2022 Butterworth Product Development Competition: Back in Full Swing!

This year’s Butterworth Product Development Competition was finally in person again, after the global pandemic forced a 2020 cancellation and 2021 virtual edition. Sponsored annually since 2010 by UCI alumnus Paul Butterworth, the competition offers students from the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) a unique opportunity to team up with other UCI students and experience real-world product development and entrepreneurship.

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Computer Science Researchers Collaborating on $1.2M NSF Grant to Study Geometric Graphs

Computer Science Professor David Eppstein.
David Eppstein
Computer Science Professor Michael Goodrich.
Michael Goodrich

Michael Goodrich and David Eppstein, both Distinguished Professors of Computer Science in UCI’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS), have been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to study algorithms for geometric graphs. They will be receiving $800,000 over the next four years for their work on this project, which is a collaboration with Computer Science Professor Stephen Kobourov of the University of Arizona. Kobourov will receive $400,000 over the next four years, bringing the total budget to $1.2 million.

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UCI News: “UCI wins 5-year, $14M NIH grant to study brain circuits susceptible to aging, Alzheimer’s disease” (Gopi Meenakshisundaram mentioned)

The University of California, Irvine has been awarded a five-year, $14 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to study brain circuits that are susceptible to aging and Alzheimer’s disease. The research findings will advance the development of early diagnostic tools and the discovery of new treatment strategies.

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Pierre Baldi Tackles Deep Learning at 800th Anniversary of the University of Padova in Italy

Distinguished Professor of Computer Science Pierre Baldi of the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) was recently in Italy to discuss AI and deep learning. On May 19, 2022, the University of Padova kicked off a weeklong celebration of its 800th anniversary with various panels and talks. The University of Padova, founded in 1222, is the second-oldest university in Italy and the fifth-oldest surviving university in the world. Copernicus and Galileo were both students of Padova. So, it’s no surprise the celebration would include thought-provoking academic discussions of theory and practice.

Baldi, director of UCI’s Institute for Genomics and Bioinformatics, gave a talk on deep learning focused on “The Quarks of Attention,” and participated in a panel discussion comprised of leading experts addressing “Mathematical Challenges in an AI-Driven World.”

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UCI Celebration of Teaching Honors Three ICS Faculty Members

On April 21, 2022, UCI’s Division of Teaching Excellence and Innovation (DTEI) recognized faculty, instructors and teaching assistants at its annual Celebration of Teaching event. This year, three faculty members from the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) were recognized: 

  • Stacy Branham received the Digital Accessibility Innovator Award;
  • Jennifer Wong-Ma was selected as a Dean’s Honoree for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching; and
  • Roderic Crooks received an Inclusive Excellence Teaching Award.
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Inaugural ICS Summer Academy on Data Analytics Now Accepting Applications

High school students interested in learning about computer science in a college setting can now apply to UCI’s inaugural Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) Summer Academy. For 2022, the ICS Summer Academy will be offering a two-week session titled, “DATA — Data Analytics: Theory & Applications.” From July 25 to Aug. 5, high school students will be on campus Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., exploring the foundations of data science with real-world, hands-on projects.

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The ZotBins Team Continues to Grow, Supporting UCI’s Move to Zero Waste

Decorative graphic showing a cartoon anteater popping out of a green trash bin with a bright yellow “Z” on the front. “otBins” is next to the bin in large black font, spelling out ZotBins. Below reads “A UCI Project on Smart Spaces.”

It has been five years since UCI hosted its first Internet of Things (IoT) Hackathon, organized through the TIPPERS (Testbed for IoT-based Privacy-Preserving PERvasive Spaces) project, a smart campus initiative originally funded by DARPA. It was there that four undergraduate students came up with the idea of ZotBins, a smart waste bin system that collects data to help make waste management more efficient. “The aim of the project was to create a tool to help with UCI’s zero waste initiatives,” says ZotBins co-founder Owen Yang, who graduated from UCI in 2020 and is now a software test engineer at Mainspring Energy. The project persists to this day, with new members applying their skills in support of technology-based zero waste management.

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Multidisciplinary Collaborators Set their Sights on Color Vision in the Dark

A multidisciplinary collaboration between ophthalmology researchers and computer scientists at UCI has shown promising results in revealing color in the dark. Distinguished Professor of Computer Science Pierre Baldi and students from the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) teamed up with Clinical Assistant Professor of Ophthalmology Andrew Browne and others from the School of Medicine (SOM) to leverage deep learning (DL) in recreating color images from infrared input images. “Deep Learning to Enable Color Vision in the Dark,” the PLOS ONE paper that Browne and Baldi co-authored with computer science Ph.D. students Ekaterina Deyneka, Francesco Ceccarelli and Siwei Chen, and SOM researchers Josiah To, Jianing Tang and Anderson Vu, outlines their findings.

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