The CSE Department received the prestigious "Partners in International Education" Award from the UCSD International Center. The UCSD Programs Abroad office nominated us to "recognize the Computer Science Department for their excellent, extensive, and continued efforts to promote and encourage study abroad for all of their undergraduate student". People explicitly recognized in the award were CSE/Math student Michael Nekrasov, CSE Undergraduate Student Affair Advisors Viera Kair and Patricia Razcka, Professor Joseph Pasquale, and Professors Rick Ord, Geoff Voelker, Dana Dahlstrom, George Varghese, Ryan Kastner, and Scott Baden.

A study by University of Washington researchers led by doctoral student Tamara Denning (B.S. 2007) calls attention to the possibility of household robots being hacked by malevolent parties and reprogrammed for nefarious purposes. Such purposes could include psychological attacks, spying, and vandalism. Denning, Yoshi Kohno (Ph. D. 2006) and their colleagues examined three commercially available household robots, and discovered that all three had the potential of being hijacked.   "It's very similar to computer security, the way that users of desktop computers have to worry about spam and malware," Denning says. "One possible trajectory is that people will have to think about security with their home robots, as well."  Click here for the link to the MSNBC article and Security and privacy of future household robots.

CSE Professor Stefan Savage has been appointed as Associate Director of the Center for Networked Systems.  His research includes the study of high-availability Internet systems, intelligent network traffic analysis and efficient self-configuring wireless networks.  Stefan joined the Jacobs School Computer Science and Engineering faculty in January 2001 and has been central to much of the activity in CNS.

Fox Harrell, UCSD Computer Science and Engineering alum (Ph.D., 2007), has received an NSF CAREER Award for his project "Computing for Advanced Identity Representation." The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is the National Science Foundation's "most prestigious award" in support of tenure-track faculty. His distinction is accompanied by a grant for $535,000, awarded through the NSF's Human-Centered Computing Division. Dr. Harrell is Assistant Professor of Digital Media at Georgia Tech where he is director of the Imagination, Computation, and Expression Lab.

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the IEEE Computer Society (IEEE-CS) will jointly present the inaugural Ken Kennedy Award to Dr. Francine Berman for her leadership in building national-scale cyberinfrastructure, the environment that supports rapidly expanding computing and information services over  networked resources, including the Internet.  Berman, former professor  in CSE, was the director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) from 2001 until August 2009.  She  was named one of the 10 top women in Technology by Business Week in 2004, and one of the 15 national leaders in Science and Technology by Newsweek in 2006.  In 2008, she was named a “Digital Preservation Pioneer” by the Library of Congress. ACM and IEEE-CS co-sponsor the Kennedy Award, which was established in 2009 to recognize substantial contributions to programmability and productivity in computing and significant community service or mentoring contributions. It was named for Ken Kennedy, the founder of Rice University’s nationally ranked computer science program, who was one of the world’s foremost experts on high-performance computing.  Click here for the full article.

The inaugural Yahoo! Excellence Awards were presented to four outstanding undergraduate students for their Excellence in Teaching, Leadership, and/or Research. The four recipients this year are Hourieh Fakourfar (nominated by Serge Belongie), Lisa McCutcheon (nominated by Rick Ord), Ankur Jain (nominated by Rick Ord), and Sarah Esper (nominated by Gary Gillespie). Each student received a newly designed Yahoo! Excellence trophy and a $250 cash award. Special thanks to Yahoo! and Don McGillen for their generous support for Excellence in our undergraduate program.

Amin Vahdat, Professor in the department of Computer Science and Engineering and CSE undergraduate Sarah Esper, have been awarded the Gordon Engineering Leadership Center’s Gordon Fellows.

The Gordon Center was established in January 2009 with the mission of educating and training effective engineering leaders who create new products and jobs that benefit society. In order to provide positive role models for students of engineering, the Gordon Center holds an annual awards ceremony to recognize exemplary engineers at the high school, undergraduate, graduate, and professional level. Recipients of the Gordon Fellows Medal not only must be outstanding engineers within their respective fields but must also have a proven record of leadership successes.

To learn more about the Gordon Center's mission and goals, please click here.

 CSE Alumni Ayse K. Coskun and CSE Professor Tajana Simunic Rosing win Best Paper Award at the VLSI-SoC 2009 conference.     Their paper “Modeling and Dynamic Management of 3D Multicore Systems with Liquid Cooling,” which includes co-authors Jose Ayala, David Atienza  received the top honor announcement Monday.  Click here for the conference link.

UCSD students competed head-to-head during the Fall 2009 UCSD Programming Contest, sponsored by Mike Dini and The Dini Group.  Students were given five hours to complete a set of problems.  Top honors and $1000 go to first-year CSE Graduate Student Do-Kyum Kim for solving 4 problems with a combined time of 616 minutes. Sophomore David Michon placed second, also solving 4 problems. Haoxi Fang, Jason Obenberger and Eric Levine rounded out the top 5.The top students will go on to compete in the ACM Southern California.  Click here for more information.

Students from UC San Diego and a handful of other universities spent two weeks in August getting intensive instruction and hands-on lab experience on projects well outside their areas of expertise. UC San Diego’s Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center (TDLC) provided this horizon-broadening “boot camp” to 19 intrepid electrical engineering, psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science, and computer science students.