Tech Times: “Hackers can steal your data by recording keystroke sounds over Skype” (Tsudik quoted)

Skype calls carry an unseen, but crystal-clear danger of leaking your passwords to hackers, say researchers at the University of California, Irvine and in Italy.

We have all been in the scenario where we Skype and our interlocutor types loudly on the keyboard, and it looks like this can be a serious security breach.

Gene Tsudik, professor of computer science at UCI, explains that he had this revelation more than a year ago while participating in a Skype conference.

Read the full story at Tech Times.

San Diego Union-Tribune: “Waging war with no bombs or missiles” (Cunningham quoted)

“Cyberspace is the Wild West. There is no consensus over how nations should behave in using cyber weapons,” said Bryan Cunningham, the former CIA officer who heads UC Irvine’s new Cybersecurity Policy and Research Institute.

“There’s no treaty that specifies what cyber activities rise to the level of armed aggression warranting a response. No one knows where the lines are, and that’s a dangerous situation. An adversary could miscalculate, taking an offensive cyber action thinking it’s below the threshold for response. But the victim nation sees it differently, triggering a much larger cyber or kinetic war than intended by the attacker.”

Read the full story at The San Diego Union-Tribune.

Times Higher Education ranks Computer Science 38th in world, 15th in U.S.

In September, Times Higher Education released its 2016-17 World University Rankings data that placed UC Irvine’s Computer Science degree at 38th among universities worldwide, 15th among U.S. universities and 9th among public universities. According to the website, the Times Higher Education World Class Rankings analyzes universities across all of their core missions: teaching (the learning environment), international outlook (staff, students and research), research (volume, income, and reputation), citations (research influence) and industry income (innovation). Overall, among 980 universities worldwide, UC Irvine as an institution was ranked 98th.

Tsudik receives $407,000 Army Research Office grant

Chancellor’s Professor of Computer Science Gene Tsudik was awarded a $407,000 grant from the U.S. Army Research Laboratory’s Army Research Office (ARO) in September 2016 for his project, “Remote Attestation of Critical Infrastructure Components.” The project focuses on mitigation of malware infestations and other attacks on swarms or groups of heterogeneous embedded systems and/or Internet of Thing (IoT) devices.
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Jain publishes book with former student about “Situation Recognition Using EventShop”

Bren Chair and Professor of Computer Science Ramesh Jain co-authored a book with former Ph.D. student Vivek Singh titled Situation Recognition Using EventShop. Published in May 2016 by Springer International Publishing, the 140-page book presents a framework for converting multitudes of data streams into actionable insights based on situation recognition by using an open-source, web-based system called EventShop that doesn’t require programming expertise. According to the authors, the book is useful for both practitioners and researchers working in situation-aware computing: “It acts as a primer for data-enthusiasts and information professionals interested in harnessing the value of heterogeneous big data for building diverse situation-based applications. It also can be used as a reference text by researchers working in areas as varied as database design, multimodel concept recognition, and middle-ware and ubiquitous computing to design and develop frameworks that allow users to create their own situation recognition frameworks.”

Eppstein awarded two NSF grants for algorithm research

Chancellor’s Professor of Computer Science David Eppstein was awarded two National Science Foundation (NSF) grants totaling $575,881 in support of his research projects “Collaborative Research: Efficient Algorithms for Cycles on Surfaces” and “Sparse Geometric Graph Algorithms.” The grant period for both projects is set to run between August 2016 and July 2019.

Many real-world problems can be modeled by geometric graphs. For instance, road networks may be represented by vertices as intersections or junctions of roads, while the edges represent the segments of road between two consecutive intersections. Eppstein’s research will cover a broad range of topics within computational geometry and graph algorithms. Eppstein is the sole PI for both NSF projects, which will work to solve common real-world problems in graph applications. “Collaborative Research: Efficient Algorithms for Cycles on Surfaces” will focus on developing accurate and efficient methods for simplifying surfaces related to “cut-graph” problems, as well as for other closely related complications. “Sparse Geometric Graph Algorithms” will concentrate on issues related to geometric graphs, such as the large collection of problems from application areas where sparse geometric graphs naturally arise.

Swarajya: “Tomorrow’s Reform – Why The Government Needs A Tech Mindset To Change” (Jordan mentioned)

A flexible system, allowing lateral induction of technical experts (like Dr Arati Prabhakar), helps US institutes to tap into cutting-edge perspectives. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the US has instituted a culture of bringing outside technical experts into their leadership team and the current FCC chief technology officer (CTO) Dr Scott Jordan is a University of California, Irvine Professor (on sabbatical). A good percentage of Silicon Valley start-up founders are faculties (on leave) from universities around Silicon Valley – Stanford, University of California Berkeley etc.

Read the full story at Swarajya.

AsterixDB becomes official Apache Software Foundation project

AsterixDB—the multi-school effort to build a highly scalable data management system that can store, index and manage semi-structured data—has officially become an Apache project, graduating from the Apache Incubator program of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF).

Now dubbed Apache AsterixDB, the system was co-developed by faculty, researchers, staff and students primarily at UC Irvine and UC Riverside, including Bren Chair and Computer Science Professor Michael Carey and Computer Science Professor Chen Li.
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Fowlkes awarded $377K NSF grant for geometric imaging research

Associate Professor of Computer Science Charles Fowlkes has received a $377,407 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant in support of his project, “RI: Small: Building Strong Geometric Priors for Total Scene Understanding.” The grant period is set to run between July 2016 and June 2019.

Understanding geometric imaging can change the way professionals approach the problem of impulsively interpreting the semantic content of individual photos or videos. Fowlkes will research data sets and algorithms to significantly improve the ability of computer vision systems to understand image content. The project involves UC Irvine students in research from a range of traditional disciplines to engage a wider audience in understanding and applying these technologies for new scientific and social purposes.