Shyhtsun Felix Wu (吳士駿)

I have a research blog, which covers our recent publications -- DSL (Davis Social Links), and the best way to contact me is via my Facebook account . As a backup, you can also try to contact me via "clicking" the following UCDavis email address link: wu@cs.ucdavis.edu (and, from time to time, I will update the 16 hexadecimal digits embedded -- so you have to come back here from time to time).

Professor of Computer Science

Office: 2109 Watershed Science Building
Lab: 2359 Academic Surge Building
Telephone: (530) 754-7070
Fax: (530) 752-4767
Office Hours: by Appointment

Associate Dean, Academic Personnel and Research
College of Engineering

Office: 1042 Kemper Hall
Telephone: (530) 754-7748
Office Hours: by Appointment

"He will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit."


About my Academic Research:

Hi, I am part of the Computer Security group at UCDavis .

In research, I "used to" be interested in security issues related to both networking and networked (if you can tell the difference) systems. Previously, I worked on subjects like unknown vulnerability analysis (BTW, the most vulnerable is inside of a human being), IPSec/VPN Policy Management (the most difficult issue here has been the "intention/requirement" specification, which involves a human society), Routing protocol security (if we route too well, we deliver "humanly unwanted" traffic very well too), Internet architecture (the current Internet architecture is something that human cannot control but being controlled by services like Google or Facebook), Mobility (can someone give me a definition of "social mobility"?), Secure computer architecture (if anybody has a solution to identify an unknown virus without signatures, please raise your hand. Also, if anybody believes that you have a brilliant definition of virus, I would love to discuss with you -- I like to apply that to all the mobile applications.) Email Antispam (again, definition of spam, please), Information Visualization for Security (what do we want to accomplish here, yes, any possible measurable usefulness based on that pretty cool/creative visual presentation?), Anomaly Analysis and Explanation (this is the only area in the list that still excites me).

At some point (maybe in Taiwan, when the session chair read this list of topics), I realized that I was probably interested in too many things though. Therefore, my latest focus has been on the DSL (Davis Social Links) project, which is currently sponsored by NSF/FIND, NSF/BBN/GENI, Army/ARO/MURI, Air Force/AFOSR/MURI, and most recently ARL/CTA Network Science. BTW, if any of you can tell me when I can stop writing grant proposal but shift those precious time to think and interact with my dear academic/industry colleagues and students, I like to hear your opinion. For the record, I put my lectures, power point slides, and the papers under this link as well. My P/E (papers accepted per earnings, or PhDs graduated per earnings) ratio is reasonably high, and my another P/E (proposals submitted per earnings) ratio has been extremely high (much higher than I hope). FYI, here is the link to my publications under Google Scholar.

What I am really interested these days has to do with the topic of relationship, especially the relationships between human, and how those will interact with the contents being accessible via Internet. I honestly don't know how I should call it. Therefore, roughly, this might be something like social informatics, social computing, social-aware content, social-based cloud computing, big social data, or social intelligence (and privacy). Anyway, I am tired of working on the kind of security research WITHOUT thoroughly considering the factor of human relationships (and, yes, I am merely pretending that I know a bit of humanity sciences before I retire). An article titled Networking: Four ways to reinvent the Internet published in Nature 463 (February 3rd, 2010, by Katharine Gammon) provided a brief but very nice cover about my primary thought on a Social-network-based future Internet architecture (much more comprehensible than if I were to write it, and NSF panelists who have reviewed my proposal would say Amen without a single bit of doubt).

Click here for my official academic CV (updated July 2013 -- but, I still need to find time to make sure that I didn't forget something critical) . Most of my publications can be found using google, but if you fail to find some of the papers, you are always welcome to send me emails.


For prospective graduate students:

I am trying to shrink/downsize my research group (and I confess that I said that every year). Therefore, only under some special circumstances, I will take new students (and I confess, also, to me, that pretty much all circumstances are special). And, I currently have no funding to employ new students anyway. Also, I am a fan of using the systems we built ourselves. If you are not interested in using the system we built (and helping us to make it much better), then our group is probably (with probability == 100%) not for you. After leading the DSL project for six years, I realized that teamwork is the key to be successful for our type of research. That's why I would like to emphasize more than enough about strong teamworking in both research and development. This is a MUST requirement for our team. If you are not willing to humbly collaborate with others on our team, I am not the kind of advisors you are looking for. And, I consider, as an example, that willing to use the systems built by our team is an important step to show your support to your colleagues.

Past Research Projects:

Here are some links to my past projects: And, my patents:

Course I am/will be teaching in 2012/2013:


My Advisor:

My academic advisor (for both my MS and PhD thesis) was Prof. Gail Kaiser at Columbia University.

Academic Genealogy:

FYI, Prof. Tao Xie at UIUC (and, earlier, at NC State University) nicely and generously maintains the Software Engineering Academic Genealogy web page, which shows how I came from academically.

MS/PhD Students working with me currently (and possibly..... for the next N years):

Graduated PhD's:

Graduated Postdoc:

Graduated MS Students (being updated, still in progress) :


Call for Papers or Participations (that I am an TPC member)


Retrieving All SecLab Publications


More information about me:

Although I have personal belief in many different perspectives, I strongly support UCDavis diversity commitment. Most of my current and past PhD/MS students do not actually share the same belief with me, while we (I hope at least) had/have a very good time working together and built up our friendship. If you would like to learn more about my background and belief (plus some photos about my family and students), you might click here .

Jeremiah 17:8