The University of California, Davis, is first and foremost an institution of learning and teaching, committed to serving the needs of society. The Department of Computer Science contributes to the mission of the University in three ways. First, its undergraduate and graduate education programs seek to educate students in the fundamental principles of computer science and the skills needed to solve the complex technological problems of modern society; the breadth of course work provides a framework for life-long learning and appreciation for multidisciplinary activities. Second, through our research programs, the department contributes to the development and progress of computer science, and software and information technology, to provide innovative, creative solutions for societal needs. Finally, the department disseminates its research - to enhance collaborations with the public sector, further interdisciplinary interests that benefit society, and educate the public - through publications, public service, and professional activities.
CS News
The paper titled, "A First Look at 802.11ac in Action: Energy Efficiency and Interference Characterization," authored by Yunze Zeng, Parth Pathak, and Prasant Mohapatra received the Best Paper Award at the IFIP Networking 2014 Conference held in Trondheim, Norway. IFIP Networking is a competitive conference, and this paper was selected from 220 papers submitted to the conference. Yunze is a PhD student and Parth is a postdoctoral associate; both of whom work with Professor Mohapatra.
PhD candidate Anandarup Sarkar who is co-advised by Prof. Bertram Ludaescher and Prof. Matt Bishop, has received the Best Paper, Student Author award for his paper on "Insider Attack Identification and Prevention Using a Declarative Approach" at the Workshop on Research for Insider Threat, held as part of IEEE Computer Society Security and Privacy Workshops in conjunction with the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, San Jose, May 2014.
Grad student Sisi Duan (advised by Assistant Adjunct Professor Sean Peisert and co-advised by Karl Levitt) recently won a Leiv Eiriksson mobility programme award that will fund her to spend a quarter at University of Stavanger in Norway working on research with one of our external collaborators, Hein Meling (http://www.ux.uis.no/~meling/). This award will particularly fund her ongoing work in symbiosis between fault tolerance and intrusion detection by allowing her to work more closely with a group that has a somewhat different set of expertise than we do here in Davis, thus giving her a broader set of experiences before she finishes her dissertation (expected by this Spring 2014). Competition for the funding was highly competitive. More information on the program.
MS stduent Darrel Aubrey, advised by Prof. Hao Chen, was selected and participated in a summer pilot program that was a collaboration between multiple agencies, federal and tribal nations for integrating Western science and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). He met with these agencies to gather knowledge on what is currently being done on the Klamath watershed. He then modified existing data collection protocols to fit the timeline. Along the way he collected data from two of the watershed's tributaries. With this data he was able to test a model which he had been working on for evaluating watershed tributaries. This evaluation model was geared towards the restoration of habitats for salmonids. Because of the work and collaboration, the program was recognized by the Department of Interior with the Partners in Conservation Award.
PhD student Adrian Chavez, who is co-advised by Prof. Karl Levitt and Adjunct Assistant Prof. Sean Peisert, is among 102 people who have received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) this year via DoE. Former CS PhD student Daniela Oliveira, who was supervised by Prof. Felix Wu and is currently an assistant professor at Bowdoin, was also selected via NSF. PECASE is the highest honor bestowed by the US government on science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers.
Professor Zhendong Su and his collaborators (You Li, Dr. Linzhang Wang, and Prof. Xuandong Li) from Nanjing University, China have won the Best Paper Award at OOPSLA 2013, a flagship ACM SIGPLAN conference, for their paper "Steering Symbolic Execution to Less Traveled Paths." The student author, You Li, conducted this work at UC Davis as a visiting PhD student. This is the third best/distinguished paper award received by the programming languages and software engineering group in 2013 at a major PL/SE venue (earlier at ICSE and ISSTA 2013).
Professor Kwan-Liu Ma received the 2013 Visualization Technical Achievement Award
on October 15 at the IEEE VIS 2013 Conference. The IEEE Visualization and Graphics
Technical Committee (VGTC) Awards program recognizes individuals who have made
a significant contribution to the community through their research. The 2013 award goes
to Professor Ma in recognition of his seminal work in large-scale data visualization
and new visualization techniques. His work has stimulated research in new fields of
visualization.
Professors Prasant Mohapatra, Karl Levitt and Zhendong Su join a newly-formed Cybersecurity Research Alliance to work on the project titled "Models for Enabling Continuous Reconfigurability of Secure Missions." The five-year funding for the core and enhanced program is $23.2 million, with an additional $25 million for the optional five-year extension -- a potential total of $48.2 million over the 10-year collaboration. Other members of the alliance include Pennsylvania State University, UC Riverside, Carnegie Mellon University and Indiana University. An industrial partner will be chosen during the first year. The alliance and the researchers from the US Army will jointly develop the research program, and lead and conduct research under this Collaborative Research Alliance. Read more from UC Davis News