Recent News
Here's what is happening in the Computer Science department.
Recent News Stories
| Jan 03 2012: | This is Jawaherul's second paper in a series of 3 (all written in the fist year of his PhD). Muhammad's first paper was invited to the special issue on the best papers at Graph Drawing 2011. The winning submission: Muhammad Jawaherul Alam, Therese C. Biedl, Stefan Felsner, Andreas Gerasch, Michael Kaufmann, Stephen G. Kobourov: Linear-Time Algorithms for Hole-Free Rectilinear Proportional Contact Graph Representations. 22nd International Symposium on Algorithms and Computation (ISAAC), p. 281-291, 2011. | |
| Dec 14 2011: | CS Professors David Lowenthal and Chris Gniady were featured for their work on green computing in the Arizona Daily Star. They are working on power/energy issues ranging from smartphones to supercomputers. Learn more | |
| Dec 14 2011: | CS Professor Christian Collberg was featured in the Arizona Daily Star with an article titled "Defeating real bad guys in the virtual world." Professor Collberg's work centers around the so-called "Man-At-The-End" problem--a kind of attack against computers that can affect anything from online computer games, to electronic voting systems, to the electrical power grid. Learn more | |
| Nov 08 2011: | Kyriacos Pavlou's work "Database Forensics in the Service of Information Accountability" won 1st place in the graduate category of Physical Sciences, Mathematics, Computer Engineering and Computer Science at the UA 2011 Student Showcase held on Friday Nov 4th. The first place winners get an Award Certificate and $250. Learn more | |
| Oct 03 2011: | Tom Smallwood, an ISTA senior, and Cody Jorgensen, a Computer Science senior, who met in a software development club, founded Objective Coders LLC in 2010, a company that develops apps for both Apple and Android devices. Learn more | |
| Oct 03 2011: | While the rest of us were researching innovative new ways to slack off, computer engineering and computer science senior Jesse Gunsch and computer engineering junior Chas Leichner formulated a system to help UA students choose their next semester’s classes just in time for the first rounds of registration. Learn more | |
| Aug 30 2011: | Daniel Stolte (University Communications) | |
| Aug 25 2011: | Graduate Student Meet-and-Greet (Gould-Simpson, 9th Floor) | |
| Aug 24 2011: | Beichuan Zhang, an assistant professor in the UA's computer science department, has received an international award for his efforts toward a more energy-efficient Internet infrastructure Learn more | |
| Aug 10 2011: | August 8, 2011: UA Honors College students have collaborated with graduate students studying computer science to train community members on basic computer skills. Learn more | |
| Aug 10 2011: | CS Instructor, Lester McCann has been awarded the 2011 College of Science Distinguished Early-Career Teaching Award. This award recognizes "outstanding classroom teaching at the undergraduate or graduate levels." He will officially receive the award at the College of Science Faculty Reception on Tue Sept. 20. Congratulations, Lester! | |
| Jul 19 2011: | Raquel Torres Peralta, Tasneem Kaochar, Ian Fasel, Clay Morrison, Tom Walsh and Paul Cohen.Challenges to Decoding the Intention Behind Natural Instruction
(Extended Abstract).
Abstract: Currently, most systems for human-robot teaching allow only one mode of teacher-student interaction (e.g., teaching by demonstration or feedback), and teaching episodes have to be carefully set-up by an expert. To understand how we might integrate multiple, interleaved forms of human instruction into a robot learner, we performed a behavioral study in which 44 untrained humans were allowed to freely mix interaction modes to teach a simulated robot (secretly controlled by a human) a complex task. Analysis of transcripts showed that human teachers often give instructions that require considerable interpretation and are not easily translated into a form useable by machine learning algorithms. In particular, humans often use implicit instructions, fail to clearly indicate the boundaries of procedures, and tightly interleave testing, feedback, and new instruction. In this paper, we detail these teaching patterns and discuss the challenges they pose to automatic teaching interpretation as well as the machine-learning algorithms that must ultimately process these instructions. We highlight the challenges by demonstrating the difficulties of an initial automatic teacher interpretation system. This paper received the Best Presentation award at the IJCAI 2011 workshop on Agents Learning Interactively from Human Teachers (ALIHT), which concluded this past weekend. Tasneem applied for and received travel support from three sources: The ACM-W (ACM's Women In Computing) travel scholarship is funded by Wipro Technologies; the scholarship site is: http://women.acm.org/participate/scholarship/index.cfm. The Coalition to Diversify Computing; http://www.cdc-computing.org/programs/current-programs/students-to-conferences/ The User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization Conference, held this year in Girona, Spain. Many thanks to these sponsors, and congratulations to Tasneem and Raquel! | |
| May 31 2011: | Professor David Lowenthal is General Chair of the 25th ACM International Conference on Supercomputing, being held this week in Tucson at Loews Ventana Canyon Resort. ICS is the premier international forum for the presentation of research results in high-performance computing systems. Professor Chris Gniady is serving as local arrangements chair. Also, Ph.D students Peter Bailey, Tapasya Patki, Aniruddha Marathe, Lei Ye (all in CS), and Greg Striemer (ECE) are serving as student volunteers. New results will be presented on topics relating to supercomputing such as GPUs, non-volatile memory systems, transactional memory, programming models, and power. Learn more | |
| May 27 2011: | Computer Science's own Stephen Kobourov was awarded a Humboldt fellowship for research to be done in Germany. Please visit the link to a recent article published in the UANews! Learn more | |
| May 17 2011: | UA researchers Beichuan Zhang and Chris Gniady have received a four-year National Science Foundation grant toward moving the Internet's infrastructure from "today's energy-oblivious to tomorrow's energy-efficient." Learn more | |
| May 12 2011: | Prof. Rick Snodgrass has been given the Outstanding Advising Award from the Honors College. The award letter says: "As a faculty honors advisor for Computer Science, your work with students stands out as excellent because of your attentiveness to students and their individual needs. You have organized the Computer Science Honors program and put together what we consider to be the model for departmental Honors websites. You are an invaluable resource and colleague---offering ideas and feedback and engaging in a full partnership with The Honors College. This award is a testament to your ability to inspire intellectual development and your commitment to teaching and advising." Congratulations, Rick! | |
| Apr 27 2011: | CS Senior David Shefchik was featured in an interview in the Kyungwon University newspaper of Korea. David is the first American exchange student to study at the university. Article in original Korean here. | |
| Apr 20 2011: | Congratulations to Tom Lowry, SISTA/CS Lab Staff, who is a 2011 recipient of The Staff Awards for Excellence, presented annually by the UA Staff Advisory Council, the Appointed Professionals Advisory Council, President Robert N. Shelton and the President's Cabinet. The Staff Awards for Excellence are designed to recognize employees who go above and beyond the call of duty in their jobs, whether it's by putting in extra hours, initiating innovative programs or always arriving at the office with a smile. Learn more | |
| Apr 13 2011: | Congratulations to Profs. Stephen Kobourov and Christian Collberg who, together with their colleagues, Profs. Loukas Lazos and Srini Ramasubramanian, have been awarded an 8-month, $380K Phase 1 award from the Office of Naval Research for the project "Putting Network Security on the Map: Visualizing Network Security with a Unified Map Metaphor". This project is directed at the design and implementation of a natural, easy to learn, comprehensive, and real-time visualization system, which employs a unified metaphor — the geographic map — for visualizing network activity of interest. The proposed visualization system will be used in conjunction with a Distributed IDS system for rapidly identifying network intrusions such as port scans, denial-of-service attacks, and topological attacks in mobile networks. A Phase 1 award such as this represents the initial portion of a multi-part project that overall adds up to a significant amount of research funding. Congratulations Stephen and Christian! | |
| Apr 01 2011: | Four UA Computer Science students who started out taking an introductory program are now developing apps and games for Apple and Android mobile devices. Learn more | |
| Nov 04 2010: | From connections to content, Beichuan Zhang, a UA assistant professor of computer science, is part of a team receiving up to $8 million in National Science Foundation funding to investigate ways to revolutionize the Internet's architecture. Learn more | |
| Oct 19 2010: | UA Working to Create a Bilingual, Bicultural 'Roboceptionist'
A three-year, $1 million grant from the Qatar National Research Foundation is funding basic advances in human-computer interaction. Majd Sakr, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, is the principal investigator on the grant. Reid Simmons, a professor at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute in Pittsburgh, and Sandiway Fong, a UA associate professor of linguistics and computer science, are the co-PIs. Carnegie Mellon University will provide the robotics innovations, while the UA will supply the language technology. Learn more | |
| Aug 24 2010: | Alon Efrat, UA Associate Professor of Computer Science, is working with a team of researchers on a project intended to help prevent a telecommunications meltdown in the event of an attack or natural disaster.
A nuclear weapon launched over the U.S. could create an electromagnetic pulse that would knock out access to power and electronics. To prepare for this and other potential disasters, Alon Efrat and his colleagues are working on a newly funded research project fueled by the philosophy that telecommunications providers should be aware of system weaknesses and actively work to secure them. Learn more | |
| Jul 29 2010: | The department is pleased to announce that Paul Cohen, Ian Fasel, Kobus Barnard and Deva Ramanan (UC Irvine) have received a $5M, five year award from DARPA's Mind's Eye program. Clay Morrison assisted with preparing the proposal. Please join us in congratulating them!
The goal of Mind's Eye is to build a camera that can tell us what it sees. DARPA is interested in this problem because the cost of surveillance teams is very high, as is the cost of monitoring "dumb" remote cameras. A "smart" camera ought to be able to report suspicious activity. Mind's Eye is a particularly interesting problem because it merges computer vision with machine learning and models of human activities. The approach of the UA-UCI team involves three levels of inference: At the highest level, there are models of activity and at the lowest, there are vision algorithms optimized for pose recognition and tracking. The innovation is at the middle level, where simulation will generate possible futures a brief instant before they happen in the physical world. Said differently, the approach is to imagine, via simulation, what might be happening in the scene. Imagination can constrain conventional vision processing and should make it more accurate and efficient. Learn more | |
| Jul 12 2010: | Alon Efrat, along with Gil Zussman of Columbia and Eytan Modiao of MIT, has been awarded $545,000 jointly by NSF to identify the most vulnerable parts of a telecommunications network and to provide a-priori protection plan and dynamtic restoration algorithms. Abstract: Telecommunication networks heavily rely on physical infrastructures (such as optical fibers, amplifiers, routers, and switches), and therefore, are vulnerable to natural disasters, such as earthquakes or floods, as well as to physical attacks, such as an Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) attack. Physical attacks or disasters affect a specific geographical area or areas, and will result in failures of a large number of neighboring components. The goals of the project are to develop techniques to identify the most vulnerable parts of the network, and to develop tools to provide a-priori protection plan for the network, and develop dynamic restoration algorithms that will improve the resilience of networks to geographically correlated attacks and prevent cascading failures. | |
| Jul 12 2010: | Paul Cohen and his team have been awarded $1.4 million for their project, which will teach students and engage them in problem-solving activities via established social networking sites. Learn more | |
| Jul 12 2010: | University of Arizona junior Warren Harper is out to rock the world of chess. The 19-year-old computer science major from Houston is headed to St. Louis to compete in the 2010 U.S. Junior Closed Chess Tournament. The competition runs today through July 19. Learn more | |
| Jun 14 2010: | Diana Archangeli, a UA linguistics professor, is heading up a team using ultrasound and a range of other devices to create a technology that would enable the detection of words without auditory queues.
The team recently earned a $30,000 Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences Grants for Faculty grant, a UA funding program established to aid University researchers in transitioning promising projects from conception to application. Other members include Ian Fasel, an assistant research professor of computer science, and Jeff Berry and Jae Hyun Sung, both graduate students in the linguistics department. Learn more | |
| Jun 07 2010: | Check out two stories in UA News today about some of our students and a faculty member. Students Tom Smallwood, Cody Jorgensen, Charles Magahern, and James Magahern developed an iPhone app Twitscape: http://uanews.org/node/32056 Travel to the WWDC is partially supported by the Department of computer Science. Professor Ian Fasel and his research on building intelligent robots: http://uanews.org/node/31830 Learn more | |
| Jun 03 2010: | Associate Professor John Kececioglu has achieved major recognition through his recent paper in the Journal of Computational Biology entitled "Aligning protein sequences with predicted secondary structure" being selected for the Faculty of 1000 Biology (See: http://www.f1000biology.com).
This means that the paper has been identified as being significant in the literature, and important for biologists to read. (Researchers in computational biology often note in their CV when their papers have been selected by Faculty of 1000 Biology.) Congratulations, John! (And also our recent graduates Eagu Kim and Travis Wheeler, who were coauthors with John on this notable paper.) Learn more | |
| May 18 2010: | Four computer science students, Cody Jorgensen, Thomas Smallwood, Charles Magahern, and James Magahern, were among 300 students worldwide chosen to attend Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference 2010 (WWDC) this summer. They applied individually to this very competitive program: a few thousand students apply, yet only 300 students are chosen (it was 400 last year, including Charles Magahern). A ticket to attend the event costs $1599 per developer. The WWDC Student Scholarship offers qualified university students the opportunity to receive a free ticket to attend the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference 2010. Charles, Cody, and Tom collaborated on an iPhone application call Twitscape. James created the application's icon. It is a location-based, anonymous Twitter client. People without a Twitter account can use the application to keep up with what people around them are Tweeting. This application is available at Apple's App Store. All four are extremely interested in Apple's products, ranging from MacBooks to iPhone/iPad. They feel that Apple creates truly amazing software for their products. They believe that they were selected because of their experience in iPhone and Mac development, their passion for software development, and their professional work experience. About WWDC Over 5,000 of the world’s best and brightest Apple developers come together for the week-long Apple Worldwide Developers Conference at Moscone West, in San Francisco, California. The event runs from June 7 through June 11. This technical event provides developers with the opportunity to hear about the latest advancements in iPhone OS and Mac OS X through practical examples that you can apply directly to your app development. Over 1,000 Apple engineers will be attending to present advanced coding and development techniques that will show how to enhance the capabilities of developers' applications with the revolutionary technologies in iPhone OS and Mac OS X. Congratulations to Cody, Thomas, Charles, and James! Travel to the WWDC is partially supported by the Department of computer Science. " Learn more | |
| May 06 2010: | The integration of computer science into the K-12 curriculum in the U.S. has not kept pace with other countries, and a serious shortage of information technologists exists at all levels, according to a new study by computer science professionals including the University of Arizona's Suzanne Westbrook. The overall shortage of women and underrepresented minority students in computing and the increasing need for professionals in the field motivated Westbook and leaders from the Computer Science Teachers Association, or CSTA, the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, or ABI, to investigate barriers to the profession and make recommendations for improvement. Westbook, associate head of the UA department of computer science, studies gender issues in computing education, and she is a member of the Education, Outreach and Training team of the National Science Foundation funded iPlant Collaborative project. Learn more | |
| Apr 21 2010: | CLIME: Concept Learning from Intrinsically Motivated sensory-motor Experience, award from DARPA Most current robots are designed for solving one or a handful of specific, sophisticated tasks, using carefully designed sensor systems (such as computer vision systems) for localizing objects, terrain and landmarks. However these robots do not truly understand anything about these objects, such as how they can be acted upon, how they interact with each other, or any causal relationships between their visual and physical properties. Moreover, the only way for robots to learn new concepts is for a human to provide very labor-intensive hand coding, sometimes utilizing supervised machine learning. Thanks to a $250,000 award from DARPA to Asst. Research Professor Ian Fasel, CLIME (Concept Learning from Intrinsically Motivated sensory-motor Experience) is a new project which seeks to establish if it is possible for a robot to learn language-like conceptual representations through unsupervised sensory-motor experience with the world. Robots in this project will be "born" with primitive sensory motor skills, but will bootstrap to higher level concepts by "playing" with objects, driven by an internal, information-theoretic "curiosity", and using their experiences to build rich, multi-modal representations of those objects and features about them such as affordances and common causes. Ultimately, these robots may one day be able to truly understand human speech by connecting "words" to all the implications those words have about the physical world. Learn more | |
| Apr 21 2010: | The Arizona Articulatory, Acoustic, and Visual Speech Database, award from AHSS The most defining characteristic of humans is our facile ability to learn and use language. Yet every domain of language is itself a complex system. Sound is the most concrete of these, with measurable acoustic and articulatory properties, yet it is only marginally understood, in part because of its inherent complexity and in part because of challenges in collecting and analyzing data, particularly articulatory data. Recently, Professors Diana Archangeli, Linguistics, and Ian Fasel, CS, received an $29,994 AHHS (Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences Grants for Faculty) award to develop new methods for understanding the non-acoustic aspects of speech. In this research, ultrasound, video, audio, nasal airflow, and electroglottography are simultaneously captured during speech, and then sophisticated machine learning methods are used to analyze the microstructure of vocal tract gestures, tongue positions, lip movement, audio, and their inter-relationships. One of the near-term outcomes of this project will be the creation of the public "Arizona Articulatory, Acoustic, and Visual Speech Database", which will serve as a foundation for a wide variety of research topics ranging from phonology, automatic speech recognition, speech therapy, music and language teaching, and documentation of Native American languages. Professor Ian Fasel and his research on building intelligent robots: http://uanews.org/node/31830" Learn more | |
| Apr 17 2010: | Greg Andrews will be one of two people receiving the inaugural Outstanding Alumni Award from the Computer Science & Engineering Department at the University of Washington. He will receive this award at the departmental commencement ceremony on June 12, 2010. The UW Computer Science and Engineering Department was established in 1967. Greg arrived two years later (his B.S. in Mathematics is from Stanford University, in 1969). Greg received a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1974. His dissertation advisor was Alan Shaw. This award joins several other prestigious awards Greg has received, including a Career Distinguished Teaching Award at the U of A and ACM Fellow. He chaired our department from 1986-93 and again from 2006-08. | |
| Apr 16 2010: | Congratulations to the following people, who have been around the department, contributing in myriad ways, for an awfully long time! John Luiten, 25 year award John Hartman, 15 year award Patrick Homer, 15 year award Alon Efrat, 10 year award Lupe Jacobo, 10 year award John Kececioglu, 10 year award Stephen Kobourov, 10 year award All were recognized last week at the Annual Service Award Luncheon hosted by President Shelton and Provost Hay. Our thanks to John, John, Patrick, Alon, Lupe, John, and Stephen for the skills they bring and for the time and energy and passion they invest in their jobs here in our department. | |
| Apr 06 2010: | Troy J. Comi, Beryl Jones, Stacy Marla Shiffler and Jennifer Sierchio are all UA Honors College students and each have been named a recipient of the prestigious national Goldwater Scholarship. Learn more | |
| Apr 05 2010: | A long-missing part of the educational informatics focal problem has been social networking and large-scale educational gaming for students. Thanks to a $1.4M, three-year award from DARPA's CS STEM program to Paul Cohen and Carole Beal, this piece will soon be developed. The project is called "Teach Ourselves," and is based on Beal's work showing that students not only enjoy authoring math problems but learn math by doing so. Social networks such as Teach Ourselves (which will be built on top of Facebook) provide large audiences for student-authored problems. Students will get points for both authoring and solving problems, and they will be able to exchange points for real goods. A marketplace will be developed not only for math problems but for all sorts of intellectual work, including writing, translation, tutoring, and so on. Students will self-organize into guilds around these kinds of activities. | |
| Mar 11 2010: | The B2E2 group (that's Biosphere 2 Evapotranspiration Experiment
Group, which consists of Carole Beal, Juan Villegas, Matt Adamson and
Clay Morrison) will be running the Evapotranspiration experiment in a
class at Wilson K8 the week of April 26-30, involving two classes, for
58 students. The exciting thing about this is that it is true "citizen science": middle and high school students are actually running experiments in the classroom that contribute data for scientific papers, augmenting the data collected at Biosphere 2. They ran experiments at the Wilson elementary/middle school last May, then in early fall at Biosphere 2 with student from Cleveland, and in December by remote teleconferencing with two schools in Australia Learn more | |
| Mar 11 2010: | First year PhD student Jinyan Guan has won a prestigious
Microsoft
Research Graduate Woman's Scholarship.
Jinyan will be receiving one of ten such scholarships awarded across North
America. In 2010 there were 109 applicants.
Jinyan is interested in computer vision, and how it related to human vision, especially with respect to representing, understanding, and recognizing 3D objects. She is part of the computer vision group, led by Kobus Barnard. | |
| Feb 23 2010: | The work of Noah Snavely, who was an undergraduate honors student in our department several years ago and who is now an Assistant Professor at Cornell, was discussed in the New York Times today. Learn more | |
| Feb 19 2010: | A graduating senior from Tucson, Alex Henniges is majoring in both Math and Computer Science. Alex has extensive research experience and was selected for the Department of Computer Science Excellence in Undergraduate Research Award. Learn more | |
| Feb 09 2010: | Jonathan Nation is our department's Outstanding Senior for Spring 2010 | |
| Feb 09 2010: | Alex Henniges is our department's winner of the Excellence in Undergraduate Research for this year. | |
| Jan 19 2010: | Cognitive Semantics for Soar Wubbles funded through the Office of Naval Research. $450,000 Proposal description: | |
| Jan 11 2010: | Dr. Carole Beal is profiled in the most recent UA Advance newsletter (PDF) Learn more | |
| Jan 06 2010: | A team of researchers from the University of Arizona is working on a project to develop an "International Internet Classroom" as a way to centralize information and resources that could be of value to teachers. Learn more | |
| Dec 16 2009: | The department has released its Fall 2009 newsletter for public consumption. The document is a PDF for easy and consistent viewing across multiple platforms. Learn more | |
| Dec 08 2009: | A team of researchers in the UA's computer science department says educators must upgrade the global classroom experience. The team is developing its "International Internet Classroom" project to promote global and shared Web-based educational resources. Learn more | |
| Nov 10 2009: | Faculty and administrators within the UA’s interdisciplinary School of Information Sciences, Technologies and Arts are planning workshops to determine areas of focus in developing a new undergraduate curriculum. Learn more | |
| Nov 06 2009: | Wesley Kerr wins 1st prize in the Physical Sciences, Mathematics, Computer Engineering, & Computer Science division of the Graduate and Professional Student Council's 2009 Student Showcase held Nov. 6 and 7. Learn more | |
| Nov 04 2009: | Based on a casual conversation at the 2008 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, Computer Science Associate Department Head and Senior Lecturer Dr. Suzanne Westbrook helped bring the first K-12 Computing Teachers Workshop to Tucson last month as an extension of this year's Grace Hopper conference. Learn more | |
| Oct 31 2009: | On Halloween, the team of Computer Science students Fei "Bill" Peng, Brian Lindsay, and Jeffrey Truman took 2nd place in the Rocky Mountain regional of the ACM-ICPC International Collegiate Programming Contest. The "Ancient Chinese War Dogs," CS students Silviu Smarandache, Josh Snider, and Jonathan Nation, captured fourth place, solving four of the problems. Learn more | |
| Oct 29 2009: | Chiefly concerned with understanding how processes work, computation has garnered a reputation for not being a true science. But Richard T. Snodgrass, a UA computer science professor, has received a National Science Foundation grant to work to change that. Learn more | |
| Oct 21 2009: | Christian Collberg, a UA professor who recently published a book about software security has launched a lecture series featuring experts on computer security issues. Learn more | |
| Oct 19 2009: | Loren Chea is selected as the Outstanding Senior for Computer Science! | |
| Oct 13 2009: | Paul Cohen and Carole Beal won a $256,000 award from DARPA for a nine-month seedling project on robot language learning entitled, "Wubble World, Phase II" | |
| Sep 23 2009: | Suzanne Westbrook and Saumya Debray receive $800,000 CPATH-2 grant Learn more | |
| Sep 23 2009: | Rick Snodgrass and Peter Denning of the Naval Postgraduate School receive $800,000 CPATH-2 grant Learn more | |
| Sep 22 2009: | Christian Collberg putting together a security seminar sponsored by Cloakware Inc - more to be announced Learn more | |
| Sep 15 2009: | Grant awarded from the United States - Israel National Science Foundation (co-PIs: Amir Herzberg Bar Ilan University and Shafi Goldwasser from MIT the Weizmann Institute) Learn more | |
| Sep 11 2009: | Christian Collberg interviewed for Network World Learn more | |
| Aug 17 2009: | Christian Collberg Interview in UANEWS Learn more | |
| Aug 05 2009: | Christian Collberg publishes Surreptitious Software Learn more |
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