Popular Science: “What happens if AI grows smarter than humans? The answer worries scientists.” (Sameer Singh interviewed)

Sameer Singh, a computer scientist [and associate professor] at the University of California, Irvine worries that focusing on possible futures obscures the very real impacts that AI’s failures or follies are already having. “When I hear of resources going to AGI [artificial general intelligence] and these long-term effects, I feel like it’s taking away from the problems that actually matter,” he says. … “It’s much more exciting to talk about, ‘we’ve reached this science-fiction goal,’ rather than talk about the actual realities of things,” says Singh. “That’s kind of where I am, and I feel like that’s kind of where a lot of the community that I work with is.” 

Read the full story on Popular Science.

Fritz Onion, M.S. ’93: An Inspiration for Giving Back

How do you put into words the impact of the Onion Foundation? Since 2014, this private charitable foundation, co-founded by UC Irvine alumnus Fritz Onion, has given millions of dollars to more than 460 organizations in all 16 counties of Maine. Through grant funding, it has supported everything from arts programming for the general public and free music education for children, to healthy soil solutions for organic farmers and access to the outdoors for people with disabilities. Countless lives have been touched by this foundation.

[Read more…]

On the Road to Internet Adoption, a Cryptographic Protocol Helps Secure 2 Billion WhatsApp Users

Internet security is getting a bit of a boost, in part thanks to cryptographic research started by Stanislaw Jarecki more than five years ago.

Back in 2018, Jarecki, an associate professor of computer science in UC Irvine’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS), published a paper with ICS Ph.D. student Jiayu Xu in collaboration with Hugo Krawczyk of IBM Research. Their work, presented at the 37th Annual International Conference on the Theory and Applications of Cryptographic Techniques (Eurocrypt 2018), proposed a new Password Authenticated Key Agreement (PAKE) protocol called OPAQUE.

[Read more…]

Ph.D. Student Alagappan Ramanathan Named Internet Society Pulse Research Fellow

Since 1992, the nonprofit Internet Society has been advocating for an open and trusted, globally accessible internet. In December 2020, it launched Internet Society Pulse in support of that work, creating data-driven insights into the internet. On May 8, 2023, the Internet Society announced its inaugural cohort of Pulse Research Fellows, and Alagappan (Ashwin) Ramanathan was among the select few named.

[Read more…]

Ph.D. Student Fangqi Liu Named a 2023 Rising Star in Cyber-Physical Systems

You won’t find computer science Ph.D. student Fangqi Liu anywhere near the UC Irvine campus on May 31, 2023. Liu, whose research focus includes cyber-physical systems (CPS), will instead be at the University of Virginia for the CPS Rising Stars 2023 Workshop. The highly competitive workshop aims to identify and mentor exceptional Ph.D. students and postdocs pursuing academic careers related to CPS. Liu is one of 32 students selected to attend as a 2023 Rising Star.

[Read more…]

UCI’s Graduate Programs Shine in U.S. News & World Report Rankings

Computer Science graduate program is in the top 20 among public universities.

Highlighted by the program in education, nine fields of advanced study at the University of California, Irvine placed in the nation’s top 20 among public universities in U.S. News & World Report’s 2023-24 graduate school rankings, published online today, marking UCI as one of the leading locations in the country for students to pursue graduate degrees.

[Read more…]

Student Spotlight: Dylan Riffle Explores Intersection of Computer Science, Biology and Agriculture

Dylan Riffle

Dylan Riffle’s technical expertise first emerged in elementary school when he started building video game servers for friends. By high school, he was developing Internet of Things (IoT) devices for Bioverse Labs, a company that leverages AI-powered technology to help farmers and governments monitor species in real time. Last year, as a computer science major in UC Irvine’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS), Riffle and his teammates took first place in the 2022 Butterworth Competition for their online farmer’s marketplace, Leprendo. Here, Riffle talks about his various projects, rooted in his interest in exploring the intersections of computer science, biology and agriculture.

[Read more…]

Back-to-Back Wins Send ICS Grad Students to Microsoft Imagine Cup World Championship

Chidroop Iyyhappan
Lakshmi Narke

UC Irvine graduate students Lakshmi Narke and Chidroop Iyyhappan can rattle off all kinds of statistics about tuberculosis. For example, they’ll tell you that more than 10 million people fell ill from TB in 2021, including 1.2 million children. They’ll stress the 1.6 million lives lost to TB that year, making it the second deadliest infectious disease.

Why do Narke and Iyyhappan, who are earning their master’s degrees in computer science from the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS), know so much about TB? Because in collaboration with Aditya Sreerama, an engineering management graduate student at Duke University, they’re developing a low-cost solution to eradicate TB using artificial intelligence and gamification.

[Read more…]