Month: March 2019

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Faculty Honors

The Association for Computing Machinery Honors CSE Faculty

Two computer scientists from UC San Diego have received member honors from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world’s largest education and scientific computing society:

• CSE professor Christine Alvarado was named a Distinguished Member of ACM for her outstanding educational contributions to computing. In particular, she was honored for the groundbreaking Early Research Scholars Program (ERSP), which supports research among early career computer science undergraduates.

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• CSE professor Alex Snoeren was named a Fellow of ACM for his innovative approaches to measuring, managing and detecting network traffic. He and his colleagues devised a method called distributed rate limiting (DRL) that allowed network traffic to avoid traversing the same physical links in a cloud environment.

ACM will formally recognize 2018 honorees at a June 2019 ACM awards banquet in San Francisco.

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Two Professors in UC San Diego’s Computer Science and Engineering Department Named AAAS Fellows

CSE professors Rajesh K. Gupta and Pavel Pevzner have been named Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the largest general science organization in the United States and publisher of the journal Science.

• Gupta, a distinguished professor of computer science and director of the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute (HDSI), was recognized for “distinguished contributions in design of embedded systems and hardware-software co-design, and leadership in research administration.”

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• Pevzner, a distinguished professor and the Ronald R. Taylor Chair in the CSE department, was recognized “for seminal contributions to computational molecular biology and for leadership in bioinformatics education.”

AAAS recently inducted the 2019 class of Fellows at its Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C.

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Tu Elected IEEE Fellow

Zhuowen Tu, an associate professor in the UC San Diego Department of Cognitive Science and a CSE affiliate professor, was elected a 2019 IEEE Fellow for his “contributions to computer vision, medical imaging and deep learning.”

In part, Tu’s work helps computers recognize the edges and boundaries of images — an essential and complicated problem in computer vision. Applications in medical imaging include recognizing and analyzing structures within the brain and body, and tracking the growth of tumor margins to aid in diagnosis and treatment.

Tu’s goal has been “to design algorithms that allow computers to see like humans do.” His interdisciplinary background in computer science, neuroimaging, cognitive science and now machine learning all contribute to this goal. In particular, Tu and his research team at UC San Diego have been developing deep learning strategies to manage the massive amounts of data involved in computer vision.

“In my group, we are developing these fundamental neural network architectures,” Tu explains, “and we are also pushing these architectures to the frontier of computer vision tasks.”

The architectures have been widely cited and can be applied to solving data-intensive machine learning tasks beyond computer vision, such as voice and text recognition. Papers by Tu and his colleagues received the Marr Prize, a biennial conference award in computer vision given by the International Conference on Computer Vision, in 2003 and 2015 (honorable mention).

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Esmaeilzadeh Named IEEE “Young Computer Architect” for 2018

CSE associate professor Hadi Esmaeilzadeh has been named the IEEE Technical Committee on Computer Architecture’s 2018 Young Computer Architect for his contributions to new computer architectures that underlie the growing success of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning.

“Two things have propelled AI and machine learning to the next level,” Esmaeilzadeh explains. “One has been the advances in the algorithms, but the second one has been the advances in the microarchitecture of processors. The amount of computation that is required to actually get something decent done with AI algorithms is so massive that without proper support from the architecture of the processors, that level of performance would not be possible.”

Esmaeilzadeh says he has been fascinated by machine learning since his days as an undergraduate, studying neural networks. He and his colleagues have warned, however, that multicore processors and general-purpose processors will not be enough to sustain computation-hungry machine learning applications and the increasing levels of performance we expect out of our phones, laptops and other devices.

Esmaeilzadeh was the first author of a highly-cited 2011 paper outlining this dilemma, which was reported on in The New York Times.

Esmaeilzadeh’s approach to tackling this problem has been to develop what he calls algorithm-defined specialized computing stacks. “We are going to the origins of these AI applications, and understanding the mathematical and theoretical foundations of their algorithms,” he explains. “When we understand that, we can design specialized computing stacks, which constitute programming languages, compilers, runtime systems, operating systems and also microprocessor architecture.”

“Hadi was a great addition to the department and the architecture group last year,” said CSE Chair Dean Tullsen. “This is a tremendous recognition of how quickly he has made a significant impact on the research community and on industry with his research.”

CSE Department Alumni News

Traveling the OpenROAD with Andrew Kahng (Ph.D. ‘89)

In July 2018, CSE professor Andrew Kahng began serving as director of OpenROAD, a multi-institution project that aims to develop open source electronic design automation tools for 24-hour, no-human-in-the-loop hardware layout generation. UC San Diego was awarded $11.3 million over four years from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to lead the project.

Designing and verifying integrated circuit chips currently requires large teams using complex computer-aided design tools for upwards of a year, with different specialists and tool chains required for integrated circuits, systems-in-package and printed circuit boards. Research teams, small companies and Department of Defense researchers often don’t have the human resources needed to attempt such a daunting design task. Moreover, many organizations are priced out of integrated circuit design, putting a drag on innovation.

“For the U.S. to be the vanguard of innovation, we need to fully leverage semiconductor technology,” says Kahng, who also holds the Endowed Chair in High-Performance Computing in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Jacobs School of Engineering. “There’s an incredible delta between what’s possible with silicon versus what people are actually able to afford or bring themselves to risk attempting — we’re trying to narrow that gap.”

Kahng and his collaborators plan to do that by creating a fully automated, no-human-in-the-loop circuit layout generator that enables a larger universe of users to design electronic hardware and systems-on-chips within 24 hours, without sacrificing power, performance or quality. This will unleash a new era of circuit and system innovation.

To accomplish their vision, the OpenROAD team will apply machine learning, extreme levels of design partitioning, cloud-based optimization and restricted layout methodologies to tame the complexities of hardware design tools and the hardware design process.

“We’re viewing chip design as a process with clearly bounded resources: time, computers, tool licenses and so on,” says Kahng. “No one has really studied how to orchestrate tools to optimize chips while staying within a fixed box of those resources. No one knows how to optimize chip design to finish within a certain amount of time while safely avoiding any human interventions. This is a fundamentally new paradigm we’re developing.”

The OpenROAD team includes researchers from six universities — UC San Diego,  University of Michigan, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Texas at Dallas, University of Minnesota and Brown University — along with Qualcomm and Arm.

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Manmohan Chandraker (Ph.D. ’09) Receives NSF CAREER Award

CSE assistant professor Manmohan Chandraker has received the CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for his research to improve the way intelligent machines “reason” about the physical, three-dimensional world.

The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program offers NSF’s most prestigious awards to support early career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and advance their department’s or organization’s mission.

Chandraker’s research has important applications for machines and systems that must navigate or interact with the real world, such as light field cameras, augmented reality devices, self-driving cars and underwater robots for exploration. Other applications include motion capture of humans and animals, gesture control and medical imaging.

Such intelligent, vision-based systems must be able to reason about 3D geometric and semantic properties while accounting for complex variations, such as shape, material, illumination, participating media and visibility.

“Recent advances in deep learning have led to impressive gains in several areas,” says Chandraker. “Our research seeks to handle the diversity of real-world images by incorporating physical models of image formation within deep learning frameworks.”

To conduct their research, Chandraker and his team plan to use physically motivated models of image formation, such as simulation of training data, designing novel architectures or using better optimization methods. The research will also create a cross-disciplinary education program in vision, graphics, learning and perception, with educational modules that provide insights into novel technologies, such as self-driving cars or augmented reality.

“Humans are intuitively able to reason about shape and semantics, even in very complex situations,” he says. “Our work seeks to enable computers to do the same.”

Letter From the AAB President

Greetings fellow CSE alumni. Since our last issue of the CSE Alumni Magazine, we have welcomed a new member to our board, Alex Gantman (B.S. CS ’98, M.S. CS ’01). Alex serves as vice president of engineering for Qualcomm Technologies Inc., where he is responsible for leading the Qualcomm Product Security Initiative (QPSI).

In this issue, be sure to read insights from your CSE Alumni Advisory Board Members Nik Devereaux (’01 B.S., M.A.S. ’11) and Kylie Taitano (B.S. ’14) as they talk about being a part of the advisory board and give career insights and advice to new CSE alumni.

You will also read about three stellar graduates who embody leadership in industry. I hope you will be inspired by their journeys from CSE students to where they are today–an engineering product manager at Cisco, a co-founder of the start-up Raken, Inc. and the chief technology officer for Ad-Juster, Inc.

Beginning with our last issue, we are transitioning the CSE Alumni Magazine to an online publication, and I encourage you to share it with friends and colleagues.  I also encourage you to stay connected and in touch with CSE through social media. Find us on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram.

We are also seeking names of alumni we can reach out to for help with events and networking opportunities, such as speaking to student organizations, organizing local alumni events and serving as mentors to students. If you are interested, please fill out this form.

I hope to see you at an event soon. Our first Celebration of Diversity Day is April 12—please mark your calendars for a day to celebrate the diversity and inclusiveness at CSE.

Aaron Liao (B.S. CS ’05)
CSE Alumni Advisory Board President

Letter From the Chair

Hello Everyone,

On January 18, we welcomed students, faculty, industry partners and alumni to our first annual Research Open House. It was a tremendous day, celebrating the innovative work being done at CSE. Visitors were given a look at some of the great research CSE is doing through student and faculty talks, poster presentations, open labs and hands-on demonstrations. Our own alum Tom Ristenpart Ph.D. CS ’10 came and gave a compelling talk on “Computer Security for Victims of Intimate Partner Violence.”

The event also connected industry sponsors—AppFolio, Intuit, Lytx, Marvell Semiconductor, Teradata and Viasat—to our students and alumni through information sessions that offered valuable career information.

I am excited to announce another significant event: our inaugural CSE Celebration of Diversity on Friday, April 12. The CSE Celebration of Diversity is a day-long event organized by our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) committee to celebrate the wealth of contributions from everyone in CSE. It will also serve as a forum, during which our community can engage openly about how to reach higher levels of inclusive excellence. I encourage you to attend and be part of this important conversation and celebration. You can register and find the latest information on our website.

I hope you enjoy this issue of the CSE Alumni Magazine and look at the accomplishments of our collective community with as much pride as I do.

Dean Tullsen
Professor and Chair, CSE

Building and Leading the Best Team

Emily Deere, B.A. CS ‘90, M.A.S. ‘13

By Becky Ham

By the time Emily Deere enrolled as a UC San Diego undergraduate, she had made up her mind that programming computers was her passion, her love, and what she wanted to do.

While she never lost that love of engineering, she decided after two decades in the workplace to move into management and build her skills as a technology leader.

Today, she works as chief technology officer for Ad-Juster, Inc., which provides data reporting and analytics for digital advertising. She manages the company’s technical leaders and oversees the creation and delivery of the company’s product suites.

Her undergraduate years, during the late 1980s and early 1990s, were a thrilling time for the computer industry, both on and off campus, she recalls.

“There was a lot of buzz in that time, because so much was so new,” Deere says. “I was very lucky. I got in with a few groups of people who would stay in the lab and code together. I think it made school much more enjoyable.”

That experience continued when Deere returned to UC San Diego in 2012 to get her Master of Advanced Study (MAS) degree in architecture-based enterprise systems engineering from the Jacob’s School of Engineering. She used it as an opportunity to sharpen her skills and learn about modern architecture, while adding management and business training to her repertoire.

“The leadership skills training in the MAS program was top notch — some of the best. Especially the amazing experts they brought in,” Deere says. “I could have spent years going to conferences and trying to find all that material. To get it all in one year through the UC San Diego program was worth every penny.”

 

Understanding personalities, and communication

The program, along with UC San Diego Extension classes she took in her 20s, helped her learn what she calls two of the most important skills for technology leaders: understanding different personality types and learning how to communicate clearly.

“Because you are dealing with a very wide variety of highly skilled people–and a lot of them want to go their own direction–to be a leader you have to understand who they are, why they’re doing what they’re doing and then how to clearly communicate what your goals are,” Deere explains.

“Engineers tend to have very strong personalities, and if you take your strong personality into a leadership position, it will be hard for you to absorb and accept all the good things from the strong personalities around you,” she adds.

“You should never be the smartest person in the room. Let your staff bring ideas to you, listen and get the most out of the people around you,” she says. “I think that’s one of the hardest things that engineers go through, because you’ve built your career around being the smartest person.”

Deere says Mark Seamans, now a senior director at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Timothy Tuff, chief executive of John H. Harland Company, who she worked with at Cardiff Software and Scantron, respectively, were among the leadership mentors she had early in her career.

“I was constantly looking at the people above me and trying to understand what it was that they did to be successful,” she recalls.

“When you’re not in the executive suite, it’s hard to understand what’s going on in there,” she says. “You need some way to get a peek in there. You need to get on a project, get a mentor, volunteer to do something for somebody … so you can start understanding the conversations, because they’re different from what’s going on in the rest of the company.”

The number of women who actually sit in the executive suite is still too small, Deere says, wryly noting that “the line at the women’s room isn’t very long when I go to CTO conferences.”

And that can affect the health of the industry. “Any time you have diversity, you have more ideas on the table, and you’ll have better vetting of those ideas, and you’ll come out with a better product on the table,” she says.

Developing and leading a team, especially of engineers, isn’t an easy job. But Deere doesn’t want that to be a deterrent to future leaders.

“It can feel rough sometimes. Some personalities can feel like they’re pushing you back. But it’s worth pushing through that,” she says. “When you get an engineering team where everyone is working to their best ability and having fun doing it, it’s the best job in the world.”

Leadership, Both Big and Small

Sergey Sundukovskiy, B.A. CS ’01

By Becky Ham

Some of the most important drivers behind Sergey Sundukovskiy’s career as a serial technology entrepreneur, he says, are “curiosity and coloring outside the lines.” It’s a mindset that has taken him from the smallest startups to multinational companies like Google and back again, now as the chief technology officer, chief product officer and co-founder of Raken, Inc., a Carlsbad, California software startup hailed as revolutionizing the construction industry.

After holding diverse executive positions in technology companies over the past 20 years, Sundukovskiy recognizes the different skills needed to pursue leadership in companies of all sizes.

“Large companies prize myopic and fairly deep skills in a particular area,” he says, “and smaller companies tend to hire ‘T-shaped people’– generalist in many different areas and very deep in one particular area.”

Between the two, he’s preferred working in smaller companies and startups. “I tend to thrive in those environments,” he explains. “I consider myself ‘M-shaped,’ where I am deep in a number of areas and generalist in a number of areas.”

 

Learning how to pivot

After working as a San Francisco-based engineer in his 20s, Sundukovskiy was intrigued by the possibilities of a career in computers. “But since I had been an electrical engineer at first, I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do in computer science,” he recalls.  

Guidance from favorite UC San Diego professors, such as Walter Savitch, helped him explore the possibilities, along with jobs he held at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, 3Com and Encyclopedia Britannica while pursuing his degree.

“That’s how I learned there is a difference between computer science and software engineering, and that computer science can be easily molded into many different professions,” he says. “What’s nice about UC San Diego is that it gives you a great balance between practical experience and theoretical experience, the base you would need.”

The university gave Sundukovskiy the “perfect mix” along with opportunities and time to work, he recalls, and he “tried my hand in just about everything.” Eventually, he settled on software development and architecture because he found he had a knack for taking complex problems and breaking them down.

Sundukovskiy says executives need to stay hands-on and never stop learning and growing in their field. To keep up with Raken’s essential forays into big data challenges, he is working on a master’s degree from Harvard University, with a focus on big data, fast data and machine learning.

“If you look at what computer science is, and you look at in general what technology is, it’s not an expert field, it’s an experiential field,” he says. “It’s not like math or physics or medicine that require deep expertise in a particular area and lots of knowledge that you carry throughout your career. Software engineering is experiential—you gain knowledge by working and trying things, especially since things change every five years.”

He works to spread that message through public speaking and mentor gigs, which have allowed him to give back to the technical and startup communities. That’s important to him, he says, because “if I had a little more help when I was just starting out, I would have avoided a lot of mistakes.” This March, in fact, he gave a talk about his engineering journey as part of the Jacobs School of Engineering’s Gordon Center Leading Technology Speaker Series.

Some of the early mistakes he made included not understanding what it takes to build a company. “An idea is not a product and a product is not a company,” he says. “And it’s never too early to establish a company culture.”

But mistakes aren’t always bad. There’s a common belief among first-time entrepreneurs that you need to do everything possible to avoid failure,” he says. “But if you look at it, really there’s nothing to be afraid of, because you start off as a failure and you need to unfail at a number of different things.”

Sundukovskiy says that leaders must learn to “micro pivot” and tackle the decisions related to smaller challenges that lead to a greater success.

“It’s very much like golf. With business-building, you can’t have a hole-in-one strategy, you need to micro pivot into a hole,” he notes.

It’s a strategy that Sundukovskiy adheres to as he looks for ways to expand Raken, a provider of mobile apps and software for the construction industry, into “the most intuitive and most-widely used platform in the industry,” he says. Its top product is a smartphone app and web-based software used to streamline required daily construction reporting.

“My plan is to grow from my previous experiences,” says Sundukovskiy, who has several successful startups under his belt, including his last that was acquired by Capital One in 2014. “I really want to get this to a billion-dollar company, and I know that you only get a few opportunities to do this.”

Leading Innovation in Technology

Sreeparna Mukherjee, MS CS ’12

By Katie E. Ismael

Sreeparna Mukherjee is driving innovation for Cisco’s next big thing (specifically the Internet of Things) and is an evangelist for women’s leadership in technology.  

Those are no small jobs for the 2012 graduate of UC San Diego’s computer science master’s program.

As an engineering product manager, she leads Cisco’s next generation product line to strategic growth all over the world. She is responsible for analyzing and driving market strategy to deliver new products that connect cities, industries and people. She’s also connecting and encouraging women in technology through Cisco’s Women in Science & Engineering Employee Resource Group, which has hundreds of members globally, and as a speaker at major conferences.

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Learning to program and lead

Mukherjee’s path to technology and leadership began as a 9-year-old girl in India, when her brother taught her how to program because there weren’t many opportunities in her school to study computer science. In an article in Diversity/Careers in Engineering and Information Technology magazine that highlighted women in computer science, Mukherjee reflected on the low number of women in engineering. When she attended the West Bengal University of Technology in Kolkata, India, as an undergraduate, she saw how there was little support for women in her classes. But that experience led her to form the Women in Computing Group, in which she organized workshops to help her peers with career growth and development.

Women make great leaders of any organization. And every organizations needs diversity to be successful.

– Sreeparna Mukherjee

During her undergraduate years, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) were gaining traction in both industry and research. “I was drawn to these fields and wanted to focus my research in these areas while I was at UCSD,” she says.

There she found the Computer Science and Engineering Department “had one of the strongest faculty bases in the country who can inspire future engineers and scientists.” She was deeply influenced by her research advisor Jürgen Schulze, an associate research scientist at the Qualcomm Institute and an associate adjunct professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. She notes how he is a leader in the futuristic augmented reality and virtual reality research being done in the state-of-the-art SunCAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment) housed in the Qualcomm Institute’s Atkinson Hall.

“I was lucky to have worked under his guidance at the facility,” Mukherjee recalls.  

She was further influenced by professors Sanjoy Dasgupta and Lawrence Saul, who taught her how to “really view AI and ML by using the language of mathematics and statistics.”  

She was a graduate student researcher during her time as a Triton, which allowed her to delve into distributed systems, database systems, algorithms, machine learning, image processing and more. She became strongly focused on, and deeply passionate about, statistical learning and deep learning and focused her research in that area.

Mukherjee has remained connected to her alma mater and has been recognized as an alumni champion for continuing to support and engage with the school.

 

A number of firsts

Mukherjee started as an engineer in the founding team of Cisco’s Internet of Things (IoT), developing the design and architecture for its first IoT platform. The platform is currently being used in more than 20 product lines in manufacturing, energy, transportation, smart cities, government, education, retail, healthcare and financial services. She also developed IoT software to bring connectivity closer to the edge.

Then she became a senior software engineer for Cisco’s data engineering and analytics platform for the company’s multi-terabit service provider routers.

“Cisco has been an incredible ride with a number of first experiences,” she says. “As a senior engineer, I was fortunate to be part of the founding team of Cisco’s next gen products in the area of IoT and smart and adaptive self-healing engineered systems.”

Those contributions led to her rise at Cisco, where she is now leading Cisco’s product line growth all over the planet.

Her group takes a product from initial concept to its architecture design then to its development and growth phases. She interacts with companies all over the world to analyze their technology and design solutions to solve their problems.

“This drives innovation internally and provides me with an opportunity to drive technology solutions on a global platform,” she says.

Beyond using her technology know-how, the role allows her to focus on business development and growth to drive increased revenue.

“My new position is one that blends aspects of engineering, business and marketing, notably customer success, to focus on how we create more value for our customers and adoption across the life cycle,” she says. “The goal is driving the transformation to recurring revenue across the entire company.”

But the best part of being in IoT, is that it allows her to delve into so many different industry spaces.

“We are exploring new frontiers of technology and along with it actually touching lives every day. From basic utilities like electricity, to providing connectivity globally with IoT, we are making a difference,” says Mukherjee, a self-described problem solver. “We’re making history here on that front. It’s very exciting.”

 

Working to inspire and give back

Through those experiences, she has learned invaluable skills and lessons and she feels spurred to share them.

At Cisco, as a lead for the Women in Science & Engineering Employee Resource Group (or WISE), she has spearheaded many technical and leadership initiatives over the years. “I wanted to create a platform for women to support each other and grow together. That’s a practice that needs to happen not just at focused forums but every day at work. It starts by supporting the people around you, both men and women, irrespective of gender,” she says.

Outside of Cisco, she has led many events on growing women in leadership roles and how to handle both career and personal growth, as they go hand in hand.

“As engineers, we tend to become siloed in our workspaces. But collaborating with other teams, that helped me. I was able to gain mentors and networks,” she says.

In turn, Mukherjee has worked to do the same for others, including at forums that have taken her to a global stage.

One notable example was at the 2016 Stream Conference in San Francisco, which explored the technologies, business strategies and architectures for the streaming web, where she spoke about real-time data streaming and big data analytics.

“It was a huge learning experience, the first time. The more you do it, the more you learn,” she says of public speaking. “It’s given me the chance to showcase my work on a bigger platform and take it to a bigger audience. It’s incredibly rewarding to be able to share your work and contributions.”

In 2017, she was a speaker at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC) conference. With more than 20,000 attendees, the annual event is billed as the world’s largest gathering of women technologists.

In a Cisco news story, Mukherjee recalled how the company’s participation in GHC, “changed who I am. From a programmer who buried herself in lines of code, it opened up a whole new world for me. As a software engineer, it gave me the chance to showcase my work to thousands of students and professionals who attended the conference.

“I’m proud to work for a company that supports and gives opportunities to their employees to connect with some of the most inspirational women in this industry today, to actively take part in the change the ratio dialogue and to meet other fellow women in tech so we can benefit from sharing our stories,” she said in the story.

She’s seen the tech industry try to take on a lot of initiatives over the last few years to introduce diversity through various outreach programs and university collaborations, though “there is still a lot of work to do,” she says.  

“Women make great leaders of any organization. And every organizations needs diversity to be successful,” notes Mukherjee. “The numbers right now are not that great. And as you go higher up the chain, even less so. I feel there is a lot of untouched talent out there.”

As an ambassador for women in technology, she “feels it’s important for me to inspire women around me, let them know that we are here to help each other grow and foster a sense of support in the community.”

As a Jacobs School of Engineering alumna,that aspiration puts Mukherjee in good company. The Jacobs School is #2 in the nation for awarding bachelor’s degrees in engineering and computer science to women, according to data published in June 2018 by the American Society for Engineering Education.

From her beginnings as a young girl learning how to program in India to becoming a tech leader in Silicon Valley today, she says it’s been an incredible journey on many different fronts.

“There were a lot of hurdles to cross in order to come to this country,” she reflects. “I arrived with eyes full of dreams and since then have experienced failures, successes, self-discovery and learning my own strengths. My own journey inspires me to help others around me, and I hope to continue working every day towards that.”