Senior Daniel Afework took his last final on Dec. 17, 2020 in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS). The fourth-year computer science major, a transfer student from College of the Canyons, is graduating two quarters early. In January, he’ll trade his part-time work as an instructor for K-12 students at Coding Minds for his full-time job as a software engineer at American Express. Here, he talks about what helped him get to where is he is today — and it wasn’t just his computer science courses. He looked to family, leveraged extracurricular actives and joined campus clubs, took on a leadership role and reached out to fellow students, finding opportunities to learn all around him and making the most of his two years at UCI.

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One of the newest faculty members of the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) is Assistant Professor Jing Zhang, who joined the Department of Computer Science in July 2020. Zhang received her Ph.D. in electrical engineering and molecular and computational biology from the University of Southern California and completed her postdoc training in the Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Program at Yale University. She spent years working on ENCODE (Encyclopedia of DNA Elements), a project highlighted in the July 2020 issue of Nature. Zhang co-authored four of the issue’s articles, including “Expanded Encyclopaedias of DNA Elements in the Human and Mouse Genomes” and “An Integrative ENCODE Resource for Cancer Genomics.” The research for this work produced 5,992 new experimental datasets, all of which are available through the ENCODE data portal.

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UCI alumnus Dan Woolley (B.S. ’90) realized his ability to build something from scratch as a teenager after creating a “rudimentary version of Donkey Kong” on his dad’s Osborne 1 PC, one of the first portable personal computers. He’s been building ever since, with his latest creation being W+R Studios, a startup he founded in 2008 with Greg Robertson that provides software for the real estate industry. This year, W+R Studios not only received a 2020 Software Companies to Watch Award from Startup Weekly, it also made its seventh appearance on Inc. 5000, an annual list of the nation’s fastest-growing companies. Here, Woolley talks about his years in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS), what led to his startup success, and why ICS graduates should consider creating a startup of their own.

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Distinguished Professor of Computer Science Rina Dechter recently received the 2020 Classic Paper Award from the Artificial Intelligence Journal. Given to papers “published at least 15 calendar years ago in the AI Journal that are exceptional in their significance and impact,” this year’s award recognized “Temporal Constraint Networks,” which Dechter co-authored with Itay Meiri and Judea Pearl in 1991. The work introduced a new framework called the temporal constraint satisfaction problem (TCSP).

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The new Women in Technology at UCI (WiT UCI) organization had 243 guests at its first event on Sept. 10, a virtual panel focused on “Altered Environments, New Opportunities.” There were faculty, staff, alumni and students of all genders, from across UCI and other higher education institutions and from industry. “This shows a great deal of support and interest around the experiences of women and minorities in tech fields during these altered times,” says Shohreh Bozorgmehri, director of the Student and Academic Services Division of UCI’s Office of Information Technology (OIT) — the inspiration behind WiT UCI.

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Computer Science Professors Ardalan Amiri Sani and Gene Tsudik recently started work on a new project, “Verifiable Provenance and Subject Awareness for Photos and Videos.” Funded through the National Security Agency (NSA), the goal is to investigate secure, user-friendly techniques for establishing the origin and authenticity of digital photographs and video clips, and for ensuring the subject was aware of the process and context of the recording.

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Sharad Mehrotra and his associates at the University of California, Irvine are developing a way to trace contacts that accounts for both challenges. Their approach uses the school’s Wi-Fi network and specially designed software to collect data from sensors that can track individuals via their connected devices. When someone tests positive and shares their diagnosis, the system warns other students who have been near the carrier—all while keeping each person’s identity private.

Read the full article at Workflow.

The University of California, Irvine is seeking to leverage the campus’s Wi-Fi connectivity to deploy a COVID-19 contact tracing application, which could help reduce the spread of the virus.

A team in UCI’s Donald Bren School of Information & Computer Sciences received a rapid funding grant from the National Science Foundation for the project. The app promises to provide enhanced situational awareness to participants while preserving their anonymity.

Read the full article at Health IT Analytics.

A new class offering at select high schools in San Jose, Philadelphia and Cleveland is exposing low-income students to data analytics, preparing them to leverage future career opportunities stemming from advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence. The new curriculum was made possible with a grant from Deloitte Foundation, which supports education through a variety of initiatives that help develop the talent of the future and promote excellence in teaching, research and curriculum innovation, and Base 11, a nonprofit focused on engaging students from low-resource communities with STEM education, and was developed in consultation with UC Irvine. The award was made to UCI to develop a high school data analytics course targeting the needs of low-income students and involved a partnership between UCI’s Office of Access and Inclusion (OAI) for the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) and the Samueli School of Engineering.

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UCI Ph.D. student Dokyung Song along with his advisor Michael Franz and Post-Doctoral Researcher Yeoul Na presented their work on the Periscope automatic programming error-finding framework at Black Hat 2019 in Las Vegas. With approximately 20,000 attendees, Black Hat is the most prestigious computer security event on the planet and is attended by the CIOs and CISOs of most major corporations.

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