Skip navigation

Home » Department » News Archive

CS Department News Archive

Citation for Prof. Norm Matloff

Prof. Norm Matloff has recieved the 2006 Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award. Professor Matloff has been a leader in curricular development in the CS department. He is the original and sole developer of four of our undergraduate courses and one graduate course. He is also the co-developer of several other courses. As Chair of the Undergraduate Affairs Committee for the past six years, he has spearheaded the development of a new and innovative sequence of courses for non-majors. Professor Matloff holds his students to the very highest standards and, in return, receives their highest praise.

[back to top]

2005-06 Best Dissertation Award

Chao Gui is the recipient of the Best Dissertation Award from the Department for the year 2005-06. His primary area of research was multi-hop wireless networks. His dissertation title is, "Power Conservation and Performance Enhancement of Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks." Chao's publications have appeared in top conferences such as Infocom, Mobicom, and Mobihoc. Professor Mohapatra is Chao's advisor.

[back to top]

Prof. Mukherjee Honored

Prof. Biswanath Mukherjee had been appointed to the Child Family Professorship in the College of Engineering. This endowed professorship was established to foster academic excellence and innovative research in "the interrelationship of engineering and entrepreneurship." The Provost's office writes, "Professor Mukherjee is an eminent and prolific scholar in the field of computer networks who would be an ideal holder of the Child Family Professorship. He is not only an outstanding scholar and teacher, but also has key industry connections that carry his academic research to practical application. His work thus promotes the vision that led to the creation of this endowment."

[back to top]

Patrice Koehl Selected Sloan Research Fellow

Professor Patrice Koehl was recently informed that he has been selected as an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow. This is an extraordinarily competitive award, involving nominations for most of the very best scientists from the US and Canada. These awards are intended to enhance the careers of the very best young faculty members in specified fields of science. Currently a total of 116 fellowships are awarded annually in seven fields: chemistry, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, computer science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience, and physics. In addition, the Sloan Research Fellowship now carries with it an unrestricted grant of $45,000 for the 2-year period.

[back to top]

Zhendong Su Receives 2005-2006 NSF CAREER Award

Zhendong Su, assistant professor in the department of computer science, has received the 2005-2006 National Science Foundation Career Award, based on his proposal for an analysis framework that would improve reliability and security of national information system infrastructures. Database and web applications contain critical faults that undermine their security and reliability. Many of these errors occur because of complex, dynamic interactions with outside environments. No tool or technique currently exists to prevent the introduction of errors, leaving applications susceptible to serious failure and security threats. Zhendong Su's proposal - "Reliability and Security of Database and Web Applications" - describes a novel systematic analysis framework that would address these database and web application vulnerabilities and have positive impact on both industry and academia.

[back to top]

Best Graduate Researcher Award

Van K. Nguyen has been announced as the recepient of the Best Graduate Researcher Award for this academic year. Professor Martel is Van's advisor. The award includes a stipend of $1000 for the student. Congratulations!

[back to top]

Best Paper at VRIPHYS'05

"Kinetic Sweep and Prune for Collision Detection" by PhD student Daniel Coming and Professor Oliver Staadt has won the best paper award at VRIPHYS'05. A PDF copy of the paper can be downloaded here.

[back to top]

Honorable Mention: Evolutionary Morphing

"Evolutionary Morphing: Statistical Interpolation of Ancestral Morphology Along an Evolutionary Tree" by Nina Amenta and David Wiley, University of California, Davis; Eric Delson, City University of New York; F. James Rohlf, State University of New York, Stony Brook; and colleagues has won an honorable mention in Science Magazine's Visualization 2005 contest. To see the movie clip go to Science Magazine (click on the Slideshow, then Non-interactive Media category) or get the PDF version.

[back to top]

ACM-IPCP Programming Contest

The ACM-ICPC Regional competition was held on Saturday, and one of our teams, Davis Blue, did very well placing in the top 10 (we were #10) out of more than 70 schools in the Pacific Northwest region. Only Stanford's and Berkeley's teams placed ahead of us at our site in Stockton, which had around 30 teams competing, while overall only those two and University of Washington, of the US schools competing, did better than our team. The top two spots were taken by Canadian Univerities and they will represent the region at the World Finals in April. The team's contestants were: Andrey Goder (CS Undergraduate), Jeff Stuart (CS Grad), Stuart Davis Herring (Applied Sci, Grad). Our other team, Davis Gold, also worked very hard during the competition, but unfortunately did not manage to solve any problems.

Professor Amenta Honored

CS Professor Nina Amenta has been selected to be a 2005-06 Chancellor's Fellow and will receive an award of $25,000 to be used in support of her research, teaching and service activities. The Chancellor's Fellows Program is supported in part by funds from the Davis Chancellor's Club and the Annual Fund of the University of California, Davis. The program was established in 2000 to honor the achievements of outstanding faculty memberes early in their careers.

[back to top]

Professors for the Future

The Professors for the Future program has announced the selection of its 2005-06 class of fellows, including Quinn Hart in CS. Professors for the Future is a year-long competitive fellowship program designed to recognize and develop the leadership skills of outstanding graduate students and postdoctoral scholars who have demonstrated their commitment to professionalism, integrity, and academic service. This unique program, sponsored by the Office of Graduate Studies, focuses on the future challenges of graduate education, postdoctoral training, and the academy. For more information, please visit http://gradstudies.ucdavis.edu/pftf/.

[back to top]

Computer Science Department Citations and Awards

Best Graduate Researcher Award

Chao Gui is the winner of the first Best Graduate Researcher Award of the Computer Science department. Chao has been working on the quality of service and power conservation issues in multihop wireless ad hoc and sensor networks. "Chao is very innovative as well as hardworking. An elegant mix of theoretical concepts with practical limitations of applications characterizes his research efforts. He is poised to be a very successful researcher in future," said Prof. Mohapatra, his advisor.

Best Dissertation Award

Prof. Eric Wohlstadter, who graduated in 2004 and is currently an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia at Vancouver, has won the first Best Dissertation Award from our department. His advisor, Prof. Devanbu said: "Eric has developed an innovative new programming model for distributed systems, that simplifies the task of developing features such as security which affect more than one part of the system. His work is poised to influence standards for distributed computing, such as CORBA and SOAP. I am delighted that he was selected for this award!"

2004-05 Citations

Based upon the recommendations received, the students below are our 2004-2005 departmental citation recipients:

Dan Alcantara (CS)
Julia Winsor (CS)
Jason Cheung (CSE)

[back to top]

Best New Journal Honorable Mention

A recent news release from American Association of Publishers, Professional and Scholorly Publishing Division announced the 2004 winners and honorable mentions in 25 areas. In the Best New Journal (in any category), the Honorable Mention was awarded to The IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. Prof. Dan Gusfield wrote the proposal to found that journal and was selected as the founding Editor-in-Chief. More information about the journal can be found at www.computer.org/tcbb/.

[back to top]

Prof. Liu Receives NSF CAREER Award

Prof. Xin Liu has been granted an NSF CAREER award for her proposal "Smart-Radio-Technology-Enabled Opportunistic Spectrum Utilization." Spectrum is among the most expensive natural resource around the world and its demand is skyrocketing due to the fast proliferation of broadband wireless services. On the other hand, preliminary studies indicate the presence of a significant amount of white space, or unused space, in the radio spectrum. Thus, it is spectrum access, instead of true spectrum scarcity, that limits the potential growth of versatile wireless services. This project is motivated by this dilemma -- opportunistic utilization of the white space is studied, which has the great potential to mitigate the spectrum scarcity. The project focuses on modeling and protocol design. Upon the successful completion of the project, we expect to gain a fundamental understanding on the potential of opportunistic spectrum utilization and develop efficient algorithms for spectrum sharing.

[back to top]

Grad Student Chad Sterling Honored

Prof. Olsson's graduate student Chad Sterling was selected by the Black Engineer of the Year Selection Panel to receive the Student Leadership (Graduate) Award during the 19th Annual Black Engineer of the Year Awards Conference. Innovators who demonstrate commitment to engineering expertise, leadership and managerial dash, the winners are also recognized for contributions as role models and mentors, helping to boost the minority presence in the tehcnology enterprise.Winners were chosen from a competitive field by an industry-wide committee in an intensive, week-long selection process. [full story]

[back to top]

Best Vis2004 Paper

Lok Hwa, Mark Duchaineau, and Ken Joy have just won the best paper award at the Visualization 2004 Conference. The title of their paper is "Adaptive 4-8 Texture Hierarchies." PDF

[back to top]

DSOM 2004

Prof. Felix Wu is Program Committee Chair for the 15th IFIP/IEEE Distributed Systems: Operations and Management (DSOM 2004) which will be held here at UC Davis at the Buehler Alumni Center November 15-17. For more information please visit DSOM 2004.

[back to top]

Prof. Joy New IDAV Co-Director

Prof. Ken Joy has been appointed co-director of the Institute for Data Analysis and Visualization (IDAV) beginning Sept 1. The IDAV (formerly known as the Center for Image Processing and Integrated Computing, CIPIC) focuses on data analysis, visualization, computer graphics, optimization, and electronic imaging. The major aim is the investigation of techniques for the study of large-scale, multi-dimensional data sets. Applications for these techniques include the analysis and visualization of environmental, geophysical, astrophysical, biological, fluid flow, and satellite data. IDAV's mission is the solution of complex data analysis and visualization problems, in a cross-disciplinary environment, working with researchers in academia, national research laboratories, and industry.

[back to top]

Prof. Devanbu Receives 2004 IBM Faculty Award

Prem Devanbu has received IBM Faculty Award of $40,000 to support his research into self-aware and self-adaptive Middleware. The award letter states: "This award is highly competitive and recognizes the quality of your program and its importance to our industry."

[back to top]

New Department Chair

Professor Zhaojun Bai accepted the position of Chair of the Department of Computer Science on August 1, 2004.

Professor Bai joined the Department in 1999, after spending nine years at the University of Kentucky. He completed his doctoral study at Fudan University, China. He was a visiting student at University of Maryland at College Park and a postdoctoral researcher at Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University.

He is one of principal developers of LAPACK (SIAM, 3rd edition, 1999), a software library for solving the most common problems in numerical linear algebra. LAPACK is designed to supersede LINPACK and EISPACK. He co-edited Templates for the Solution of Algebra Eigenvalue Problems: A Practical Guide (SIAM, 2002). His current research include synergistic activities in designing and implementing numerical algorithms for emerging computational problems, computing environments and user communities in computational science and engineering, such as structure-preserving dimension reduction techniques for large scale dynamical systems in circuit simulations, linear algebra algorithms for quantum simulations in solid state physics and design and optimization mathematical kernels on IA-64 computer architecture. Professor Bai also holds a joint appointment with the Department of Mathematics.

[back to top]

Prof. Mohapatra New GGCS Chair

CS is happy to announce that Prasant Mohapatra has been appointed as the new chair of the GGCS. Our (long) nomination process gave Graduate studies two excellent candidates to choose from, and I'm confident that Prasant will do an excellent job. We have a strong program due to the efforts of our great faculty, staff and students, and I'm sure all of you will continue your good efforts to help Prasant as you have helped me.
Chip Martel
(Former GGCS chair)

[back to top]

Prof. Staadt awarded ACM VRCAI Best Paper Award

The paper "blue-c API: A Multimedia and 3D Video Enhanced Toolkit for Collaborative VR and Telepresence" has won the Best Paper Award at the ACM SIGGRAPH International Conference on Virtual Reality Continuum and its Applications in Industry (VRCAI) 2004 held in Singapore. The paper is available here (http://graphics.cs.ucdavis.edu/~staadt/download/p_Nae04.pdf)

[back to top]

CS Welcomes New Faculty

Hao Chen

joins the department from UC Berkeley. Dr. Chen's research interests focus on significant and difficult problems of computer security and software verification. These two topics relate to each other, in that it is crucial to verify that computer programs do not have bugs that may result in security vulnerabilities. By combining theoretical insights with detailed knowledge of real computer systems, Mr. Chen's work results in practical, usable security verification systems. Mr. Chen is best known for his tool MOPS, which finds security vulnerabilities in C programs.

Dr. Patrice Koehl

joins the department from Computational Structural Biology at Stanford University where he is a Senior Research Associate. Dr. Koehl received his PhD in Biophysics (Molecular Biology and NMR spectroscopy), Louis Pasteur University, Strasbourg in 1989. His research program focus on understanding protein structures. He is interested in characterizing their shapes, and uses this information to improve our understanding of their stability (ProShape). He is also interested in characterizing the subset of sequence space compatible with a protein structure: this is an indirect approach to understanding protein sequence evolution (ProDesign). In parallel, he is involved in the development of new algorithms for predicting the structure of a protein, based on its sequence(ProModel). Dr. Koehl will also have a research appointment with the Genome Center.

Dr. Bertram Ludaescher

joins the department from UC San Diego. Dr. Ludaescher is a computer science researcher at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, where he leads the Knowledge-Based Information Systems Lab within the Data and Knowledge Systems program. He is also an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. His research interests include knowledge-based information systems, information integration (model-based/semantic mediation) esp. of scientific data, management of semistructured data (XML), database languages (active, deductive, object-oriented), query evaluation, and database theory.

[back to top]