NEWS HIGHLIGHTS Tuesday, February 18, 2014
Larry Smarr Honored with Golden Goose Award
CSE Prof. and Calit2 Director Larry Smarr (right) is being honored for his long-term impact on science. Two members of the House of Representatives announced on Feb. 15 at the AAAS Annual Meeting that Smarr will receive the Golden Goose Award, for the impact that NSF funding of his work on black holes (as an astrophysicist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the 1980s) had on the eventual development of the U.S. supercomputing program, for which Smarr co-authored the proposal to NSF in 1985 that led to the creation of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), led by Smarr himself, and the San Diego Supercomputer Center, led by CSE emeritus professor Sid Karin.
In citing Smarr's work, the members of Congress noted that today's Web browsers are descendants of the NCSA Mosaic browser developed at Illinois when Smarr led the supercomputer center there. The Golden Goose Award honors researchers whose federally funded research has resulted in major economic or other benefits to society - even if the original funding didn't seem to have significant practical benefits at the beginning. Smarr will receive his award Sept. 18 at a ceremony in Washington, DC. Read the full news release
CSE and CMRR to Host 5th Annual Meeting on Non-Volatile Memories
The Non-Volatile Memories Workshop, originally developed by the Non-Volatile Systems Laboratory led by CSE Prof. Steven Swanson (at left, during the 2012 NVM Workshop), is getting ready to celebrate its fifth anniversary, March 9-11, at the Price Center on the UCSD campus. The workshop gathers scientists and engineers from around the world to discuss the latest innovations in non-volatile computer memories: how they will be used to power increasingly sophisticated mobile electronic devices; and the role they will play in the era of Big Data and cloud computing.
Following a half-day tutorial on Data Integrity and Reliability in Storage Stacks on Sunday, the program spreads 32 presentations across Monday and Tuesday, including keynotes by top executives at SanDisk and NetApp. "Non-volatile memories are driving innovation in all kinds of computer systems, from iPhones to warehouse-sized data centers, but we have only begun to exploit their potential. The problem is that fully utilizing them is complex and requires many components working together seamlessly," said CSE's Swanson. "The goal of this workshop is to get experts on each of those components together, in one place, to share ideas and drive innovation." The NVM Workshop is co-produced by Swanson's Non-Volatile Systems Laboratory and the Center for Magnetic Recording Research (CMRR). It's supported by the NSF, IEEE Magnetics Society, and a diverse group of industry sponsors. For the complete program, visit the workshop website. Read the full news release.
Reinventing MOOCs
According to CSE Prof. Scott Klemmer, there is an obvious reason why computer science has played a leadership role in the offering of massive open online courses (MOOCs). "I think the reason MOOCs came out of computer science is that we had the ability to build the tools to do the things that we need," he is quoted as saying in a Feb. 18 article on Inside Higher Ed. "I think there are big opportunities for rethinking from first principles what the interactive experience is like." Klemmer launched his MOOC on Human-Computer Interaction in spring 2012 while still at Stanford, before moving to UC San Diego last fall, where he just completed the fourth session of his MOOC. But the last major overhaul occurred in the second round, for which he introduced new features such as a community teaching assistant, a LinkedIn group for former students, and a way to curate a daily forum post. In the Inside Higher Ed article, Klemmer compares the MOOC design cycle to that of the automotive industry: "Once or twice a decade, you will jump to a different point in the design phase."
"As we run these classes multiple times, a major question is: What is the role of the instructor?" observed Klemmer in the article. "When you run it for the 10th time, how do you have it so you can be involved in the class at the level you want without you feeling like 'Groundhog Day,' where you're doing the same thing over and over again." In particular, the CSE and Cognitive Science professor admits that it is difficult to make changes in a major component of each MOOC: video lectures. "If you want to change the text for an assignment, it's really easy," Klemmer told Inside Higher Ed's Carl Straumsheim. "But if you want to change a video - even by one sentence - it's a huge amount of work." He added that he expects software developers to come up with better video editing tools to allow MOOC instructors more freedom to update their video lectures from one quarter to the next.
Read the full Inside Higher Ed article.
Visit Scott Klemmer's Human-Computer Interaction MOOC on Coursera.
Computer Engineering Student Has Papers at Two Premier Conferences
CSE graduate student Abbas Rahimi (at left) is looking forward to receiving his Ph.D. next fall, so 2014 will be a banner year for the computer engineering student on several counts. He and co-authors have papers accepted at the premier electronic design automation (EDA) conferences in Europe (DATE 2014) and the U.S. (DAC 2014), and Rahimi is first author on both papers.
Rahimi will be in San Francisco at the 51st Design Automation Conference in June, where he will present the paper, "Energy-Efficient GPGPU Architectures via Collaborative Compilation and Memristive Memory-Based Computing." Rahimi co-authored the paper with colleagues from UCSD, UC Santa Barbara and institutions in Switzerland and Italy (including his alma mater, the University of Bologna). Meanwhile, in March, Rahimi is first author on "Temporal Memoization for Energy-Efficient Timing Error Recovery in GPGPUs." Variability Expedition director and CSE chair Rajesh Gupta is senior on both papers, and will make the presentation at DATE in Dresden, Germany. Both papers can be downloaded ahead of the conferences from CSE's Microelectronic Embedded Systems Laboratory (MESL) website at the following links. Read the DATE 2014 paper. Read the DAC 2014 paper.
Journal Reports CSE Professor to Participate in Hundred Person Wellness Project
In the Feb. 11 edition of Nature, the journal reports on a new long-term study that will monitor healthy people in detail and encourage them to respond to the results. The article, "Medicine gets up close and personal," reports on the start of what's being called the Hundred Person Wellness Project, because it will document intensively the status of 100 healthy individuals, offering "regular feedback and counseling on lifestyle changes such as shifts in their dietary or sleep habits," writes W. Wayt Gibbs. The current focus is on a 9-month pilot study, but the study could expand to 100,000 subjects over 25 years if funding is available. For the pilot study, organizers have invited CSE Prof. Larry Smarr to take one of the spots in the Hundred Person Wellness Project, because he has been what Nature calls "an early pioneer of the 'quantified self' movement." "I'm 65, so it's questionable whether I'll be around for another 25 years" to see the end of the long-term study, said Smarr. "On the other hand, watching me go bad could be a good thing to have in the database." Read the full article in Nature.
UPCOMING EVENTS
February 19, 2014 - 11am-Noon - Room 1202, CSE Building
This seminar with faculty candidate and University of Washington Ph.D. candidate Erik Andersen will look at "Designing Engaging Learning Experiences," a key challenge in education: how to keep students engaged.
February 24, 2014 - 2pm-3pm - Room 1202, CSE Building
Cornell University assistant professor Tanzeem Choudhury will discuss "Using Smartphones to Sense, Assess and Improve Well-being." She will provide an overview of work on turning sensor-enabled mobile phones into well-being monitors and instruments for administering real-time, 'real-place' intervention strategies.
February 24, 2014 - 2pm-3pm - Room 4140, CSE Building
"List and Unique Coding of Interactive Communication" is the title of a Theory Seminar by Klim Efremenko of the University of Chicago. He will talk about extending the notion of list decoding to the setting of interactive communication, and studying its limits.
February 24-26, 2014 - All day - Calit2 Auditorium, Atkinson Hall
CSE professors Mihir Bellare and Daniele Micciancio (at left) are organizing the Theory of Cryptography Conference (TCC 2014), the 11th in the series. CSE Prof. Russell Impagliazzo and MIT Prof. Silvio Micali will deliver the keynote talks.
February 26, 2014 - 11am-Noon - Room 1202, CSE Building
Faculty candidate and UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow Ross Girshick will discuss "Learning Architectures for Visual Object Recognition." He will focus on two new systems that have more than doubled the performance of object recognition over the past seven years.
February 26-27, 2014 - All day - SDSC Auditorium
The San Diego Supercomputer Center's Predictive Analytics Center of Excellence (PACE) program kicks off the first of its Data Mining Boot Camps for 2014. The two-day course aims to provide the Big Data community with conceptual and hands-on training.
March 3, 2014 - 2pm-3pm - Room 1202, CSE Building
Prof. Marilyn Wolf, Distinguished Chair in Embedded Computing Systems at Georgia Tech, will talk about "Distributed Smart Cameras for Real-Time Analysis of Human Behavior," focusing on her group's work over the past decade to improve real-time computer vision.
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 CSE Prof. Stefan Savage (pictured), SDSC Director Mike Norman, Calit2 Director and CSE Prof. Larry Smarr, among others.
FACULTY GPS
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.