Highlights
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Sophomore Wins Prize to Support New App to Match Student Volunteers and Social Causes
CSE sophomore Sneha Jayaprakash (at right) is passionate about two things: computer science, and social change. As part of the 2013 Microsoft YouthSpark Challenge for Change contest, she developed a winning proposal for a mobile app to engage students with volunteerism and social issues – and Jayaprakash walked away with a $2,500 prize to get the project going with six fellow computer science majors. The prize money is in addition to $10,000 awarded to the project by the Microsoft Imagine Fund in February, so the team is revving up to turn the idea into a successful startup. “I’ve always been passionate about global issues,” said Jayaprakash. “I wanted to show people that volunteer service is easy. You don’t have to go overseas or make a big commitment. There are simple things you can do every day to make a difference.”The winning idea is a mobile app called Bystanders to Upstanders (B2U). Jayaprakash’s app presents simple, service-related challenges for users to complete in order to earn rewards. The challenges are personalized to the interests and skills of the participant. In addition, users can compete with their friends and use their earned points to make real donations to a variety of nonprofits. “I thought, ‘this is something unique we can do with our computer science education,’” said Jayaprakash. “Most people don’t associate computer science with social activism.” Added Winnie Xu, also a computer science student, who worked on the B2U app. “To be able to take what I’m learning in class and apply it to something I’m passionate about is really gratifying.”
Read the full news release.
What a YouTube video interview with Challenge for Change winner Sneha Jayaprakash.
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Qualcomm Institute Invites CSE Proposals for Strategic Research Grants
CSE faculty, research scientists and other researchers who are eligible to be a Principal Investigator (PI) on a federal funding award have nearly two months to submit one-year grant proposals under the Qualcomm Institute’s Calit2 Strategic Research Opportunities (CSRO) program. Two earlier CSRO rounds awarded over $1.5 million in cash and in-kind grants or graduate fellowships. In the 2012 round, three CSE professors were awardees: David Kriegman, Ryan Kastner and Yuanyuan (YY) Zhou (pictured at right).PIs must submit their 3-to-5 page proposals by April 30, for grants that will take effect on July 1. Each award typically provides a 50-50 combination of cash and other support in the form of Qualcomm Institute services, equipment, lab space and other resources. Any CSE PI may submit a CSRO proposal. If they are not already an academic participant in the institute, they must sign and date an online Investigator Agreement prior to submitting the proposal.
The institute is expanding the range of research areas in which proposals will be welcomed. Two major areas for 2014 are robotics and brain science, in keeping with major initiatives already underway on campus and in the Qualcomm Institute. Projects should also be consistent with the research initiatives spelled out in the campus Strategic Plan (due to be finalized this summer). PIs will also be asked to indicate whether their proposals fit into one or more of the institute’s targeted enabling technologies (wireless, photonics, cyberinfrastructure and nano-MEMS) or application thrusts (culture, energy, environment and health).
Read the CSRO Call for Proposals.
Visit the Calit2 Strategic Research Opportunities website.
Read the full Qualcomm Institute news release.
Download and sign an Investigator Agreement. -
CSE Students, Faculty Eligible for Free Admission to Big Data at Work Symposium
Two CSE faculty members will be among a handful of experts set to explore the explosion of big data in the workplace at a symposium March 12. UC San Diego Extension and UCSD-TV are organizing the campus event to highlight the explosion of data in the workplace – and how students and staff can prepare for jobs in industry or academe. The hour-long ‘Big Data at Work: A Conversation with the Experts” symposium will feature TED-style presentations about emerging trends in big data, including the latest developments in research, services and education. The event will take place in the Calit2 Auditorium, Atkinson Hall, and the speakers will include CSE professor and Calit2 director Larry Smarr, who will give the opening talk and focus on big data and health, and Prof. Stefan Savage (pictured at left), who will explore the world of cybersecurity and big data. Other speakers will include San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) director Mike Norman, industry speaker Michael Zeller of Zementis, Inc., and SDSC’s Natasha Balac, director of the Predictive Analytics Center of Excellence, who will moderate a panel discussion. While organizers are charging an admission fee of $10 through March 10, or $20 at the door, CSE students, staff and faculty can get in for free. Organizers set aside 40 seats for those affiliated with CSE or the Qualcomm Institute, but RSVPs must be done in advance. CSE students, staff or faculty can respond by email to unex-techdata@ucsd.edu and indicate Big Data in the subject line.The Big Data at Work symposium is a reminder that CSE and SDSC are collaborating on a Master of Advanced Studies (MAS) program in this area. If all goes well, the proposed MAS in Data Science and Engineering could kick off as early as this Fall quarter. The Big Data at Work event will be recorded for a broadcast on UCSD-TV later in 2014.
Learn more about Big Data at Work: A Conversation with the Experts.
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Supercomputing Conference Announces Student Cluster Competition
Teams Sought for SC14 Student Cluster Competition in New Orleans; Deadline to Apply Friday, April 11
CSE and other students interested in demonstrating their high-performance computing skills on a global stage are invited to form teams and sign up to compete in the eighth annual Student Cluster Competition at the SC14 supercomputing conference to be held Nov. 16-21, 2014, in New Orleans. The Student Cluster Competition is a high-energy event featuring young supercomputing talent from around the world competing to build and operate powerful cluster computers. Applications are now being accepted and the deadline for team submissions is Friday, April 11, 2014.Detailed information about the Student Cluster Competition can be found at http://sc14.supercomputing.
org/engage/hpc- interconnections/sc14-student- cluster-competition. Team proposals must be submitted via the SC14 submission site at https://submissions. supercomputing.org/. Each accepted team must submit a final architecture proposal by Monday, September 29, 2014, and the proposal should contain detailed information about both the hardware being used and the software stack that will be used for the challenge.
Upcoming Events
Yesterday
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Faculty Candidate: Ippokratis Pandis (IBM)
- Start time: 11:00am
- End date: Friday, March 7th
- End time: 12:00pm
- Where: CSE 1202
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Description:
Eliminating unscalable communication in transaction processing, toward bionic databases
On-line transaction processing (OLTP) is one of the two most important enterprise data management applications. Transaction processing workloads typically exhibit high concurrency and provide ample opportunities for parallel execution by multicore hardware. Unfortunately, due to the characteristics of the application, transaction processing systems must moderate and coordinate communication between independent agents. As a result, transaction processing systems cannot always convert abundant request-level parallelism into execution parallelism, due to communication bottlenecks. In order to improve scalability of transaction processing, we identify three forms of communication in the system—unbounded, fixed, and cooperative—and argue that only the first type poses a fundamental threat to scalability. We then present and evaluate under a common framework, techniques that attack significant sources of unbounded communication during transaction processing, and sketch a solution for those that remain. All the techniques are implemented in Shore-MT, which is the most scalable open-source storage manager. The solutions we present affect fundamental services of any transaction processing engine, such as locking, logging, and physical page accesses. They either reduce unbounded communication, they downgrade it to a less-threatening type, or they eliminate it completely through system redesign.
We find that the latter approach is the most effective. The final design, based on data-oriented transaction execution, cuts unbounded communication by almost two orders of magnitude compared with the baseline, exhibiting more predictable behavior and better scalability. The predictable behavior of the final design, allows to offload to hardware a large fraction of the complex transaction processing functionality that underutilizes the capabilities of modern general-purpose processors. Hence, in the last part, we make the case for a “bionic” database system design that enables operational analytics on truly live data.
Biography
Ippokratis Pandis is a member of the research staff at IBM Almaden Research Center. His work focuses on scalable hardware-aware data management. For the past two and a half years, Ippokratis has been a member of the core team that designs and implements the BLU column-store engine, which currently ships as part of IBM's DB2 LUW v10.5 with BLU Acceleration. Ippokratis received his PhD from the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the recipient of Best Demonstration awards at ICDE 2006 and SIGMOD 2011 and Best Paper runner up award at the Outrageous Ideas and Vision track of CIDR 2013. He is currently serving as PC chair for DaMoN 2014 and PC area chair for the Main-memory, Parallel and Distributed Database systems area of CIKM 2014.
Monday, March 10th
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Faculty Candidate: Johan Ugander (Cornell University)
- Start time: 11:00am
- End date: Monday, March 10th
- End time: 12:00pm
- Where: CSE 1202
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Description:
Computational Challenges in Large-Scale Social Networks
Problems involving social networks and massive social data sets motivate some of the most difficult computational challenges today, and there is a pressing demand for understanding the structure of these problems. The design and measurement of social networks is commonly studied for properties shared with other networks, when in fact many aspects are specifically characteristics of social contexts. The spread of ideas is often studied as an epidemiological process, but very little research has examined how individuals make social decisions when adopting ideas. In the online world, experimentation using A/B tests does not account for social interference between treatment units, making it poorly suited for many studies on social networks. In this talk I will present research on these challenges (social structure, social contagion, social experimentation), developing computational approaches adapted to understanding the structure of social networks and social processes, and also to impacting the design of large-scale online social systems.
Biography
Johan Ugander is a Ph.D candidate at Cornell University, advised by Jon Kleinberg. His research develops tools for analyzing massive social graphs and other large-scale social data, aiming to provide a better understanding of social structure and human decision making while also impacting the design of large-scale computational systems. He is the recipient of the WSDM '13 Best Student Paper Award and the WebSci '12 Best Paper Award, and his work has been featured in popular-media outlets including The New York Times, The Economist, NPR, and Wired.
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DLS Speaker: Shivnath Babu (Duke University)
- Start time: 2:00pm
- End date: Monday, March 10th
- End time: 3:00pm
- Where: CSE 1202
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Description:
DBMS+: The Management System for Next-Generation Databases
Easy use of data requires a database, and efficient use of adatabase (DB) requires a Database Management System (DBMS). As organizations become more data-driven---popularly known today as using big data---their needs grow quickly to encompass: relational, text, graph, and array data; batch, interactive, and streaming analytics; SQL queries, machine-learning techniques, and natural language processing; and rapid evolution of data sources, applications, and users.
Big data has forced databases to change from a monolithic architecture to a composition of compute and storage engines running in one or more multi-tenant clusters. In this talk, I will describe how the DBMS+ project at Duke is rethinking Management Systems for these next-generation databases. I will introduce the core methodology of DBMS+, namely, "applying big-data techniques to big-data systems." I will also discuss some of the challenges that we have addressed so far.
Biography
Shivnath Babu is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Duke University and the Chief Scientist at Unravel Data Systems. He got his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2005 and BTech from IIT Madras in 1999. He has received a U.S. National Science Foundation CAREER Award, three IBM Faculty Awards, and an HP Labs Innovation Research Award. His research interests are in ease-of-use and manageability of data-intensive computing systems, automated problem diagnosis and cluster sizing for systems running on cloud platforms, and automated detection and recovery from corruption of data caused by hardware faults, software bugs, or human mistakes.
Wednesday, March 12th
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Faculty Candidate: Dafna Shahaf (Stanford)
- Start time: 11:00am
- End date: Wednesday, March 12th
- End time: 12:00pm
- Where: CSE 1202
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Description:
The Aha! Moment: From Data to Insight
The amount of data in the world is increasing at incredible rates. Large-scale data has potential to transform almost every aspect of our world, from science to business; for this potential to be realized, we must turn data into insight. In this talk, I will describe two of my efforts to address this problem computationally:
The first project, Metro Maps of Information, aims to help people understand the underlying structure of complex topics, such as news stories or research areas. Metro Maps are structured summaries that can help us understand the information landscape, connect the dots between pieces of information, and uncover the big picture.
The second project proposes a framework for automatic discovery of insightful connections in data. In particular, we focus on identifying gaps in medical knowledge: our system recommends directions of research that are both novel and promising.
I will formulate both problems mathematically and provide efficient, scalable methods for solving them. User studies on real-world datasets demonstrate that our methods help users acquire insight efficiently across multiple domains.
Biography
Dafna Shahaf is a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University. She received her Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University; prior to that, she earned an M.S. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a B.Sc. from Tel-Aviv university. Dafna's research focuses on helping people make sense of massive amounts of data. She has won a best research paper award at KDD 2010, a Microsoft Research Fellowship, a Siebel Scholarship, and a Magic Grant for innovative ideas.
Monday, March 17th
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Faculty Candidate: Mona Attariyan (Google)
- Start time: 11:00am
- End date: Monday, March 17th
- End time: 12:00pm
- Where: CSE 1202
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Description:
Finding the needle in the haystack: How dynamic information flow analysis can help diagnose software misconfigurations
Complex software systems are difficult to configure. When misconfigurations inevitably arise, users spend a considerable amount of time troubleshooting those problems. Misconfigurations are also costly. They cause million-dollar service outages and add substantially to the cost of software support. My work minimizes the impact of misconfigurations by reducing the time to recover from such problems.
In this talk, I will show that system support for dynamic information flow analysis can substantially simplify the diagnosis process by reducing the human effort needed to find misconfigured options. I will present ConfAid and X-ray, two diagnosis tools that automatically pinpoint the likely root causes of a configuration problem. ConfAid focuses on misconfigurations that lead to crashes and incorrect outputs, and X-ray focuses on diagnosing performance misconfigurations. The analysis takes no more than a few minutes, which is much faster and far less labor-intensive compared to manual troubleshooting.
Biography
Mona Attariyan received her Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan in 2012, under supervision of Professor Jason Flinn. She joined Google in August 2012 and is currently a Senior Software Engineer working on cloud infrastructure at the Seattle office. She has received multiple awards during her career. She was awarded the University of Michigan Margaret Ayers Host Award in 2010, the Jay Lepreau Best Student Paper Award at OSDI 2012, and the Rising Star in Systems Research Award at the Diversity Workshop at SOSP 2013. She has also received the inaugural ACM SIGOPS Dennis M. Ritchie Best Thesis Award at SOSP 2013.
Her research interests lie in the general area of software systems, with an emphasis on operating systems and distributed systems. Her current research focuses on creating highly distributed and efficient platforms for analyzing life science workloads.
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DLS Speaker: Rick Szeliski (Microsoft)
- Start time: 2:00pm
- End date: Monday, March 17th
- End time: 3:00pm
- Where: CSE 1202
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Description:
Reflections on Image-Based Modeling and Rendering
Richard Szeliski
Microsoft ResearchABSTRACT:
Image-based modeling and rendering have been active areas of in computer vision and graphics since the early 1990s. Starting with early work in representations and algorithms based on Light Fields and Lumigraphs, the field has seen steady improvements in many of the component technologies, including image-based modeling of 3D proxies, dealing with irregularly sampled data, the incorporation of video, and an interesting interplay with non-photorealistic rendering and computational photography. It has also spawned widely used consumer experiences such as panoramic "VR" photography, street-level (and indoor) immersive tours, and rich 3D navigation of Internet photo collections. In this talk, I review the evolution of this field, tease out some of the common themes and techniques, and speculate on the remaining difficulties and promises in this field, including the handling of reflections and transparent motion that commonly occur in such applications.
BIO:
Richard Szeliski is a Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft Research, where he leads the Interactive Visual Media Group. He is also an Affiliate Professor at the University of Washington, and is a Fellow of the ACM and IEEE. Dr. Szeliski has done pioneering research in the fields of Bayesian methods for computer vision, image-based modeling, image-based rendering, and computational photography, which lie at the intersection of computer vision and computer graphics. His research on Photo Tourism and Photosynth is an exciting example of the promise of large-scale image-based rendering.
Dr. Szeliski received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, in 1988 and joined Microsoft Research in 1995. Prior to Microsoft, he worked at Bell-Northern Research, Schlumberger Palo Alto Research, the Artificial Intelligence Center of SRI International, and the Cambridge Research Lab of Digital Equipment Corporation. He has published over 150 research papers in computer vision, computer graphics, medical imaging, neural nets, and numerical analysis, as well as the books Computer Vision: Algorithms and Applications and Bayesian Modeling of Uncertainty in Low-Level Vision. He was a Program Committee Chair for CVPR'2013, served as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence and on the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Computer Vision, and is a Founding Editor of Foundations and Trends in Computer Graphics and Vision.
Wednesday, March 19th
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Faculty Candidate: Mohammad Alizadeh (Stanford)
- Start time: 11:00am
- End date: Wednesday, March 19th
- End time: 12:00pm
- Where: CSE 1202
Friday, March 21st
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Faculty Recruit Talk: Piotr Dollar (Microsoft Research)
- Start time: 11:00am
- End date: Friday, March 21st
- End time: 12:00pm
- Where: CSE 1202
