A Wireless Road Around Data Traffic Jams / New York Times / Amin Vahdat

“When we bounce signals off the ceiling, we take advantage of much more bandwidth than we could if we restricted ourselves to a horizontal plane,” says Amin Vahdat, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, who specializes in large-scale data center architecture and deployment and is working with Dr. Zheng on the project. Dr. Vahdat, who is on sabbatical leave from the university, is also a principal engineer at Google.

This is a quote from Amin Vahdat in a story in the New York Times entitled,  "A Wireless Road Around Data Traffic Jams".

Gert Lanckriet Electrical Engineering Prof Named to TR35 List

Electrical engineering professor Gert Lanckriet was named to Technology Review TR35 list. The Jacobs School story is coming, but here is the link to the Gert Lanckriet Technology Review story.

Below is a video that describes some of Lanckriet's work. 

NPR All Things Considered: Study May Shed Light On How To Stop Spam

Computer science professor Stefan Savage is on NPR today. The interview with Robert Siegel is called "Study May Shed Light On How To Stop Spam".



This story is tied to a paper presented this week at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. Get the PDF of the paper from Stefan Savage's website.

Click Trajectories: End-to-End Analysis of the Spam Value Chain, Kirill Levchenko, Andreas Pitsillidis, Neha Chachra, Brandon Enright, Márk Félegyházi, Chris Grier, Tristan Halvorson, Chris Kanich, Christian Kreibich, He Liu, Damon McCoy, Nicholas Weaver, Vern Paxson, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Stefan Savage, Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium and Security and Privacy, Oakland, CA, May 2011.

More news stories tied to this research:

New York Times: Study Sees Way to Win Spam Fight

MIT Technology Review: Anatomy of a Spam Viagra Purchase

Wall Street Journal: Three Banks Handle Money For 95% World’s Spam

Discover: How to Stop Spammers: Focus on Money Going Out, Not Spam Coming In

IEEE Spectrum: Battling to Protect Online Privacy and Defeat Spam

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

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).

MicroMouse the Maze Solving Robot / Cool video from 2010

Here is text and video from an electrical engineering undergrad's blog post regarding a maze-solving robot designed and built here at the Jacobs School of Engineering by the UCSD IEEE Micromouse team:

We took a mouse to UCLA last weekend for an unofficial competition. It was actually a much more interesting competition than the official IEEE southwest area competition since several bots actually solved the maze. The maze was more reasonable than the SW area maze. Even though it was only 13x13 instead of 16x16, the walls were properly aligned and well-programmed bots didn’t have many problems getting stuck. This is a video of our mouse’s shortest solution path. Unfortunately, we only took 2nd place since one of the teams from UCLA had a much smaller and more maneuverable robot.

GreenDroid Research in MIT Technology Review

Research led by computer science professors Michael Taylor and Steven Swanson is covered in Technology Review today by Tom Simonite.

The first paragraph from the Technology Review GreenDroid project is below:

A processor etched with circuits tailored to the most widely used apps on Android phones could help extend the devices' battery life. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego have created software that scans the operating system and a collection of the most popular apps and then generates a processor design tailored to their demands. The result can be 11 times more efficient than today's typical general-purpose smart-phone chip, says Michael Taylor, who leads the GreenDroid project with colleague Steven Swanson.

The Jacobs School covered this work back in August when the UC San Diego computer scientists presented at HotChips 2010.

The first two paragraphs of the Jacobs School of Engineering GreenDroid story are below:

A new smartphone chip prototype under development at the University of California, San Diego will improve smartphone efficiency by making use of “dark silicon” – the underused transistors in modern microprocessors. On August 23, UC San Diego computer scientists presented GreenDroid, the new smartphone chip prototype at the HotChips symposium in Palo Alto, CA.


Dark silicon refers to the huge swaths of silicon transistors on today’s chips that are underused because there is not enough power to utilize all the transistors at the same time. The new GreenDroid chip prototype from computer scientists at UC San Diego will deliver improved performance through specialized processors fashioned from dark silicon. These processors are designed to run heavily used chunks of code, called “hot code,” in Google’s Android smartphone platform.

Yahoo! Hack Week at UC San Diego

Congratulations to the Hack Winners and Best of luck to our #1 team “What’s in My Fridge?” that will be headed to the ultimate Hack-A-Thon championships hosted by Yahoo! in New York next Fall.

Thanks to Cody Noghera, Deputy Dir/Corp Affiliates Program (CAP), for this write up on Yahoo! Hack Week at UC San Diego.


Congratulations to the Hack Winners and Best of luck to our #1 team “What’s in My Fridge?” that will be headed to the ultimate Hack-A-Thon championships hosted by Yahoo! in New York next Fall.

About the winning hack:
Have you ever been at the grocery store shopping for dinner and asked yourself, "What's in my fridge?" Do you constantly run out of sugar and nag your next door neighbors for the half cup you need to finish your cookie recipe? Or do you ever wonder which of your friends has the most suitable ingredients for a party? Our application, which can run on a web browser, or mobile smartphone, bridges the physical gap between the grocery store, your refrigerator, and your cooking location.

Winning team members: Leilani Gilpin, Andrew Huynh, David Vanoni, Lynn Nguyen

At Yahoo! Hack Week at UC San Diego, over 400 students from across a dozen majors participated in weeks worth of focused Web Technology talks on APIs, JavaScript, and open source software by Yahoo! guest speakers. The Yahoo Hack U competition came to an exciting end that showcased 30 teams of talented ‘hackers’ presenting in shotgun fashion after 24 hours of sleepless coding, caffeine, and snacks (all ingredients for the proverbial All-Star engineering student) at UC San Diego Jacobs School Engineering Friday, April 8th, 2011.

“The level of enthusiasm, creativity, and sophistication across each the hacks this year is what keeps us coming back to UC San Diego”
-Jamie Lockwood, Academic Relations Manager-Research and Engineering, Yahoo!

Second Place: Best Overall Category

BODY MOTION – Are you blind? Do you know how to dance? Then you'll love our product! Browse the internet only using your body language. No need to type a single word, and we can find restaurants, places to go, and YouTube videos you love to listen to.

·         Members: Tyler O’Neil, David Lluncor, Jennifer Chandler

·         Motion Sensors, Weather, Opener

·         Browsing the web with your body

Third Place: Best Overall Category

TAB HOME AUTOMATION - By turning your home's wiring system into a network of communication, we can manipulate appliances and other electrically-driven machines to help improve efficiency and save money (and even help the environment!). We give users the ability to control their house remotely through our website, and have a specialized section to cater towards those who want to water their indoor/outdoor garden and help dynamically drive the system with interaction with Yahoo's Weather API to determine how much water to use, and whether to water at all (in cases of rain or other circumstances).

·         Members:  Thomas Gray, Alvin Lee, Brandon Breitenstein

·         Remote House Control

·         Alert on house item

·         Lot of work, device control, X10-Protocol

·         Impressive; interesting

Best Mobile Category

MUM - Getting up in the morning -- or anytime, for that matter -- is never easy. We've witnessed countless classmates miss vital midterms and interviews, either because they forgot to set their alarms or because they snoozed through their alarms. Frustrated by the opportunities missed as a result of peoples' inability to wake up and tendency to accidentally fall asleep, our team decided to create a motherly alarm system.

Introducing MUM:
A geo-location movement based non-intrusive alarm. Based on your location, movements, and calendar, MUM determines whether or not you need to be woken up. If it finds you sleeping before an event, it will initiate a series of wake-up techniques, starting from beeping and flashing lights to, if set up, texting a friend to come wake you up. Using movement data, MUM determines whether you're lying in bed hitting the snooze button, or actually awake.

It knows when you've been sleeping, it knows when you're awake, it knows when you've been good or bad so be good for goodness sake.

·         Members: Dimitri Bouniol, Akshay Maheshwari, Igor Terzic

·         Geoaware and smart

·         Sensory and location aware alarm clock

Hack for Good Category

CREOLE - #!/bin/web - A command line to seamlessly interact with web services.

·         Members: Avinash, Daniel Park, Matt Kim, Andrew Chen

·         Merge 3 languages, command line

·         Potential

·         Surfing web, Facebook integration

·         YOL

·         Nicely presented, images

The week of events attracts staff, faculty, students, primarily from the Jacobs School of Engineering but not exclusively. 16 disciplines, 8 outside of the Jacobs School of Engineering made way to hear speakers and interact with visiting Yahoo!s. Jacobs School majors included Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Bioengineering, Aerospace Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Structural Engineering, Engineering Physics. Those majors outside Jacobs include Mathematics, Statistics, Cognitive-Sci, Management Science, Visual Arts, Psychology, Economics, and Business majors.

A HUGE ‘Thank You’ goes to Yahoo!: Johnathan LeBlanc, Subramanyan Murali, Jamie Lockwood; The UC San Diego Jacobs School Corporate Affiliates Program Team: Anne O’Donnell, Cody Noghera, Paula Kreger, Erica Kosa, Jaminna Arnau; The CSE Department: Rajesh Gupta, Jocelyn Bernardo, Samira Khazai, Viera Kair; Faculty Judges: Rick Ord, Gert Lanckriet; Student Organizations: TESC, CSES, and SAGE Tutors (special thanks to Sarah Esper)and to all that contributed to making the 2011 Yahoo! Hack U competitions a runaway success.

written by Cody Noghera, Deputy Director, Corporate Affiliates Program, UC San Diego – Jacobs School of Engineering

 

RF MEMS Switch Wins Research Expo 2011 / Watch Chirag Patel

University of California, San Diego electrical engineering Ph.D. student Chirag Patel won the top prize – the Rudee Outstanding Poster Award – at Research Expo 2011 for his work on RF MEMS metal-contact switches. The switches could make their way into MRIs and other medical equipment, satellites, and electronic instrumentation such as spectrum analyzers and signal sources. Search all Research Expo poster abstracts.

Read the full story on the Jacobs School news site.

The Zetabytes are Back!

Just when you think you're processing way more than your share of the bits in the digital deluge, UC San Diego's Roger Bohn and co come out with another study about zetabytes.

Today's zetabyte story, excerpted from the UC San Diego press release:

The world’s roughly 27 million computer servers processed 9.57 zettabytes of information in 2008, according to a paper to be presented April 7 at Storage Networking World’s (SNW’s) annual meeting in Santa Clara, Calif. The first-of-its kind rigorous estimate was generated with server-processing performance standards, server-industry reports, interviews with information technology experts, sales figures from server manufacturers and other sources. (One zettabyte is 10 to the 21st power, or a million million gigabytes.)

How much info is this? According to the press release, it's "the digital equivalent of a 5.6-billion-mile-high stack of books from Earth to Neptune and back to Earth, repeated about 20 times a year."

I wonder what kind of books...maybe the hard-copy encyclopedias that we don't look at any more.

Check out Gary Robbins' story on the topic in the San Diego Union Tribune:  "Business data could fill books reaching to Neptune and back."

Hack U is Coming to campus

The Hack is back! Yahoo is coming to UCSD for a week of tech talks and the famous 24 hour hack contest! All events in CSE 1202. (Read about Hack U 2010 on the Jacobs School news site.)

Tuesday, April 5

Hack U Kickoff / BBQ @ 6:00 pm

Wednesday, April 6

API Brain Jam + Lunch @ 12:00 pm

Douglas Crockford: Javascript - The Good Parts @ 6:00 pm

Thursday, April 7

Office Hours + Informal Talks @ 12:00 pm

24-hour Hack Kickoff @ 2:00 pm

Friday, April 8

Hack Demos @ 2 pm

Speeding Toyotas

Tom Fudge from KPBS has an interesting piece on speeding Toyatas, with insights from two Jacobs School of Engineering professors: computer science (CSE) professor Ingolf Krueger and electrical engineering (ECE) professor Mohan Trivedi.

History Sniffing KPBS Audio File is Available

KPBS posted the audio file of the These Days show (yesterday) in which Hovav Shacham, Sorin Lernin, and Ranji Jhala described their "history sniffing" work.

Nuno Vasconcelos Electrical Engineering Professor Quoted in Wall Street Journal

ECE prof Nuno Vasconcelos is quoted in an interesting story on counting crowds in Cairo by Wall Street Journal reporter Carl Bialik. Check out the Statistical Visual Counting Lab site.

History Sniffing Story on KPBS These Days

The UC San Diego computer scientists involved in the history sniffing research were on "These Days" on KPBS this morning. The transcript and audio file of the show with Hovav Shacham, Sorin Lerner, and Ranjit Jhala will be posted shortly here on the KPBS site. The Jacobs School of Engineering history sniffing press release is here.

Stefan Savage and Pavel Pevzner named 2010 ACM Fellows

Congrats to Stefan Savage and Pavel Pevzner, both named 2010 ACM Fellows.

Pavel Pevzner

Stefan Savage

Stefan Savage is being recognized by the ACM “for contributions to large scale systems and network security.”

Pavel Pevzner is being recognized by the ACM “for contributions to algorithms for genome rearrangements, DNA sequencing, and proteomics.”

Both are professors in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego.

UC San Diego computer science professor Stefan Savage’s work has focused on the security threats enabled by broad Internet connectivity; including worms, viruses, denial-of-service, botnets and spam. He is known for advancing a quantitative approach towards computer security, including the development of empirical techniques to measure and analyze global-scale attacks and efforts to identify the economics driving modern attackers.

Savage is part of the Systems & Networking and Security research groups in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego. Savage is also the Acting Director of the UC San Diego Center for Networked Systems. His interests range from the economics of e-crime, to characterizing availability, to automotive systems to routing protocols and data center virtualization.

UC San Diego computer science professor Pavel Pevzner’s work has focused broadly on algorithmic aspects of bioinformatics. Bioinformatics has become a part of modern biology and often dictates new fashions, enables new approaches, and drives further biological developments. Pevzner’s work focuses of DNA sequencing, proteomics, and genome rearrangements, the key areas of algorithmic biology. He authored influential graduate and undegraduate textbooks on bioinformatics algorithms and is now interested in new approaches to interdisciplinary computer science education and introducing computer science to education of biologists. 

Pavel Pevzner is the Ronald R. Taylor Professor of Computer Science at UC San Diego; Director of the NIH Center for Computational Mass Spectrometry; and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Professor.

What is the state of certain kinds of security problems in the real web?

Another tidbit related to the history sniffing story from computer scientists at UC San Diego.

“The tool we ended up with is useful for answering questions that no one knew how to answer at all before: ‘what is the state of certain kinds of security problems in the real web?’” said computer science professor Hovav Shacham from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. 

The UC San Diego computer scientists did this while working on the cutting edge of how to efficiently do information tracking in a JavaScript setting.

History Sniffing and Browser Tracking / What about Mobile Browsers?

While the original history sniffing research presented at CCS10  did not look at mobile browsers, the UC San Diego computer scientists say that is something they are looking into now. 

“In general, the mobile browsers and mobile sites seem to be way behind in security,” said computer science professor Hovav Shacham from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. 

The UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering history sniffing press release is here.