Reference Database Helps Scientists Estimate a Person's Genetic Repeats

There are many ways in which our genomes vary from one another, leading to differences in various traits or disease susceptibilities. Most researchers who want to uncover these differences focus on simple “spelling” mistakes in our DNA.

“Yet there are complex, repetitive parts of our genome that are also known to cause diseases, such as Huntington’s disease, and these parts of the genome are not analyzed in most large medical genetics studies,” said Melissa Gymrek, PhD, assistant professor at UC San Diego School of Medicine and Jacobs School of Engineering.

So Gymrek and her team built a reference database that allows researchers to estimate a person’s genome at these repetitive regions, even when they are not directly measured.

“This resource will enable analyzing the effects of repeat variation for the first time across hundreds of thousands of individuals on thousands of traits without the need to collect any additional data,” Gymrek said.

Read more about this new resource and its applications in Nature Communications, October 23:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-06694-0

A reference haplotype panel for genome-wide imputation of short tandem repeats. 

FBI issues PSA on cars' cybersecurity citing work by Jacobs School researchers

Last summer, computer scientists at the Jacobs School demonstrated that they could wirelessly control thousands of vehicles via a gadget that's often used by insurance companies to monitor cars. The team, led by Professor Stefan Savage, has worked to raise awareness of flaws in the cybersecurity of cars since 2010.

On March 17, the Federal Bureau of Investigation issued a public service announcement titled "Motor Vehicles Increasingly Vulnerable to Remote Exploits," which alludes to the researchers' work:

As previously reported by the media in and after July 2015, security researchers evaluating automotive cybersecurity were able to demonstrate remote exploits of motor vehicles. The analysis demonstrated the researchers could gain significant control over vehicle functions remotely by exploiting wireless communications vulnerabilities. While the identified vulnerabilities have been addressed, it is important that consumers and manufacturers are aware of the possible threats and how an attacker may seek to remotely exploit vulnerabilities in the future. Third party aftermarket devices with Internet or cellular access plugged into diagnostics ports could also introduce wireless vulnerabilities.

The PSA also says:

The FBI and NHTSA are warning the general public and manufacturers – of vehicles, vehicle components, and aftermarket devices – to maintain awareness of potential issues and cybersecurity threats related to connected vehicle technologies in modern vehicles.

The agency recommends that vehicle owners check the safercar.gov website twice a year for recalls on their cars.

Still connected after all these years

When he doesn't bodysurf, S. Gill Williamson focuses on providing free educational materials for CSE 20 and CSE 21. The former chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, now in his 70s and an emeritus, was profiled in This Week @ UC San Diego as part of a feature about faculty members who have been connected to the campus for 50 years or more.

Williamson joined UC San Diego as a professor of mathematics in 1965 and then became the chair of the computer science department in 1991.  He retired in 2004.

Here are some of the things he had to say:

On why he decided to provide free educational materials:

 “From 1965 to 1991, I was a mathematics professor. I taught many calculus classes large and small during this period. In 1991, I transferred to Computer Science and Engineering—so my calculus teaching days were over. But in cleaning out files I came across handouts that I used to give to students who wanted to tutor for my integral calculus classes. I had fun rereading this ‘tutors’ guide,’ so I decided to bring it up to date with respect to online resources now regularly used by students.”

On why he stayed at UC San Diego for so long:

“The main change in higher education for me,” said Gill Williamson, “was the increasing number of students in my classes and less opportunity to talk with them personally about the subjects I was teaching. A student can ace every exam but, under questioning in person, show little imagination or curiosity. This important type of information about students was missing for me in later years.”

On being chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering:

"Although I had had little experience in administrative work, the change worked out well for me. CSE had hired many talented young people who were willing to tell me about their research. I learned a lot from them. Also, CSE had an excellent and talented staff.”

On higher education and research:

“The main change in higher education for me,” said Gill Williamson, “was the increasing number of students in my classes and less opportunity to talk with them personally about the subjects I was teaching. A student can ace every exam but, under questioning in person, show little imagination or curiosity. This important type of information about students was missing for me in later years.”

Read the full story here. 

Engineers explore the Guatemalan jungle

It's not every day that you get to explore the jungles of Guatemala as an undergraduate or graduate student. But that's exactly what students in the Engineers for Explorations program get to do every year.

They are led by computer science professor Ryan Kastner and Qualcomm Institute research scientist Albert Lin. Kastner and Lin in turn work with USC archeologist Tom Garrison, Edwin Roman-Ramirez of UT Austin and Jason Paterniti of the GEOS Foundation.

The goal of the yearly expeditions is using drones equipped with LIDAR to find new Maya archeological sites and help document existing sites. Researchers also hope to develop new technologies to speed up data gathering at archeological sites.

You can find out more about last year's expedition here.

Bitcoin experts and CSE alumna wins Chancellor's Dissertation Medal

Sarah Meiklejohn, an alumna who earned a Ph.D. in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Jacobs School, has won the 2015 Chancellor's Dissertation Medal. She is now an assistant professor at University College, London.

Here is what Mihir Bellare, a professor in the department and her dissertation co-advisory had to say when outlining Meiklejohn's merits:

1. Impact: The results in Sarah’s thesis have shaped government policy. The methods in the thesis have been used to track cyber-criminals. The thesis has received significant media attention (NY Times, Washington Post, radio, TV, ...).
2. Intellectual and technical depth: The thesis introduces an innovative new experimental technique to track Bitcoins that was used not only to obtain the thesis results but is now used as a key forensic tool by law enforcement.
3. Independence: Unlike many theses, which write up group projects, this one was entirely Sarah’s work. She alone conceived the idea and methods and pushed it through from algorithms to reality.
In my 20 years of experience at UCSD, I would say that a thesis with one of the above elements is rare. To have all three in the same thesis is unique and extra-ordinary.

Read our story about Meiklejohn's work here. 

More media coverage of her work:

Forbes 

The Economist

Wired

MIT Technology Review

KPBS

This amazing autonomous robot tracks and follows an RC copter

A team of undergraduate computer science students completed their final project for their CSE 190 class, taught by alum Chris Barngrover: an autonomous robot that follows a remote-controlled helicopter around.
They started off with a TurtleBot, a low cost personal robot kit equipped with open source software. The robot includes a Kinect and a netbook. Students used the open-source Robot Operating Software to program its tasks.
The students are: Frank Bogart, Mike Lara, James Lee and Kenny Yokoyama. 
We're impressed with the results!

Lovely digital creatures on display at Research Expo April 16

A relative of this cute digital white rabbit will be part of one of the many posters on display April 16 at Research Expo at the Price Center. The picture is a--very rough--draft for the work of computer science Ph.D. student Chiwei Tseng, who works with Professors Ravi Ramamoorthi and Henrik W. Jensen. The work also is part of the Jacobs School's new Center for Visual Computing.
Here's the abstract for Tseng's poster, which is titled "A generic light scattering model for rendering photorealistic animal fur fibers:"

Rendering photorealistic animal fur is of practical importance in many computer graphics productions. In the past, the visual appearances of specific fiber types have been studied, and various light scattering models derived from cylindrical geometry have been proposed. These models, however, lack either physical accuracy or versatility to produce the wide range of specular and diffusive material properties observed on animal fur fibers in the wild. We propose an anatomically based light scattering model for arbitrary animal fur fibers, represented by two coaxial cylinder volumes. We show that our model preserves high fidelity to actual animal fur and can simulate a large array of visual appearances by qualitatively matching synthetic optical microscopy images and far-field scattering profiles with measured data. Through reconstructing the light paths for formerly unexplainable scattering lobes observed on 10 animal fur fiber types, we reveal how the subsurface structures of a fur fiber can bring about decisive effects to its visual appearance.

More info about Research Expo at: http://www.jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/re/

Cybercrime? It's all about the money, Jacobs School computer scientist says

Photo: Erik Jepsen/UC San Diego Publications

It's all about the money, Stefan Savage, a computer science professor at the Jacobs School, says in the Los Angeles Times. 

“Ninety-nine percent of what you and I deal with when it comes to computer security is motivated by economics,” Savage said. “Data breaches? It’s all about the money. Spam? It’s all about the money. Malware? It’s all about the money. The problem is we are looking at this as a purely technical problem.”

 Over the years, Savage and colleagues at the Jacobs School and the International Computer Science Institute, an independent nonprofit in Berkeley, have probed the economics of cyber crime. The LA Times explains:

Throughout 2011 and 2012, he and a team of researchers posed as buyers of counterfeit goods sold on the Internet and, by tracking the flow of money in these transactions, showed that only a handful of banks were involved in these activities. Working with a Washington, D.C.-based anti-piracy organization called the International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition (IACC), they helped create a framework whereby brandholders and credit card companies could work together to shut down the counterfeiter's financial accounts, effectively cutting off their economic lifeblood.

Full LA Times article here.

 More about Savage's work here, here  and  here.

When Facebook and Pinterest are both on campus to recruit students

Computer science alumna Brina Lee interviews UC San Diego students during a Facebook recruiting event.

A line of students sneaked around the lobby of the Computer Science and Engineering building Oct. 16, waiting to talk to Facebook recruiters and employees--including our very own alum, Brina Lee, the first female engineer to work at Instagram after it was purchased by Facebook.
Freshmen Nancy Ponce and Maya Bello stood patiently in line, talking with other students. "We're hoping to get a summer internship to get more experience," said Ponce, a computer engineering major who is from San Diego. She hoped the internship would help her figure out whether to she wants to switch to computer science. Ponce said she already felt comfortable around campus after attending the 5-week Summer Program for Incoming Students organized by the Department of Computer Science and Engineering.
"It's always good to put yourself out there," said Bello, a computer science major from Oakland. She chose to come to UC San Diego because of its great computer science program--and because of the weather, she said.
Even if they didn't get an internship, this would be good practice, they both agreed.
Lee took a break from interviewing students to say that she had seen great candidates. So far, she wanted to interview them all, she said. "A lot of them are industry-focused," she said. "Which is great."
Some of the students peeled away from the Facebook line to attend a presentation by Pinterest right next door. The company handles a total of more than 20 terabytes of data and fields 110,000 requests a second. It's looking for engineers to help it grow. The event was organized by the UC San Diego chapter of Women in Computing. Everyone got pizza--and a Pinterest-labeled Mason jar.

Maya Bello, left, talks with a fellow student.

Computer science teaching professor featured in Labor Day news story

Congratulations to computer science teaching professor Mia Minnes, who is featured in the Labor Day issue of UT San Diego!
Minnes was hired this year after serving as a postdoctoral visiting assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics at UC San Diego from 2010 to 2014. In addition to teaching many introductory and advanced undergraduate classes in the department, she works on outreach and research projects, including the five-week residential Summer Program for Incoming Students, which she co-developed. She's also the faculty sponsor for the Summer Internship Symposium for the Department of Computer Science and Engineering.
Read the full story here.

CSE-Related Research and Researchers Dominate USENIX Security Forum

Here's an alert to graduate students in CSE who want to attend the 23rd annual USENIX Security Symposium that will take place August 20-22 at the Manchester Grand Hyatt San Diego. The conference has extended the deadline for students to apply for travel, accommodations and/or registration grants to attend this year's event. The new deadline is Monday, July 14, and applications must be submitted online (see link below).

USENIX Security is one of the "big three" conferences in computer security, and this year's meeting is going to showcase the work of current faculty and grad students, but also the work of UC San Diego CSE alumni. CSE Prof. Hovav Shacham (pictured at right) is the senior author of a paper, "On the Practical Exploitability of Dual EC in TLS Implementations," co-authored with colleagues including grad student Jake Maskiewicz and CSE alumni Stephen Checkoway (now at Johns Hopkins) and Tom Ristenpart (University of Wisconsin-Madison). Shacham is also senior author on another paper with co-authors from UC San Diego and the University of Michigan. CSE Ph.D. student Neha Chachra(at left during previous internship at Google), advised by Geoffrey Voelker and Stefan Savage in the Systems and Networking group, is one of the co-authors on a paper titled, "Hulk: Eliciting Malicious Behavior in Browser Extensions." In addition to Chachra, the co-authors on the Hulk paper hail from two other University of California campuses -- three co-authors from UC Santa Barbara, and two from UC Berkeley and the International Computer Science Institute, including senior author Vern Paxson.

In addition to the paper above, CSE alumnus Tom Ristenpart (Ph.D. '10) has three other papers on the USENIX Security program. Both Ristenpart and Georgia Tech professor Alexandra (Sasha) Boldyreva (Ph.D. '04) studied under CSE Prof. Mihir Bellare, and Boldyreva also has a paper at USENIX Security this year. Another CSE alumnus, Stephen Checkoway (Ph.D. '12), had four papers accepted (two of them co-authored with UC San Diego researchers). A fourth CSE alumnus, Chris Kanich (Ph.D. '12) -- now an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago -- also has a paper ("The Long 'Taile' of Typosquatting Domain Names"). Pictured above (l-r): CSE alumni Ristenpart, Checkoway, Boldyreva and Kanich.

According to Center for Networked Systems director Stefan Savage, CSE's intellectual imprint on USENIX Security 2014 goes beyond the individual papers. "There are two sessions whose purpose is driven by our past work," said Savage. "There is a session on return-oriented programming (ROP) that is driven entirely by Hovav Shacham's seminal work on ROP. On top of that, roughly 75 percent of the side-channel session is motivated by the work Tom Ristenpart did here at UC San Diego on cross-VM attacks in the cloud."

Deciphering CSE's Upcoming Presence at Crypto 2014

CSE professors Mihir Bellare and Daniele Micciancio will be in Santa Barbara August 17-21 for the 34th International Cryptology Conference at UC Santa Barbara. The conference is sponsored by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR), and the general chair of the conference is CSE alumna Alexandra (Sasha) Boldyreva (Ph.D. ’04), who worked in Bellare’s lab and is now an associate professor in Georgia Tech’s Information Security Center.

This year’s IACR Distinguished Lecture will be given by UC San Diego’s Bellare (pictured at left). The title of his talk: “Caught in between theory and practice.”  “This talk explores the culture and motivations of the cryptographic research community,” explains Bellare. “I examine the tension between theory and practice through the lens of my own experience in moving between them. I examine the peer-review process through the lens of psychology and sociology. In both cases the aim is to go from critique to understanding and, eventually, change.”

Bellare also has two other papers at Crypto 2014. In the August 18 opening session, he and colleagues Kenneth G. Paterson (University of London) and Phillip Rogaway (UC Davis) have a paper on "Security of Symmetric Encryption against Mass Surveillance." According to its authors, the research was “motivated by revelations concerning population-wide surveillance of encrypted communications.” In the paper, Bellare and colleagues formalize and investigate the resistance of symmetric encryption schemes to mass surveillance. The research abstract notes that, “We assume that the goal of ‘Big Brother’ is undetectable subversion,” going on to spell out a way to defend against so-called algorithm-substitution attacks (ASAs), which aim to replace a real encryption algorithm with a subverted encryption algorithm.

Separately, Bellare and his postdoc (Viet Tung Hoang), and Ph.D. student Sriram Keelveedhi teamed on a paper called, "Cryptography from Compression Functions: The UCE Bridge to the ROM." UCE stands for Universal Computational Extractor, and ROM is the Random Oracle Model.

Then on August 19, in a session on lattices, Micciancio (at right) and his French postdoc Léo Ducas have a paper on “Improved Short Lattice Signatures in the Standard Model.” They will present “a signature scheme provably secure in the standard model (no random oracles) based on the worst-case complexity of approximating the Shortest Vector Problem in ideal lattices within polynomial factors” – achieving short signatures (consisting of a single lattice vector), and “relatively short” public keys.

Computer scientists in the spotlight on the Torrey Pines Mesa

Several Jacobs School computer scientists and their work are highlighted in a UT San Diego story about the history of the scientific institutions on the Torrey Pines Mesa.

Under the major science accomplishments section:

•Computer scientist Kenneth Bowles and his students modified the Pascal programming language, allowing a program to be moved around from machine to machine, a technique now widely used to build mobile applications.

 •George Varghese and Stefan Savage developed the first automated method for automatically identifying worm and virus attacks across the Internet and other high-speed networks almost as soon as the outbreaks occur. Cisco acquired the technology.

We also spotted computer scientists Ryan Kastner and Mia Minnes in the video accompanying the story:

Computer science Ph.D. student quoted in The New York Times about getting girls interested in programming

We are very excited to see that Jacobs School Ph.D. student Stephen Foster quoted in an opinion piece in The New York Times about getting girls interested in programming.
Forster is a co-founder, with fellow Ph.D. students Sarah Foster and Lindsey Handley, of ThoughtSTEM, a nonprofit organization that teaches children how to code here in San Diego. He talked to the author of the New York Times piece, Nitasha Tiku, the editor of Valleyway, Gawker's blog about the tech industry:

“Students kept walking in asking to learn how to code wearing Minecraft T-shirts,’” said Stephen Foster, a founder of the San Diego-based organization ThoughtSTEM, which teaches kids ages 8 to 18 to code in after-school programs and summer camps. “Once it happened the 20th time, we started to realize, ‘Oh, hey, maybe these kids know something that we don’t.’ ”

So ThoughtSTEM started offering Minecraft 101 classes at UC San Diego Extension. The organization also makes a special effort to enroll girls.  Foster told The New York Times:

A hundred students were on ThoughtSTEM’s waiting list for its first Minecraft class two months ago. “I would say that the girls are actually outperforming the boys, at least in my class,” Mr. Foster said. “And it’s very good to see, because as computer scientists, we definitely recognize that there’s a big gender disparity in our field.” He added, “There are just so many girls who play Minecraft who, as far as I’m concerned, are all people who can be swayed to pursue coding — they just don’t realize it yet.”

"ThoughtSTEM is a proud supporter of getting more girls and women into computing," Esper said. "With a majority of female co-founders, we are so excited to be featured as a company making headway, not just in computer science education, but in engaging a more diverse group with curriculum and programs that attract students of all kinds."

Help engineering teams raise funds for student scholarships!

Update: As of May 27 at 2:30 p.m.: Overclocked CSE Enthusiasts was in second place with $3510 raised, followed by Team Cymer with $2760 and ViaSat with $2440. Team Village was in first place with $4820.

There is a battle brewing between three engineering-related teams registering for this year's Triton 5K June 7. Team Cymer is currently in third place in terms of money raised for the event, with $1770, followed closely by ViaSat, with $1650 and by Overclocked CSE Enthusiasts, led by computer science chair Rajesh Gupta, with $1340. Feel free to throw your support behind either one. The funds go to student scholarships.

The competition prompted the following exchange on Facebook on the UCSD CSE Students and Alumni group between CSE alumni board president Lindsey Fowler and fellow board member Nikolai Devereaux, who is a program manager at ViaSat. Devereaux wondered if the rivalry between Overclocked CSE Enthusiasts and the ViaSat team is "the nerd version of Team Edward vs Team Jacob."

Lindsey Fowler via UCSD CSE Department

16 hrs

There's still time to join us at the Triton 5k! "Overclocked CSE Enthusiasts" are currently #4 in fundraising! Still 3 more days to register!

Triton 5K

5K.UCSD.EDU

Unlike ·  · Share

• 

  Nikolai Devereaux I'm pushing for Team ViaSat. It's this the nerd version of Team Edward vs Team Jacob?

  16 hours ago · Unlike · 1
• 

  Nikolai Devereaux Either way, Team Cymer is going DOWN

  16 hours ago · Like
• 

  Lindsey Fowler Yes that's exactly what this is! Nerd takeover of the 5k!

  15 hours ago · Like · 1

Watch: autonomous drone programmed by Jacobs School students avoids obstacles

NEW VIDEO!



A team of students in the Jacobs School's Embedded System Design Project class (CSE 145) programmed an autonomous drone to avoid obstacles. This is their first test flight.

CSE 145 is teaching students to build an embedded computing system. They learn the fundamentals of  microcontrollers, sensors and actuators. Students are also introduced to end-to-end system building and the hardware and software tools they will need to build a project in a team environment.

Video courtesy of computer science student David Dantas, who is also an IDEA Scholar. He worked on the project with team mates Miles Minton and Abe Hart (their adviser is CSE Prof. Ryan Kastner).

Video of an earlier demo:




From the course description: 

We are seeing substantial integration of computing systems into common objects. Such embedded systems silently control countless aspects of our life including our cars, phones, appliances, etc. And as computing hardware becomes cheaper and more powerful, we are capable of integrating it’s sophisticated intelligence everywhere. This is having an enormous societal impact, enabling advances in communications, medicine, and transportation, among many other things.  Yet, computer science courses are largely focused on traditional desktop computing despite the fact that over 99% of the microprocessors sold are used for embedded computing. Evidence for the success of this project class is extremely positive. Students are tremendously self-motivated when they are allowed to develop a project of their choosing.

Inviting girls to study computer science

"Women in Computer Science: How I became one and why you should be one too." That was the title of the talk that computer science teaching professor Christine Alvarado gave to about100 girls from around San Diego county high school girls May 10 here at the Jacobs School during Girl's Day Out, an event organized by the UC San Diego chapter of Women in Computing.

The girls toured labs here on campus, including the immersive Star Cave, and got to make their own Arduino-powered mood lamps. In addition to Alvarado, they also got to hear from the computer science's department new teaching professor Mia Mannes, and students from WIC @ UCSD.

Computer science department hires two faculty

In the face of heavy enrollment and strong demand for computer science education, the Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) department at the University of California, San Diego is expanding its faculty. CSE Chair Rajesh Gupta recently announced two more new faculty hires in the department, indicating that there will also likely be more announcements to come. Following the recent hiring of lecturer Mia Minnes, CSE has recruited two assistant professors who will join the faculty as of July 1, 2014: mathematician and computer scientist Daniel M. Kane, and datacenter and networked systems expert George Porter.

Porter is not a newcomer to CSE or UC San Diego (which may be why he opted to stay despite several competing offers). The former research scientist and associate director of the Center for Networked Systems (CNS) now becomes an assistant professor in the department, where he will continue his work at the intersection of computer networks and data-intensive computing. Porter will remain associate director of CNS. For most of his time at UCSD, Porter has also been a key player in the NSF-funded Center for Integrated Access Networks (CIAN). Since arriving on campus in 2009, Porter has been involved in a long series of industry grants as principal investigator or co-PI. These include projects funded by Cisco Systems, Google, Ericsson and NetApp (a faculty fellowship in 2011). Porter also designed and built the Scalable Energy Efficient Datacenter (SEED) testbed, and he was a co-PI on the Mordia project, which developed a microsecond optical research datacenter interconnect architecture (with primary funding from Google). A team of CSE graduate students and Porter achieved world records back-to-back in 2010 and ’11 in the SortBenchmark.org competition. In 2010 they broke two records for highly efficient sorting, and the following year they came out on top in five categories.

Going forward, Porter is PI on a major project funded by NSF through mid-2016. The large-scale Networking Technology and Systems (NeTS) research project on "Hybrid Circuit/Packet Networking" is developing a hybrid switching paradigm that spans the gap between traditional circuit switching and full-fledged packet switching. "The hybrid model will allow us to achieve a level of performance and scale not previously attainable," said Porter. "This will result in a hybrid switch whose optical switching capacity is orders of magnitude larger than the electrical packet switch, yet whose performance from an end-to-end perspective is largely indistinguishable from a giant (electrical) packet switch." If successful, Porter and his co-PIs (CSE's Alex Snoeren as well as ECE's George Papen and Joseph Ford) will produce a system that stands to dramatically improve data center networks by increasing energy efficiency and significantly reducing operating costs.

Daniel Kane is moving to San Diego from Palo Alto, where he has been a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Mathematics at Stanford University on an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. Kane will be based in CSE, but with a dual appointment in the Department of Mathematics. Prior to Stanford, he attended graduate school in mathematics at Harvard University (Ph.D. '11, MS '08). Before that, with a perfect GPA, Kane received two BS degrees at MIT in 2007, one in mathematics with computer science, the other in physics.

Kane has diverse research interests in mathematics and theoretical computer science, though most of his work fits into the broad categories of number theory, complexity theory or combinatorics. "My mathematics work has tended to focus on analytic number theory," said Kane. "My computer science work has typically involved k-independence, polynomial threshold functions or derandomization." In 2013, he received the Best Paper award at the Conference on Computational Complexity, and a decade earlier Kane – as a member of the USA team – won a gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad in 2002 and again in 2003.

Both Kane and Porter are members of the Association for Computing Machinery. Kane is also a member of the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America. "George and Daniel are wonderful additions to the Computer Science and Engineering faculty," says CSE chair Gupta. "We also owe a big thanks to our recruiting committee that continues to attract compelling talent to the department! And yes, I do look forward to repeating this sentence again this recruiting season!"

If you aren't getting rejected on a daily basis, your goals aren't ambitious enough

Imagine being able to try on clothes from around the world virtually via your webcam. That's the experience offered by Clothia, a website and iPad app designed by Elena Silenok, who earned her master's in computer science here at the Jacobs School back in 2006.
Silenok gave a tech talk about start-ups about the different options available to CS students after graduation April 24. The event was hosted by the Women in Computing group here at UC San Diego. Some of Silenok's advice:
"If you aren't getting rejected on a daily basis, your goals aren't ambitious enough."
 Silenok is now a guest lecturer at Columbia University and NYU, among others, as well as a contributing writer to Business Insider.
Clothia also allows users to browse their friends' closets, mix-n-match items to create outfits, get inspired by style icons and share their finds. She described her inspiration for the company in a 2012 story in The New York Times:

“I was like, ‘Oh, my God, my pink thing is not working,’ ” said Ms. Silenok, who was born in Kaliningrad, Russia, to a family of engineers and has a master’s in computer science from the University of California, San Diego. She decided to build a new wardrobe and wanted input from her friends. But e-mailing and instant messaging photos while slogging around stores was a chore. And she wanted to call up mental images of her entire closet at all times. “As a girl, you don’t think of just an item you buy,” Ms. Silenok said. “You think of an outfit.” She cited as inspiration the computer touch-screen that Cher Horowitz pressed to mix and match the contents of her closet in the 1995 film “Clueless.”

“That scene was only 17 seconds,” Ms. Silenok said. (She timed it.) “And people still remember the clothes closet. Women everywhere always wondered, Why don’t we have something like this?”

Why Minecraft is good for teaching computer science

Minecraft enthusiasts in San Diego will be able to take a unique inside look into their favorite game during a class taught by Jacobs School computer science Ph.D. student Stephen Foster at UC San Diego Extension.

Students will learn how to set up Minecraft servers and build Minecraft mods. In the process, they will learn about client/server architectures, network security, operating systems and computer programming. The class will be taught in a project-based style.

Heads-up: the class, which starts March 1, is full. But Foster says it'll be offered again soon.

In this video, Foster explains why the video game is a great tool to teach computer science. In the process, he makes some interesting connections between Alan Turning, one of the fathers of computer science, and Minecraft.

Note: Foster is one of three co-founders of ThoughtSTEM, a company that teaches students ages 8 to 18 how to program. He is also one of two creators of CodeSpells, a first-player video game that teaches children (and adults too) how to program in Java.

Related stories:

Teaching Kids How to Code

UC San Diego Computer Scientists Develop First-Person Player Video Game that Teaches how to Program in Java