The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a five-year grant for $400,000 to CSE Alumni Jeannie Albrecht  for research on managing distributed applications on mobile computing platforms composed of cell phones, vehicles, and embedded sensors. Albrecht earned her Ph. D. from UCSD in  2007 and is currently an assistant professor of computer science at Williams College.  Albrecht  will direct the project, which is funded as a part of the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program, one of the most prestigious awards the NSF grants to young scholars that effectively integrate research into their teaching. Click here to see the full article.

Computer scientists have developed an inexpensive solution for diagnosing delays in data center networks as short as tens of millionths of seconds—delays that can lead to multi-million dollar losses for investment banks running automatic stock trading systems. Similar delays can delay parallel processing in high performance cluster computing applications run by Fortune 500 companies and universities. This work highlights a fundamental shift happening across the Internet. As computer programs—rather than humans—increasingly respond to streams of information moving across computer networks in real time, millionths of seconds matter. Algorithmic stock trading systems are just one example. Extra microseconds of delay can also mean slower response times across clustered-computing platforms, which can slow down computation-intensive research, such as drug discovery projects. Computer scientists from University of California, San Diego (George Varghese, Alex Snoeren, and Kirill Levchenko)  and Purdue University (Ramana Kompella) presented this work on August 20, 2009 at SIGCOMM, the premier networking conference. For the full article please click here.

University of California, San Diego computer scientists have created software that they hope will lead to data centers that logically function as single, plug-and-play networks that will scale to today’s massive data center networks. The software system—PortLand—is a fault-tolerant, layer 2 data center network fabric capable of scaling to 100,000 nodes and beyond. PortLand is fully compatible with existing hardware and routing protocols and holds promise for supporting large-scale, data center networks by increasing inherent scalability, providing baseline support for virtual machines and migration, and dramatically reducing administrative overhead. Critically, it removes the reliance on a single spanning tree, natively leveraging multipath routing and improving fault tolerance. The computer scientists (Radhika Niranjan Mysore, Andreas Pamboris, Nathan Farrington, Nelson Huang, Pardis Miri, Sivasankar Radhakrishnan, Vikram Subramanya, and Amin Vahdat) reported this advance in data center networking on August 18, 2009 at SIGCOMM, the premier computer networking conference. Click here for the article in Jacobs School of Engineering News   Click here for the articles in Network World (Article 1 and Article 2)

With the support of a multi-year funding award from the National Science Foundation, Assistant Professor Michael Taylor will work on the design of Stingray, a chip with many massively specialized, diverse kinds of processing cores, which is tuned for maximal energy efficiency in vision processing applications. The project explores these and other architectural challenges that arise in designing effective low power Stingray systems. The NSF's Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program aims to support the activities of leading young academics who successfully integrate research with education.

There is a long literature identifying vulnerabilities in electronic voting machines, but critics of these results argue that such attacks are unrealistic because the researchers had access to proprietary source code, design documents or extended physical access to the machine's being attacked. To rebut this argument, CSE's Stephen Checkoway and Hovav Shacham, along with colleagues from the University of Michigan and Princeton, have recently demonstrated techniques to completely subvert the behavior of the AVC Advantage voting machine. In addition to operating without source code or design documents, they also used Shacham's new "return-oriented programming" technique to overcome a security feature of the AVC that restricts the processor from executing instructions from its Read Only Memory. The resulting attack is embedded in an AVC voting cartridge that can be used by anyone with short-term access to the machine and does not require any technical know-how to use.

CSE faculty member Beth Simon is helping to change the dynamics of todays classrooms by developing high-tech options to help engage students.

Three current and former UC San Diego computer science students created TowerMadness, the cheat-resistant 3D game which challenges players to repel alien onslaughts by constructing defensive towers in strategic locations. A multi-touch interface allows TowerMadness players to zoom in and around the visually-detailed 3D action.