02.04.14

 

NEWS HIGHLIGHTS                                                            Tuesday, February 4, 2014


Most Influential Paper in Principles of Programming Languages

 

So-called 'test of time' awards are among the most influential, because they reward scientific papers that have proved their value over many years, i.e., they have stood the... test of time. The 41st ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL) will take place this year in San Diego from Jan. 22-24, and one of the recipients of the POPL Most Influential Paper Award is a San Diego-based researcher: CSE Prof. Ranjit Jhala (at right). In POPL's case, the award looks back a decade, so the judges determined that of all the conference papers from 2004, the most influential in hindsight was "Abstractions from Proofs," co-authored by Jhala, Tom Henzinger, Rupak Majumdar and Ken McMillan, while all of them were still at UC Berkeley (except for McMillan, who was at Cadence Berkeley Labs and is now at Microsoft Research). Jhala earned his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 2004, prior to joining the UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering, where he is currently an Associate Professor in CSE.


In citing the 2004 paper, the award committee notes that, "Interpolation can be used to construct an inductive invariant for a transition system that is strong enough to prove a given property." Prior to the "Abstractions from Proofs" paper, the citation explains, interpolation had only been applied to model checking of 'finite-state' systems. With the 2004 paper, "the authors demonstrated a fundamental generalization of Craig interpolation to program analysis by predicate abstraction, opening the door for interpolation to be applied to abstraction refinement of 'infinite-state' systems." The citation goes on to say that the work by Jhala and his colleagues "showed how interpolation offers a fundamental way to explain abstraction refinement in a logical framework, and has led to many extensions to increase the power of abstraction in program analysis." The POPL conference will be held at the U.S. Grant Hotel in downtown San Diego.  Visit the POPL 2014 home page.  Previous winners of the Most Influential Paper Award.   "Abstractions from Proofs" award-winning paper.

 

  

Alvarado Earns Jacobs School Best Teacher Award for CSE

The Jacobs School of Engineering each year singles out the faculty members who are deemed "the best" teachers in each department. Dean Al Pisano presented the awards recently, and the Best Teacher Award for the Computer Science and Engineering department went to Christine Alvarado. She was on hand to receive the award (at left with Pisano). Alvarado is a Lecturer with Security of Employment, and she joined the CSE faculty in 2012. Alvarado - who earned her Ph.D. in computer science from MIT in 2004 - is working in CSE to develop new curriculum and programs for computer science education that engage a wider audience, notably women. Prof. Alvarado's profile.

  


Computer Science Undergraduate Honored by California Utilities

 

The Careers in Energy Week were set up by the national Center for Energy Workforce Development. The center promotes science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education, and addresses the need for a qualified and diverse energy industry workforce. In California, San Diego Gas & Electric and other utilities will hand out awards to students who participated in the 2013 Careers in Energy Week, when individual high school students and teams of community college and university students competed to develop videos and apps describing why "a career in the energy/utility industry is exciting, innovative and engaging." The prizes to be awarded at the dinner in San Diego on Feb. 20 will go to winners including two UC San Diego students who are Southern California runner-up winners in the university category. They are Computer Science major Akshat Vasavada (pictured), and NanoEngineering major Sarin Parikh. The CSE student is also co-president of the Indian Student Association at UCSD. 

 
 

Moxie Center and Rady Hold Joint PitchFest for Student Startups
 

The Computer Science and Engineering auditorium was the location Jan. 29 for a joint competition staged by the Moxie Center for Student Entrepreneurship and the Rady School of Management. Over 40 students, mentors and advisors gathered at the Moxie/Rady PitchMatch Mixer for networking opportunities and pitches of new ideas. The Moxie Center was created in 2012 to provide an educational program in entrepreneurship open to all UC San Diego students. At the PitchMatch Mixer, 15 student startups pitched their ideas to a panel of judges from the business community. Competitors entered round one with 60-second pitches on the general idea of their product or service.  Round two selected five semi-finalists to discuss customers. From there, two finalists were selected for round three where competition was discussed. The ultimate winner of the PitchMatch competition was Martyn Gross from Skylit, a Rady School StartR Accelerator Program participant.  

 
 

Moxie Center and Rady Hold Joint PitchFest for Student Startups
 

Tech talks, a Q&A titled 'the secrets of recruitment' and of course, In-N-Out burgers, were highlights of CSE Day Jan. 23. The event's goal was to show students the different paths available to them after graduation and how best to navigate them. This year's program included industry talks by Sean Baumann, lead of the architecture team responsible for product development and software engineering for Life Technologies' Cloud Platform-as-a-Service applications, and by Adrienne Milner, a neuromorphic software engineer with Qualcomm Research, who leads the effort to manifest biological networks in robots and is developing a system to rain neural networks. The event also featured a talk on automotive security by CSE Prof. Stefan Savage. View more photos from CSE Day 2014.

 

UPCOMING EVENTS

 

February 5, 2014 - 11am-Noon - Room 1202, CSE Building

McGill University lecturer Anil Ada will present on "Communication Complexity." The topic includes a study of privacy in the context of communication complexity: how much information do the players reveal about their input when following a communication protocol. 

February 5, 2014 - Noon-1pm - Cognitive Science Building 003

The Design at Large lecture series organized by CSE Prof. Scott Klemmer kicks off with this presentation on "Designing Engaging Learning Experiences" by Erik Andersen, a Ph.D. candidate in computer science and engineering at the University of Washington. 

February 7, 2014 - 1-2pm - Room 2217, CSE Building

This talk will focus on "Dynamic Analysis for Android: Infrastructure and Applications." The speaker is Iulian Neamtiu, a professor at UC Riverside. The lecture is hosted by Prof. Ranjit Jhala and the Programming Languages group in CSE.

February 9-14, 2014 - All day Mon-Fri - Catamaran Resort

The 2014 Information Theory and Applications (ITA) Workshop, organized by the Qualcomm Institute-based ITA Center, will attract nearly 600 experts in information theory from around the world. Five plenary lectures will include one by UC Berkeley's David Tse (pictured) on "Information Theory of High-Throughput Sequencing."

February 10, 2014 - 2-3pm - Room 4140, CSE Building

Microsoft Research staff researcher Alexandr Andoni delivers a Theory and Communications Sciences Seminar on "Parallel Algorithms for Geometric Graph Problems."  

February 10-11, 2014 - All day Mon-Tue - Calit2 Theater, Atkinson Hall

The "Big Data Big Network 2" workshop is the second international conference on Mexican-American research collaboration partnerships, and provide information and training on how best to use high-speed networking and display walls. SDSC distinguished scientist Chaitan Baru (pictured) will deliver the keynote on "Big Data and Fat Pipes: Building a Shared Infrastructure for Data Research at Scale."

February 10, 2014 - Noon-1pm - Cognitive Science Building 003

This seminar by IDC Herzliya professor of communication Guy Hoffman is the second in the Design at Large series for Winter 2014 organized by CSE Prof. Scott Klemmer. Hoffman will talk about "Human-Robot Teamwork: Fluency and Embodiment in Artificial Intelligence."

March 12, 2014 - 6-7pm - Calit2 Auditorium, Atkinson Hall

UC San Diego Extension and UC-TV are organizing a conference on "UCSD Big Data at Work," primarily to serve the campus and San Diego communities with information about the Big Data challenge to existing industries, and the most valuable future jobs in the Big Data sector. Speakers on the program include SDSC director Mike Norman, Calit2 director Larry Smarr, CSE Prof. Stefan Savage (pictured), among others.

 

FACULTY GPS                                                             

 Washington, D.C.  -  CSE Prof. and Calit2 Director Larry Smarr is in the nation's capital this week, attending the National Health Policy Conference. On Tuesday afternoon, he was part of a panel on "Using Big Data to Advance Healthcare." Smarr and speakers from Kaiser Permanente and Geisinger Health System explored how new sources of data, including genomics and consumer sensor technology, will increase the availability of data and the potential for big data to dramatically change healthcare.  

Have a notice about upcoming travel to conferences, etc., for the Faculty GPS column in our weekly CSE Newsletter? Be sure to let us know! Email Doug Ramsey at dramsey@ucsd.edu.