Tech Trends for 2022

ICS Professors Daniel Epstein, Mohsen Imani and Tianchen Qian discuss their research and the technological developments they expect in the coming year.

The new year starts with healthcare front and center, as COVID-19 continues to impact people’s daily lives. Throughout the pandemic, the fields of computer science, informatics and statistics have all played an important role in helping people move their lives online, stay connected, and analyze vast amounts of data for informed decision making. How will these fields continue to advance virtual and augmented spaces, find new ways to bring people together, and improve healthcare analytics and interventions in the coming year?

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Nalini Venkatasubramanian Named ACM 2021 Distinguished Member

On Dec. 15, 2021, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) recognized its 2021 Distinguished Members, including Professor Nalini Venkatasubramanian of the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS).

“Each year we are excited to recognize a new class of ACM Distinguished Members for their professional achievements, as well as their longstanding membership with ACM,” explained ACM President Gabriele Kotsis in the announcement. “The Distinguished Members program is a way both to celebrate the trailblazing work of our members, and to underscore how participation with a professional society enhances one’s career growth.”

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ICS Students Train for Embedded Capture the Flag Competition

A team of students from UCI’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) spent the fall quarter preparing for battle. Computer Science Professor Ian Harris has been training the students, who will participate from January to April 2022 in the MITRE Embedded Capture the Flag (eCTF) competition. The team will spend the first two months designing and implementing a secure system, and they will spend the final month analyzing and attacking the other teams’ designs.

“It’s certainly a different skillset for the students — one that’s needed in industry that you can’t get in regular classes,” says Harris. “You could open up books and learn on your own, but it’s not as cool as doing a competition.”

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Disney Research Supports Stephan Mandt’s Work on Generative Modeling with $50,000 Gift

Stephan Mandt, an assistant professor of computer science and statistics in UCI’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS), received an unrestricted gift of $50,000 from Disney Research Los Angeles to support his work on generative modeling.

Mandt is exploring how to use machine learning under resource constraints — in particular, given a lack of relevant training data. “In other words, how might you train a deep learning algorithm to mimic speech when you don’t have massive amounts of available speech recordings?”

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Alumni Spotlight: Devin Held ’15 shares her journey from UCI to Arteria AI

From famous theme parks to sunny beaches, Orange County, California has it all. The charm of this county is precisely what drew alumna Devin Held to the University of California, Irvine. 

“I grew up in a very small town in Canada and was always fascinated by the beauty of California, in particular Orange County,” said Held, who attended UCI as an international student and is also an avid travel blogger with almost 20,000 followers on Instagram. “I knew I wanted to live there and came across UCI during my research. I became obsessed with the school as I read more about it and knew I needed to apply!”

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Computer Science Ph.D. Student Vikram Narayanan Receives IBM Fellowship

Computer science Ph.D. student Vikram Narayanan was recently nominated as an IBM Ph.D. Fellowship recipient and as one of the two finalists in the systems area for a Facebook Ph.D. fellowship. “It’s a great honor to receive this award from IBM and be one of the 46 Facebook finalists,” says Vikram who is a fifth-year Ph.D. student at UC Irvine. Vikram works on developing operating systems that provide new security and performance guarantees in the age of datacenter computing, heterogeneous hardware and targeted security attacks. This year, he became one of the 16 recipients selected by IBM from hundreds of applications from 183 universities in 32 countries. As noted in the IBM Fellowship announcement, the award recipients demonstrated academic excellence and provided innovative, exceptional research proposals.

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Senior Spotlight: Kazeem Salaam Promotes STEM Learning, Combining Programming Skills with a Passion for Helping Others

Kazeem Salaam

If you’re a local student, you might already know senior Kazeem Salaam, a computer science major at UCI in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS). Perhaps he helped you better understand Python or C++ through the 4.0 Club, a free tutoring service for ICS and engineering students at UCI. Or he might have introduced you to the MIT App Inventor as a K-12 web application instructor, or to Raspberry Pi as a volunteer for the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) youth program, Engineers of the Future. Or maybe you’ve watched his video on How to Use LeetCode. Because when Salaam isn’t studying software development at UCI or interning at Amazon, he’s often sharing his knowledge with others in the classroom or documenting his own experiences on his YouTube channel ZeemTheDream, encouraging students — especially those from underrepresented backgrounds — to explore careers in STEM.

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Sang-Woo Jun and Collaborators Win Best Paper Award for Predictive Maintenance at the Edge

Sang-Woo Jun, an assistant professor of computer science in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS), was pleased with the Best Paper Award announcement at the 31st International Conference on Field-Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL 21). The award went to “Eciton: Very Low-Power LSTM Neural Network Accelerator for Predictive Maintenance at the Edge,” a paper he co-authored that introduces a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural network accelerator for low-power edge sensor nodes. The work was a collaboration with ICS graduate students Jeffrey Chen and Sehwan Hong, Diamond Bar High School student Warrick He, and Professor Jinyeong Moon of Florida State University.

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