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CSE Community Honors (2019-2020)
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row el_class=”margin-fix”][vc_column width=”2/3″][vc_column_text]Mia Minnes Receives Distinguished Teaching Award From UC San Diego Academic Senate
CSE Associate Teaching Professor Mia Minnes has received the prestigious Distinguished Teaching Award from the UC San Diego Academic Senate. This university-wide award, given to only five members of the Academic Senate, recognizes Minnes’s commitment to excellence in teaching, her contributions to her students and to the importance of pedagogy and mentorship at the university.
Students and colleagues alike can attest to her influence on the educational experience within CSE and across campus.
Minnes, who earned a PhD in mathematics and master’s degrees in computer science and mathematics from Cornell University, joined the CSE department in 2014 and has made a deep impact in a relatively short amount of time.
In the classroom, Minnes is the leading CSE instructor for the large enrollment, theory-based courses in the CSE curriculum, including CSE 20 (Discrete Math) and CSE 105 (Theory of Computation). A colleague noted in a letter of recommendation that these can be challenging courses to teach because of their mathematical focus, which many students find daunting.
Beyond CSE, Minnes has become recognized as an educational leader across the campus, and to the broader computer science community.
Her university-wide leadership includes partnerships with the Teaching and Learning Commons (the Commons) and the Center for Advancing Multi-disciplinary Scholarship for Excellence in Education (CAMSEE), a cross-campus group that brings together educators from many departments to look at how to improve teaching at UC San Diego. Minnes was one of the early leaders of CAMSEE and has served on its steering committee for several years.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”4488″ img_size=”full” alignment=”center” onclick=”img_link_large”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_separator][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row el_class=”margin-fix”][vc_column width=”2/3″][vc_column_text]Christine Alvarado Honored for Outstanding Teaching
Jacobs School of Engineering Associate Dean for Students and CSE lecturer Christine Alvarado has been honored by Warren College with the 2020 Outstanding Faculty Teaching Award, which was presented to her during the virtual graduation ceremony on June 13.
Alvarado has been with UC San Diego for eight years, coming from Harvey Mudd College, and teaches a variety of upper and lower division programming classes. Her approaches vary with course level. During her introductory programming classes, Alvarado both teaches and coaches, helping her students understand that – even if the material is difficult – they belong.
CSE 100 presents a different challenge. As a mid-level course, it’s the first time students are coding larger projects from scratch. She supports students by breaking them into smaller pieces, which she calls checkpoints. Each student must complete a small bite before they can move on to the next. It helps keep them on track.
In addition to her teaching, Alvarado conducts research on education, focusing on diversity and equity in computing and developing teaching methods and programs to make computer science education more equitable.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”4487″ img_size=”200×300″ alignment=”center” onclick=”img_link_large”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_separator][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row el_class=”margin-fix”][vc_column width=”2/3″][vc_column_text]Researchers Receive Influential Paper Award
A paper by CSE PhD alumnus Rakesh Kumar, CSE department chair Dean Tullsen and Victor Zyuban is being honored by the International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA) with the 2020 Influential Paper Award.
Entitled Interconnections in Multi-Core Architectures: Understanding Mechanisms, Overheads and Scaling, the study was first presented at the 32nd International Symposium on Computer Architecture in June 2005. At the time, dual core architectures were just starting to hit the market, and computer scientists were still investigating how they should be designed. The paper illuminates how the interconnects on chips create unique challenges, which differ significantly from connected chips. To develop the best multi-core design, the core/cache and interconnect architectures had to be co-developed.
Prior to this study, nobody knew the significant impact interconnect architectures could have on performance and power usage. The study also offered new ways to model area, power and latency, findings that proved tremendously helpful for researchers over the years.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”4550″ img_size=”full” alignment=”center” onclick=”img_link_large”][vc_single_image image=”4551″ img_size=”full” alignment=”center” onclick=”img_link_large”][vc_single_image image=”4552″ img_size=”full” alignment=”center” onclick=”img_link_large”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_separator][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row el_class=”margin-fix”][vc_column width=”2/3″][vc_column_text]Research that Changed Automotive Industry Wins Test of Time Award
UC San Diego computer scientist Stefan Savage and his colleagues first gave the automotive industry a wake-up call when they published research demonstrating the ability to hack a car’s computer system in 2010.
This paper was honored with a Test of Time Award for its broad and lasting impact at this year’s IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. To qualify, a paper must have been published at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy within the past 10 to 12 years.
In the decade since the paper was first published, it has spawned new automotive security standards and organizations, government programs focused on vehicular cybersecurity, dozens of automotive security startups, countless follow-on research efforts and, most importantly, a pervasive focus on product security by major automakers around the globe.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”4527″ img_size=”full” alignment=”center” onclick=”img_link_large”][vc_single_image image=”4526″ img_size=”full” alignment=”center” onclick=”img_link_large”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_separator][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row el_class=”margin-fix”][vc_column width=”2/3″][vc_column_text]Nadia Polikarpova Named a 2020 Sloan Research Fellow and Wins NSF CAREER Award
Assistant Professor Nadia Polikarpova thinks outside the box, and her novel approaches to automating software programming are earning her national recognition.
Polikarpova recently received the National Science Foundation’s CAREER Award for helping software developers increase productivity and reduce mistakes in their code. She is also a 2020 Sloan Research Fellowship recipient. Each year, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation awards two-year fellowships to around 100 early-career scientists and scholars who demonstrate a unique potential.
Polikarpova and her team have also been collaborating with Professor Eric Baković, chair of UC San Diego’s Linguistics Department. On the surface it might not seem like the work of a computer scientist and a linguist share much common ground, but Polikarpova’s research is well-suited to solving some of Baković’s more complex phonology problems.
Phonology focuses on how sounds are put together to make language. Sounds aren’t organized arbitrarily into words; they follow certain patterns. The variations in how words are pronounced can be quite complex. Consider the word begged, which sounds like it ends in a “d.” On the other hand, sipped sounds like it ends in a “t.”
Some of these patterns can be quite complex, and analyzing them manually is time-consuming and prone to errors. The team is currently developing software that could solve some basic, textbook phonology problems. Once this is fully accomplished, the tool will be used to process more complicated patterns and realistic data.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”4326″ img_size=”full” alignment=”center” onclick=”img_link_large”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_separator][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row el_class=”margin-fix”][vc_column width=”2/3″][vc_column_text]Alex C. Snoeren Elected IEEE Fellow
Professor and CSE Vice Chair Alex C. Snoeren has been elected to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Fellow class of 2020 for his “contributions to management and security of networked systems.” Recognition as an IEEE Fellow is the organization’s highest honor for electrical engineers, computer engineers and computer scientists.
Snoeren is a leader in network security. Early in his career, he focused on defeating denial of service attacks, developing a unique capability to track where these attacks originate. He has also done extensive work measuring malicious activity on services that run on the Internet.
This is the latest in a series of honors for Snoeren. In 2018, he was named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for his work measuring, managing and detecting network traffic. Among other awards, he has also received an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, and earned best-paper awards at the ACM SIGCOMM and USENIX OSDI conferences.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”4328″ img_size=”full” alignment=”center” onclick=”img_link_large”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_separator][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row el_class=”margin-fix”][vc_column width=”2/3″][vc_column_text]Two Honored for Diversity and Inclusion Advocacy
Two members of the CSE community have been honored with Inclusive Excellence Awards from UC San Diego for their contributions to a more diverse and inclusive community. Ph.D. student Ariana Mirian and Undergraduate Affairs Manager Veronica Abreu were recognized during an awards ceremony on February 4.
In January 2018, Mirian and two peers launched the CSE Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) committee, a grassroots organization that provides a platform for students, faculty and staff interested in change. The committee has grown to include more than 30 regular members. Mirian counts its formation as one of her proudest achievements.
Within the DEI committee, Veronica Abreu acts as a culture subcommittee co-lead, focusing on forward momentum and identifying social justice issues. She realized she felt “very frustrated” with power imbalances in society and decided to channel that into action.
With the help of a colleague, Abreu established a training workshop for advisors in her department, preparing staff to identify microaggressions. Abreu’s peers were exceptionally positive about the workshop.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”4521″ img_size=”full” alignment=”center” onclick=”img_link_large”][vc_single_image image=”4522″ img_size=”full” alignment=”center” onclick=”img_link_large”][/vc_column][/vc_row]