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Rick Ord and Kevin Webb Receive Barbara and Paul Saltman Distinguished Teaching Awards
Rick Ord has been selected by the Committee on Senate Awards as a recipient of 2012/13 Barbara and Paul Saltman Distinguished Teaching Award for Non-Senate Members to be confirmed by the representative assembly later in April.For the department, the only other news that matches in celebration is Barbara and Paul Saltman Distinguished Teaching Award for Graduate Students awarded to our Kevin Webb who serves as Master TA for the department.
"Congratulations and congratulations to us all for recognizing the gems in our midst!" Rajesh Gupta
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Sarah Esper and Stephen Foster's Research and Release of "CodeSpells"
UCSD graduate students Sarah Esper and Stephen Foster, advised by Bill Griswold, have released the beta version of CodeSpells. A videogame designed to teach the art of programming to younger audiences, the player in CodeSpells is a magician who has lost their memory and must remember their spells (programs) and learn to make and execute new ones. Their research is detailed in their recent paper "On the Nature of Fires and How to Spark Them When You're Not There".
Related Links:
Wired: Experimental Videogame Teaches Kids How to Program Java
KPBS video: Students Learning Programming Like Magic
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Nuno Bandeira Selected to Receive Sloan Research Fellowship
Bandeira is one of four UC San Diego assistant professors selected to receive a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2013 (from among 126 recipients across the U.S. and Canada). “The university has allowed me to push forward and help develop a novel paradigm that is changing the way that researchers interpret and learn from mass spectrometry,” said Bandeira. “My hope is that the Sloan Research Fellowship will make more scientists aware of the work we are doing, and how researchers around the world can take advantage of the new algorithms, tools and the repository we are building.” -
Improving Efficiency of Cloud Computing Infrastructure
Lingjia Tang and Jason Mars have developed a novel approach that allows the massive infrastructure powering cloud computing to run more efficiently. The new approach can make these warehouse-scale computers run as much as 15 to 20 percent more efficiently. This novel model has already been applied at Google.
