Author: katie

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V7

Letter From Aaron Liao, Alumni Advisory Board President

Letter From the Alumni Advisory Board President

CSE Alumni Advisory Board President, Aaron Liao

Our spring issue of CSE Alumni Magazine is focused on alumni who have ventured into the world of entrepreneurism and started their own companies. You’ll find inspiring stories about how they parlayed the skills they learned as CSE students into successful start-ups.

While starting a company at any stage of your career is difficult, your Alumni Advisory Board (AAB) realizes we are all experiencing tremendous challenges due to the COVID-19 pandemic and some members of our community may be seeking employment.  As part of the CSE and Triton families, there are several resources where job and networking opportunities can be found:

·      UCSD CSE LinkedIn Page

·      UCSD CSE Facebook Group for Students and Alumni

·      UCSD Career Center Alumni website

·      Jacobs School of Engineering Alumni

Despite these difficult and uncertain times, we are continuing to move forward with building a strong, supportive network for our CSE alumni and community. I would like to welcome two of our new members to the AAB:  Maritza Borunda ’98 and Rahul Sabnis ’19. I would also like to extend a hearty congratulations to our two Distinguished Alumni Award winners: Taner Halıcıoğlu ’96 and Tim Sherwood ’03. This is the highest honor given to CSE alumni for their contributions to society.

You can find information about upcoming alumni events and opportunities to get involved on the CSE Alumni website.

I would also like to congratulate the Class of 2020 and welcome them into our network of accomplished CSE alumni. As our newest members, I invite you to share your opinions and feedback by taking our CSE Alumni Survey.

In light of the current turbulence from acts of racism and violence, I want to let our CSE community know that your AAB wholeheartedly supports the department’s emphasis on diversity, equity and inclusion and the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committee’s important work. Indeed we all benefit when we embrace different perspectives, backgrounds, and experiences and we will support their call for solidarity in putting an end to these systemic issues.

 

Aaron Liao (BS ’05)
CSE Alumni Advisory Board President

 

 

 

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V7

Advice from Angel Investor Taner Halıcıoğlu ’96

Advice from Angel Investor Taner Halıcıoğlu ’96

By Katie E. Ismael

Taner Halıcıoğlu (BS ’96) is the founder and manager of angel investment firm Keshif Ventures. According to the San Diego Business Journal, which included him in its “San Diego 500, The Book of Influential Business Leaders,” he is “one of San Diego’s few ‘super angels’ in local tech, meaning he’s an active investor in early-stage startups.” He’s also a founding partner of SEED San Diego, a small investor group that supports local startups. His portfolio companies include Empyr, Portfolium, Doctible, CloudBeds, Soci and MixMode.

What do you look for when you are considering investing in a company?

When considering a company for investment, I value the team over everything else. Mainly, what is the composition of the team, how well do they seem to work together and are they open to taking direction/advice from investors and advisors. The next factor is the more obvious one, which is “what is this company trying to solve/do?”.

What motivates someone to start their own company? 

I’ve been an early employee at several startups (Halıcıoğlu was Facebook’s first full-time employee back in 2004), and of course, I’ve also seen plenty of people starting up companies.

They are motivated to do this for various reasons, but one common theme I’ve seen is they see a certain need and have a way to solve that need- or perhaps solve it in a better way than it’s currently being solved. 

What are some successes and challenges you’ve seen in starting a company? 

One of the harder things for startups to do is gain traction for their product or service. This is usually because they are a no-name company, and it’s hard to sell something when people realize you are a startup, perhaps on a shoestring budget, that might disappear if you run out of money or face other challenges.

On a related note, it’s hard to raise money for your company, since in the early days- when all you have is basically an idea- you need to either self-bootstrap or you need to find some angel investors, or perhaps friends and family who believe in you and your idea.

One thing about startups is you’re not going to be sleeping a lot and you’re probably going to be wearing a lot of different hats.

How did CSE shape or influence you and your success?

Without the resources and opportunities that CSE had provided me, I’m not sure I would have been able to do what I have done, let alone do it well and succeed.  Between the professors and classes, to the labs and other resources like having a supercomputer center right here on campus, there are many advantages to being a CSE alumnus.

Halıcıoğlu has remained a familiar face around CSE and UC San Diego, serving as a lecturer in computer science since 2013 and as a member of the CSE Alumni Advisory Board. Halıcıoğlu donated $75 million to his alma mater to help create the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute and was recently honored as a CSE Distinguished Alumnus.

 

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V7

CSE Community Honors

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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]

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V7

Innovation and Community on Display at the CSE Winter Research Open House

Innovation and Community on Display at the CSE Winter Research Open House

The 2020 CSE Winter Research Open House was held on January 31 and, for anyone interested in learning about UC San Diego’s Computer Science and Engineering Department, this was the place to be. The event featured a keynote on augmented reality, two rounds of student research presentations, an industry panel, open labs, a graduate student poster session and industry info sessions.

Keynote speaker Edward Wu (CSE ‘04), VP, Platform at Niantic and technical lead for Pokémon Go, showcased the company’s evolution and ongoing efforts to develop technology that connects people to one another and their surroundings.

“That’s the fundamental mission that Niantic embarked upon,” said Wu, “not to create augmented reality. What we wanted to do is use technology to get people closer to their world.”

CSE Research Open House Winter 2020

The company succeeded, engaging hundreds of millions of users. Wu cited an example close to home.

“My mom is an inveterate Pokémon Go player,” he said. “She’s aligned with a group of several hundred other Taiwanese grandmas, who every morning – I kid you not – walk several kilometers together across the city.”

Wu went on to discuss Niantic’s future plans. As always, low latency is a major goal. But the company is also working to make augmented reality more lifelike, for example, recognizing actual people and structures and having game characters interact with them in more realistic ways.

Research Sessions and the Industry Panel

Immediately after Wu’s keynote, students, faculty and researchers hosted a number of breakout sessions. During the first round, people could choose between Computer Vision and Robotics, Sustainable Computing and Security and Program Languages. Later sessions included talks on Architecture, Bioinformatics and Machine Learning and AI.

The afternoon kicked off with an industry panel, featuring Ryne Chaloux (CSE ‘15) , senior software engineer and tech lead at AppFolio; Parand Darugar (CSE ’93), VP, service architecture at Coupa; and Alessandro Muti, VP and software engineer at WeWork. The panel was moderated by Professor Tajana Rosing.

The group touched on a wide range of topics: what they love about their work; the technologies that excite them; how they got where they are; where the industry is headed; the challenges they face; and what got them into computer science in the first place.

“Computer science is a very creative act. You’re building things, you’re imagining things,” said Darugar.

Chaloux had a similar take: “I think what draws me to computer science is the challenge. When the challenge is done, that’s boring, right? So, I like when things change faster and faster and faster. Which, especially in computer science, happens very quickly.”

Labs and Awards

A variety of labs, including Healthcare Robotics and Cognitive Robotics, demonstrated their work for excited participants. Upstairs, graduate students showed off their posters – everything from bioinformatics to applying augmented reality to surgery to cybersecurity.

Later, a number of companies held Industry Info Sessions, including Research Open House sponsors AppFolio, Marvell Semiconductor, Qimia and WeWork.

The day finished off with a reception and awards ceremony. Michael Barrow’s poster took first place in the industry category for Data Driven Tissue Models for Surgical Image Guidance. Audrey Randall was runner-up with Regional Congestion Control for Availability and Reliability in Andromeda’s Hoverboards.

Jens Luebeck won first place in research for Integrated Analysis of NGS and Optical Mapping Resolves the Complex Structure of Highly Rearranged Focal Amplifications. Saransh Gupta was runner-up with Digital and Scalable Processing in Memory for Big Data.

This was also the first year for the CSE Distinguished Alumni awards. Taner Halıcıoğlu (’96) and Tim Sherwood (’03) were honored. Halıcıoğlu worked at Loudcloud, Ebay and Facebook, where he was the first full-time employee. He now shares his vast knowledge and experience as a CSE lecturer and angel investor. The Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute was named in his honor.

Sherwood is a professor of Computer Science and Associate Vice Chancellor for Research at UC Santa Barbara. Sherwood’s contributions to novel program analysis, particularly his work on basic block vectors, fundamentally changed the research landscape. In 2016, he was awarded a SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes Award from the Association for Computing Machinery for his outstanding contributions to computer architecture.

“This was an amazing event,” said Department Chair Dean Tullsen after the open house. “We got to witness the excellent research being conducted at CSE, and I walked away inspired. I am grateful to everyone who had a hand in organizing this event.”

With another successful event completed, the CSE faculty, staff and student organizers are already planning for the next Research Open House – fall 2020.

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V7

Researchers Develop Framework That Improves Firefox Security

Researchers Develop Framework That Improves Firefox Security

Computer scientists develop a technique to protect browsers from buggy third-party libraries

Researchers from the University of California San Diego, University of Texas at Austin, Stanford University and Mozilla have developed a new framework to improve web browser security. The framework, called RLBox, has been integrated into Firefox to complement its other security-hardening efforts.

RLBox increases browser security by separating third-party libraries that are vulnerable to attacks from the rest of the browser to contain potential damage—a practice called sandboxing. The study will be published in the proceedings of the USENIX Security Symposium in March.

Browsers, like Firefox, rely on third-party libraries to support media decoding (e.g., rendering images or playing audio files) among many other functionalities. These libraries are often written in low-level programming languages, like C, and highly optimized for performance. 

“Unfortunately, bugs in C code are often security vulnerabilities—security vulnerabilities that attackers are really good at exploiting,” noted senior author Deian Stefan, an assistant professor with UC San Diego’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering.

RLBox allows browsers to continue to use off-the-shelf, highly tuned libraries without worrying about the security impact of these libraries. “By isolating libraries we can ensure that attackers can’t exploit bugs in these libraries to compromise the rest of the browser,” said the lead PhD student on the project, Shravan Narayan.

A key piece of RLBox is the underlying sandboxing mechanism, which keeps a buggy library from interfering with the rest of the browser. The study investigates various sandboxing techniques with different trade-offs. But the team ultimately partnered with the engineering team at San Francisco-based Fastly to adopt a sandboxing technique based on WebAssembly, a new intermediate language designed with sandboxing in mind. The team believes that WebAssembly will be a key part of future secure browsers and secure systems more broadly. The WebAssembly sandboxing effort is detailed in a recent Mozilla Hacks blog post.

“Unfortunately, it’s not enough to put a library in a sandbox, you need to carefully check all the data that comes out of the sandbox—otherwise a sophisticated attacker can trick the browser into doing the wrong thing and render the sandboxing effort useless,” said Stefan. RLBox eliminates these classes of attacks by tagging everything that crosses the boundary and ensuring that all such tagged data are validated before being used.

RLBox has been integrated into Mozilla’s Firefox and will be shipping to Linux users in Firefox 74 and Mac users in Firefox 75, with plans to implement in other platforms.

“This is a big deal,” says Bobby Holley, principal engineer at Mozilla. “Security is a top priority for us, and it’s just too easy to make dangerous mistakes in C/C++. We’re writing a lot of new code in Rust, but Firefox is a huge codebase with millions of lines of C/C++ that aren’t going away any time soon. RLBox makes it quick and easy to isolate existing chunks of code at a granularity that hasn’t been possible with the process-level sandboxing used in browsers today.”

In the study, the team isolated half a dozen libraries using RLBox. To start, Firefox will ship with their sandboxed Graphite font shaping library. Mozilla plans to apply the sandboxing more broadly in the future, ultimately making millions of users’ browsers more secure. 

Other authors included: Craig Disselkoen and Sorin Lerner at UC San Diego; Hovav Shacham at  UC San Diego and UT Austin; Nathan Froyd and Eric Rahm at Mozilla; and Tal Garfinkel at Stanford University.

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V7

UC San Diego’s Rosing Receives DARPA Grant To Explore Hyperdimensioinal Computing

UC San Diego’s Rosing Receives DARPA Grant To Explore Hyperdimensioinal Computing

By 2025, computers and other instruments will generate more than 175 zettabytes of data. For context, there are a billion terabytes in a zettabyte. If you’re wondering how all that information will be analyzed, you’re not alone. At present, only one percent of data produced worldwide is ever evaluated.

To help solve this problem, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded a $1 million grant to Computer Science and Engineering Department professors Tajana Rosing, Sanjoy Dasgupta and Electrical and Computer Engineering Department professor Tara Javidi to explore how hyperdimensional computing (HD) can help address this informational onslaught. The project is called HyDREA (Hyperdimensional Computing: Robust, Efficient and Accurate).

HD computing seeks to better replicate human brain power in silico. The “hyper” part comes from much larger data sizes. Instead of 32 or 64 bits, data can contain 10,000 bits or more.

“Let’s imagine I have a 32-bit number,” said Rosing. “Today, each 32-bit number would have to be stored separately. But with hyperdimensional computing, I can combine the information into a single, 10,000-bit vector, which could, for example, represent all photos of a cat or all photos of a dog.”

Brains have similar mechanisms. Sensory data enters at relatively low dimensionality, but the mind expands those representations as it processes them. Data that started at a million bits can be enlarged to 200 million bits.

The 18-month HyDREA project will have to overcome a long list of technical challenges. Current memory isn’t really designed to handle these large datasets. In addition, the team will need to develop new ways to process data and handle large dimensionality without losing speed.

“One issue is encoding the data, or taking whatever data we’re currently collecting that’s in 32- or 64-bit numbers, and figuring out the right way to map it into high dimensional space,” said Rosing. “This encoding process takes the majority of the time, and we are looking at how we could make it run a lot faster.”

They also want to identify the best applications for HD computing. At present, no one fully understands all the possible HD applications, though that challenge is a bit downstream.

“If I have multiple nodes that can do hyperdimensional computing, how should they communicate the data?” asked Rosing. “Should they communicate the hypervectors? Should they communicate something we learned from the hypervectors? What happens if some data gets blocked? Do we lose a lot of accuracy?” These are just a few of the questions that the project seeks to address.

Overall, the team will have to develop new coding and decoding strategies, fast HD algorithms and efficient hardware. On this last point, the HyDREA team is collaborating with Northrop Grumman to test HD computing on the aerospace company’s stochastic computing chip.

“At the end of the project we’ll hopefully have a couple of hardware implementations that will show the power of HD,” said Rosing. “We want to show that HD computing can be made a thousand times more efficient and faster than current machine learning without losing accuracy.”

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V7

New Record Set For Cryptographic Challenge

New Record Set For Cryptographic Challenge

San Diego, Calif., March 11, 2020 — An international team of computer scientists has set a new record for integer factorization, one of the most important computational problems underlying the security of nearly all public-key cryptography currently used today.  

Public-key cryptography is used for a number of applications including encrypting sensitive and confidential data and digital signatures.  In public-key cryptography, keys that protect data come in pairs, one public, and one private. The security of the encryption or digital signature relies on the assumption that it’s impossible to compute the private key from the public key.

One of the most commonly used public-key cryptographic algorithms for both encryption and digital signatures is the RSA cryptosystem, invented in 1977.  It’s named for its inventors Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman. Its security is based on the fact that it is believed to be difficult to factor large integers of a specific form.

To encourage research into integer factorization, the “RSA Factoring Challenges” were created in 1991. These challenges consisted of challenge integers of varying sizes, named for the number of integer digits. 

The team of computer scientists from France and the United States set a new record by factoring the largest integer of this form to date, the RSA-250 cryptographic challenge. This integer is the product of two prime numbers, each with 125 decimal digits. In total, it took 2700 years of running powerful computer cores to carry out the computation, which was done on tens of thousands of machines around the world over the course of a few months. 

The key broken with this record computation is smaller than keys that would typically be used in practice by modern cryptographic applications: it has 829 binary bits, where current practice dictates that RSA keys should be at least 2048 binary bits long. Researchers use these types of computations to choose key strength recommendations that will remain secure for the foreseeable future.

“Achieving computational records regularly is necessary to update cryptographic security parameters and key size recommendations,” said Nadia Heninger, a professor of computer science at the University of California San Diego, and a member of the research team. 

The same team set the previous integer factoring record back in December 2019, when they factored the RSA-240 challenge, a 795-bit integer.

The researchers carried out this computation using CADO-NFS, which is free software developed by the team at INRIA Nancy.  They used a number of computer clusters, including research group, university, and national research clusters in France, Germany, and UC San Diego. 

The team was composed of Aurore Guillevic, Paul Zimmermann, and Emmanuel Thomé of Inria Nancy, France; Pierrick Gaudry of CNRS Nancy, France; Nadia Heninger of the University of California San Diego; and Fabrice Boudot of the University of Limoges, France.

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V7

Amateur Radio Digital Communications Completes Turing Scholarship Endowment

Amateur Radio Digital Communications Completes Turing Scholarship Endowment

The Center for Networked Systems (CNS) at UC San Diego has announced that following a $225,533 donation from the Amateur Radio Digital Communications (ARDC) association, the Alan Turing Memorial Scholarship is now fully endowed.

“We are incredibly grateful to ARDC for their generous gift,” said CNS Co-Director Stefan Savage. “Now that the endowment is complete, starting in the spring of 2021, we will be able to provide $10,000 scholarships for worthy students in perpetuity.”

A nonprofit based in California, ARDC promotes STEM education and digital development for amateur radio. Their gift honors former UC San Diego Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) employee and ARDC founder Brian Kantor, who died unexpectedly in November 2019.

Kantor worked at UC San Diego for 47 years, including a decade at CSE. During his long career, he was a university postmaster, ran the name servers, and helped manage network infrastructure. Among his many accomplishments, he wrote the protocol standard for rlogin, and designed the Network News Transport Protocol (NNTP) that was the foundation for Netnews. Kantor was a nationally known ham radio operator and co-founded and managed AMPRnet, the gateway between the amateur packet radio community and the Internet. He retired from CSE in 2018.

CNS established the scholarship in 2015 to encourage a more diverse and inclusive community of engineers and to pay homage to Alan Turing. “Alan Turing is a giant in the pantheon of computer science pioneers, and his story is both tragic and inspirational,” said CNS Co-Director George Porter. Turing is a co-founder of the field of computer science and a brilliant mathematician, and his work contributed substantially to the Allied victory in World War II through his brilliant codebreaking. After the war, Turing suffered outright persecution for his activities as a gay man. He died by suicide in 1954.

“I am delighted that you are able to support students through the Alan Turing Memorial Scholarship, said Dermot Turing, Alan’s nephew. “I am certain that this kind of initiative is one which would have received his whole-hearted support.”

The scholarship is for enrolled UC San Diego undergraduate students majoring in computer science or computer engineering, public policy, communications, and other programs touching on networked systems, and who are active in supporting the LGBT community. With generous donations from individuals, and corporations/foundations, CNS has awarded scholarships to six deserving UC San Diego undergraduate students since 2016. “CNS is extremely grateful to Brian Kantor and the ARDC for completing the endowment of this scholarship,” said CNS Administrative Officer Jennifer Folkestad. “It has and will continue to have a transformative impact on students for generations to come.”

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V7

Halıcıoğlu and Sherwood Recognized as CSE Distinguished Alumni

Halıcıoğlu and Sherwood Recognized as CSE Distinguished Alumni

The Distinguished Alumni Award is the highest honor given to CSE alumni for their contributions to society. This year at the Winter 2020 Research Open House, the department honored Taner Halıcıoğlu ’96 and Tim Sherwood ’03.

Taner Halıcıoğlu

Early in his career, Halıcıoğlu worked at Loudcloud, Ebay and Facebook, where he was the company’s first full-time employee. He now shares his vast knowledge and experience as a CSE lecturer and angel investor. The Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute was named in his honor.

Tim Sherwood

Sherwood is a professor of computer science and Associate Vice Chancellor for Research at UC Santa Barbara. His contributions to novel program analysis, particularly his work on basic block vectors, fundamentally changed the research landscape. In 2016, he was awarded a SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes Award from the Association for Computing Machinery for his outstanding contributions to computer architecture.

 

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Welcome new CSE Alumni Advisory Board Members

Welcome new CSE Alumni Advisory Board Members

Maritza Borunda

 

The CSE Alumni Advisory Board, which promotes community among alumni, CSE students and faculty, is proud to welcome its newest members: Maritza Borunda ’98 and Rahul Sabnis ’19.

Borunda earned a bachelor’s in computer science and engineering and human development and has worked at Qualcomm for nearly 10 years, where she now manages engineering development. Borunda works as an internal consultant, leading educational and enrichment activities in AI and hardware security for the company.

Prior to Qualcomm, Borunda was a software engineer for Accenture, Cubic, IBM and NCR. Borunda has been a longtime volunteer, providing mentorship and workshop facilitation for students and others.

Rahul Sabnis

Sabnis graduated with a bachelor’s in computer science and began working as a software engineer for Google in Mountain View. He works on the Android Bluetooth team and is excited to make open source contributions. At UC San Diego, Sabnis was president of the Computer Science and Engineering Society (CSES) and a tutor for CSE 11, 12 and 30.