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News Item 2012 Graduate Student Awards

Recipients of Outstanding Graduate Student Research Awards from industry affiliates (advisors in parenthesis)

Mahsan Rofouel (Majid Sarrafzadeh)                 Google 

Nick Furlotte (Eleazar Eskin)                               Northrup Grumman Corporation

Abhishek Jain (Amit Sahai & Rafi Ostrovsky)      Symantic

Yi Zou (Jason Cong)                                           Cisco Systems, Inc.

Recipients of  the CS Department's 2012  Outstanding Graduate Awards

Dan He (Eleazar Eskin)                                       Outstanding Ph.D. Graduate

Saro Meguerdichian (Miodrag Potkonjak)           Outstanding Master's Graduate

News Item Professor Leonard Kleinrock: Internet Hall of Fame

On April 23rd,  the Internet Society marked its 20th anniversary with a gala event in Geneva, Switzerland, introducing the newly established Internet Hall of Fame and inducting the inaugural class of 2012.  The 33 inductees were categorized as pioneers, innovators, or global connectors.

Professor Leonard Kleinrock has been inducted into the Hall of Fame's Pioneers Circle, a group that encompasses those who were instrumental in the early design and development of the Internet.  Other inducted pioneers include Paul Baran, Vint Cerf, Danny Cohen, Steve Crocker, Donald Davies, Elizabeth Feinler, Charles Herzfeld, Robert Kahn, Peter Kirstein, John Klensin, Jon Postel, Louis Pouzin, and Lawrence Roberts.  Additionally, Leonard was the Internet Society's keynote speaker for this 20th anniversary event.

The Internet Society is the trusted independent source for Internet information and thought leadership from around the world.  With its principled vision and substantial technological foundation, the Society promotes open dialogue on Internet policy, technology, and future development among users, companies, governments, and other organizations.  Its goal is to enable the continued evolution and growth of the Internet for everyone.

News Item SIGMOD 2012 Best Paper Award

"High-Performance Complex Event Processing Over XML Streams," a paper authored by graduate students Barzan Mozafari and Kai Zeng, and advisor Professor Carlo Zaniolo, has been selected as the winner of SIGMOD's 2012 Best Paper Award.  SIGMOD is the ACM's Special Interest Group on Management of Data, specializing in large-scale data management problems and databases.

News Item Professor Judea Pearl Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Professor Judea Pearl has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in recognition of his outstanding accomplishments.  Judea is one of six UCLA faculty elected to the Academy's 2012 class: two from the field of mathematics and two from biology and human genetics; one from the field of English literature, and of course, Judea's field is artificial intelligence.

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences has a 230-plus year history of recognizing some of the world's most accomplished scholars, scientists, writers, artists, and civic, corporate and philanthropic leaders.  Current membership includes more than 250 Nobel laureates and more than 60 Pulitzer Prize winners.

News Item Remembering Professor Boris Kogan

For over two decades, we were fortunate to have Boris Kogan as an adjunct professor in the Computer Science Department. His history of ground-breaking scientific work and his 1987 immigration from the Soviet Union to the United States should be an inspiration to all.  

Dr. Kogan's B.S. and M.S. degrees were from the Charkov Electrical Engineering Institute; he received his Ph.D. in automatic control from the Moscow Institute of Automation and Telemechanics, USSR Academy of Science. In the Soviet Union, Dr. Kogan's scientific interests centered on automatic control, computer design, and computer simulation. He served as a professor/lecturer with the Moscow Institute for Physics and Engineering; he created and was the first director of the Computer Simulation Laboratory; and in 1951 he was awarded the USSR State Prize for creating the first analog computer.

Here at UCLA, Dr. Kogan's research turned to the investigation of electrical wave propagation in excitable media using massively parallel digital computer systems.  His studies focused on the peculiarities of electrical wave propagation along the healthy and the diseased heart muscle, and his goal was to find, together with cardiologists, the mechanisms of heart fibrillation and the corresponding preventive means.  

Boris Kogan was 98 years old when he died this month (April 2012).  He had many colleagues and friends here in the Computer Science Department and in several of UCLA's medical departments.  We shall miss him.

News Item Graduate Student Elias Bareinboim Wins Yahoo Award

Graduate Student Elias Bareinboim has been selected as one of thirty exceptional Ph.D. students to be part of Yahoo!'s 2012 Key Scientific Challenges Program.  Yahoo! created this program to support a limited number of outstanding Ph.D. students who are doing research in very important and challenging areas.  Professor Judea Pearl is Elias' advisor.

News Item Leonard Kleinrock awarded status of Eminent Member of IEEE Electrical & Computer Engineering Honor Society (Eta Kappa Nu)

Professor Leonard Kleinrock has been awarded the status of Eminent Member of IEEE's Electrical and Computer Engineering Honor Society (Eta Kappa Nu).  This honor is conferred upon those whose technical attainment and contributions to society through leadership in the fields of electrical and computer engineering have resulted in significant benefits to humankind.  Other recipients include Vannever Bush, Simon Ramo, Robert Lucky, Gordon Bell, Gordon Moore, Steve Wozniak and Vinton Cerf.

News Item Symantec Term Chair in Computer Science for 2011

Professor Jennifer Wortman Vaughan has been appointed to the Symantec Term Chair in Computer Science for 2011.  The chair was established to support the teaching and research activities of a distinguished junior faculty to foster innovation in computer science.  Professor Vaughan's fields of expertise include machine learning, learning theory, incentive design, and social computing.  

News Item Professor Lixia Zhang: Jonathan B. Postel Chair in Computer Science

Professor Lixia Zhang has received an appointment to the Jonathan B. Postel Chair in Computer Science, effective 1 July 2011.  Professor Zhang's areas of expertise include Internet architecture, principles of network protocol designs, security, and resiliency in global-scale systems.

The chair, established through an endowed fund initially created by a distinguished group of Postel's friends and family, honors the famed computer scientist's lifetime achievements.

News Item In Memoriam: Computer Science Pioneer Gerald Estrin

Gerald Estrin, an outstanding teacher, computer scientist, and friend to so many here at UCLA, passed away on March 29, 2012, at age 90.  

Jerry earned his bachelor's, master's and Ph.D. in 1948, 1949, and 1951 at the University of Wisconsin.  From 1950 to 1956 he served as a research engineer with the John von Neumann group at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton, N.J.  It was here that Jerry worked on one of the earliest computers.

In 1954 Jerry left for Israel to lead the development of the first computer in the Middle East. Expertise was scare; e.g., he had to rely on two Bulgarian immigrants who made parts for fans and bicycles in a shack to manufacture the very thin copper strips needed for the project.  In just 15 months, he and his team developed WEIZAC, the first large-scale computer outside the U.S. or Western Europe.

Jerry joined the UCLA faculty in 1956, serving as chair of the Computer Science Department from 1979 to 1982 and again from 1985 to 1988. His accomplishments were manifold, and included developing the concept of reconfigurable computing, an idea that led to new types of programmable computer chips that are part of systems and devices in use today.   In addition, many of the original Internet pioneers were fortunate to have been his students or colleagues.

Jerry was an IEEE Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a member of the Board of Governors of the Weizmann Institute of Science.  He was also an avid fan of the UCLA Bruins basketball team and the Metropolitan Opera.  Both his wife, Thelma Estrin, and his daughter, Deborah Estrin, are faculty members here in the Computer Science Department.

Jerry contributed so much to so many.  We shall miss him.

News Item Algirdas Avizienis Selected as Winner of 2012 Jean-Claude Laprie Award in Dependable Computing
The Jean-Claude Laprie Award recognizes outstanding papers published at least ten years ago that have significantly influenced the theory and/or practice of dependable computing. Professor Algirdas Avizienis is one of three recipients of this 2012 award based on his 1967 paper, "Design of Fault-Tolerent Computers," which was published in Proceedings of American Federation of Information Processing Societies Fall Joint Computer Conference.  

The citation for this award reads, in part:  "This landmark paper was instrumental in defining fault-tolerant computing as a discipline.  It laid out a preliminary description and methodology of the field defining fault and error types, the use of various forms of protective redundancy and recovery techniques to continue operation in the presence of faults."
News Item Student receives IBM Ph.D. fellowship

Graduate student Chunyi Peng has been awarded a 2012-2013 IBM Ph.D. fellowship to support her research in computer networking.  This is an extremely selective worldwide competition that receives hundreds of nominations each year, but only makes a handful of awards.  Chunyi's advisor is Professor Songwu Lu.

News Item In Memoriam: Robert "Buz" Uzaglis

Robert "Buz" Uzgalis, an amazing individual and former professor in the Computer Science Department, passed away suddenly in March 2012 at the age of 71.

Bob served UCLA for many years, beginning in 1964 as a computer programmer in the Sociology and Anatomy Departments.  He became a lecturer in what is now the Computer Science Department, and then served as a professor in our department from 1973 to 1985.  Following that, the urge to wander struck him, and he gave away most of his possessions and moved to the Far East, doing research at Sumitomo Metal Industries labs in Osaka until 1990, and then research and teaching at the University of Hong Kong until 1993 and the University of Auckland until 1997.  He then retired and moved back to Los Angeles, acting as a part-time consultant (home page http://serve.net/buz/) and among other things, developing the Tigertail Virtual Museum, one of the first successful virtual art museums.

Bob was a classic self-trained computer scientist, the likes of which one no longer sees: he had no Ph.D., no master's, not even a bachelors!  He approached his research topics with zest and a painstaking effort that inspired colleagues and students.  He worked in many areas, including computer graphics and language design and implementation, hashing and compression, reliable knowledge representation, and art preservation.  Bob was active until the day he died.  When our department switched to its current website format this year, his visiting talk happened to be the first one featured.  Currently, two of my students are finishing off directed-research projects based on work that we did in collaboration with Bob.

What all of us remember about Bob is how he gave of himself -- always thinking and always ready to hear and give back.  Guests at his concerts and dinners included music store clerks, Turing Award winners, students, software developers, and art and law professors.  Bob clearly cherished and listened to and talked with them all.  We are all lucky to have had him, and he will be greatly missed.

News Item Professor Judea Pearl Wins 2011 ACM Turing Award

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has named Professor Judea Pearl the winner of the 2011 Turing Award for innovations that have enabled remarkable advances in the partnership between humans and intelligence (AI).  As noted by the ACM, Professor Pearl's work serves as the standard method for handling uncertainty in computer systems, with applications ranging from medical diagnosis, homeland security, and genetic counseling, to natural language understanding and mapping gene expression data.  His influence extends beyond artificial intelligence and even computer science, to human reasoning and the philosophy of science.

The Turing Award is widely considered to be the "Nobel Prize in Computing."  It is named for British mathematician Alan M. Turing who articulated the mathematical foundation and limits of computing, and who was a key contributor to the Allied cryptanalysis of Germany's Enigma cipher and Tunny encoding machine in World War II.

Since its inception in 1966, The Turing Award has honored the computer scientists and engineers who created the systems and underlying theoretical foundations that are propelling today's information technology industry.

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.

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