Department News
The Spring 2008 issue of "UCLA Engineer" features an overview of the current research efforts being headed up by CSD's Jason Cong and Tony Chan (joint appointment with Math and Bioengineering). The article, "UCLA Scientists Working to Create Smaller, Faster Integrated Circuits," describes their research team and the demonstrated improvements to integrated circuits achieved by creating new computer-aided design software based on better mathematical algorithms. Professors Cong and Chan have been collaborating for nearly a decade on the design of integrated circuits.
Professor Amit Sahai's research in cryptography has recently been featured in both the Daily Bruin (24 April 08) and the UCLA Newsroom (17 April 08). This work, conducted with co-researchers Brent Waters of SRI International and Jonathan Katz of University of Maryland, concerns a mathematical system -- known as functional encryption -- that will not only help simplify the encryption of data in servers, but will also allow access to the data in an intuitive way, making it much easier for programmers to secure sensitive information and much harder for hackers to gain access to it. As Professor Sahai succinctly puts it: "We want to change the rules of the game on hackers and even out the playing field."
The UCLA Office of Intellectual Property publication, "UCLA Invents -- Driving Innovations to Market" (Vol II, 2007), features xPilot, a recently developed and copyrighted cutting-edge electronic-design-automation software developed by Professor Jason Cong and his VLSI CAD laboratory as a response to industry's ever-increasing demand for faster and more complex chips. The xPilot system enables designers to use C/C++ specifications for chip design, and has been licensed by AutoESL Design Technologies, Inc., for commercialization.
A January 2008 issue of NewScientistTech magazine features an article entitled "Wi-Fi music polling device takes heat off the DJ." This article discusses the "Smart Party" technology developed by CS graduate student Kevin Eustice and advisor Dr. Peter Reiher. The Smart Party system relies on people carrying Wi--Fi-enabled music-playing devices; it polls the musical preferences of party-goers and creates a playlist for the gathering that will appeal to everyone. This new technology was recently revealed at the Consumer Communications and Networking Conference recently held in Las Vegas, NV.
The 19 December on-line issue of Technology Review (published by MIT) featured the work of Professor Demetri Terzopoulos and his former graduate student Dr. Wei Shao (now at Google). The story by science and technology journalist Duncan Graham-Rowe, entitled "Virtual Extras," describes how the "autonomous pedestrians" software created by Shao and Terzopoulos simulates lifelike animations of large-scale human activity -- in part by giving each member of a digital crowd its own personality and cognitive abilities that generate complex, rational behaviors. In a virtual reconstruction of the original Pennsylvania Station in New York City, the software simulated visually realistic pedestrian activity that included well over 1000 commuters, tourists, buskers, and law-enforcement officers going about their business. See http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19964
On December 5, 2007, Both Forbes and Yahoo issued the following press release: "Huge Opportunity in IC Design Optimization Gained by Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), National Science Foundation (NSF), UCLA."

Quoting from this press release, "Research at UCLA sponsored by Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), the world's leading university research consortium for semiconductors and related technologies, and the National Science Foundation (NSF) celebrated today CAD techniques that will facilitate advances for multiple technology generations. The resulting optimization methods can provide improvements equivalent to the investment of billions of dollars in fabrication equipment costs."

The press release goes on to quote UCLA's Professor Jason Cong, SRC's Dr. William Joyner, and NSF's program director Dr. Sankar Basu, and to discuss this new circuit placement tool and its impact on the semiconductor industry.
November 2007. The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has selected Professor Todd Millstein to participate in their Computer Science Study Group program, a multi-year effort specifically designed for junior faculty members around the country. The program supports university research in computer science and related fields for the exploration and development of technologies that have the potential to transition innovative technology advances to the government. It is also designed to introduce a new generation of researchers to DoD information technology needs and priorities, and to familiarize them with DoD practices and challenges.
Professor Amit Sahai recently appeared on the LA Fox 10 o'clock evening news (14 Nov 07) in a segment on cybersecurity; in particular, the vulnerability of the Internet infrastructure to hacker attacks -- as illustrated by the recent large-scale attacks on MySpace.
The October 2007 issue of PC World ranks, in ascending order of importance, its selections for "The 16 Greatest Moments in Web History." UCLA, Leonard Kleinrock, ARPAnet, and that famous first message are featured as the No. 4 greatest moment.

Google was ranked as No. 3, Netscape as No. 2, and the creation of the Web was ranked as No. 1.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded $22.5 million to a team of scientists centered at UCLA's Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. This interdisciplinary team, called "Consortium for Neuropsychiatric Phenomics, is dedicated to understanding the biology underlying a variety of mental disorders.

Computer Science professors Wes Chu and Stott Parker are the "informatics" component of the Consortium, which is also comprised of M.Ds and Ph.Ds from many fields of science: psychiatry, neurobiology, statistics, genetics, radiology, primatology, learning & behavior, epidemiology, psychology, imaging and public health.
Eleazar Eskin, assistant professor of human genetics and computer science, is part of a team of researchers on the Mouse Genome Resequencing and SNP Discovery Project (sponsored by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, a component of the National Institutes of Health). Their collaborative research paper, "A Sequence-Based Variation Map of 8.27 Million SNPs in Inbred Mouse Strains," will be published in an upcoming issue of "Nature." This research, which examined the DNA of 15 mouse strains commonly used in biomedical studies, is expected to help scientists determine the genes related to susceptibility to environmental disease.
The August 2007 issue of Nature discusses the “h-index,”—a metric proposed by Jorge Hirsch (UC San Diego) that ranks researchers by the number n of their papers that have all received at least n citations. Under this ranking index, Deborah Estrin has been ranked No. 2 (worldwide) in the field of computer science. Her score of “68” means that 68 of her papers have been cited at least 68 times each. Proponents of the h-index feel that it is substantially better than other indices, and that it even predicts future productivity better than does a record of past productivity.
UCLA's recent "Graduate Quarterly" magazine (Spring 07) profiles postdoctoral scholar Jens Groth and his revolutionary research in cryptographic proofs -- the fundamental building blocks for countless security applications.

"As a postdoctoral scholar, Jens has been working with Professors Amit Sahai and Rafail Ostrovsky on these kinds of cryptographic issues. This summer he will be leaving UCLA for a permanent faculty position at University College London."
Mario Gerla's research, funded by NSF and a micro from ST-Microelectronics, is discussed in the 8 May 07 issue of "UCLA Today," and is also featured on the cover of the Fall 2007 issue of "UCLA Engineer."  This research, which turns specially equipped cars into mobile networks that enable one car to transmit signals to an entire fleet of cars, has caught the attention of public agencies such as California's Department of Transportation. This new technology could be especially crucial in those times when normal communication networks are down because of a natural disaster or hostile attack.
Professor Amit Sahai's research on zero-knowledge was featured in the 26 April 07 issue of "Nature" (Vol 446, author Bernard Chazelle of Princeton's Department of Computer Science).

Entitled "The Security of Knowing Nothing," the article describes Sahai's research (joint with Boaz Barak) which focuses on developing new zero-knowledge proofs and related cryptographic techniques for use on the Internet.
Rafail Ostrovsky has received an invitation to be the keynote speaker at the 10th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Public Key Cryptography. This year's conference is being chaired by Andrew Yao and hosted by the Institute for Theoretical Science, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 16-19 April 2007.
Leonard Kleinrock. On 3 December 2006, the Los Angeles Times published a commemorative edition on "What Los Angeles Gave the World." One of the categories under this topic was: "People in the news: Ten Angelenos who left an indelible mark on the world." Professor Kleinrock was one of the ten Angelenos named by the Times -- sharing this honor with other well-known figures such as former President Richard Nixon, artist David Hockney, astronaut Sally Ride, seismologist Charles Richter, composer Charlie Mingus and basketball great Magic Johnson.
Leonard Kleinrock. For their December issue, the Atlantic Monthly assembled members of a panel to compile a list of people whom they felt were the "most influential living Americans." Leonard Kleinrock, Vint Cerf, Robert Kahn and Lawrence Roberts were selected to be on this list as the four "fathers of the Internet."
See Atlantic Monthly December 2006 website
Amit Sahai, Principal Investigator.  July 2006.  A one-year subaward from SRI International entitled Cyber-Threat Analytics (prime contract U.S. Army Research Office).  Scope:  Enable designated parties to perform data analysis, while also providing appropriate guarantees of data confidentiality to contributors of the data.
Amit Sahai, Principal Investigator.  October 2006.  Receives NSF three-year grant entitled New Directions in Cryptographic Proof Systems.  Scope:  Develop efficient general cryptographic proof techniques that are applicable to a wide variety of problems, and crucially, techniques that are compatible with each other.  This will be the first efficient system for complex assertions on encrypted data.
The 2006 International Symposium on Physical Design (ISPD 2006) has announced the results of their recent placement contest (involving nine teams from universities worldwide, and eight designs released by IBM with 300,000 to 2,500,000 placement objects). The UCLA mPL6 placer—developed by graduate students Kenton Sze and Min Xie under the direction of Tony Chan (Math Dept) and Jason Cong and Joseph Shinnerl (CS Dept)—produced the best wirelength result under congestion control and received second place in this contest. Technical University Munich's Kraftwerk placer received first place. Compared to mPL6, Kraftwerk uses a 6% longer wirelength on average but runs roughly 3X faster. Under the combined quality-of-result and runtime metric defined by the contest organizers, Kraftwerk finished ahead of mPL6 by 1%. The mPL6 tool is available here.
Rafail Ostrovsky and grad student William Skeith are recently featured in the "UCLA Engineer" magazine (Spring 06). These researchers are developing technology to make the tracking of terrorist communications over the Internet more efficient and more targeted than ever before. This technology mines potential terrorist-related communications and narrows down data to only those documents that fit pre-set, secret criteria chosen by intelligence agencies. This could potentially resolve today's highly relevant dilemma concerning the individual's right to privacy versus the government's need to monitor communications in its hunt for terrorists.

Stefano Soatto, Principal Investigator.  April 2006:  Receives AFOSR three-year grant entitled 3D Dynamic Vision.  Scope: Study scenarios with multiple UAVs navigating in partially known urban environments populated by dynamic targets and fine-scale obstacles that call for aggressive maneuvers and cooperative action. 

Lixia Zhang, Principal Investigator.  January 2006:  Receives NSF one-year grant entitled Optimization and Games in Inter-Domain Routing. Scope:  Develop a theoretical framework together with the experimental capability to understand, predict, and design the interplay between economics and routing that implement today’s Internet connectivity.
The January 2006 edition of UCLA Magazine presents a lengthy article on the 2005 DARPA-sponsored "Grand Challenge" robotic car competition. Our entry, "Golem 2," was the result of a joint Golem Group/UCLA, effort, with Professor Stefano Soatto heading up UCLA's team of researchers. (full story)
Jason Cong, Principal Investigator.  October 2005:  Receives NSF two-year grant entitled PIRE: International Center on Design for Nanotechnologies.  Scope:  Address the design issues for nanotechnologies, with a special focus on the architectural level and the integration level.
Deborah Estrin, Principal Investigator.  September 2005:  Receives NSF three-year grant entitled Tenet: An Architecture for Tiered Embedded Networks.  Scope: Develop an alternative architecture for tiered wireless sensor networks that contain both small-form-factor motes and Stargate-class "masters.”

Lixia Zhang, Principal Investigator.  August 2005:  Receives NSF two-year grant entitled DNS Security Revisited:  Enabling Cryptographic Defense in Large-Scale Networks (collaborative research with Colorado State University). 
Scope: Identify and address fundamental technical challenges that must be overcome in order to successfully deploy the DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC) in the global Internet.
Deborah Estrin, Principal Investigator.  July 2005:  Receives NSF three-year grant entitled A Community Resource for Heterogeneous Embedded Sensor Network Development.  Scope:  Develop a community resource for heterogeneous sensor systems based on Emstar, a highly resilient application methodology for microservers and general heterogeneous deployments.  Expand and extend Emstar’s functionality, flexibility, completeness, robustness, documentation, and programmability.  
Boris Kogan. June 2005: Interviewed by IEEE Control Systems Magazine. Account of interview published in the magazine's 2005 issue.

Jason Cong, Principal Investigator (Co-PI Glenn Reinman).  June 2005:  Receives three-year SRC contract entitled Design & Evaluation of Power-Efficient High-Performance Heterogeneous Multi-Core Processors with Programmable Fabric.  Scope:  Address the need for a variety of different tools in the system design space, including accurate models of interconnect power and thermal behavior, cycle-accurate simulation in a heterogeneous CMP environment, and an exploration framework that can determine the most power-efficient core configuration, layout, and interconnect.

Peter Reiher, Principal Investigator.  April 2005:  Receives two-year subcontract from the University of Delaware (prime is HSARA) entitled Benchmarks for Evaluation of DDoS Defense Systems.  Scope:  Develop a common methodology, performance metrics and guidelines for evaluation of DDoS defenses consisting of a benchmark suite defining all necessary elements needed to recreate typical DDoS attack scenarios in a testbed setting.