Highlights
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In Facebook Open Academy, CSE Undergrad Earns Oculus Rift VR Kit
In February, Facebook expanded its Facebook Open Academy to UC San Diego and nine other top computer science schools, in addition to Stanford and 14 other schools admitted in 2012 and 2013. The 2014 program kicked off with approximately 250 students and faculty from 25 schools assembling at Facebook headquarters to meet with mentors from 22 open-source projects (such as Ruby on Rails, Mozilla Firefox and Wikimedia). The Open Academy specifically encourages practical, applied software-engineering experiences for undergraduates by matching them with active open-source projects and mentors. According to Jay Kunin, executive director of the Jacobs School of Engineering's Moxie Center for Student Entrepreneurship, “we had 11 undergrad CSE students complete the course, which spanned the Winter and Spring quarters.” For the prize contest, each student was asked to develop a project summary for the Open Academy.
In mid-July Facebook informed Kunin that CSE junior Wai Ho Leung (at left) had submitted one of the four winning papers, related to his work with the Waterbear Open Source Project, a visual programming toolkit that aims to make programming more accessible and fun, especially for self-educated learners. "I have been helping with designing a simple-to-use integrated development environment [IDE] and localizing Waterbear," says Leung, who is working full-time this summer at Websense. "I believe a simple IDE sets up a friendly learning environment, which is the key to drawing people's interest in programming."Leung’s prize: an Oculus VR development kit for the headline-grabbing Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset, primarily used in its early incarnation for 3D gaming. Mulling over ideas about what to develop, the student thinks his first project will be a 3D flight simulator.
Leung is no stranger to software development challenges. Since his AP Computer Science teacher at Gabrielino High School in San Gabriel, Calif., urged him to do so, Leung has competed or mentored students in IBM’s Master the Mainframe competition five years in a row. As a university freshman, he also entered the UCSD Programming Contest. In CSE he tutored roughly 500 students in Java, Android, PHP, C++ and other topics over a 15-month period. Leung expects to graduate from UC San Diego in 2015 with dual B.S. degrees in Computer Engineering and Mathematics-Computer Science. To supplement his formal education at UC San Diego, Leung says he joined the CSE 198 Autograder team as a sophomore. (Autograder is an application that will grade programming assignments automatically and publish the grades online.) "We plan to release a beta version of Autograder this fall," says Leung.
After graduation, he plans to work as a software engineer, but his dream is to start his own business eventually. Meanwhile, Leung says he will remain involved with Waterbear open-source project. "Ten years from now programming will most likely become a required course for primary and secondary schools," he notes. "I am hoping that Waterbear will be used to teach programming to the next generation."
Learn more about the Facebook Open Academy and how to participate.
Visit Wai Ho Leung's LinkedIn profile.
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Deciphering CSE's Upcoming Presence at Crypto 2014
CSE professors Mihir Bellare and Daniele Micciancio will be in Santa Barbara August 17-21 for the 34th International Cryptology Conference at UC Santa Barbara. The conference is sponsored by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR), and the general chair of the conference is CSE alumna Alexandra (Sasha) Boldyreva (Ph.D. ’04), who worked in Bellare’s lab and is now an associate professor in Georgia Tech’s Information Security Center.
This year’s IACR Distinguished Lecture will be given by UC San Diego’s Bellare (pictured at left). The title of his talk: “Caught in between theory and practice.” “This talk explores the culture and motivations of the cryptographic research community,” explains Bellare. “I examine the tension between theory and practice through the lens of my own experience in moving between them. I examine the peer-review process through the lens of psychology and sociology. In both cases the aim is to go from critique to understanding and, eventually, change.”Bellare also has two other papers at Crypto 2014. In the August 18 opening session, he and colleagues Kenneth G. Paterson (University of London) and Phillip Rogaway (UC Davis) have a paper on "Security of Symmetric Encryption against Mass Surveillance." According to its authors, the research was “motivated by revelations concerning population-wide surveillance of encrypted communications.” In the paper, Bellare and colleagues formalize and investigate the resistance of symmetric encryption schemes to mass surveillance. The research abstract notes that, “We assume that the goal of ‘Big Brother’ is undetectable subversion,” going on to spell out a way to defend against so-called algorithm-substitution attacks (ASAs), which aim to replace a real encryption algorithm with a subverted encryption algorithm.
Separately, Bellare and his postdoc (Viet Tung Hoang), and Ph.D. student Sriram Keelveedhi teamed on a paper called, "Cryptography from Compression Functions: The UCE Bridge to the ROM." UCE stands for Universal Computational Extractor, and ROM is the Random Oracle Model.Then on August 19, in a session on lattices, Micciancio (at right) and his French postdoc Léo Ducas have a paper on “Improved Short Lattice Signatures in the Standard Model.” They will present “a signature scheme provably secure in the standard model (no random oracles) based on the worst-case complexity of approximating the Shortest Vector Problem in ideal lattices within polynomial factors” – achieving short signatures (consisting of a single lattice vector), and “relatively short” public keys.
CSE Alumni and Former Postdocs
Crypto 2014 is also an opportunity to hear from CSE alumni and former postdocs in CSE’s Cryptography and Security Group. For example, CSE alumnus Michel Abdalla (Ph.D. ’01) has co-authored a paper on “Related Key Security for Pseudorandom Functions Beyond the Linear Barrier.” Since 2005 Abdalla (at left) has been a full-time researcher in the Computer Science department of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. (Note: Abdalla is also lead author on a July 2014 paper in the Journal of Cryptology on “Verifiable Random Functions: Relations to Identity-based Key Encapsulation and New Constructions.”) Another CSE alumnus, Bogdan Warinschi (Ph.D. ’04), is co-author of a Crypto paper on “Homomorphic Signatures with Efficient Verification for Polynomial Functions.” Warinschi is now a lecturer at the University of Bristol in the UK.
Yi-Kai Liu (Ph.D. ’07) earned his doctorate under CSE Prof. Russell Impagliazzo and Math Prof. David Meyer. Now a staff scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Liu (at right) did postdocs at UC Berkeley and Caltech before joining NIST. At Crypto 2014, he has a presentation on “Single-shot security for one-time memories in the isolated qubits model.”
Finally, Eike Kiltz (at left), a former postdoc working with Mihir Bellare, is now on the faculty at Germany’s Ruhr University Bochum. He spent 2004-05 at UCSD. For Crypto 2014, Kiltz has co-authored a paper on “(Hierarchical) Identity-based Encryption from Affine Message Authentication.” His co-authors, Olivier Blazy and Jiaxin Pan, are from the same university.Other CSE postdocs sit on the Crypto 2014 program committee. They include UC Santa Barbara professor Stefano Tessano, who worked with Bellare (2010-‘12), and Nadia Heninger, who worked with Micciancio (2011-12), who is now on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania.
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Best-Paper Prize for Computational Cognitive Modeling
At the 36th annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society which runs from July 24-26 in Quebec City, CSE Prof. Gary Cottrell (at right) and his Cognitive Science Ph.D. student Ben Cipollini will be honored with a best-paper award. This Thursday, July 24, they will receive the Computational Modeling Prize for Perception/Action. It awards the modeling paper in one of four categories of computational cognitive modeling. (The other three categories are Applied Cognition, Higher-Level Cognition, and Language.) The prize-winning research, “A Development Model of Hemispheric Asymmetry of Spatial Frequencies,” will be presented in a session on Cognitive Development—Reasoning that afternoon. In the paper, they put forward a “differential encoding (DE) model” which suggests that “lateralization in visual processing of spatial frequencies is the result of a postulated asymmetry in the spatial spread of connections with the retino-topic visual cortex.” The authors connected lateralized function to anatomical asymmetries, and the anatomical asymmetries to temporal asymmetries in development.The same day as he and Cipollini receive their $1,000 award, Cottrell will watch as one of his Ph.D. students, Panqu Wang, gives a talk on modeling the relationship between face and object recognition (a paper co-authored by Cottrell and Vanderbilt University’s Isabel Gauthier). On Thursday, Cottrell will also present a poster at the conference on some of the work he did during his year-long sabbatical in Dijon, France, with University of Burgundy professor Bob French. In it, they explain what Cottrell and French have dubbed TRACX 2.0, a “memory-based, biologically-plausible model of sequence segmentation and chunk extraction.”
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CSE Faculty Win Qualcomm Institute Research Funding
CSE professors Ryan Kastner and Steven Swanson (pictured l-r) are leading two projects awarded seed grants from the Qualcomm Institute’s Calit2 Strategic Research Opportunities (CSRO) program. It’s the third round of CSRO grants totaling $1,673,000 to 35 one-year projects that got underway effective July 1. In addition to the CSE-led projects, several Qualcomm Institute researchers who teach CSE courses made the final cut, including Jurgen Schulze, Albert Lin, Curt Schurgers and Falko Kuester.The awards to CSE’s Kastner and Swanson allocated support to graduate student researchers in the form of full or partial CSRO Fellowships. The projects now getting off the ground are:
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Mapping and Visualizing Complex, Large Scale Underwater Archaeological Sites and Artifacts (PI Ryan Kastner): This project was awarded a partial CSRO Fellowship, in addition to cash for equipment and travel expenses – primarily for an expedition to a submerged archaeological site. The project will enhance a 3D underwater imaging platform, notably by integrating location information into existing structure-from-motion 3D modeling software.
- Rapid Prototyping of Electronic Gadgets (PI Steven Swanson): In addition to a CSRO Fellowship for recent CSE graduate, Devon Merrill (at right), who has been accepted into the Ph.D. program, Swanson was seeking substantial services from the Design and Prototyping Lab in the Qualcomm Institute. Swanson envisages a Gadgetron system that would “allow almost anyone to design and have manufactured simple electronic devices.” The CSRO project is specifically focused on the rapid prototyping aspects of the Gadgetron project.
CSE’s Kastner is co-PI on another project getting the green light from the Qualcomm Institute. With “Aerial Sensing for the Maya Jungle,” led by Curt Schurgers, undergrads from the Engineers for Exploration program (including many CSE students) will work with aerial drones and LiDAR laser scanners to sense and map Mayan ruins in Central America and the Yucatan Peninsula. Separately, Albert Lin was funded to develop what he calls “The Location Lab” – a geospatial lab with tools and expertise for analysis and research to support UCSD and external partners who have expressed a growing need to use GIS in their projects.
Another CSE lecturer, Jurgen Schulze, is co-PI on The Location Lab, but also leads a separate CSRO team developing an Applied Virtual Reality Initiative that could eventually evolve into a full-fledged center using cutting-edge VR technology to help companies enter the VR marketplace. And CSE faculty-affiliate Falko Kuester leads a project on "Multi-Sensing Micro-Drone Swarms that Save Lives."
Most of the funding for the CSRO program was earmarked from private support received by the Qualcomm Institute, notably from Qualcomm, Inc., the Qualcomm Foundation, and The Legler Benbough Foundation.
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Mapping and Visualizing Complex, Large Scale Underwater Archaeological Sites and Artifacts (PI Ryan Kastner): This project was awarded a partial CSRO Fellowship, in addition to cash for equipment and travel expenses – primarily for an expedition to a submerged archaeological site. The project will enhance a 3D underwater imaging platform, notably by integrating location information into existing structure-from-motion 3D modeling software.
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