Around CSE Archive

Researchers from CSE were among those honored with a 2022 IEEE Cybersecurity Award for Practice for their work on WebAssembly Sandboxing for Firefox. CSE Department Chair Sorin Lerner and Associate Professor Deian Stefan – along with engineers from Mozilla and researchers from Stanford and the University of Texas at Austin – were recognized for their novel approach to improving memory safety for Firefox. The team addressed one of the open-source web browser’s biggest security challenges by breaking code into multiple sandboxed processes with reduced privileges.

CSE bachelor’s student Arjun Sampath has been awarded a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Scholarship. The scholarship recognizes students who demonstrate academic excellence and a commitment to their field.

“My work in research labs at UC San Diego, such as SEELab, shows a passion for pursuing computer science past just the academic courses,” said Sampath, who attributes winning the scholarship to his CSE research and community involvement.

Sampath serves as Vice Chair Finance for the UC San Diego branch of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He is also a CSE tutor and mentors first-year students through the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) student organization.

Earlence Fernandes, a recent addition to CSE, has received an Amazon Research Award for his proposal, “Verifiable Distributed Computation.” For Fernandes, this honor follows closely on the heels of another: a 2022 National Science Foundation CAREER Award for his research on Security and Privacy Foundations of Internet-Scale User-Centered Automation.

Fernandes’ research focuses on computer security from a systems perspective, anticipating security issues in emerging technologies and establishing their security foundations early on. Fernandes joins CSE Assistant Professor Sean Gao as two of 74 researchers to earn the 2022 Amazon Research Award. They are the latest of a half-dozen CSE faculty members honored by Amazon over the past four years.

 A new study published in Nature Genetics is helping illuminate some of the mechanisms that can make extrachromosomal DNA (ecDNA) so dangerous. Professor Vineet Bafna was a corresponding author on the study.
 
“EcDNA are formed when fragments of genetic material break away from their chromosomes, forming small, circular molecules that can act independently,” said Bafna. “These fragments can duplicate cancer-promoting oncogenes, helping tumors become more aggressive and resist treatments.”

The study uses mathematical modeling, simulations, and experiments to explain how random segregation and selection can boost cancer aggressiveness and its ability to resist treatments.
 

Sean Gao, an assistant CSE professor, has received an Amazon Research Award for his proposal “Interior Search Methods in SMT.” Gao joins a half-dozen CSE faculty members who have been honored by Amazon with this award in the last four years.

Gao is one of 74 researchers from 51 countries to receive an Amazon Research Award this year. His award-winning proposal – an extension of his research on practical algorithms for NP-hard search and optimization problems – was selected for its scientific content, creativity and potential impact.

Professor Hadi Esmaeilzadeh, the Halicioğlu Chair in Computer Architecture, and Ph.D. students Byung Hoon Ahn and Sean Kinzer were nominated for a Design Automation Conference (DAC) Best Paper Award. Their research, Glimpse: Mathematical Embedding of Hardware Specification for Neural Compilation, was chosen as one of six nominees for this prestigious award.

The CSE research team’s paper proposes a previously unexplored approach to optimizing the code for Deep Neural Network (DNN) hardware. They devised a Bayesian optimization framework called Glimpse with multiple exclusively unique components, allowing them to mathematically embed the hardware specifications into the search. When Glimpse was compared with hardware-agnostic compilers, the results indicated faster compilation time and the best inference latency