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CS Department News

Updated August 22, 2008

2007-08 Department Citations

The 2007-2008 departmental citation recipients are Kari Okamoto (CSE) and Andrey Goder (CS). They will be presented with their citation on Thursday, June 5th, at 3 pm in 1065 Kemper.

Globecom 2007 Best Paper Award

Networks Lab PhD student Marwan Batayneh, his research advisor Child Family Professor Biswanath Mukherjee, and their research collaborators Dr. Andreas Kirstädter, Dr. Dominic A. Schupke, and Dr. Marco Hoffman from Siemens, Germany, have won the Best Paper Award for their paper “Lightpath-Level Protection versus Connection-Level Protection for Carrier-Grade Ethernet in a Mixed-Line-Rate Telecom Network” in the Optical Networking Symposium at the annual IEEE Globecom 2007 Conference, Washington DC, November 2007

Nelson Max Wins Coons Award

Prof. Nelson Max has won the Steven A. Coons Award from ACM SIGGRAPH. This award is given every two years for Outstanding Creative Contributions to Computer Graphics, and earlier recipients include other giants in the field. [ more (PDF) ]

Best Paper at Graphics Hardware 2007

CS grad student Shubhabrata Sengupta was first author on the Best Paper at Graphics Hardware 2007, along with Mark Harris, Yao Zhang, and his advisor John D. Owens. This is a competitive conference in a hot area. Downloand the paper here

Technology, Security of Electronic Voting Machines Can Be Compromised

Professor Matt Bishop led teams that bypassed controls on electronic voting machines and demonstrated that the technology and security of all three systems could be compromised. This was part of the California Secretary of State's top-to-bottom review of electronic voting machines. Professor David Wagner of UC Berkeley was co-PI on the project.

Professor Hao Chen wins NSF CAREER Award

Professor Hao Chen won the National Science Foundation CAREER award for his proposal to secure broadband cellular data networks. Professor Chen endeavors to understand the inherent, unique vulnerabilities in cellular data networks and mobile devices, and to develop technologies for defending against emerging threats. Click here for the award abstract.

Two Multi-Million Dollar MURI Awards For Computer Science

The Department of Defense (DoD) has awarded two multi-million dollar grants to two research teams consisting of computer science faculty through the Multi-disciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) program. UC Davis is the lead institution in one award, and a member institution of the other one.

The team for the first proposal, titled " ARSENAL: A cross layer ARchitecture for SEcure resilieNt tacticAL mobile ad hoc networks," includes Professors Prasant Mohapatra (PI), Karl Levitt, and Felix Wu. UC Davis is the lead institution for this project, and the subcontracting partners are UC Riverside, UC Santa Cruz, BYU, University of Utah, University of Pittsburg, and Penn State.

The second team, whose proposal is titled “Helix: A Self-Regenerative Architecture for the Incorruptible Enterprise,” consists of Professors Hao Chen, Karl Levitt, Jeff Rowe, Zhendong Su, and Felix Wu. University of Virginia is the lead institution for this project, and the subcontracting partners are UC Davis, UC Santa Barbara, and University of New Mexico.

The awards are among 36 announced by the DoD totaling $19.4 million in fiscal year 2007 and $207 million over five years.

The MURI program supports multi-disciplinary research in areas of DoD relevance related to science and engineering. A MURI effort usually involves a team of researchers with expertise in a variety of disciplines in order to help accelerate research progress and convert research results to application.

Competition for the 2007 MURI awards was very intense. The Army Research Office (ARO), the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) received a total of 129 proposals, and only 36 were selected for funding, based on a merit review by panels of experts in the science and engineering fields. A complete list of projects selected for fiscal 2007 funding can be viewed at: http://www.defenselink.mil/news/MAR2007/d20070307muri.pdf

Best Graduate Researcher Award

Jedidiah Crandall has been selected as the recipient of the Best Graduate Researcher Award. Jed's area of interest is systems and computer security, and his research has focused on protecting the Internet infrastructure from Internet worms. The Minos and DACODA projects (published at MICRO and CCS, respectively) allowed Jed and colleagues to capture and analyze many real Internet worms and provide the first detailed, empirical study of how much polymorphism and metamorphism are available to worms in the exploit phase. Jed has also explored some other interesting aspects of security and privacy, including behavior-based malware analysis (specifically a technique called temporal search proposed in a recent ASPLOS paper), probabilistically enforcing an information flow security property called non-interference for a full system via repeated deterministic replays, and modeling and understanding the implementation and application of keyword-based Internet censorship such as the "Great Firewall of China."

NSF Cyberinfrastructure Grants Awarded

CEOP/COMET: Profs. Gertz (PI) and Ludäscher from the CS department and an interdisciplinary team of researchers from UC Davis, including Profs. Schladow (Tahoe Environmental Research Center), Ustin (UC Davis Center of Excellence in Agriculture, Natural Resources, Environment), and Williams (Bodega Marine Laboratory), have received a three year $2,100,000 grant under the NSF program Cyberinfrastructure for Environmental Observatories: Prototype Systems to Address Cross-Cutting Needs.

CEOP/KEPLER: A team of investigators from UC Santa Barbara (Matt Jones, Mark Schildhauer), UC Davis (Prof. Ludäscher), UC San Diego (Ilkay Altintas, Chaitan Baru), UC Los Angeles (Prof. Deborah Estrin), and OPeNDAP Inc. (Peter Cornillon) have been awarded a four year $2,700,000 grant for the Management and Analysis of Environmental Observatory Data using the Kepler Scientific Workflow System. [ more ]

CyberTrust Team - NSF grant on malware defense awarded

Profs. Zhendong Su and Felix Wu along with Prof. Fred Chong (UCSB) have been awarded a $750,000 NSF grant on malware defense, titled "A Vertical Systems Framework for Effective Defense against Memory-based Attacks." [ more ]

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Cell Phone Attacks

Prof. Hao Chen and his students Denys Ma and Radmilo Racic have discovered that malicious junk mail could leave your cell phone with a dead battery. Learn how you can protect yourself. (Also see COE story)

Capital Public Radio interview
SacBee article 10.23.06

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UC Davis Team Wins Award to Study Open-Source Systems

Profs. Devanbu (PI) and Filkov from the CS Dept and an interdisciplinary team of UC Davis researchers, have received a three-year, $750,000 NSF grant to study the long-term effects of design in open source software. The other members of the team are Prof. Raissa D’Souza (ME, Physics of networks), and Profs. Anand Swaminathan and Greta Hsu (GSB, Social and Organizational Science). The team brings together expertise in analyzing, modeling, and design of software, biological systems, and social networks.

The goal of this project is to formulate novel, testable hypotheses relevant to software engineering outcomes, employ the best available data gathering, analysis, visualization and machine learning techniques to extract data from open source repositories to evaluate these hypotheses. An improved understanding the social processes underlying open-source systems could help improve software engineering practice; this could well lead to faster development of cheaper, better, software systems.

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Prof. Bishop Receives CISSE Award

The Colloquium for Information System Security Education (CISSE) recently awarded Matt Bishop the Colloquium Academia Award for his research and pedagogical work in computer information security (such as collecting seminal research papers that were hard to find before CISSE made them available, and his textbook). The award also honors Prof. Bishop for his "demonstrated research leadership in the analysis of vulnerabilities in computer systems, including modeling them, building tools to detect vulnerabilities, and eliminating or ameliorating them." More information about the CISSE can be found at http://www.cisse.info/background.htm.

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