Graduate Student Spotlight: Persistence Pays Off for Ph.D. Candidate Ivan De Oliveira Nunes

As a Ph.D. student studying networking systems in UCI’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS), Ivan De Oliveira Nunes explored research opportunities in industry, serving as an intern at Visa Research and at SRI International. However, he ultimately chose to stay in academia and will join the faculty of Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) as an assistant professor in the fall. “One of my favorite parts of the whole Ph.D. experience was interacting with other students,” says De Oliveira Nunes, who earned his B.S. from the Federal University of Espirito Santo (UFES) and M.Sc. from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) in Brazil before coming to UCI to earn his Ph.D.

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Phys.org: “An artificial neural network joins the fight against receding glaciers” (Ph.D. student Daniel Cheng mentioned)

Neural networks have begun finding use in glaciology, becoming a critical new tool in the study of climate change and its effects on receding glaciers. A recent publication in The Cryosphere releases and evaluates a new neural network known as the Calving Front Machine (CALFIN), a program capable of automatically identifying the calving fronts of ocean-terminating glaciers from decades of satellite imagery. Programs such as CALFIN could make it possible to catalog and monitor the rates of glacier loss all around the world, even at sites that scientists haven’t been able to study manually.

Read the full story at Phys.org.

Computer Science Undergraduate Pratyush Muthukumar Named 2021 Goldwater Scholar

Pratyush Muthukumar, a third-year computer science major in UCI’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS), has been named a 2021 Goldwater Scholar by the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation. The highly competitive award is given to academically promising sophomores and juniors who intend to pursue research careers in natural science, mathematics or engineering. The Goldwater Scholarship provides annual financial support that is equal to the cost of tuition, mandatory fees, books, and room and board minus the amount of support from other sources, up to a maximum of $7,500.

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UCI Finishes in Top 5 at National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition

At the start of this year’s Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC), there were more than 160 university/college teams participating in the event designed to test the ability of undergraduate students to detect and respond to real-world security threats. Only 10 teams — one finalist from each region — advanced to the National CCDC in April. Among them was the UCI team, thanks to its first-place finish in the Western Regionals.

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2020 Amazon Research Awards recipients announced (Sameer Singh awarded)

In March 2021, Amazon notified applicants that they were recipients of the 2020 Amazon Research Awards, a program that provides unrestricted funds and AWS Promotional Credits to academic researchers investigating research topics across a number of disciplines. Sameer Singh was recognized for research in “detecting and fixing vulnerabilities in NLP models via semantic perturbations and tracing data influence.”

Read the announcement and list of recipients at Amazon Science.

Michael Franz Wins ACM Chuck Thacker Breakthrough in Computing Award

On April 28, 2021, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) announced that Michael Franz, Chancellor’s Professor of Computer Science in UCI’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS), has been selected to receive the ACM Charles P. “Chuck” Thacker Breakthrough in Computing Award. The award recognizes “individuals or groups who have made surprising, disruptive, or leapfrog contributions to computing ideas or technologies.” Franz is being recognized for his development of just-in-time (JIT) compilation techniques that enable fast and feature-rich web services on the internet — services now used by billions of people daily with applications such as Gmail and Facebook.

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UCI News: “UCI advances to national cyber defense competition following “historic” regionals win”

A team of undergraduate students from the cybersecurity club in UCI’s Department of Computer Science is moving on to the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition following their recent first-place finish in the Western Regionals against several formidable opponents. Only the winners out of the nine regionals across the nation can directly advance to the national competition.

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