Xiaohui Xie, a computer scientist at the University of California, Irvine, is also applying AI to the genome, though with a broader focus than autism. He, too, hopes to classify any mutations by the odds they are harmful. But he cautions that in genomics, deep learning systems are only as good as the data sets on which they are trained. “Right now I think people are skeptical” that such systems can reliably parse the genome, he says. “But I think down the road more and more people will embrace deep learning.”

Read the full story at the Science website.

In the May 10 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) meeting “Saving Power in the Data Center”, Marios Papaefthymiou, professor of computer science and dean of the UCI Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) showed how redesigning the internal architectures of high performance computer chips can increase their energy efficiency, which can translate to saving significant amounts of power in data centers that rely on myriads of such chips. Papaefthymiou’s research is in energy-efficient architectures for high performance computing.He co-founded Cyclos Semiconductor, a developer of energy-efficient resonant clocking technologies that enable high-performance computing with drastically reduced power consumption.

Read the full story at the UCI Applied Innovation website.

“If you go to a doctor and the doctor says, ‘Hey, you have six months to live,’ and offers absolutely no explanation as to why the doctor is saying that, that would be a pretty poor doctor,” says Sameer Singh, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of California at Irvine.

Read the full story at Fast Company.

Professional poker player Jason Les will join three other players in a head-to-head competition against a poker-playing bot whose artificial intelligence was engineered by a computer science team at Carnegie Mellon University.

Read the full story at the OC Register.

Researchers from seven institutions received an $8.6 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to conduct research on the anatomy and function of the nerves that control the heart.

Kalyanam Shivkumar, MD, PhD, of the University of California, Los Angeles, will serve as the lead researcher. The title of the project is “Comprehensive Structural and Functional Mapping of the Mammalian Cardiac Nervous System.”

The principal investigators from the other schools are Viviana Gradinaru, PhD (California Institute of Technology), Stephen Liberles, PhD (Harvard University), Charless Fowlkes, PhD (University of California, Irvine), Irving Zucker, PhD (University of Nebraska Medical Center), Beth Habecker, PhD (Oregon Health and Science University) and David Paterson, DPhil, DSc (Oxford University).

Read the full story at Cardiovascular Business.

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.

“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.

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.

With the onset of Internet of Things (IoT) technology, an enormous number of devices are now accessible via the Internet and are therefore vulnerable to cyberattack. Society is still adjusting to the fact that devices that people used to trust can now betray them in unexpected ways. Your television may expose your conversations, your printer may divulge your documents, and your fitness monitor may reveal your health information. All of these attacks become possible in the presence of IoT devices which are not designed with security in mind. System designers are trained to evaluate system design options in terms of their impact on system characteristics such as power, performance, and time-to-market, but security is a property which is less well understood. Designers of IoT devices need to have the ability to consider, both qualitatively and quantitatively, how design alternatives affect the security of the system. To do that, designers must understand the essential aspects of common cyberattacks.

Read the full story at Circuit Cellar.

“We’re trying to study where there’s a trade-off between what you’re willing to share and what you get as a utility,” says computer science professor Sharad Mehrotra. “We want to know if there’s a way to build privacy protections on a layer in between the sensors and the end user.”

Read the full story at UCI News.