current interface is compatible with Amazon’s EC2. Recently, RightScale announced a new strategic initiative to become the first cloud management platform to support multiple cloud environments. As part of their initiative, they also target Eucalyptus. For more information, check out the links on MIT Technology Review, the .NET Developer’s Journal, or the Cloud Computing Journal.

The second project is concerned with the security of electronic voting machines. Electronic voting systems have been introduced to improve the voting process. Since their inception, they have been controversial, because both the technologists and the general public realized that they were losing direct control over an important part of the voting process: counting the votes. The Security Group at UCSB participated in a review of the electronic voting systems used in California and in the EVEREST evaluation effort sponsored by the Secretary of State of Ohio. In both cases, the team found a series of serious vulnerabilities that could compromise the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the voting process. More details are discussed in the New York Times Tech Talk (October, 22nd), Forbes Magazine, and in Current News.