Research Areas

Curiosity about the world and a commitment to solving problems are the passions that drive ICS faculty. Their research in the information and computer sciences are applicable to many scholarly and scientific fields. But our faculty don’t do it alone, students work side-by-side with nationally renowned professors to advance knowledge and improve lives. Below is a list of research areas tackled by our faculty.

The dominant research theme in our group is algorithm design, studied from several diverse viewpoints: combinatorial optimization; approximation, online, randomized and parallel algorithms; graph algorithms; and algorithmic game theory. A second theme is computational complexity theory, with an emphasis on studying new complexity classes, such as those used for establishing intractability of economic and game-theoretic solution concepts. Other areas of theory studied include computational geometry, data structures, geometric graph theory, quantum computing, spectral graph theory, theory of deep learning, cryptography, and online and matching-based market design.

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Research in AI is concerned with producing machines to automate tasks requiring intelligent behavior. Examples include computer vision, bioinformatics, constraint-based problem solving, text understanding, data mining and smart sensor networks.

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The dominant research theme in our group is the development and application of algorithmic, machine learning, and artificial intelligence methods for most areas of biomedical informatics and computational biology, including: chemoinformatics and drug discovery; bioinformatics and high-throughput omic analyses (transcriptomic, metabolomic, proteomic); regulatory and structural proteomics/genomics; integrative systems and network biology; biological systems modeling; computational neuroscience; biomedical imaging; medical and clinical informatics; diagnostic and predictive medicine; electronic medical records and health care. Projects are often carried out in close collaboration with lifescientists from the UCI Schools of Biology and Medicine and the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences with an emphasis on clinical and translational applications.

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Computer architecture research studies various aspects of computer system definition, design and optimization. Computer Science faculty conduct research on multiple topics in this area, including processor and memory hierarchy micro-architecture, interplay between compilers and other system software and architecture, optimization for performance, power, and other constraints, heterogeneous computing using FPGAs and GPUs, architecture for emerging technologies including non-volatile memory, architectural aspects of computer security, concurrency and parallelism. Faculty in this area also design and build computer systems.

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The Computational Science research area at the UCI Computer Science Department includes:

  1. “Scientific computing”: Scalable numerical algorithms of all kinds,  including optimization, differential equation solutions, and stochastic simulation; also many other computer science topics as shaped by the need for large-scale modeling and simulation in science, prominently including but not restricted to numerical computing.
  2. Computing that contributes in an essential way to new scientific knowledge and/or results (usually and most canonically, in the form of answers to well-formulated scientific questions) in the sciences, including extensive collaborations in astronomy, particle physics, chemistry, geoscience and climate science, biological sciences, and neuroscience among others.
  3. The integration of appropriately specialized methods from artificial  intelligence, including both numerically intensive machine learning, and also computing with high level symbolic representations of mathematical models in science.

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The field of visual computing deals with generating/capturing, representing, rendering, and interacting with synthetic and real-world images and video. Virtual and augmented reality that involves a different presentation and interaction media, as well as combining real and synthetic worlds are also core aspects of visual computing. Interactive Graphics and Visualization (iGravi) faculty work on end-to-end solutions from capturing of images and geometry; representing large geometric, image, and video data sets; geometry, image, and topology processing; interactive rendering of large visual data sets; algorithms for building large area immersive displays for presentation of visual content; and virtual and augmented reality including spatially augmented reality using projectors, cameras, and interaction devices. Examples of projects include deep learning algorithms for geometry representation, appearance modeling and rendering, medical image processing for 3D reconstruction and topological analysis of anatomical parts, and augmented reality on dynamic surfaces using projector camera systems.

iGravi Core (Primary) Faculty

iGravi Core (Secondary) Faculty​

Computer vision at UCI focuses on developing algorithms and systems for understanding images and video. Research spans from theoretical questions of perception and representation to practical applications including 3D reconstruction, human activity recognition, and biomedical image analysis.

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The Database and Information Systems group covers a broad range of topics related to modern data and information systems. ISG faculty research interests include data management, big data systems, multimedia data systems, secure data management, privacy-preserving computation in databases, middleware and distributed systems, concurrency, performance evaluation, data quality and cleaning, text analytics, and data visualization.

Much of our research is driven by creating a new generation of end-to-end systems capable of autonomously ingesting data from diverse sources (e.g., sensors, in sensed environment or wearable device contexts, or social media feeds, network monitors, and/or click-stream data), addressing issues related to the volume, velocity, veracity, and variety of such data, extracting and representing such data in a semantically enriched form, ensuring the privacy and security of such data, and building both real-time and analytic systems that scale to the applications’ needs.

 

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Research in this area explores the principles and practices of distributed and parallel computing and the design of systems to address emerging needs of large scale enterprise and societal applications. Topics include architectures, protocols, algorithms, middleware systems and programming methodologies to support performance, concurrency, reliability,  security and QoS in next generation systems. Faculty and research teams are engaged in cloud and edge computing, high-performance systems, distributed middleware, parallel algorithms, messaging and information interchange, and adaptive open systems for a wide range of application domains.

 

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Embedded systems comprise a combination of hardware and software, that are purpose-built for specific applications and which must satisfy a complex set of interacting requirements (e.g., safety and reliability) as well as interacting constraints (e.g., low power/energy and real-time). ESS faculty study both fundamental advances in embedded systems (e.g., software/hardware codesign, formal methods, design space exploration, embedded software and compilers for embedded applications, multi-criteria optimization), as well as emerging applications in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) and the Internet-of-Things (IoT), such as healthcare IoT, automotive embedded systems, hardware and software security, and hardware accelerators for machine learning and mission-critical applications.

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The mobile computing research at UCI covers a diverse set of research topics dealing with mobility and mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets, wearables, IoT devices, drones and vehicles. These topics include (but are not limited to) system software design, security, privacy, communications, applications and services. 

 

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The research interests of faculty in this area spans a variety of topics centered on networked systems, including: communication and networking protocols, stochastic control, optimization, simulation, distributed computing in networked systems and security, as well as policy aspects. Applications include Internet of Things, cognitive networks, communications and networking for autonomous, mission critical and cyber-physical systems.

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Our research focuses on a broad range of topics related to performance, security and reliability of operating systems. We are interested in both development of clean-slate operating system architectures and on a practical evolution of de facto industry standard operating system kernels towards hardware, software, and security requirements in the age of mobile and warehouse-scale computing. Our research covers areas of operating system security, support for heterogeneous hardware, low-latency datacenter networking and storage, virtualization, access control, and software verification. Also, we work on a range of topics where operating systems interface with computer architecture, networking, programming languages, distributed systems, and databases.

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Programming Languages and Software Engineering faculty in Computer Science investigates new tools, runtime systems, compilers, program analysis techniques and languages with the goal of making software faster, more secure, easier to develop, more reliable, more energy efficient and optimized for new architectures. Our research includes practical implementations that test the concepts developed. CS faculty have made contributions in multiple sub-areas, including systems security, parallelism, program analysis and optimization, just-in-time compilation, verification, testing and memory management.

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Our research spans a broad range of timely and important topics in
security, privacy and cryptography.  It covers numerous traditional as well as
emerging themes, including:
  • malware mitigation
  • internet security & privacy
  • wireless, ad hoc, mobile & vehicular network security
  • OS, distributed systems & middleware security
  • hardware, IoT, embedded & cyber-physical systems security
  • usable security & privacy
  • genomic security & privacy
  • theoretical & applied cryptography
  • database security & privacy
  • security algorithms & social engineering
  • secure compilation, language & software security
  • security & privacy in machine learning

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Software Systems at UCI focuses on the design and implementation of software across the system stack, from embedded devices all the way to large-scale distributed systems. Instead of concentrating on individual layers of the stack, we are particularly interested in cross-cutting concerns such as how to achieve end-to-end security or quality of service or how to partition critical functions of a complex computer system between hardware and software and between clients and servers while pursuing multi-modal goals such as minimizing latency and overall costs while maximizing user privacy and energy efficiency. We are interested in virtualization techniques at all levels, from hypervisors to high-level language runtimes, both from the perspective of designing such virtualization layers as well as deploying them in software architecture. Our research also incorporates topics from areas that traditionally have been called “Software Engineering” and “Trustworthy Computing.”

 

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