Highlights
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Former CSE Professors Join Faculty of 5-Week Summer Program for Incoming Students
The team behind CSE's Summer Program for Incoming Students (SPIS) is growing, as is the number of students admitted to the 2014 program. SPIS was devised to help incoming students excel in their early computer science courses and beyond---even if they have no background in computer science or programming. Sixty-six students (including 13 non-CSE majors from various disciplines) will attend the five-week program that kicks off August 17, 2014. Sixteen of the accepted students hail from low-ranking California schools (rank 7 or lower). Selection was based on the students' degree of preparation in computer science, and how much organizers thought they would benefit from the program. More than half the students received financial assistance to attend the residential program, and tuition is free for all, thanks to support from CSE, the Qualcomm Institute, and local community donors. In addition to CSE faculty members Christine Alvarado, Mia Minnes and Mohan Paturi as well as humanities faculty Amanda Solomon (all of whom organized SPIS 2013), two former CSE faculty members - Laurette Bradley and Gus Uht (pictured above) - will return to campus to participate in the SPIS program as faculty in 2014. The married couple stepped down as assistant professors from the (relatively new) CSE department's faculty in 1992.Also joining the SPIS teaching faculty this year: CSE instructor Diba Mirza, fresh from teaching CSE 140 (Components and Design Techniques for Digital Systems) during the spring quarter, and CSE 30 (Computer Organization and Systems Programming) in Winter 2014. Mirza is a former member of CSE Prof. Ryan Kastner's research lab and computer engineering alumna (from ECE). Faculty or potential sponsors who want to know more about the program or to contribute in some fashion are urged to connect with Mohan Paturi.
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Computer Science Graduates in Strong Demand
They didn’t track graduates of UC San Diego’s Computer Science and Engineering program specifically, but there is plenty of good news in a new report from UC San Diego Extension. In its sixth annual report on “Hot Careers for College Grads and Returning Students,” Extension reports that the single hottest career nationwide is… computer systems analysts.
Indeed, the survey tracked a number of positive trends for college graduates and mid-career professionals, and the ranking identifies the job opportunities that are “most likely to expand in the foreseeable future.” Nine of the top 10 careers are technology- or business-oriented, with elementary school teachers (at #5) the sole exception. CSE produces graduates for three of the top 10 careers: they include computer programmers (#9) and database administrators (#8) in addition to the systems analysts at #1. Computer network architects came in at #11.In announcing the new survey, UC San Diego Extension reported that “technology continues to drive job creation, with many of the growing careers tied to technological changes ranging from cloud computing to the need for easily accessible data in such emerging fields as healthcare and biotech.” Tech-oriented sectors also continue to seek a high level of analytical and marketing skills as the prime hiring criteria. The four major criteria considered in establishing the Hot Careers 2014 list included: current employment in the field; projected growth in the occupation from 2010 to 2020; median annual salary; and characteristics of the workplace environment in each occupation. Extension also reported an across-the-board hiring “rebound in the aftermath of the Great Recession,” noting a recent survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, which found that more than 30 percent of graduating college seniors from the Class of ’14 were hired prior to graduation.
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CSE-Related Research and Researchers Dominate USENIX Security Forum
Here's an alert to graduate students in CSE who want to attend the 23rd annual USENIX Security Symposium that will take place August 20-22 at the Manchester Grand Hyatt San Diego. The conference has extended the deadline for students to apply for travel, accommodations and/or registration grants to attend this year's event. The new deadline is Monday, July 14, and applications must be submitted online (see link below).
USENIX Security is one of the "big three" conferences in computer security, and this year's meeting is going to showcase the work of current faculty and grad students, but also the work of UC San Diego CSE alumni. CSE Prof. Hovav Shacham (pictured at right) is the senior author of a paper, "On the Practical Exploitability of Dual EC in TLS Implementations," co-authored with colleagues including grad student Jake Maskiewicz and CSE alumni Stephen Checkoway (now at Johns Hopkins) and Tom Ristenpart (University of Wisconsin-Madison). Shacham is also senior author on another paper with co-authors from UC San Diego and the University of Michigan. CSE Ph.D. student Neha Chachra (at left during previous internship at Google), advised by Geoffrey Voelker and Stefan Savage in the Systems and Networking group, is one of the co-authors on a paper titled, "Hulk: Eliciting Malicious Behavior in Browser Extensions." In addition to Chachra, the co-authors on the Hulk paper hail from two other University of California campuses -- three co-authors from UC Santa Barbara, and two from UC Berkeley and the International Computer Science Institute, including senior author Vern Paxson.
In addition to the paper above, CSE alumnus Tom Ristenpart (Ph.D. '10) has three other papers on the USENIX Security program. Both Ristenpart and Georgia Tech professor Alexandra (Sasha) Boldyreva (Ph.D. '04) studied under CSE Prof. Mihir Bellare, and Boldyreva also has a paper at USENIX Security this year. Another CSE alumnus, Stephen Checkoway (Ph.D. '12), had four papers accepted (two of them co-authored with UC San Diego researchers). A fourth CSE alumnus, Chris Kanich (Ph.D. '12) -- now an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago -- also has a paper ("The Long 'Taile' of Typosquatting Domain Names"). Pictured above (l-r): CSE alumni Ristenpart, Checkoway, Boldyreva and Kanich.According to Center for Networked Systems director Stefan Savage, CSE's intellectual imprint on USENIX Security 2014 goes beyond the individual papers. "There are two sessions whose purpose is driven by our past work," said Savage. "There is a session on return-oriented programming (ROP) that is driven entirely by Hovav Shacham's seminal work on ROP. On top of that, roughly 75 percent of the side-channel session is motivated by the work Tom Ristenpart did here at UC San Diego on cross-VM attacks in the cloud."
Full-time grad student online application for grants to cover travel, accommodations or registration fees.
Visit the online program for USENIX Security 2014. -
Former CSE Faculty Member Receives ACM SIGCOMM Award
While he was still on the CSE faculty at UC San Diego, last summer George Varghese was named the winner of the IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award (named for the longtime leader of NEC). At that time, Varghese was cited for his "contributions to the field of network algorithmics and its applications to high-speed packet networks." Fast forward to summer 2014, and once again he is being honored -- this time by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) with its highest award in communications networking. Varghese is the recipient of the 2014 ACM SIGCOMM Award, and he was cited for his "sustained and diverse contributions to network algorithmics, with far-reaching impact in both research and industry." Varghese stepped down from the CSE faculty in August 2013 to take a position at Microsoft Research after 14 years at UC San Diego. Together with colleagues from Microsoft's networking and programming-languages groups (the latter because of their experience with program verification), Varghese hopes to take the new field of network verification to the next level and apply it to Bing, Windows Azure and other networks run by Microsoft. As he said last year, "The hope is to make our networks — and perhaps our customers' — more available and easy to manage." Another of his current research directions: interactive genomics. Responding to word of Varghese's ACM SIGCOMM honor, CSE Chair Rajesh Gupta noted that, "Coming as it does on the heels of the Koji Kobayashi Award by the IEEE, this is very impressive and very much in keeping with the excellence George has come to personify."
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