Associate Professor of Computer Science Charless Fowlkes has been awarded The Helmholtz Prize by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for his paper “A database of human segmented natural images and its application to evaluating segmentation algorithms and measuring ecological statistics,” co-authored with then-UC Berkeley researchers David Martin, Doron Tal and Jitendra Malik in 2001.
Franz named 2016 IEEE Fellow
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has named Computer Science Professor Michael Franz a 2016 IEEE Fellow. Franz is being recognized by IEEE for his contributions to just-in-time compilation as well as his contributions to computer security through compiler-generated software diversity.
The IEEE Grade of Fellow is conferred by the IEEE Board of Directors upon a person with an outstanding record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest. It is the highest grade of membership and is recognized by the technical community as a prestigious honor and an important career achievement. The total number of fellows selected in any one year cannot exceed one-tenth of 1 percent of the total voting membership. “It is a great achievement receiving recognition from one’s peers and being included among such a distinguished group of IEEE members,” says Franz.
The IEEE is the world’s leading professional association for advancing technology for humanity with 400,000 members in 160 countries. Dedicated to the advancement of technology, the IEEE publishes 30 percent of the world’s literature in the electrical and electronics engineering and computer science fields, and has developed more than 900 active industry standards.
Nature: “Artificial intelligence called in to tackle LHC data deluge” (Baldi mentioned)
Although they emphasized that they would not be comfortable handing over this level of control to an algorithm, several speakers at the CERN workshop discussed how deep learning could be applied to physics. Pierre Baldi, an AI researcher at the University of California, Irvine who has applied machine learning to various branches of science, described how he and his collaborators have done research suggesting that a deep-learning technique known as dark knowledge might aid — fittingly — in the search for dark matter.
View the full story on the Nature website.
NBC Los Angeles: “Social Media Quizzes Could Give Hackers Access” (Tsudik quoted)
“Just like hostages wind up often getting passed around and sold like goods,” said Gene Tsudik, who heads the computer science department at UC Irvine. “This is really a complete takeover of one’s identity,” he said. … “Don’t over share,” Tsudik warned.
View the full story on the NBC Los Angeles website.
AARP: “Digital Entrepreneurs Over 50 In the App World” (Jain quoted)
Ramesh Jain got the start-up bug a couple of decades ago. While spending a year at Stanford University as a visiting professor of computer science, he was stunned by the whirlwind of entrepreneurial activity among his fellow professors. “You’re developing something people really can use,” he says. “And it makes you a better researcher.”
Now, Jain, 66, who is a professor at the Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California in Irvine, is launching his seventh enterprise, one that, he says, “brings together many concepts and ideas I’ve been researching for the past 20 years.”
Read the full story on the AARP website.
Info Security Magazine: “NSA: Business as Usual” (Tsudik quoted)
The USA Freedom Act also curtails some mechanisms already ruled illegal by appellate court, including the direct collection of bulk call metadata directly by the NSA. However, it still leaves the data in the hands of the phone companies, and allows it to be queried by the NSA using targeted selectors.
This worries Gene Tsudik, a professor in the computer science department at the University of California, Irvine. “This stuff represents a treasure trove of information, and an attractive target for attacks,” he says. “I believe that if metadata has to be kept for some time, it is best to split it in a way that neither NSA nor the phone company can make sense of it, without cooperation.”
Read the full story on the Info Security website.
Grad students participate in global UCSB iCTF hacking competition; place third among U.S. teams
Graduate students from the SPROUT (Security & Privacy Research OUTfit) and SSLLAB (Secure Systems & Software Laboratory) research groups at UCI collaborated as a team, called KHCZUU Labs, to participate in this year’s UC Santa Barbara International Capture The Flag (iCTF) competition. The iCTF contest is an annual competition where academic teams pit their skills at cyber attacks and defenses against each other. In security capture-the-flag events, the teams compete to try to find vulnerabilities in programs provided by the organizers and hack other teams to steal “flags,” while defending their own flags. CTF events provide a realistic but safe environment to learn and practice how real-world computer security works.
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Tsudik Co-Authors Award-Winning Student Paper on ‘Violating Consumer Anonymity’
Chancellor’s Professor of Computer Science Gene Tsudik and Alberto Compagno, a visiting Ph.D. student from University of Rome (Italy), co-authored a paper titled “Violating Consumer Anonymity: Geo-locating Nodes in Named Data Networking” that received the Best Student Paper Award at the 13th International Conference on Applied Cryptography and Network Security 2015 (ACNS 2015), which took place in New York in June. The paper’s other authors included Mauro Conti (University of Padua), Paolo Gasti (New York Institute of Technology) and Luigi V. Mancini (Sapienza University of Rome). View a PDF of the paper here.
Developing an ANTrepreneurial Spirit
Computer science freshman Alec Kriebel created and released an iOS app development course with the help of UCI’s Blackstone LaunchPad.
Computer science freshman Alec Kriebel first demonstrated his entrepreneurialism in the fourth grade. At his elementary school just outside of Reading, Pa., Kriebel established a small comics “company” with his classmates. They called it Bob Co. Comics —“something that a fourth grader would think of,” Kriebel quips today.
UCI Data Science Initiative awarded $1.25 million from NASA for minority research opportunities
UCI has been awarded $1.25 million from NASA as part of a new $5-million 5-year award to establish a new center at Cal State LA for STEM education. This new center will collaborate with UCI’s Data Science Initiative and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)’s Center for Data Science and Technology to train undergraduate and masters students in areas such as climate change, hydrology, computational physics, and data science with an emphasis on minority and low-income students.
Professor Padhraic Smyth, UCI Data Science Initiative Director, will be UCI’s PI on the project and will be working with five other UCI faculty members from engineering, physical science and computer science to host Cal State LA students for short summer workshops and lab visits. The funding will support a project coordinator and provide some summer support for participating faculty and Ph.D. students.
For more information, click here.