Spam study in the New York Times

The New York Times just posted a story about a new study from computer scientists here at UC San Diego and at UC Berkeley / International Computer Science Institute.

The paper describing the study is called "Click Trajectories: End-to-End Analysis of the Spam Value Chain".

The abstract is below, and a PDF of the paper is available here.

The New York Times article by John Markoff is here:
"Study Sees Credit Cards as ‘Choke Point’ for Spam"

Spam-based advertising is a business. While it has engendered both widespread antipathy and a multi-billion dollar anti-spam industry, it continues to exist because it fuels a profitable enterprise. We lack, however, a solid understanding of this enterprise’s full structure, and thus most anti-spam interventions focus on only one facet of the overall spam value chain (e.g., spam filtering, URL blacklisting, site takedown). In this paper we present a holistic analysis that quantifies the full set of resources employed to monetize spam email— including naming, hosting, payment and fulfillment—using extensive measurements of three months of diverse spam data, broad crawling of naming and hosting infrastructures, and over 100 purchases from spam-advertised sites. We relate these resources to the organizations who administer them and then use this data to characterize the relative prospects for defensive interventions at each link in the spam value chain. In particular, we provide the first strong evidence of payment bottlenecks in the spam value chain; 95% of spam-advertised pharmaceutical, replica and software products are monetized using merchant services from just a handful of banks.

The full list of authors: 

Kirill Levchenko, Andreas Pitsillidis, Neha Chachra, Brandon Enright, Mark Felegyhazi, Chris Grier, Tristan Halvorson, Chris Kanich, Christian Kreibich, He Liu, Damon McCoy, Nicholas Weaver, Vern Paxson, Geoffrey M. Voelker, Stefan Savage.

The authors affiliated with the following institutions:

Department of Computer Science and Engineering 

University of California San Diego

Computer Science Division

University of California, Berkeley

International Computer Science Institute 

Laboratory of Cryptography and System Security (CrySyS)

Budapest University of Technology and Economics

In Memory of Jack Keil Wolf, Prominent Information Theorist at UC San Diego

Jack Keil Wolf, a pioneer in information theory and its applications, died in La Jolla, California on May 12, 2011. A member of both the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences, Wolf made profound contributions to digital communication and data storage technology. He served as a UC San Diego professor since 1984.

 

Jack Keil Wolf, a pioneer in information theory and its applications, died in La Jolla, California on May 12 at the age of 76, following a battle with cancer. A member of both the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences, Wolf made profound contributions to digital communication and data storage technology. Wolf served as a professor of electrical and computer engineering at UC San Diego since 1984.

“When you save data on a hard disk, the magnetic medium is imperfect. Jack’s innovations have allowed us to write and read data from these magnetic devices with near perfect fidelity. This is at the heart of the information revolution,” said Lawrence Larson, professor and chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. “Jack was one of the deepest thinkers in terms of how you take information – ones and zeros – and make it so it can be stored or transmitted without losing its fidelity,” said Larson.

“It’s hard to overstate Jack’s role in getting the information theory community interested in data storage,” said Paul Siegel, Director of UCSD’s Center for Magnetic Recording Research (CMRR) and an electrical engineering professor at the Jacobs School of Engineering.

In the 1980s, Wolf was instrumental in bringing a technique known as maximum likelihood detection to the field of data storage.  Essentially every hard disk drive, tape drive, and DVD player made in the last 20 years uses some form of this technology. Read the full story on the Jacobs School of Engineering news site: Jack Keil Wolf, Prominent Information Theorist at UC San Diego, Dies

Photo caption: An early hard disk drive. Courtesy of the UC San Diego Center for Magnetic Recording Research (CMRR).

Siebel Scholars Travel to China to Meet Business, Government, and Cultural Leaders

From May 7-17, 2011, Thomas M. Siebel, Chairman of the Siebel Scholars Foundation, will lead a delegation of nearly 20 Siebel Scholars to Beijing, Hangzhou, and Shanghai.  Frieder Seible, Dean of the Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, also accompanies Mr. Siebel and the Siebel Scholars delegation.

Follow Live Updates & Tweet with #siebelscholars 

The Siebel Scholars alumni in this delegation to China come from a wide variety of technical, scientific, and managerial backgrounds. This accomplished group includes executives at leading healthcare, investment, consulting, and energy companies such as Morgan Stanley, Baxter, McKinsey & Company, Kraft Foods, and The Hina Group; and postdoctoral researchers in Bioengineering and Computer Science at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University, and Tsinghua University.

Hosted by President Gu of Tsinghua University, the purpose of the Siebel Scholars delegation trip to China is to provide these leaders with an opportunity to learn about Chinese business, technology, and culture firsthand, through visits to businesses and factories and meetings with executives and senior Chinese central and regional governmental leadership.  See the full trip itinerary here.

In doing so, the Siebel Scholars Foundation hopes that the delegation, and the greater Siebel Scholars community, will gain deeper insight into the issues and opportunities facing China—and the rest of the world.

Click here for the full list of Siebel Scholars alumni who are on the trip.  The delegation includes Marcio von Muhlen, MIT Bioengineering '10, who is now a research scientist at the UC San Diego School of Medicine.

Marcio is tweeting from China. Follow along by searching for the #siebelscholars "hash tag".

UCSD Entrepreneur Challenge Final Business Plan Competition Prizes Increased to $100k

UCSD Entrepreneur Challenge Final Business Plan Competition Prizes Increased to $100k

Always striving to create the most unique entrepreneur environment, the UCSD Entrepreneur Challenge has year over year been able to expand it's prize offerings.  This year they are excited to be able to increase our $80k prize package to $100k and expand the resources they are able to provide to aspiring entrepreneurs.

(Be sure to also check out the Startup Job Fair on Monday May 9, organized by the UCSD Entrepreneur Challenge).

The $100k in prizes offered will encompass 
1) Cash
2) Legal Services provided by DLA Piper
3) Incubation Services 
4) Financial Services


The Deadline for submission is Friday May 13 at 11:59pm.  Submissions consist of a 1500 word Executive Summary and 15 slide Powerpoint deck.
The top 5 submissions will pitch live on June 1st at the Neurosciences Institute Auditorium for our final Judging Panel:


Ernest Rady--Namesake Rady School of Management, Rady Childrens Hospital
Saeed Amidi--Founder Plug and Play Tech Center--seed funders of Paypal
Gail Naughton--Dean of the College of Business Administration at SDSU
Leo Spiegel--Managing Partner Mission Ventures
Blaise Barrelet--Founder and CEO Anametrix and WebSideStory (acquired by Adobe for $1.8 Billion)
Mary Ann Beyster--President for the Foundation of Enterprise Development
Bruce Breslau--Senior Vice President Market Manager at Union Bank of California

SUBMIT HERE
Submission Guidlines can be found here

 *NOTE THAT ALL E. CHALLENGE COMPETITIONS ARE SEPARATE AND INDEPENDENT

"UCSD Entrepreneur Challenge is bringing to light the vibrant, yet underground entrepreneurial scene in San Diego. Thanks to programs like these, we are sure to see the growth of San Diego as a well known entrepreneurial hot spot. Thank you UCSD Entrepreneur Challenge."

--Daniel Bonsoms (Babson College--Ranked #1 in Entrepreneurship)

Weekend Reading from Jan Kleissl: Convective heat transfer on leeward building walls in an urban environment: Measurements in an outdoor scale model

New paper from environmental engineering professor Jan Kleissl and Jacobs School PhD student Anders Notrott (and A. Inagaki, M. Kanda from Tokyo Institute of Technology).

"Convective heat transfer on leeward building walls in an urban environment: Measurements in an outdoor scale mode". It appears this week online in the International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer.

Abstract: Convection over the building envelope is a critical determinant of building cooling load, but parameterization of convection in building energy models and urban computational fluid dynamics models is challenging. An experimental investigation intended to clarify the heat transfer mechanism of a convective wall boundary layer (WBL) on a leeward, vertical building wall was conducted at the Comprehensive Outdoor Scale Model (COSMO) facility for urban atmospheric research. Comparison of mean and turbulent temperature fluctuation intensity profiles showed that the dominant regime of the WBL flow was turbulent natural convection. Implications for parameterization of convective heat fluxes in urban areas are discussed.

Notrott and Kleissl worked together on the California solar map project: Engineers Help Power Solar Use by 'Mapping' the Sun

Startup Job Fair / UCSD Entrepreneur Challenge

The first annual Startup Job Fair is this Monday May 9th, 2011 from 5PM to 8PM.
Where? UCSD Student Services Center, Multipurpose Room

The student-organizers of the event expect 30 startup companies to attend, including:

BrightScope, Client Radius, SOOVO, Open Candy, Edge Tech Wireless, Zenobia Therapeutics, Precision Point, Cloud Canvas and Congionics.

The organizers give special thanks to:
CONNECT, CommNexus San Diego, Tech Coast Angels,  von Liebig Center and BIOCOM.

The Startup Job Fair is hosted by the UC San Diego Entrepreneur Challenge and Ansir Innovation Center

Bioengineer Kun Zhang Wins Stem Cell Grant to Study Stem Cell Mutations

Bioengineering professor Kun Zhang took home one of the 8 CIMR grants that went to UC San Diego today. (Read the original press release by Debra Kain.)

The summary of Zhang's newly funded project:

Kun Zhang, assistant professor, Department of Bioengineering, Jacobs School of Engineering and the UCSD Institute for Genomic Medicine, was awarded $1,382,140 to study mutations associated with stem cell reprogramming and differentiation. By understanding the functional consequences of mutations that can arise during the course of reprogramming a patient’s own stem cells into pluripotent stem cells, the researchers hope to clear one of the biggest hurdles in the field of hIPS cells – the risk of cancer.  The scientists will comprehensively identify genetic changes in protein coding sequences, or exomes, through large-scale DNA sequencing, with the goal of better understanding of how such mutations occur and propagate. Read about Zhang's recent Nature paper on stem cell mutations.

Learn about Zhang's recent Nature paper.

Media coverage from the Zhang Nature paper:
Nature News & Views
MIT Technology Review
San Diego Union Tribune
Los Angeles Times
NPR Science Friday