22-23 CSE Research Highlights – CSE Annual Report

CSE research + impact

UC San Diego Computer Scientists Lead $50.5M Center for Computing

The new Processing with Intelligent Storage and Memory center, or PRISM, is partially funded by a $35M contract from the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) to make computing orders of magnitude faster and more efficient. The initiative includes a group of 10 universities who contributed additional funds to create the $50.5 million center led by CSE’s Tajana Šimunić-Rosing.

The center recently was awarded its second-year funding during a successful annual review by the SRC.

Nine CSE Research Papers in Computer Architecture Included in ISCA's 25-Year Retrospective

In commemoration of its 50th anniversary, the International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA) compiled a volume of memorable papers – a 25-Year Retrospective: 1996-2020 – to demonstrate the progression of research within computer architecture. The compilation of 98 research papers, culled from a pool of over a thousand submissions, included nine papers from UC San Diego’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE).

That means CSE faculty were involved in 10 percent of the selected papers. Professors Hadi Esmaeilzadeh and Dean Tullsen each had four papers selected and Jishen Zhao, an associate professor, had one paper selected.

SIGGRAPH Celebrates 50 Years of Graphics Research - with CSE Leading the Way in Rendering

Three of the 11 rendering papers in the new Association of Computing Machinery’s Seminal Graphics Papers: Pushing the Boundaries, Volume 2 were selected based on the transformative research of CSE Emeritus Professor Henrik Wann Jensen and Professor Ravi Ramamoorthi.

A compilation of SIGGRAPH conference papers from several decades, the impressive volume features two ground-breaking papers by Jensen and one by Ramamoorthi, who is director of the Center for Visual Computing.

New Algorithm Reveals Extremely High Mutations Rates in Complex Genomic Regions

Pavel Pevzner, a distinguished professor in CSE, and PhD student Andrey Bzikadze shared a new UniAligner algorithm for comparing highly repetitive genomic regions in a Nature Methods paper. This algorithm can identify mutations in complex and biomedically important genomic regions, such as centromeres that play a major role in cell division and in immunoglobulin loci that harbor antibody-encoding genes.

Scammers Can Abuse Security Flaws in Email Forwarding to Impersonate High-profile Domains

Sending an email with a forged address is easier than previously thought, due to flaws in the process that allows email forwarding, according to a research team led by computer scientists at UC San Diego.

The issues researchers uncovered have a broad impact, affecting the integrity of email sent from tens of thousands of domains, including those representing organizations in the U.S. government–such as the majority of U.S. cabinet email domains, including state.gov, as well as security agencies. Key financial service companies, such as Mastercard, and major news organizations, such as The Washington Post and the Associated Press, are also vulnerable.

The research team includes PhD students Alex Enze Liu, Ariana Mirian and Grant Ho and professors Geoffrey M. Voelker and Stefan Savage.

CSE Researchers Have Distinguished Showing at ASPLOS 2023

From reclaiming the 1.5 billion smartphones deactivated annually to finding a new way to reduce browser security risks, UC San Diego computer scientists tackled big issues in two papers that were recognized with Distinguished Paper Awards at the 2023 Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS) conference.

PhD student Jennifer Switzer is first author of Junkyard Computing: Repurposing Discarded Smartphones to Minimize Carbon.

The paper Going Beyond the Limits of SFI: Flexible Hardware-Assisted In-Process Isolation with HFI was led by alumnus and postdoctoral researcher Shravan Narayan (PhD ’22).

In total, CSE researchers presented four papers at the conference.

Surprise: A Small Change Leads to Big Results for Computer Security

Computer scientists that include a team from CSE have discovered for the first time the popular Intel processor has a key security feature already in place that protects against attacks, including Spectre. The findings were presented at the 2023 IEEE Security and Privacy conference.

Authors of the new paper Half&Half: Demystifying Intel’s Directional Branch Predictors for Fast, Secure Partitioned Execution include Hosein Yavarzadeh, first author and CSE PhD student; Kazem Taram, a CSE alumnus now at Purdue University; Shravan Narayan, CSE alumnus and postdoc researcher; and CSE professors Deian Stefan and Dean Tullsen.