Gene Tsudik and Co-authors Receive 2020 Jean-Claude Laprie Award

More than a decade ago, Distinguished Professor of Computer Science Gene Tsudik helped develop a technique for efficiently and securely verifying that a storage server is faithfully storing its client’s outsourced data. This Provable Data Possession (PDP) technique, which allowed for outsourcing of dynamic data, was developed in a paper, “Scalable and Efficient Provable Data Possession,” that Tsudik co-authored with Giuseppe Ateniese, Roberto Di Pietro and Luigi V. Mancini. This work was presented at the 4th International Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks (SecureComm) in Istanbul, Turkey, in September 2008.

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Neftali Watkinson Medina Receives Latino Excellence and Achievement Award

The Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) has selected computer science Ph.D. student Neftali Watkinson Medina to receive the Latino Excellence and Achievement Award for graduate student excellence. Every spring, the Latino Excellence and Achievement Dinner (LEAD) brings together the campus community to highlight Latinx graduate student success and inspire others in the Latinx community to advance in graduate and postdoctoral programs. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, LEAD will honor this year’s awardees virtually through a variety of platforms, including the LEAD 2020 webpage.

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ICS Researchers Receive $1.6M DARPA Grant to Advance Machine Learning

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has started a new program focused on the Science of Artificial Intelligence and Learning for Open-world Novelty (SAIL-ON). The SAIL-ON program, with help from researchers from the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS), aims to develop AI systems that can act appropriately in situations that were not previously encountered.

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Professor Franz’s Research Group Invited to Present at Black Hat USA 2020

UCI’s work on “NoJITsu: Locking Down JavaScript Engines” by Taemin Park, Karel Dhondt, David Gens, Yeoul Na, Stijn Volckaert, and Michael Franz has been invited for presentation at Black Hat USA 2020 in August. Now in its 23rd year, Black Hat USA is the world’s leading information security event, providing attendees with the very latest in research, development and trends. Every year Black Hat USA brings together about 20,000 attendees, including C-suite representation from virtually every company in the Fortune 1000/Global 1000. Presenting at Black Hat in front of this illustrious audience is a rare honor that demonstrates UCI’s relevance in this space.

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UCI News: “Coronavirus Twitter map developed at UCI displays social media reactions to COVID-19” (Chen Li quoted)

To give the public a sense of how social media conversations about COVID-19 are happening in real time, UCI computer scientists have developed and launched a coronavirus Twitter map. The interactive resource visualizes the spatial and temporal distribution of tweets related to the pandemic, allowing users to view the growth and transformation of social media activity as the contagion spreads. The map is mainly focused on Twitter activity in the U.S. currently. “This tool gives people a way to locate discussions about the coronavirus within a region and in a time window,” said computer science professor Chen Li, who led a six-person development team.

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Chemical & Engineering News: “Exploring chemical space: Can AI take us where no human has gone before?” (Pierre Baldi quoted)

Pierre Baldi, a computer scientist at the University of California, Irvine, thinks data availability is key to enabling AI exploration of chemical space. “Discovery of drugs and things that benefit all of us could be accelerated by making data more readily open and available within the broad chemical sciences community,” he says. He argues that organizations that own chemical data without making them openly available impede the application of AI across chemical space. For example, Baldi points to ACS, which owns data in the journal articles it publishes and in databases like those compiled by CAS.

Read the full story at Chemical & Engineering News.

2020 Hall of Fame Celebration Honors Achievement and Opportunity

With much of the world now socially distanced to stem the tide of a global pandemic, it seems a lifetime ago that more than 220 attendees gathered on the evening of Feb. 28 to attend the 2020 Hall of Fame Celebration for the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) and Samueli School of Engineering. There was no way to know that widespread quarantines were just around the corner, but this year’s event could not have happened at a better time — or place. As UCI alumni and their family and friends, along with faculty and staff, playfully explored a room full of interactive science-based exhibits, there was no doubting that the Discovery Cube Orange County was the perfect place to honor the achievements of computer scientists and engineers.

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‘Just Code It’ Introduces Middle Schools Girls to Computer Science

When computer science major Bhavani Panda first came to UCI, she was determined to join a campus club related to her major. So when she learned about Women in Information and Computer Sciences (WICS), it was a perfect fit. Now the third-year undergraduate is co-chair of WICS Community Outreach with fellow computer science major Diellza Sopi, and the two have developed a new program, Just Code It, focused on introducing middle school girls to web development. Although WICS has helped with similar outreach programs in the past, this is the first time the student club has organized its own program from scratch.

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