On Dec. 15, 2021, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) recognized its 2021 Distinguished Members, including Professor Nalini Venkatasubramanian of the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS).

“Each year we are excited to recognize a new class of ACM Distinguished Members for their professional achievements, as well as their longstanding membership with ACM,” explained ACM President Gabriele Kotsis in the announcement. “The Distinguished Members program is a way both to celebrate the trailblazing work of our members, and to underscore how participation with a professional society enhances one’s career growth.”

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A team of students from UCI’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) spent the fall quarter preparing for battle. Computer Science Professor Ian Harris has been training the students, who will participate from January to April 2022 in the MITRE Embedded Capture the Flag (eCTF) competition. The team will spend the first two months designing and implementing a secure system, and they will spend the final month analyzing and attacking the other teams’ designs.

“It’s certainly a different skillset for the students — one that’s needed in industry that you can’t get in regular classes,” says Harris. “You could open up books and learn on your own, but it’s not as cool as doing a competition.”

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Stephan Mandt, an assistant professor of computer science and statistics in UCI’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS), received an unrestricted gift of $50,000 from Disney Research Los Angeles to support his work on generative modeling.

Mandt is exploring how to use machine learning under resource constraints — in particular, given a lack of relevant training data. “In other words, how might you train a deep learning algorithm to mimic speech when you don’t have massive amounts of available speech recordings?”

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Computer science Ph.D. student Vikram Narayanan was recently nominated as an IBM Ph.D. Fellowship recipient and as one of the two finalists in the systems area for a Facebook Ph.D. fellowship. “It’s a great honor to receive this award from IBM and be one of the 46 Facebook finalists,” says Vikram who is a fifth-year Ph.D. student at UC Irvine. Vikram works on developing operating systems that provide new security and performance guarantees in the age of datacenter computing, heterogeneous hardware and targeted security attacks. This year, he became one of the 16 recipients selected by IBM from hundreds of applications from 183 universities in 32 countries. As noted in the IBM Fellowship announcement, the award recipients demonstrated academic excellence and provided innovative, exceptional research proposals.

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If you’re a local student, you might already know senior Kazeem Salaam, a computer science major at UCI in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS). Perhaps he helped you better understand Python or C++ through the 4.0 Club, a free tutoring service for ICS and engineering students at UCI. Or he might have introduced you to the MIT App Inventor as a K-12 web application instructor, or to Raspberry Pi as a volunteer for the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) youth program, Engineers of the Future. Or maybe you’ve watched his video on How to Use LeetCode. Because when Salaam isn’t studying software development at UCI or interning at Amazon, he’s often sharing his knowledge with others in the classroom or documenting his own experiences on his YouTube channel ZeemTheDream, encouraging students — especially those from underrepresented backgrounds — to explore careers in STEM.

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Sang-Woo Jun, an assistant professor of computer science in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS), was pleased with the Best Paper Award announcement at the 31st International Conference on Field-Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL 21). The award went to “Eciton: Very Low-Power LSTM Neural Network Accelerator for Predictive Maintenance at the Edge,” a paper he co-authored that introduces a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural network accelerator for low-power edge sensor nodes. The work was a collaboration with ICS graduate students Jeffrey Chen and Sehwan Hong, Diamond Bar High School student Warrick He, and Professor Jinyeong Moon of Florida State University.

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Earlier this year, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) announced that Michael Franz, Chancellor’s Professor of Computer Science in UCI’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS), had been selected to receive the ACM Charles P. “Chuck” Thacker Breakthrough in Computing Award. The award recognizes “individuals or groups who have made surprising, disruptive, or leapfrog contributions to computing ideas or technologies.” Franz is being recognized for his development of just-in-time (JIT) compilation techniques that enable fast and feature-rich web services on the internet — services now used by billions of people daily with applications such as Gmail and Facebook.

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A paper by Chancellor’s Professor of Computer Science David Eppstein, “Finding Relevant Points for Nearest-Neighbor Classification,” has won the best paper award of the 2022 SIAM Symposium on Simplicity in Algorithms (SOSA22), to be held in a hybrid online and in-person format in Virginia in January 2022, jointly with several other SIAM conferences.

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The Information and Computer Sciences Student Council (ICSSC) kicked off the fall quarter with WebJam 2021, a weeklong competition that was open to all UCI students who wanted to learn web development. 

Students had the option to participate in the competition individually or in teams of up to four students. Between Oct. 11-15, students learned the skills they needed to create fully functional web applications. 

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