CSE News
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Predictive Analytics Using Distributed Computing
The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) has published a case study of how one CSE professor, Yoav Freund, is using SDSC's newest high-performance computing system, Gordon, to move software to the data rather than the traditional approach of moving data to the software for operations on large data sets. Prof. Freund is a recognized authority in big data analytics, and he recently taught a graduate-level class in which students used a dedicated Hadoop cluster on Gordon to analyze data sets ranging in size from hundreds of megabytes to several terabytes. Student projects were diverse. They included: analysis of temperature and airflow sensors on the UC San Diego campus; detection of failures in the Internet through the analysis of the communication between Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) nodes; and predicting medical costs associated with vehicle accidents. However, all the projects had one need in common: the need for rapid turnaround of data analysis.
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$18.5 Million Gift for CSE, largest gift ever made to the university by one of its alumni
An $18.5 million gift from a UC San Diego alumnus will set the computer science and engineering department on a new course into the future, funding new faculty endowed chairs, top-of-the-line teaching labs, support for graduate students, and expanded mentoring and tutoring programs for the next generation of undergraduates.
“This is a game-changing gift for UC San Diego – both in terms of alumni support and in terms of the tremendous impact it will have on our computer science and engineering department,” said UC San Diego Chancellor Pradeep K. Khosla.
This gift puts the computer science and engineering department more than half of the way to the $25 million goal for its “Inspiring Imaginations” initiative.
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Kahng to Recieve Recoginition at the 50th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference
Professor Andrew Kahng will receive several recognitions June 5, 2013 at the 50th Anniversary Banquet of the ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference. He is one of the 10 most cited authors, the third most collaborative author in DAC’s 50-year history, and he is in the “DAC 40 club” with 40+ DAC papers.
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2013 Nerode Prize Winners
The Nerode Prize 2013 Committee, consisting of Georg Gottlob (University of Oxford, UK), Rolf Niedermeier (TU Berlin, Germany; chair), and Peter Widmayer (ETH Zurich,Switzerland), unanimously decided to award Chris Calabro (Google Inc., Mountain View, USA), Russell Impagliazzo (UC San Diego, USA), Valentine Kabanets (Simon Fraser University, Canada), Ramamohan Paturi (UC San Diego, USA), and Francis Zane (Alcatel Lucent, Murray Hill, USA) the 2013 EATCS-IPEC Nerode Prize for outstanding papers in the area of multivariate algorithmics. Their series of papers, on ways to develop (tight) lower bounds for NP-hard problems, is a subject that is now a required reading in multivariate algorithmics.
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Cellphone Chips in the Data Center
Jason Mars and Lingjia Tang have been working with Robert Hundt from Google. Their research, to be presented this year at ISCA, shows that Google can save a tremendous amount of money by pairing specific software tasks with specific types of processors. They found that if Google were to more carefully match applications with chips, it could improve the speed of its entire operation by as much as 15 percent.
Wired: Why Even Google Will Embrace Cellphone Chips in the Data Center
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CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award
CSE Student Marjori Pomarole was named a 2013 finalist for the Computing Research Association's Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award. This award program recognizes undergraduate students in North American universities who show outstanding research potential in an area of computing research.
Congratulations Marjori!
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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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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 -
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.
