What are some of the benefits of UCI’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS)? Aside from the fact that it’s the only computing-focused school in the UC system and happens to sit in the middle of “Silicon Beach,” it also offers capstone courses that provide hands-on experience in a practical, real-world environment. The strength and importance of such programs was reiterated June 6-8, 2022, when ICS faculty, students and staff attended the National Capstone Design Conference in Dallas, Texas.

[Read more…]

When Robert Logan, a Ph.D. student in UCI’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS), started a summer internship at Google last year, he says he wanted to “flip things around.” Instead of seeing whether knowledge bases could be used to improve language models, the goal was to explore whether language models could be used to improve knowledge bases.

“In the short span of a summer internship, we decided to look into the novel task of whether language models could be used to automatically update Wikipedia articles when given new information about the article subject,” says Logan. “I have a lot of experience building datasets from Wikipedia that I was able to draw upon in order to create a dataset for this task, and Google has compute infrastructure that makes training large language models fast and painless.”

[Read more…]

The UCI Machine Learning (ML) Repository hosted the 2022 Machine Learning Hackathon from May 18 to May 29. Throughout the hackathon, participants engaged with members of the UCI ML Repository and its datasets to build creative and meaningful projects. On June 3, hackathon organizers held an awards ceremony to review project submissions and recognize four winning hacks.

[Read more…]

More than 250 students from UCI’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) showcased their talent and mingled with industry professionals on June 1, 2022, at the Second Annual ICS Project Expo. Held in the new state-of-the-art Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Building (ISEB), the event was a culmination of months of hard work, offering the students the opportunity to present projects completed for undergraduate capstone courses in informatics, computer science and data science, as well as for the Butterworth Product Development Competition. Project sponsors and students alike look forward to this annual opportunity to highlight projects they’ve labored over throughout the year.

[Read more…]

This year, for the first time, a team of students from UCI’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) entered the MITRE Embedded Capture the Flag (eCTF) competition, going against 31 other teams. Led by Computer Science Professor Ian Harris, the students participated in the attack-and-defend exercise from January to April 2022, learning how to better design secure embedded systems and placing fourth overall.

“From my perspective, that is outstanding given the fact that this was our first time competing,” says Harris. “Now that we understand the process, I expect that we will do much better next year.”

[Read more…]

This year’s Butterworth Product Development Competition was finally in person again, after the global pandemic forced a 2020 cancellation and 2021 virtual edition. Sponsored annually since 2010 by UCI alumnus Paul Butterworth, the competition offers students from the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) a unique opportunity to team up with other UCI students and experience real-world product development and entrepreneurship.

[Read more…]

Michael Goodrich and David Eppstein, both Distinguished Professors of Computer Science in UCI’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS), have been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to study algorithms for geometric graphs. They will be receiving $800,000 over the next four years for their work on this project, which is a collaboration with Computer Science Professor Stephen Kobourov of the University of Arizona. Kobourov will receive $400,000 over the next four years, bringing the total budget to $1.2 million.

[Read more…]

The University of California, Irvine has been awarded a five-year, $14 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to study brain circuits that are susceptible to aging and Alzheimer’s disease. The research findings will advance the development of early diagnostic tools and the discovery of new treatment strategies.

[Read more…]