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CSE News

  • San Diegans and their Cell Phones will help Computer Scientists Monitor Air Pollution

    "CitiSense" – the vision of a team of CSE faculty recently won a $1.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to solve the many technical challenges that stand in the way of applications that merge the cyber and physical worlds. Team members are creating a network of environmental sensors that will help you avoid air pollution hot spots that exist exactly when you are planning your route. The system will provide up-to-the-minute information on outdoor and indoor air quality, based on environmental information collected by hundreds, and eventually thousands, of sensors attached to the backpacks, purses, jackets and board shorts of San Diegans going about daily life.

    The goal of CitiSense is to build and deploy a wireless network in which hundreds or thousands of small environmental sensors carried by the public rely on cell phones to shuttle information to central computers where it will be analyzed, anonymized and reflected back out to individuals, public health agencies and San Diego at large. At the same time, the sensor-wearing public will have the option to also wear biological monitors that collect basic health information, such as heart rate. This combination of sensors will enable the team's medical team to run exacting health science research projects, such as investigating how particular environmental pollutants affect human health. For more information click on the following articles: UCSD News and KPBS

  • CSE/ECE Undergraduates Receive CRA Honorable Mention

    Undergraduates Jordan Rhee and Christopher Louie were given honorable mention in the Computing Research Associations Outstanding Undergraduate Research Awards for 2010.  Students were commended for making significant contributions to more than one research project, several were authors or coauthors on multiple papers, others had made presentations at major conferences, and some had produced software artifacts that were in widespread use. Jordan Rhee (ECE) developed and implemented a real time, position-aware algorithm that compensates for off-axis viewing effects in a rear projected tiled screen virtual reality environment (the StarCAVE at Calit2). The implementation leverages OpenGL fragment shaders for real time post-processing and only decreases framerate by 1-3 fps.  Christopher Louie (CSE) created p-ray, a tool that quickly estimates parallelism in a program and suggests methods to parallelize the program with the least amount of effort.  He developed methodologies and algorithms to implement multi- and many-core architecture concepts and generated concrete results to show their effectiveness.

  • Andrew Kahng named IEEE Fellow

    Andrew Kahng was named to the 2010 class of IEEE Fellows for his contributions to the design for manufacturability of integrated circuits, and the technology roadmap of semiconductors.   Andrew joins existing CSE fellows Walt Burkhard (2000), Larry Carter (2000), CK Cheng (2000), Bill Howden (2001), Rajesh Gupta (2004), Jeanne Ferrante (2005), Andrew Chien (2007) and Dean Tullsen (2009). More information and a full listing of this year's awardees can be found at the IEEE Fellow Program.

  • CSE Receives Prestigious Award from UCSD International Center

    The CSE Department received the prestigious "Partners in International Education" Award from the UCSD International Center. The UCSD Programs Abroad office nominated us to "recognize the Computer Science Department for their excellent, extensive, and continued efforts to promote and encourage study abroad for all of their undergraduate student".

    People explicitly recognized in the award were CSE/Math student Michael Nekrasov, CSE Undergraduate Student Affair Advisors Viera Kair and Patricia Razcka, Professor Joseph Pasquale, and Professors Rick Ord, Geoff Voelker, Dana Dahlstrom, George Varghese, Ryan Kastner, and Scott Baden.

  • CSE Mourns the Loss of Alan Nash

    The Department is deeply saddened to announce the death of former PhD student Alan Nash in a tragic bicycle accident on November 15, 2009. Alan earned his PhD at UCSD in 2006, under the direction of co-advisors Jeff Remmel, Russell Impagliazzo, and Victor Vianu. This Ph.D. was awarded by both the department of Mathematics and the department of Computer Science and Engineering.  He was the first UCSD student to earn a multi-departmental PhD.

  • CSE Alumni Explore "Bad" Robots

    A study by University of Washington researchers led by doctoral student Tamara Denning (B.S. 2007) calls attention to the possibility of household robots being hacked by malevolent parties and reprogrammed for nefarious purposes. Such purposes could include psychological attacks, spying, and vandalism. Denning, Yoshi Kohno (Ph. D. 2006) and their colleagues examined three commercially available household robots, and discovered that all three had the potential of being hijacked.   "It's very similar to computer security, the way that users of desktop computers have to worry about spam and malware," Denning says. "One possible trajectory is that people will have to think about security with their home robots, as well."  Click here for the link to the MSNBC article and Security and privacy of future household robots.

  • CSE Professor Appointed Associate Director of CNS

    CSE Professor Stefan Savage has been appointed as Associate Director of the Center for Networked Systems.  His research includes the study of high-availability Internet systems, intelligent network traffic analysis and efficient self-configuring wireless networks.  Stefan joined the Jacobs School Computer Science and Engineering faculty in January 2001 and has been central to much of the activity in CNS.

  • CSE alumnus receives NSF CAREER Award

    Fox Harrell, UCSD Computer Science and Engineering alum (Ph.D., 2007), has received an NSF CAREER Award for his project "Computing for Advanced Identity Representation." The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is the National Science Foundation's "most prestigious award" in support of tenure-track faculty. His distinction is accompanied by a grant for $535,000, awarded through the NSF's Human-Centered Computing Division. Dr. Harrell is Assistant Professor of Digital Media at Georgia Tech where he is director of the Imagination, Computation, and Expression Lab.

  • Fran Berman wins Kennedy Award

    The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the IEEE Computer Society (IEEE-CS) will jointly present the inaugural Ken Kennedy Award to Dr. Francine Berman for her leadership in building national-scale cyberinfrastructure, the environment that supports rapidly expanding computing and information services over  networked resources, including the Internet. 

    Berman, former professor  in CSE, was the director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) from 2001 until August 2009.  She  was named one of the 10 top women in Technology by Business Week in 2004, and one of the 15 national leaders in Science and Technology by Newsweek in 2006.  In 2008, she was named a "Digital Preservation Pioneer" by the Library of Congress. ACM and IEEE-CS co-sponsor the Kennedy Award, which was established in 2009 to recognize substantial contributions to programmability and productivity in computing and significant community service or mentoring contributions. It was named for Ken Kennedy, the founder of Rice University's nationally ranked computer science program, who was one of the world's foremost experts on high-performance computing.  Click here for the full article.

  • CSE Members awarded the Gordon Engineering Leadership Fellow

    Amin Vahdat, Professor in the department of Computer Science and Engineering and CSE undergraduate Sarah Esper, have been awarded the Gordon Engineering Leadership Center's Gordon Fellows.

    The Gordon Center was established in January 2009 with the mission of educating and training effective engineering leaders who create new products and jobs that benefit society. In order to provide positive role models for students of engineering, the Gordon Center holds an annual awards ceremony to recognize exemplary engineers at the high school, undergraduate, graduate, and professional level. Recipients of the Gordon Fellows Medal not only must be outstanding engineers within their respective fields but must also have a proven record of leadership successes.

    To learn more about the Gordon Center's mission and goals, please click here.



by Dr. Radut.