There are reminder apps for people who frequently forget to take their medication, but what about for those who don’t think they need the medication in the first place?

“Culturally bound, negative beliefs about medications, and a preference to replace medications with natural remedies, are common in disadvantaged Latino communities,” states a recent grant proposal, “but are rarely discussed with health providers due to language barriers, low health literacy and cultural distance.” The proposal comes from two UCI researchers, Sergio Gago-Masague and John Billimek, who are working to address this issue.

The Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences is pleased to introduce the following eight faculty who joined ICS in calendar year 2019. These outstanding researchers and educators advance our school’s strategic priorities in the areas of data science, artificial intelligence, and big data systems while strengthening our expanding collaborations across campus in the areas of health informatics and computational science and engineering. With these new hires, the number of tenure-track faculty in our school has increased by 40% within three years, bringing the total count to an all-time high of 93, and reflecting the unprecedented growth in our enrollments and research activity.

Incoming faculty member Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi, a postdoc at VMware Research who will join the Department of Computer Science in July 2020, was selected to attend the Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF) last month as a young researcher. Each year, 200 early career researchers from across the globe are chosen — through a multi-step application and selection process — to attend the event and network with laureates of mathematics and computer science.

To foster professional excellence and societal contributions, the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Multimedia Computing (TCMC) established three new awards this year: the Impact, Rising Star and Service awards. Winners were recently announced, and the IEEE TCMC Impact Award went to Donald Bren Professor in Information & Computer Sciences, Ramesh Jain, for his “pioneering and wide-spread impact to multimedia computing for the past four decades.”