Computer Science Capstone Pilot Paves the Way for New Course

Assistant Professor of Teaching Sergio Gago-Masague has been leading project-based assignments for years. He first started working at UCI in 2012, when he joined the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) and founded the Engaging Technology and Application Design (ETAD) Lab. Since then, he has become involved with the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) and the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship in the Internet of Things (SURF-IoT).

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Forbes: “Covid Crimes: Espionage, Hackers And Why America Is Vulnerable” (Bryan Cunningham quoted)

With millions of lives and trillions of dollars at stake, the U.S. is in a dangerous place when it comes to vulnerabilities associated with the pandemic – one of which is cybersecurity. To understand just what we’re facing, Forbes asked Bryan Cunningham, long-time cybersecurity and privacy lawyer and Founding Executive Director of the University of California, Irvine Cybersecurity Policy & Research Institute, exactly what’s going on, what the focus should be, and what precautions Americans should be taking.

Read the full story at Forbes.

Sameer Singh Wins Best Paper Award at ACL 2020 for Tool that Test NLP Models

In a recent tweet, Computer Science Professor Sameer Singh asked, “Are Natural Language Processing models as good as they seem on leaderboards?” He then provided the answer. “We know they’re not, but there isn’t a structured way to test them.” He went on to introduce CheckList, a task-agnostic methodology for testing NLP models that he developed in collaboration with Marco Tulio Ribeiro of Microsoft Research and Tongshuang Wu and Carlos Guestrin at the University of Washington. The team presented their paper, “Beyond Accuracy: Behavioral Testing of NLP Models with CheckList,” at the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2020). Their work was not only well-received; it was the recipient of the Best Paper Award.

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ICS Team Explores Distance-Based Mental Health Services for Minority Students

With the emergence of the global pandemic, UCI’s Office of Inclusive Excellence (OIE) reached out to the campus community with a call for proposals, urging researchers to use COVID-19 as “a lens through which to explore fault lines of inequities.” The call, part of OIE’s Confronting Extremism program, led to more than $500,000 in funding spread across 13 individual and team faculty projects, including a project from the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS), “Distance Based Support for HBCU and HSI Students.”

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ICS Alumnus Mamadou Diallo Wins Galileo Award for Cyber/Science & Technology

SAN DIEGO, (April 30 2015) Mamadou Diallo, scientist, at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific (Photo by Alan Antczak Released) 150429-YN244-008

Since 2013, Mamadou H. Diallo has worked as a scientist at the Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific (NIWC Pacific), focusing on science and technology activities in the area of cybersecurity. Diallo, who received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. from UCI’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS), was recently recognized for his outstanding contributions in the area of Cyber and Science & Technology (C/S&T) with an NIWC Pacific Galileo Award.

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Health IT Analytics: “UCI Uses Campus Wi-Fi to Test COVID-19 Contact Tracing App”

The University of California, Irvine is seeking to leverage the campus’s Wi-Fi connectivity to deploy a COVID-19 contact tracing application, which could help reduce the spread of the virus.

A team in UCI’s Donald Bren School of Information & Computer Sciences received a rapid funding grant from the National Science Foundation for the project. The app promises to provide enhanced situational awareness to participants while preserving their anonymity.

Read the full article at Health IT Analytics.

VentureBeat: “AI researchers create testing tool to find bugs in NLP from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft”

AI researchers have created a language-model testing tool that has discovered major bugs in commercially available cloud AI offerings from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Yesterday, a paper detailing the CheckList tool received the Best Paper award from organizers of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) conference. The ACL conference, which took place online this week, is one of the largest annual gatherings for researchers creating language models.

Read the full article at VentureBeat.

UCI News: “UCI researchers use campus as test bed for coronavirus contact tracing system”

Who among us does not value a good, reliable Wi-Fi signal? For researchers at the University of California, Irvine, that appreciation goes further: They want to use the campus’s connectivity to help combat the spread of COVID-19.

A team in UCI’s Donald Bren School of Information & Computer Sciences recently received a rapid funding award from the National Science Foundation to explore the deployment of the university’s wireless network as part of a coronavirus contact tracing application. The promise of the project, according to its lead researchers, is that it will provide enhanced situational awareness to participants while preserving their anonymity.

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Computer Science Professor Pierre Baldi Involved in Multiple Multidisciplinary Collaborations

To understand the expansive reach of computer science today, look no further than some of the recent research collaborations of Pierre Baldi, Distinguished Professor of Computer Science in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS). He is working on multidisciplinary projects involving natural language processing, deep learning, chemoinformatics, and bioinformatics, partnering with faculty from the Departments of Physics & Astronomy, Mathematics, and Chemistry, and well as from the UCI Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory (CNLM).

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