Mohsen Imani Receives DARPA Young Faculty Award

Each year, through the Young Faculty Award (YFA) program, DARPA identifies “rising stars” in research positions, supporting their work in the context of national security needs. This year, DARPA selected UC Irvine’s Assistant Professor of Computer Science Mohsen Imani as one of those rising stars.

“This accolade is bestowed upon only around 20 exceptional emerging talents,” says Tony Givargis, chair of the Department of Computer Science in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS). “In particular, Mohsen has been granted $1 million to spearhead research on hyperdimensional computing as a neuro-symbolic AI technique, aiming to facilitate transparent and efficient learning and cognitive computation.”

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New Findings on CAPTCHAs Attract Worldwide Attention

Sample CAPTCHA

“Select all images with chimneys.” How many times were you inconveniently interrupted and asked to look through a group of photos to prove that you’re human? Although such CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) tasks have been used for two decades to boost online security against bots, they’re annoying and burdensome to users. So, when a recent study presented at the 32nd USENIX Security Symposium suggested that CAPTCHAs are no longer effective, it garnered widespread attention.

“I am happy that the results have fueled mainstream technology discussions,” says Andrew Searles, a Ph.D. student in UC Irvine Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) who led the study. “It has been exciting to watch the propagation of news outlets covering my work!”

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ICS Summer Academy 2023: An ‘Incredible’ College Experience for High School Students

If “beach days” and “learning loss” is all that comes to mind when you think of high school students on summer break in Southern California, then you haven’t met any of the students who attended UC Irvine’s ICS Summer Academy. Housed in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS), the academy hosted 45 local high school students this summer on weekdays from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., giving them the opportunity to learn about data science and machine learning, and apply their new knowledge and skills to a real-world problem. Plenty of social activities were included as well for the perfect blend of college academics and summer fun.

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NPR: “Armed with traffic cones, protesters are immobilizing driverless cars” (CS Ph.D. candidate Ziwen Wan quoted)

Ziwen Wan, a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at University of California, Irvine, has studied why driverless cars may be acting this way.  Wan found that ordinary objects on the road can lead to dangerous driving behavior. … “The software can make the autonomous vehicle behave as conservatively as possible because a safety violation would be very serious,” Wan says. “But this may lead to concerns on the other side, like in some cases, even though it’s safe it will fail to drive normally.” That abnormal driving includes abrupt halts, swerves, erratic behavior or just stopping in the middle of the road.

Read the full story on NPR.

Alumni Spotlight: From Cancer to Climate Change, Peter Sadowski Applies Machine Learning to Address Real-World Problems

When Peter Sadowski was visiting potential grad schools in hopes of exploring ways to apply machine learning to scientific applications, he was told to talk to Pierre Baldi, Distinguished Professor of computer science at UC Irvine. “I joined Pierre’s lab that fall,” says Sadowski, who earned a B.S. in computer science from Caltech. He went on to earn his Ph.D. in computer science from UCI’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS). This October, Sadowski will return to UCI, where Baldi will introduce his former student as a guest speaker for the Southern California AI and Biomedicine Symposium 2023. Sadowski will discuss his work on AI systems that detect tumors from breast ultrasound imaging.

Now an associate professor of information and computer sciences at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, Sadowski helps lead the AI Precision Health Institute, an organization he co-founded to reduce the burden of cancer in Hawaii and the Pacific Islands. He also recently received an NSF CAREER award to explore using machine learning to help Hawaii adapt to climate change.

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Mandt Appointed Program Chair for AISTATS 2024

stephenMandt

Associate Professor of Computer Science and Statistics Stephan Mandt has been selected as the program chair for the 27th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), scheduled to take place from May 2-4, 2024, in Spain. AISTATS stands as a premier conference at the intersection of artificial intelligence and statistics, drawing approximately 800 participants and garnering roughly 2,500 paper submissions. Mandt’s role overseeing the technical program activities underscores his exceptional capabilities and the trust the community places in his expertise. 

New Scientist: “Bots are better at beating ‘are you a robot?’ tests than humans are” (Gene Tsudik quoted)

Bots are better and faster than humans at online CAPTCHA tests designed to keep them out of websites. The finding calls into question whether we should continue using these kind of security measures, given how much frustration they can cause for people. …

Gene Tsudik at the University of California, Irvine, and his colleagues have shown that bots have little problem solving the current crop of tests faster than humans, and suggest the tests are more trouble than they are worth.

“We do know for sure that they [the tests] are very much unloved. We didn’t have to do a study to come to that conclusion,” he says. “But people don’t know whether that effort, that colossal global effort that is invested into solving CAPTCHAs every day, every year, every month, whether that effort is actually worthwhile.”

Read the full story on New Scientist (must create free account to view full article).

Tsudik Delivers Keynote at ICCCN 2023

Distinguished Professor of Computer Science Gene Tsudik gave a keynote talk Wednesday titled “Compromise/Malware Detection vs. Avoidance for Low-End Embedded/Smart/IoT Devices” at the 32nd International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN 2023). The conference, technically co-sponsored by IEEE and the IEEE Communication Society, was held in Honolulu from July 24-26, and serves one of the leading international conferences for presenting novel ideas and fundamental advances in the fields of computer communications and networks.

ICS Researchers Receive Best Paper Award at Algorithms and Data Structures Symposium

Ofek Gila
Michael Goodrich

A conversation between two scholars that started at a conference in Italy — and continued on a connecting flight to Newark, New Jersey — sparked an idea that led to an award-winning paper. As Michael Goodrich, a Distinguished Professor of computer science at UC Irvine, chatted with Turing-Award winner Robert Tarjan, they came up with some preliminary ideas regarding a new type of binary search tree. Goodrich later shared the ideas with Ofek Gila, his Ph.D. student in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS).

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Sang-Woo Jun’s Work Selected for ISCA’s 25-Year Retrospective

Five years ago, as a Ph.D. student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sang-Woo Jun co-authored a paper suggesting a novel way to boost system efficiency without sacrificing performance. The paper, “GraFboost: Using Accelerated Flash Storage for External Graph Analytics,” discussed a way to design algorithms and physical systems using solid-state secondary storage (such as solid-state drives) instead of the main memory (dynamic RAM) for I/O intensive graph analytics.

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