[Alumni Archive]

(2/27/2012) Mohammad Al-Fares defended his dissertation today, "A Scalable, Adaptive, and Extensible Data Center Network Architecture". Mohammad is scheduled to continue changing the world, but now at Google. Congrats!

(2/25/2012) The ACM Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing (HPDC) recently identified the 20 "most influential" papers it published over the last 20 years. Among these is "WebOS: Operating System Services for Wide Area Applications" with the lead author none other than our own Amin Vahdat! Published back in 1999, Amin and his colleagues anticipated the cloud computing services of today, describing a Web service that could dynamically replicate itself across the wide area in response to client access patterns. The application, which they called Rent-A-Server, is one that will be familiar to anyone who uses modern on-demand cloud services today such as AWS or Azure.

(2/16/2012) Today, the CCC sponsored a symposium to recognize the 20th anniversary of the Federal Networking and Information Technology Research and Development program (NITRD) — the multi-agency funding program that has sponsored US computing research over the past two decades. The NITRD Symposium featured a broad range of technical speakers including Jeannette Wing, Kevin Knight, Beth Mynatt, Helen Nissenbaum, Sebastian Thrun, Shwetak Patel, Erik Brynjolfsson, Tom Lange, Vint Cerf, Bill Scherlis, Russ Altman, David Keyes, Kathy Yelick, Tom Davis, Eric Brown, Eric Horvitz, Alex Szalay, Tom Kalil, Peter Lee, Chuck Vest and our own Stefan Savage. In 15 minutes apiece, each highlighted how transformative twenty years of computing research in their field has been on the real world.

(2/1/2012) In his ongoing cybercrime series, Brian Krebs hunts down the operators of major botnets. In today's column he focuses on the Grum botnet and uses evidence from our previous Trajectory study to help attribute its operator. CSI here we come!

(1/15/2012) Today's NY Times quotes Amin Vahdat about new research focused on using 60Ghz wireless signals to interconnect data center racks. Electrical, optical, wireless... if there's a way to do data center interconnect Amin is on it. Next up: lasers...

(1/30/2012) The National Research Council's study The Safety Challenge and Promise of Automotive Electronics: Insights from Unintended Acceleration was released on January 18th and, along its recommendations, argues for a more significant focus on cybersecurity issues (based largely on our joint work with University of Washington). Mainstream press coverage around this release and the issues of automotive cybersecurity include the LA Times, BusinessWeek. and MIT Technology Review. The last article suggests that industry is moving quickly and it documents a ten-fold increase in security staffing at GM's OnStar division and the development of focused automotive security tams within both research and product companies. Our thanks to NSF for their support; its nice to see a project pay off.

(12/15/2011) Today YY Zhou was named an ACM Distinguished Scientist for her significant accomplishments and impact on the computing field. Go YY!

(12/11/11) The fall hike this year ventured into Mission Trails, covering roughly an 8-mile loop up and down North and South Fortuna Peaks. [All Hikes]

(12/8/2011) Two of our own, Keith Marzullo and Amin Vahdat, were named to the 2011 Class of ACM Fellows! Amin is cited for his "contributions to data center scalability and management", while Keith is recognized "for contributions to distributed systems and service to the computing community". Congrats all around! Amin and Keith are the 5th and 6th SysNet faculty to be so honored and the 12th and 13th in the department. Read more about their accomplishments (and about CSE architecture faculty Dean Tullsen who also joins them this year) in the UCSD press release.

(12/8/2011) Infographics rule! This week's BusinessWeek features a two page spread highlighting results from our research on spam economics. The data for these visuals are derived from two efforts: one led by Research Scientist Kirill Levchenko (spam value chain) and the other by CSE Ph.D. candidate Chris Kanich (spam revenue and demand) but both were a huge team effort (including the key help of our colleagues at ICSI as well)

(12/6/2011) Today's NY Times features a special section looking at the future of computing; nine essays written by nine computer scientists. Our own Stefan Savage penned one of these pieces, focusing on the future direction of security threats.

[News Archive]