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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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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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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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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According to a recent Bloomberg Law article, “the wet signature requirement, that a document be signed in-person and with ink, could see its demise as social distancing practices take hold across the globe in an effort to stop the spread of coronavirus.” The article notes how COVID-19 has “accelerated the already growing use and acceptance of electronic signatures to such an extent that wet signatures may soon become relics for attorneys.”

The increased use of electronic signatures, however, comes with risks, according to University of California, Irvine (UCI) Assistant Professor of Computer Science Ardalan Amiri Sani.

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Vikram Narayanan and Anton Burtsev, in collaboration with researchers from Penn State University, won the best paper award at ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments (VEE 2020).

ACM VEE is an annual, international research conference that brings together researchers and scientists from computer science in the area of virtualization, systems programming and programming languages. 2020 marked VEE’s 16th year.

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