ACM SIGMM Records: “An interview with Prof. Ramesh Jain”

Ramesh Jain is an entrepreneur, researcher, and educator. He is a Donald Bren Professor in Information & Computer Sciences at University of California, Irvine. Earlier he has been at Georgia Tech, University of California, San Diego, University of Michigan, and some other universities in many countries. He was educated at Nagpur University (B.E.) and Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur (Ph.D.) in India. His current research is in Social Life Networks including EventShop and Objective Self, and Health Intelligence. He has been an active member of professional community serving in various positions and contributing more than 400 research papers and coauthoring several books including text books in Machine Vision and Multimedia Computing. He is a Fellow of AAAI, AAAS, ACM, IEEE, IAPR, and SPIE.

Read the interview on the ACM SIG Multimedia Records website.

Husky or wolf? Using a black box learning model to avoid adoption errors

Say you want to adopt a dog, from a picture, and you task your machine learning system to classify the image as either a husky, which would be safe to adopt, or a wolf, which probably is not a good idea. Can you get that photograph classified with certainty? “Because researchers don’t have insights into what is going on they can easily be misled,” said Sameer Singh, assistant professor in the UCI Department of Computer Science. “Classification is core to machine learning,” said Singh, describing ‘black box’ machine learning predictions at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) July 12 meeting at the Cove. Machine learning is pervasive in our lives—from email to games. “It’s in our phones,” said Singh, a machine learning and natural language processing expert. “It is in our houses. It is basically everywhere.”One of his students created a wolf/dog classifier in a few hours that seemed to work—at first.

Read the full story on the UCI Applied Innovation website.

Dutt, Levorato awarded NSF grant for healthcare IoT research

Chancellor’s Professor of Computer Science Nikil Dutt and Assistant Professor of Computer Science Marco Levorato have received a $300,000 research grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for designing a personalized ubiquitous healthcare framework using the Internet of Things (IoT). Dutt and Levorato are leading the research project “IoCT-CARE: Internet of Cognitive Things for Personalized Healthcare” jointly with Finnish partners at the University of Turku, the Turku University Central Hospital and VTT Finland. The two-year project investigates a self-aware cognitive IoT architecture for ubiquitous health monitoring that can predict the early onset of critical health conditions such as heart attacks. The project is funded as part of the NSF WiFiUS program, which is jointly managed by the Academy of Finland and the U.S. National Science Foundation, and aims to expand research collaboration between Finland and the United States in new areas of wireless telecommunications research.

Levorato, Kia awarded NSF grant for Urban IoT research

Assistant Professor of Computer Science Marco Levorato and Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Solmaz Kia have received a $500,000 research grant from the National Science Foundation’s Smart and Autonomous Systems program. The project, “Cognitive and Reflective Monitoring Systems for Urban Environments,” investigates an innovative urban IoT-based monitoring architecture for smart cities. In the envisioned system, mobile drones and sensors interoperate with the layered citywide networking and computation infrastructure to jointly optimize distributed data acquisition, transportation and processing, as well as drones’ navigation. The project leverages recent IoT architectures such as fog and edge computing, and introduces a new notion of architecture level intelligence for mobile sensor networks.

Immunant: Protecting millions of mobile users behind the scenes


From left to right: Andrei Homescu, Per Larsen, Stephen Crane, Michael Franz and Immunant’s summer intern, Julian Lettner.

A tiny computer security company has been working quietly at the Cove to develop ways of protecting mobile systems against hackers. Immunant builds specialized tools for developers. The company’s software transforms the way code is compiled, linked, and loaded by a host operating system. This three-person company’s reputation in the security community belies its actual size. “Our industry is relationship-heavy,” says Stephen Crane, Immunant’s CTO. “We have built up credibility over years of collaborations. This is a premium advantage in a field with a huge amount of snake oil. A lot of companies promise more security than they can deliver on.” Meanwhile, the tools Immunant is developing could improve system security for hundreds of millions of mobile network users by safeguarding the computers that act as the nodes of communications networks from hacking incursions.

Immunant was co-founded by three graduate and post-doctoral researchers at the UCI School of Information and Computing Sciences (ICS); Per Larsen, Andrei Homescu, and Crane. Their advisor, UCI Professor of Computing Science, Michael Franz, also has a stake in the startup.

Read the full story on the UCI Applied Innovation website.

Mazmanian, Regan and Shahbaba appointed DECADE Graduate Faculty Mentors

The UCI Office of Inclusive Excellence (OIE) has appointed ICS professors Melissa Mazmanian, Amelia Regan and Babak Shahbaba to serve as DECADE (Diverse Educational Community and Doctoral Experience) Graduate Faculty Mentors. Mazmanian will serve as a mentor for the graduate program in informatics, Shahbaba will be the mentor for the graduate program in statistics; and Regan will serve as a mentor for the graduate programs in computer science, network systems and transportation science. They each will serve two-year terms that started in July.
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Tsudik receives ICCCN Best Paper Award

Chancellor’s Professor of Computer Science Gene Tsudik co-authored a paper, titled “Closing the Floodgate with Stateless Content-Centric Networking,” which received the Best Paper Award at the 26th International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN) that took place July 31-Aug. 3, 2017 in Vancouver, Canada. The ICCCN, which is co-sponsored by the IEEE Communications Society, is a leading international conference for presenting new ideas and fundamental advances in the fields of computer networks and communications.
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The Wrap: “Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg’s Artificial Intelligence Divide: Experts Weigh In” (Singh quoted)

“Overall [Musk is] definitely too negative,” said Sameer Singh, Associate Professor of Computer Science at University of California, Irvine, during an interview with TheWrap. “I’m much more positive about it and so are a lot of AI researchers — otherwise we wouldn’t be working in this area if we thought it was going to spell doom for the society.”

Professor Singh focuses his research on machine learning, and believes the human-AI dynamic will continue to be a master-and-servant relationship for years to come.

Read the full story at The Wrap.

Singh to deliver machine learning talk at July OC ACM Meetup

Assistant Professor of Computer Science Sameer Singh is scheduled to deliver a talk on machine learning to the Orange County ACM Chapter on Wednesday, July 12, 2017.  Singh’s talk, titled “Explaining Black-Box Machine Learning Predictions,” will include approaches to explain the predictions of any classifiers in an interpretable and faithful method.

The meeting is the fourth installment of the OC chapter’s 2017 bi-monthly evening program series co-sponsored by the IEEE Orange County Computer Society.

Singh will be the third ICS professor to guest speak, following Dean Marios Papaefthymiou and Chancellor’s Professor of Computer Science Michael Franz.
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Forbes: “Help! Hackers Stole My Password Just By Listening To Me Type On Skype!” (Tsudik research)

For many, everyday life involves sitting in front of a computer typing endless emails, presentation documents and reports. Then there’s the frequent typing of passwords just to get access to those files. But beware: researchers have hacked together a tool that can harvest what’s being typed simply by listening to the sounds of the keys.

They’ve created the Skype&Type program for snooping on Skype users by learning what frequency matches with specific keys on a laptop. And in June Forbes became a guinea pig for the researchers, PhD student Daniele Lain, Prof. Mauro Conti, and Dr. Alberto Compagno from the University of Padua, and Prof. Gene Tsudik from the University of California, Irvine. The headline from the first field test? Their prototype works. And it stole a randomly-chosen password within seconds of us typing it out.

Read the full story at Forbes.