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

August 29, 2023

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.

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

August 10, 2023

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).

The Washington Post: “Is the ‘internet apocalypse’ nigh? Breaking down the solar-storm science.” (Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi interviewed)

June 28, 2023

Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi, a computer science [assistant] professor at University of California, Irvine whose paper “Solar Superstorms: Planning for an Internet Apocalypse” has played a role in popularizing the term, started thinking about internet resilience when the coronavirus began to spread, and she realized how unprepared we were for a pandemic. Research on widespread internet failure was scant. “We’ve never experienced one of the extreme case events, and we don’t know how our infrastructure would respond to it,” Jyothi said. “Our failure testing doesn’t even include such scenarios.”

Read the full story on The Washington Post. 

UCI News: “Bringing emotional intelligence to artificial intelligence”

June 13, 2023

UCI alumni siblings Karishma and Pratyush Muthukumar ’22 to present at UN’s AI for Good 2023 global summit.

Karishma and Pratyush Muthukumar play to each other’s strengths. Over the years, the siblings, UCI alumni, have tag-teamed many projects together, employing their respective expertise in cognitive science and computer science. Their current project: developing an empathetic chatbot for use in the medical field.

“There’s a lot of buzz around ChatGPT and similar language models that are coming out around this time, but we wanted to gear a chatbot specifically designed to consider empathy and compassion in responses,” says Pratyush Muthukumar, the younger of the pair. “Patients suffering from depression, anxiety or other mental health challenges might be able to talk with a chatbot that’s empathetic.”

He and his sister both graduated from UCI in 2022, Pratyush with a degree in computer science and Karishma in cognitive science.

She was invited by the United Nations to be a speaker at the AI for Good global summit in 2020, but it was delayed several years due to the pandemic. When organizers reached out again in 2022, she suggested a joint talk with her brother on their recent research together at UCI. Finally, the two Southern California natives will be making their way to Europe in July for a presentation on emotion-driven AI at the summit, in Geneva, Switzerland.

Read the full story on UCI News.

Popular Science: “What happens if AI grows smarter than humans? The answer worries scientists.” (Sameer Singh interviewed)

June 12, 2023

Sameer Singh, a computer scientist [and associate professor] at the University of California, Irvine worries that focusing on possible futures obscures the very real impacts that AI’s failures or follies are already having. “When I hear of resources going to AGI [artificial general intelligence] and these long-term effects, I feel like it’s taking away from the problems that actually matter,” he says. … “It’s much more exciting to talk about, ‘we’ve reached this science-fiction goal,’ rather than talk about the actual realities of things,” says Singh. “That’s kind of where I am, and I feel like that’s kind of where a lot of the community that I work with is.” 

Read the full story on Popular Science.

UC Irvine Partners With Linux Foundation to Welcome New Open Source Projects from Peraton Labs to Scale 5G Security

March 3, 2023

Peraton Labs, the applied research unit of Peraton, open sources its ProD3 and SEDIMENT network security projects for 5G and IoT under neutral auspices of the Linux Foundation.

[Read more…]

The Lawfare Podcast: Chris Inglis (Bryan Cunningham Interviewed)

February 21, 2023

Chris Inglis, former National Cyber Director in the White House, sat down for his first interview as a private citizen with David Kris, Lawfare contributor and former assistant attorney general for the National Security Division, and Bryan Cunningham, Lawfare contributor and executive director of the University of California, Irvine’s Cybersecurity Policy & Research Institute. They talked about a wide range of cyber topics, including the newly minted National Cyber Strategy, protection of critical infrastructure, cyber insurance, competition in the international front, and more.

Listen to the podcast: https://www.lawfareblog.com/lawfare-podcast-chris-inglis

UC Irvine alumni Paul and Jo Butterworth pledge $35.5 million to Donald Bren School

February 13, 2023

Record gift will support programs fostering ICS student success and achievement

“I was considering not going to the university unless I received financial aid, because I didn’t have any money. But when UCI came through with a package to help out, that made all the difference in the world,” says alumnus Paul Butterworth, shown here with his wife, Jo Butterworth, also a UCI graduate. “This is what inspired us to pledge support for students – so they can follow their dreams despite their financial situations.” Roland Lane
[Read more…]

Singh Talks ChatGPT and More on Popular Machine Learning Podcast

January 31, 2023

The TWIML AI Podcast, originally launched by Sam Charrington in 2016 as This Week in Machine Learning & AI, is a popular podcast highlighting the “top minds and ideas from the world of ML and AI to a broad and influential community of ML/AI researchers, data scientists, engineers, and tech-savvy business and IT leaders.” On Jan. 23, 2023, Charrington sat down with a faculty member of UC Irvine’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) for a podcast titled, “AI Trends 2023: Natural Language Proc — ChatGPT, GPT-4 and Cutting Edge Research with Sameer Singh.”

[Read more…]

University of Colorado Boulder News: “ICS Alumna Leysia Palen recognized as rare ‘distinguished professor’ by CU system

January 30, 2023

Leysia Palen, professor in the Department of Computer Science and the founding chair of the Department of Information Science (2015-19), has been recognized as a distinguished professor, the highest recognition given by the University of Colorado system.

Since the award was established 45 years ago, only 136 professors have been recognized in this way across all four campuses.This rare distinction recognizes the three pillars of professorship: research, teaching and service. Palen said it was deeply meaningful to be awarded for all these dimensions she cares about.  

Read the full story on the University of Colorado Boulder website.

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Latest news

  • Mohsen Imani Receives DARPA Young Faculty Award September 18, 2023
  • New Findings on CAPTCHAs Attract Worldwide Attention September 13, 2023
  • ICS Summer Academy 2023: An ‘Incredible’ College Experience for High School Students September 12, 2023
  • NPR: “Armed with traffic cones, protesters are immobilizing driverless cars” (CS Ph.D. candidate Ziwen Wan quoted) August 29, 2023
  • Alumni Spotlight: From Cancer to Climate Change, Peter Sadowski Applies Machine Learning to Address Real-World Problems August 28, 2023
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