CSE’s Stefan Savage has been recognized at UC San Diego and internationally for his acclaimed work in cybersecurity. For the past 240 years, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAS) has honored individuals whose work has advanced the public good, and this year Savage was elected into the class of 2021 fellows. Savage was also honored with the prestigious Distinguished Researcher award from the UC San Diego Academic Senate. These awards are a sign of respect from peers for groundbreaking research conducted by members of UC San Diego faculty. Savage’s research is particularly noted for his usage of both computer science and the social sciences to pinpoint security vulnerabilities in cars, track fraudulent financial transactions, and design methods of measuring distributed denial of service attacks.
A relatively new member of the department, it has only taken two years for Assistant Teaching Professor Joe Politz to be recognized for his tireless work and dedication to his students with the Distinguished Teacher of the Year Award from the UC San Diego Academic Senate. Says CSE Chair Sorin Lerner, “I am so excited to see Joe Politz be recognized with this prestigious award. He is a fantastic teacher whose originality, energy, and genuine care for students is an inspiration to us all. I am also excited that our CSE teaching faculty have been recognized with this university-wide award for the second year in a row!” Associate Teaching Professor Mia Minnes was honored with this award the previous year.
CSE’s Mihir Bellare, an internationally renowned cryptographer and a pioneer in data security and privacy, has been honored with the prestigious IACR (International Cognitive Ability Resource) Test-of-Time award for his Crypto 2006 paper: New Proofs for NMAC and HMAC: Security Without Collision-Resistance. This is not the first time Bellare’s research has stood the test of time: he also received the Test of Time Award, ACM CCS 2011, given for the best paper from ten years prior.
CSE’s Victor Vianu gave a presentation titled Datalog Unchained as part of the Gems of PODS series at the ACM SIGMOD Principles of Database Systems (PODS) conference this past June. Compared to the ACM PODS Alberto O. Mendelzon Test-of-Time Awards, which he received in 2010 and 2015, this series encompasses a broader body of work. Vianu’s talk described his work on database query languages inspired by logic programming. His research began in 1988 and spanned nearly a decade.
CSE Assistant Teaching Professor Niema Moshiri has been selected by students as the department’s top teacher in only his first year of teaching. Having completed both his undergraduate degree and his Ph.D at US San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering, Moshiri holds a unique perspective as a former student, former TA, and current member of the faculty. He currently conducts research on computational biology with a focus on HIV phylogenetics and epidemiology, while also intentionally rebuilding the Advanced Data Structures course (CSE 100) to adapt to the shift to a fully online learning environment. His unique methods and ability to connect with his students, sets Moshiri apart from his peers.
In recognition of his impressive body of research to create software to support persistent memory, CSE Professor Steven Swanson was recently named the inaugural holder of the Halicioglu Chair in Memory Systems at UC San Diego. The $1 million chair is part of a larger $18.5 million gift made in 2013 to the department by CSE alumnus Taner Halicioglu (CSE ‘96). The chair provides a dedicated source of funds for the chair holder’s scholarly activities as well as support for graduate students. As the director of UC San Diego’s Non-Volatile Systems Laboratory, Swanson directs a team that builds computer systems to explore how new memory technologies will impact the future of computing.
Four standout undergraduate engineers were recognized at the Computing Research Association (CRA) for their significant contributions to research. Bioinformatics major Bonnie Huang and Data Science major Raechel Walker were named finalists, while Computer Science and Engineering students Kabir Nagrecha and McKenna Lewis received honorable mentions.
Mentored and guided by CSE Assistant Professor Nadia Polikarpova, three UC San Diego computer science undergraduate students took home top honors at the Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages’ Student Research Competition: Darya Verzhbinsky and Daniel Wang received first place for their work on Polymorphic Enumerative Type-Guided Synthesis, and David Cao earned second place for his paper on Automated Dependent Resource Analysis.
Four teams from UC San Diego CSE were awarded Qualcomm Innovation Fellowships that recognize creative Ph.D. students and provide them with funding, mentorship, and other resources to pursue innovative research. Each team will receive $100,000 from Qualcomm to research in a multitude of fields, including autonomous vehicles and natural language processing.
copyright 2020 – Computer Science & Engineering – University of California San Diego
