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In the News
Four CS students awarded scholarships to attend the Grace Hopper Celebration Conference!May, 2018Congratulations to UCR Computer Science students (left to right on the picture) Shirin Haji Amin Shirazi (1st year PhD CS), Saheli Ghosh (3rd year PhD CS), Wendy Li (senior BS CS), and Elise Lin (freshman BS CSBA) on receiving a GHC Scholarship Grant to attend this year’s Grace Hopper Celebration for Women in Computing! GHC is the world's largest gathering of women technologists (attended by over 20000 yearly) and will be held in Houston in September. The department will be sponsoring several other students to attend the event. Saheli also has a poster accepted in the ACM Student Research Competition. |
More than 300 students from 33 colleges compete in CitrusHack 2018!May, 2018The fifth edition of CitrusHack, a hackathon organized by the ACM and IEEE student chapters at UCR, was held in the BCOE college of engineering at UCR. It brought together over 300 students from across 33 colleges in California to UCR. The competitors worked in a variety of events over 24 hours to create innovative technology and applications. |
Prof. Zhao wins National Science Foundation CAREER awardMay, 2018Congratulations to Prof. Zhao for winning a CAREER award, the most prestigeous National Science Foundation grant for young faculty! The award, titled "CAREER: Transducer-Centric Parallelization for Scalable Semi-Structured Data Processing", supports research on the parallelization of basic computation models, such as automata and transducers, with applications to semi-structured data processing and beyond. His research will enable automatic generation of parallel processing routines, such as parsing and validation for various types of semi-structured data. |
ACM student chapter concludes exciting year!May, 2018The chapter activities this year focused on preparing members with the technical and professional skills. The chapter hosted over 30 technical workshops with participation from members, alumni, and invited industry professionals. The chapter also created events to connect members with companies such as Google, Facebook and Esri for future opportunities. As the year wraps up, the chapter is celebrating what its members will be doing during the summer from internships, traveling, and research. |
UCR crypto research on subverting backdoored encryption in the newsMay, 2018Professor Richelson's recent work "How to Subvert Backdoored Encryption" has been featured on Bruce Schneier's blog and Cory Doctorow's Blog, and spent some time on the front page of Hacker News. The paper describes a protocol for secure communication in an Orwellian world where citizens' only legal method of communication is via a backdoored encryption scheme where all secret keys are known to the central government. |
First Riverside Security and Privacy Workshop kicks off new security centerMay, 2018The first Riverside Security and Privacy Workshop was held in the Alumni center in UCR with attendance that exceeded 70 cybersecurity experts and enthusiasts from Southern California and beyond. The workshop featured four keynote speakers: Prof. Xiaofeng Wang, Distinguished Professor from Indiana University; Dr. Xiaoning Li, the Chief Security Officer for Alibaba Cloud; Prof. Stephen Chong, from Harvard University; and Dr. Shomit Ghose, serial entrepreneur and venture capitalist. The workshop, which is intended to be held yearly, was chaired by Prof. Heng Yin, and it marks the official launch of the UCR Center for Research and Education in Cyber Security and Privacy (CRESP). |
UCR Researchers win best paper award for work identifying fake news; featured in press enterpriseApril, 2018CSE PhD student Seyedmehdi Hosseinimotlagh and Prof. Vagelis Papalexakis recent paper on identifying different types of fake news articles won the best paper award at the Misinformation and Misbehavior Mining on the Web workshop! The paper demonstrates a new approach with very promising preliminary results to automatically detect fake news articles on the web. The research was recently featured in the Riverside newspaper, the Press-Enterprise. We have still not verified this news item through their tool. |
UCR security research part of the dangerous Meltdown/Spectre attackJanuary, 2018Prof. Abu-Ghazaleh's work on attacking branch predictors (with Dmitry Evtyushkin at College of William and Mary, and Dmitry Ponomarev at Binghamton University) provided an important ingredient behind the dangerous Meltdown and Spectre attacks. Branch predictors are a core component of modern processors. The vulnerabilities they discovered in the branch predictor provide the understanding (and in some variants of the attack, the control) of the predictor so that the attackers can force the CPU to execute their chosen vulnerable code. The work was referenced by the Google Project Zero report that disclosed and explained the vulnerability, as well as the Spectre paper. |
Faloutsos leads large grant on smart campus securityJanuary, 2018Prof. Michalis Faloutsos (pictured middle) is the lead investigator on a large grant (over $3.5 million USD) from the University of California Office of the President. The project's aim is to secure future smart campuses that integrate intelligent buildings and autonomous systems. The collaborative team includes two other CSE faculty (Silas Richelson, left in the picture and Nael Abu-Ghazaleh, right) as well as researchers from UCLA, UCSD, UCSB, and Lawrence Livermore National Labs. |
Prof. Ramakrishnan elected ACM FellowDecember, 2017CSE Professor K. K. Ramakrishnan has been elevated to the status of Fellow in the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). He is one of 54 distinguished international researchers recognized in the 2017 ACM Fellow class. Elevation to the status of Fellow recognizes exceptional contributions to the computing field, and is a status achieved by less than 1% of the ACM membership. Ramakrishnan's citation states: "For contributions to congestion control, operating system support for networks and virtual private networks." |
Prof. Ramakrishnan papers win best paper awards in MMSys and IEEE Transactions on Vehicular TechnologyDecember, 2017Two of Professor Ramakrishnan's papers have recently been recognized with best paper awards. The first is a recent paper, titled "SAP: Stall-Aware Pacing for Improved DASH Video Experience in Cellular Networks," that was awarded the first prize in the DASH Industry Forum Excellence in DASH Award at the ACM MMSys 2017 conference. The second paper, titled “Design and Characterization of a Full-Duplex Multiantenna System for WiFi Networks,” from March 2014 won the 2017 Jack Neubauer Memorial Award recognizing the Best Systems Paper published in the IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology. |
Prof. Ramakrishnan leads NIST grant on resilient communicationDecember, 2017Prof. K. K. Ramakrishnan received a $1.2M grant from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Public Safety Innovation Accelerator Program for “Modeling and Development of Resilient Communication”. He leads a team that includes PIs from University of Central Florida, University of Illinois, Chicago and Rutgers University. The project will develop resilient communication for first responders in disaster situations, which can dramatically affect outcomes. The proposed resilient architecture allows dynamically formed groups of first responder teams to communicate even when there is damage to infrastructure. |
Best Poster award at SIGSPATIAL 2017November, 2017A paper titled "Large Scale Analytics of Vector+Raster Big Spatial Data" from Prof. Ahmed Eldawy's lab. won the best poster award at ACM SIGSPATIAL 2017. The presentation was selected among 41 posters presented at the conference. The paper was co-authored with two former UCR students, Lyuye Niu, MS Computer Engineering, and Zhiba Su, an undergraduate exchange student from the GPP program, along with David Haynes from the University of Minnesota. |
Yin and Song receive 4.6 mil. USD grant from the Office of Naval ResearchNovember, 2017Prof. Heng Yin (lead PI; shown in picture), Prof. Chengyu Song and two industrial partners (Kryptowire and Deepbits) received a large award ($4.6M for five years) from the Office of Naval Research. The project addresses an important software security problem, namely late-stage software customization. Over several decades of software evolution, modern software has increased in complexity and layers of abstractions. While software becomes more extensible and versatile, this trend also leads to worse runtime performance and larger attack surface. Prof. Yin and Prof. Song propose an end-to-end late-stage binary customization system called LeapFrog, which takes a COTS (Commercial Off-The-Shelf) binary program as input, removes unnecessary features, retrofits security protections, and validates correctness of the resulting pruned binary. |
CSE PhD student Yan Zhu wins best paper award at ICDM 2017!October, 2017Congrats to Yan Zhu, who got a nice first wedding anniversary present, finding out that she had won the best paper award at IEEE ICDM 2017 [a]. Ms. Zhu also had a paper shortlisted for this award in 2016. This is the second win at this conference for Keogh’s lab. In IEEE ICDM 2007, Dragomir Yankov (now at Microsoft) also won this award.[a] Yan Zhu, Makoto Imamura, Daniel Nikovski, and Eamonn Keogh. Matrix Profile VII: Time Series Chains: A New Primitive for Time Series Data Mining. IEEE ICDM 2017 |
UCR CSE research highly ranked by csrankings.org!October, 2017CSRankings is a recent ranking of CS Departments in the US and globally based on publications in the topmost venues in different areas of CS. It is a strong indicator of high research quality. UCR is ranked 30th for the period of 2012-2017, and even higher in several specialties (14th in Systems overall, 12th in Architecture, 18th in Networking, 17th in Security, 27th in Databases, 5th in Design Automation, 17th in Embedded Systems, 4th in High Performance Computing, 26th in Measurement and Performance Analysis, and 24th in Bioinformatics). |
Prof. Papalexakis wins ACM SIGKDD Dissertation Award DistinctionAugust, 2017Prof. Vagelis Papalexakis was awarded the runner-up distinction for the prestigious 2017 SIGKDD Doctoral Dissertation award. ACM SIGKDD is the flagship venue for data mining and SIGKDD dissertation awards recognize outstanding work done by graduate students in the areas of data science, machine learning and data mining. Vagelis’ dissertation, titled ‘Mining Large Multi-aspect Data: Algorithms and Applications‘ bridged signal- and tensor-analysis, with data mining at scale, and illustrated the power of the resulting methods in several, real-world applications (Neuroscience, social networks, knowledge on the web). The winners and runners-up were officially announced and recognized at KDD 2017 in Halifax, and they presented their work at a special session on Tuesday, August 15 2017. |
Three from UCR land tenure track faculty positions!July, 2017Two UCR recent PhD graduates (Keval Vora and Panruo Wu) and post-doc Israat Tanzeena Haque accepted tenure track Assistant Professor positions this year. Keval (advisor, Rajiv Gupta) will be joining the CS department at Simon Fraser University; Panruo (advisor Zizhong Chen) will be joining the CS department at the University of Houston; and Israat (advisor, Nael Abu-Ghazaleh) will be joining the CS Department at Dalhousie University. Congratulations! |
Two new faculty join CSE!June, 2017Two new faculty will be joining the department starting in July. Amr Magdy (left) completed his PhD degree from the University of Minnesota in the area of big data computing systems, with specialization in spatial databases. Silas Richelson (right) completed his PhD from UCLA and is currently a Post-doctoral researcher with joint appointment at MIT and Boston University. His area of research is applied cryptography. Welcome Silas and Amr! |
Recent CSE PhD alumnus' company featured in the newsMay, 2017Rachid Ounit (CSE PhD 2017) is the CTO of a startup Biota that was recently featured on GenomeWeb. Biota is aiming to help hospitals cut down on infections by providing them with a DNA sequencing-based microbial surveillance service and targeted interventions. Biota leverages proprietary metagenomics analysis software based on Rachid's PhD work which was completed under the supervision of Prof. Stefano Lonardi. |