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News Item Professor Leonard Kleinrock honored with 2012 IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal

The IEEE Board of Directors has honored Professor Leonard Kleinrock with the 2012 IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal, which is given for exceptional contributions to the advancement of communications sciences and engineering.  The citation reads "For pioneering contributions to modeling, analysis, and design of packet-switching networks."

News Item Professor Alexander Sherstov receives an NSF Faculty Early Career Development Award

Professor Alexander (Sasha) Sherstov has been awarded an NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award for 2012-2017 based on the scientific and technical merits of his proposed project entitled "Limits of Communication."  

News Item Professor Judea Pearl awarded the Harvey Prize in Science & Technology

Professor Judea Pearl and Sir Richard Friend of Cambridge University have received the Harvey Prize in Science and Technology for 2011.  

Award commentary: "Through his wide-ranging and keen research, Professor Judea Pearl has laid the theoretical fountains for knowledge representation and reasoning in computer science.  His theories for inference under uncertainty, and most notably the Bayesian network approach, have profoundly influenced diverse fields such as artificial intelligence, statistics, philosophy, health, economics, social sciences, and cognitive sciences.  The Harvey Prize is awarded in recognition of Professor Pearl's foundational work that has touched a multitude of spheres of modern life."

News Item Professor David Heckerman: Elected to 2011 ACM Fellow

Professor David Heckerman has been elected to ACM Fellow based on his significant contributions to reasoning and decision-mking under uncertainty.  The ACM Fellows Program annually celebrates the exceptional contributions of its members in the computing field by electing scientists from the world's leading universities, corporations and research labs.

News Item Professor Mario Gerla receives 2011 MILCOM Technical Achievement Award

Professor Mario Gerla has received the 2011 MILCOM Technical Achievement Award in recognition of "sustained technical contributions to military communications."  Sponsored by the aerospace industry, MILCOM is one of the largest conferences in computer and communications, and covers a variety of fields in addition to tactical communications.

News Item Technology Teams Up With Patient Care

In October 2010, a UCLA-led consortium of five UC schools (Los Angeles, Davis, Irvine, San Diego, San Francisco) and the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center received a three-year $9.9M grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. The effort, Variations in Care: Comparing Heart Failure Case Transition Intervention Effects, will research the use of wireless and telephone care management to reduce hospital readmissions for heart failure patients.

The UC consortium includes Los Angeles, Davis, Irvine, San Diego, and San Francisco. Given that this research involves not just healthcare but technology, the project will take a “team science” approach among the six institutions and within UCLA. The UCLA team includes the Geffen School of Medicine (Dr. M. Ong, Dr. C. Mangione, Dr. J. Escarce, Dr. G. Fonarow); the School of Nursing (Prof. L. Evangelista); the School of Dentistry (Prof. H. Liu); and the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science (Prof. Majid Sarrafzadeh, co-director of the Computer Science Department’s Wireless Health Institute).

The project will examine the effect of two interventions: managing the transition from inpatient to outpatient care via telephone, and managing the transition from inpatient to outpatient care via wireless remote monitors and telephone. These two interventions will be compared to the standard care for heart failure patients.  The goal is to improve quality and reduce cost of care and, most importantly, to identify approaches that are applicable in every community, not just in large academic centers. 

News Item Professor Rafail Ostrovsky: A More Secure Internet

In February 2011 the Computer Science Department received a $2.6M grant from DARPA/ONR to study the mathematical interplay between two-party and multi-party secure protocols, coding theory including probabilistically checkable proofs, and other cryptographic primitives.    The effort, Novel Foundations of Advanced Security (N-FAST), is headed up by Professor Rafail Ostrovsky, who is also the director of the department’s Center for Information & Computational Security (CICS). 

Professor Ostrovsky is a well-known leader in the world of cryptography and has gathered a team of highly qualified researchers for the N-FAST effort. The research team will work with security technologies that prove good behavior without violating privacy, including a win-win approach that builds efficient verification protocols. The impact of the research will be the establishment of novel mathematical structures and insights to bring about significant improvements in the mathematical foundations and future capabilities of national cyber security.

News Item Named Data Networking: A New Internet

As part of the Future Internet Architecture (FIA) program, the National Science Foundation has awarded a three-year, $8M grant to UCLA (and collaborating universities) for support of the Named Data Networking (NDN) project. NDN was one of four projects funded under the FIA program, whose goal is to help develop new ideas and innovations toward the development of a more robust, secure and reliable Internet.

In UCLA’s Computer Science Department, the NDN project is under the direction of Professor Lixia Zhang, whose experience with the design of the Internet is preeminent. Collaborating institutions are Colorado State University, Palo Alto Research Center, University of Arizona, University of Illinois/Urbana-Champaign, UC Irvine, University of Memphis, UC San Diego, Washington University and Yale University.

While the Internet has far exceeded expectations, it has also stretched initial assumptions, often creating problems that challenge its underlying communication model. Users and applications operate in terms of content, making it increasingly limiting and difficult to conform to the IP's requirement to communicate by discovering and specifying location. To carry the Internet into the future, a conceptually simple yet transformational architectural shift is required—and that is what NDN is all about.

NDN capitalizes on the strengths—and addresses the weaknesses—of the Internet's current host-based, point-to-point communication architecture in order to naturally accommodate emerging patterns of communication.  The proposed architecture will move the Internet's communication paradigm from today's focus on "where" (i.e., addresses, servers, and hosts) to "what" (i.e., the content that users and applications care about). 

The current Internet secures the data container. NDN will secure the contents, a design choice that decouples trust in data from trust in hosts, enabling several radically scalable communication mechanisms such as automatic caching to optimize bandwidth. The project studies the technical challenges that must be addressed to validate NDN as a future Internet architecture—routing scalability, fast forwarding, trust models, network security, content protection and privacy, and fundamental communication theory. 

News Item Inspiration Through Education

Mobilizing for Innovative Computer Science Teaching and Learning is a $12.5M National Science Foundation math/science partnership funded for 2010-2015. UCLA’s Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS), headed up by Debra Estrin, is partnered with UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies (Center X), the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), and the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA).

Mobilize builds upon a high school student’s enchantment, fascination, and engagement with mobile technology. At the heart of this project is the CENS Participatory Sensing System—an innovative method of data collection and analysis in which individuals use mobile phones to systematically collect and interpret data about issues important to them and their communities.  The project will develop a hands-on, query-based curriculum along with professional development for teachers in computer science, mathematics, and science high school classes.  Mobilize brings together computational thinking with our students’ sense of civic involvement in their own communities.

The project is especially committed to ensuring access to innovative instruction in the Los Angeles Unified School District—especially those schools with high numbers of African American and Latino students. In LAUSD, interdisciplinary teams of students and teachers in computer science, mathematics, life and physical science, as well as social science, will participate in this project. As computer science is now an integral part of innovation across all fields, our goal is to strengthen computer science instruction throughout our educational system.

We are sitting at the crux of critical educational issues facing our country: How can we foster innovation and inventiveness, and how do we guarantee quality and rigorous education for all students?  What we learn about increasing opportunities for query-based, rigorous learning of computer science and about innovative professional development for teachers, especially in large urban school districts, will be critically important for the entire country across multiple disciplines, communities, and institutions. 

News Item Professor Majid Sarrafzadeh honored as keynote speaker at Eight Annual HEALTHCARE UNBOUND Conference

Professor Majid Sarrafzadeh was recently honored as a keynote speaker at the Eight Annual HEALTHCARE UNBOUND Conference held 11-12 July 2011 in San Diego. His address, Remote Monitoring to Improve Hospital Readmission Rates, addressed concerns over the cost and effectiveness of America's health care system. Professor Sarrafzadeh works with practicing physicians to develop easily understood remote monitoring solutions that can save patients' time, money and lives.

News Item Professor Jason Cong serves as keynote speaker

Professor Jason Cong served as keynote speaker at the ASAP 2011 22nd IEEE International Conference on Application-Specific Systems, Architectures and Processors.  The conference was held in Santa Monica, CA, 11-14 September 2011.

News Item A Successful Technology Transfer for the Computer Science Department

Xilinx, Inc., the world's leading provider of programmable platforms, has announced the acquisition of AutoESL Design Technologies, Inc.

AutoESL has been a leader in high-level synthesis since its inception in 2006. The company was founded by Professor Jason Cong and former doctoral students Yiping Fan and Zhiru Zhang. The company was licensed to use the xPilot system-level synthesis software that was developed by Professor Cong and his students with support from NSF, GSRC, SRC and the UC MICRO program. more

News Item Professor Stanley Osher: The Split Bregman Method for L1-Regularized Problems

"The Split Bregman Method for L1-Regularized Problems" authored by Tom Goldstein (Math) and Stanley Osher (Math and CS), has been identified by the Thomson Reuters Essential Science IndicatorsSM as a featured "New Hot Paper in the Field of Computer Science." This means that the paper has been one of the most-cited papers in this discipline during the past two years. The paper was published in the SIAM Journal on Imaging Sciences, 2009. http://epubs.siam.org/siims/resource/1/sjisbi/v2/i2/p323_s1

News Item Leonard Kleinrock selected to give this year's E. Leonard Arnoff Memorial Lecture

Leonard Kleinrock has been selected to give this year's E. Leonard Arnoff Memorial Lecture. His lecture, A brief History of the Internet and Its Dynamic Future, will take place in May 2011.

These lectures are sponsored by the University of Cincinnati's College of Business and are among the most prestigious series of lectures in the world on operations research and management science topics.

 

News Item Judea Pearl nominated to present the Institute of Mathematical Statistics Medallion Lecture

Professor Judea Pearl has been nominated to present the Institute of Mathematical Statistics Medallion Lecture at the annual IMS Joint Statistical Meeting which will be held in Montreal, Canada, in 2013.

Each year eight Medallion Lecturers are chosen across all areas of statistics and probability. The Medallion nomination is an honor and an acknowledgement of a significant contribution to one or more areas of research.

 

News Item Cultivating Innovation: success of technology transfer between universities and companies

In an article entitled "Cultivating Innovation," the January issue of Alaska Airlines Magazine discusses the success of technology transfer between universities and companies.

More universities are now seeking ways to commercialize their academic work, thereby creating new businesses, jobs and revenue streams. Among the many people interviewed and quoted for this article is CSD professor Majid Sarrafzadeh, who is co-director of UCLA's Wireless Health Institute. Majid discusses his current work (e.g., the smart shoe which monitors a patient's balance problems and the smart bedsheet which reduces the risk of bedsores), and his affiliation with the California NanoSystems Institute which is acting as an on-campus incubator to nurture the university's intellectual property and technology transfer programs.

News Item Wall Street Journal awarded its 2010 Technology Innovation Award to Carey Nachenberg

The Wall Street Journal has awarded its 2010 Technology Innovation Award (Computer Security Category) to a technology that was invented by Carey Nachenberg, CSD adjunct assistant professor.

This new technology (currently called Quorum) examines the software running on millions of computers to spot possible threats. Based on patterns that reflect a program's source, age, prevalence and other characteristics, a "reputation rating" is assigned to every piece of software that Quorum comes across. This new technology is detecting about 10 million new threats a month that are invisible to traditional security methods.

 

News Item US News and World Report article on UCLA's Center for Domain-Specific Computing

US News and World Report has posted a 26 July 2010 article featuring UCLA's Center for Domain-Specific Computing, which is headed up by Professor Jason Cong. This article discusses the Center's goal of developing a health care computing prototype that will enable physicians to use computers in speedier, more cost-efficient, and more productive ways. Additionally, the goal here is that these researchers can tailor this domain-specific technology to other applications -- for example, to study atmospheric effects. See the following website for the full text of this article.

http://www.usnews.com/science/articles/2010/07/26/customized-computing-for-health-care.html
News Item Heuristic, Probability and Causality: A Tribute to Judea Pearl

Computer science professor Judea Pearl was honored on March 12th 2010 at an all-day workshop celebrating his influential contributions to artificial intelligence and related science. story

This event, held at the UCLA Faculty Center, coincided with the 25th anniversary of Pearl's introduction of the term Bayesian Network—a graphical model of probabilistic and causal relationships named after the 18th Century English mathematician Thomas Bayes. Professor Pearl was presented with a Festschrift entitled "Heuristic, Probability and Causality: A Tribute to Judea Pearl". See video

 

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