At the start of this year’s Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC), there were more than 160 university/college teams participating in the event designed to test the ability of undergraduate students to detect and respond to real-world security threats. Only 10 teams — one finalist from each region — advanced to the National CCDC in April. Among them was the UCI team, thanks to its first-place finish in the Western Regionals.

In March 2021, Amazon notified applicants that they were recipients of the 2020 Amazon Research Awards, a program that provides unrestricted funds and AWS Promotional Credits to academic researchers investigating research topics across a number of disciplines. Sameer Singh was recognized for research in “detecting and fixing vulnerabilities in NLP models via semantic perturbations and tracing data influence.”

Read the announcement and list of recipients at Amazon Science.

On April 28, 2021, 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), has 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.

On April 22, the 2021 Facebook Fellows were announced, including Cheng Zhang, a computer science Ph.D. student in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS). “It is a great honor for me to receive the Facebook Fellowship this year,” says Zhang. “It is delightful that my research is being recognized and awarded by the industry.”

Gayatri Subramaniam

Kasey Chuang

What comes to mind when you think of computer science? Kasey Chuang and Gayatri Subramaniam, community outreach co-chairs of UCI’s Women in Information and Computer Sciences (WICS) organization, want to make sure young girls are aware of all the different opportunities available through this field of study. “When a person says, ‘computer science,’ a lot of people think it’s all math and programing,” they say, “but it’s so much more than that!”

Best Value Schools recognized UCI as having the fourth best computer science school in California in its 2021 Best 15 Computer Schools in California Rankings. The Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences was noted for its location in the greater LA metro area and being part of the University of California system. The rankings were primarily based on the tuition and overall attendance cost required to attend computer science schools in California for the 2020-21 school year. 

Prioritizing “privacy by design” in a world increasingly interconnected through the Internet of Things (IoT), researchers in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) have created the TIPPERS (Testbed for IoT-based Privacy-Preserving PERvasive Spaces) system. Funded by DARPA through the Brandeis program, TIPPERS is an integrated IoT data management middleware that uses a variety of privacy-enhancing technologies.

“Understanding long-term COVID symptoms is an increasingly pressing priority for doctors and researchers,” notes a recent New York Times article, “as more and more people report debilitating or painful aftereffects that hamper their ability to work or function the way they did before.” The article cites troubling data coming from a new study, “COVID Symptoms, Symptom Clusters, and Predictors for Becoming a Long-Hauler: Looking for Clarity in the Haze of the Pandemic.”