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.
[Read more…]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.
[Read more…]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.
[Read more…]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.
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.
[Read more…]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.
The research team of Computer Science Professor Chen Li, along with Ph.D. students Qiushi Bai and Yicong Huang, has developed a website called CoronavirusTwitterMap to support interactive visualization and analytics of coronavirus-related tweets in real time. The team started collecting tweets related to COVID-19 in January, and they plan to further improve the system by adding more information such as case numbers of different regions, and certain sentiments of the public as shown on social media. “We hope this website can help people easily visualize and analyze social media tweets temporally and geographically in real time so that we understand how the public is responding to the Coronavirus pandemic,” says Li.
TwitterMap is a research prototype powered by Cloudberry and Apache AsterixDB to support interactive analytics and visualization of large amounts of tweets.
Artificial intelligence has made big strides recently in understanding language, but it can still suffer from an alarming, and potentially dangerous, kind of algorithmic myopia. Research shows how AI programs that parse and analyze text can be confused and deceived by carefully crafted phrases. A sentence that seems straightforward to you or me may have a strange ability to deceive an AI algorithm.
Read the full story at Wired.
A new artificial intelligence-enhanced video compression model developed by computer scientists at the University of California, Irvine and Disney Research has demonstrated that deep learning can compete against established video compression technology.
[Read more…]What happens when you give art a voice? This isn’t a metaphorical question about artistic expression. It was a concept on display for six months at Italy’s Venice Biennale cultural festival, with three unique pieces — by artist Belu-Simion Fainaru and UCI Computer Science Professors Alex Nicolau and Alexander Veidenbaum and their students — literally speaking to viewers.
[Read more…]