UCI Celebration of Teaching Honors Three ICS Faculty Members

On April 21, 2022, UCI’s Division of Teaching Excellence and Innovation (DTEI) recognized faculty, instructors and teaching assistants at its annual Celebration of Teaching event. This year, three faculty members from the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) were recognized: 

  • Stacy Branham received the Digital Accessibility Innovator Award;
  • Jennifer Wong-Ma was selected as a Dean’s Honoree for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching; and
  • Roderic Crooks received an Inclusive Excellence Teaching Award.
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Inaugural ICS Summer Academy on Data Analytics Now Accepting Applications

High school students interested in learning about computer science in a college setting can now apply to UCI’s inaugural Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) Summer Academy. For 2022, the ICS Summer Academy will be offering a two-week session titled, “DATA — Data Analytics: Theory & Applications.” From July 25 to Aug. 5, high school students will be on campus Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., exploring the foundations of data science with real-world, hands-on projects.

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The ZotBins Team Continues to Grow, Supporting UCI’s Move to Zero Waste

Decorative graphic showing a cartoon anteater popping out of a green trash bin with a bright yellow “Z” on the front. “otBins” is next to the bin in large black font, spelling out ZotBins. Below reads “A UCI Project on Smart Spaces.”

It has been five years since UCI hosted its first Internet of Things (IoT) Hackathon, organized through the TIPPERS (Testbed for IoT-based Privacy-Preserving PERvasive Spaces) project, a smart campus initiative originally funded by DARPA. It was there that four undergraduate students came up with the idea of ZotBins, a smart waste bin system that collects data to help make waste management more efficient. “The aim of the project was to create a tool to help with UCI’s zero waste initiatives,” says ZotBins co-founder Owen Yang, who graduated from UCI in 2020 and is now a software test engineer at Mainspring Energy. The project persists to this day, with new members applying their skills in support of technology-based zero waste management.

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Multidisciplinary Collaborators Set their Sights on Color Vision in the Dark

A multidisciplinary collaboration between ophthalmology researchers and computer scientists at UCI has shown promising results in revealing color in the dark. Distinguished Professor of Computer Science Pierre Baldi and students from the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) teamed up with Clinical Assistant Professor of Ophthalmology Andrew Browne and others from the School of Medicine (SOM) to leverage deep learning (DL) in recreating color images from infrared input images. “Deep Learning to Enable Color Vision in the Dark,” the PLOS ONE paper that Browne and Baldi co-authored with computer science Ph.D. students Ekaterina Deyneka, Francesco Ceccarelli and Siwei Chen, and SOM researchers Josiah To, Jianing Tang and Anderson Vu, outlines their findings.

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Machine Learning ‘Street Talk’ Podcast Features Reality Check from Sameer Singh and Yasaman Razeghi

A popular machine learning podcast, ML Street Talk, recently featured Computer Science Professor Sameer Singh and Ph.D. student Yasaman Razeghi discussing their paper, “Impact of Pretraining Term Frequencies on Few-Shot Reasoning.” Co-authored with Robert Logan, also a Ph.D. student in UCI’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS), and Matt Gardner, a principal researcher at Microsoft, the paper suggests that large language models perform well on reasoning tasks not because the models can reason well but maybe because they’ve memorized the dataset.

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ICS Researchers Win Best Paper Award at Eurosys 2022

Chancellor’s Professor of Computer Science Michael Franz and a group of current and former Ph.D. students and postdoctoral researchers from the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) recently won the Best Paper Award at the European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys 2022), a flagship venue in system software. The paper, “PKRU-Safe: Automatically Locking Down the Heap Between Safe and Unsafe Languages,” is by Ph.D. students Paul Kirth and Mitchel Dickerson, Immunant CTO Stephen Crane and CEO Per Larsen, postdoctoral researchers Adrian Dabrowski and David Gens, Apple software engineer Yeoul Na, KU Leuven Professor Stijn Volckaert, and Franz.

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Machine Learning Street Talk Podcast: “NLP Benchmarks & ML DevOps Interoperability With Yasaman Razeghi and Prof. Sameer Singh”

This week we speak with Yasaman Razeghi and Prof. Sameer Singh from UC Irvine. Yasaman recently published a paper called “Impact of Pretraining Term Frequencies on Few-Shot Reasoning” where she demonstrated comprehensively that large language models only perform well on reasoning tasks because they memorize the dataset. For the first time she showed the accuracy was linearly correlated to the occurrence rate in the training corpus, something which OpenAI should have done in the first place!

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Culture of Collaboration Leads to Cutting-Edge Work in AI

Recently, UCI announced that researchers had developed a hybrid human-machine framework for AI systems that can complement human expertise:

From chatbots that answer tax questions to algorithms that drive autonomous vehicles and dish out medical diagnoses, artificial intelligence undergirds many aspects of daily life. Creating smarter, more accurate systems requires a hybrid human-machine approach, according to researchers at the University of California, Irvine. In a study published this month in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they present a new mathematical model that can improve performance by combining human and algorithmic predictions and confidence scores.

The seeds for this cutting-edge work by researchers in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) and the School of Social Sciences were first planted decades ago. This collaboration started with Padhraic Smyth, Chancellor’s Professor in the Computer Science and Statistics Departments, and Mark Steyvers, a professor in the Department of Cognitive Sciences.

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