Sorin Lerner, CSE Department Chair
Jennie Morrow, CSE Chief Administrative Officer
Katie E. Ismael, Editor
Kimberley Clementi, Contributor
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CSE students and alumni help fuel the future of computing
From his childhood home near the South China Sea to the singing eucalyptus trees overlooking La Jolla’s scenic shoreline, UC San Diego alumnus David Loo (BS ’91) has zigzagged continents to earn a world-class education and launch global companies, including ServiceNow. Loo recently returned to the Computer Science and Engineering Department to accept its 2024 Distinguished Alumni Award. “This is where the seed of ambition was sown. This is where my curiosity was nurtured, setting the path for me to become an entrepreneur later in life,” said Loo at the awards ceremony.
Sarah Meiklejohn (PhD ’14) was a computer science student when the revolutionary paper “A Fistful of Bitcoins: Characterizing Payments Among Men with No Names” was published in 2013. Nearly a decade later, the research team led by Meiklejohn is still credited with shedding light on the structure of the Bitcoin economy and how it is used. Their paper was recognized with a Test-of-time Award at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) 2024 held recently in Madrid, Spain.
The story behind the paper and its impact on cybercrime was chronicled in a 2024 book, Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency, by award-winning author and veteran cybersecurity reporter Andy Greenberg. Several chapters recounting Meiklejohn’s pivotal role in tracing these illicit transactions were featured in a WIRED magazine article also by Greenberg.
Other CSE alumni involved in the work are Marjori Pomarole (B.S. ’13) and Kirill Levchenko (PhD ’08).
The computer science and engineering community at UC San Diego broke ground this fall on a significant renovation of the building where most of its research and many of its classes take place.
The long-awaited renovation will add a student collaboration space on the first floor of the Computer Science and Engineering building. It will also add a 2,900 square foot state-of-the-art server room, which is key to the research of some of the department’s faculty. The additional server capacity will also allow the department’s artificial intelligence researchers to make advances.
UC San Diego’s Triton Quantitative Trading team emerged as the top performer in the Q3 Quant League Competition, achieving an impressive 27.4% profit. Competing against over 20 universities, the team skillfully adapted strategies to evolving market conditions, especially during the third quarter. Team members say: “Representing TQT in this competition was an incredible journey that pushed our technical limits, and we’re grateful for the opportunity to compete and grow as a team.”
Computer Science student Helyaneh Ziaei Jam is one of five UC San Diego graduate students applying engineering principles to solve medical challenges to have been selected as 2025 Siebel Scholars. The Siebel Scholars program recognizes the most talented students in the world’s leading graduate schools of business, computer science, bioengineering and energy science. The students are selected based on outstanding academic performance and leadership, and each receive a $35,000 award toward their final year of study.
The CSE community came out in full force this summer at picnics from Seattle to the Bay Area and, of course, the homeland of San Diego. Attendees enjoyed delicious food and spent a relaxing afternoon outdoors playing lawn games and reconnecting with friends. The CSE spirit was alive and well!
CSE continues to drive computing for the greater good
A research team led by UC San Diego computer scientists including Nadia Heninger investigated the widely-used Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service (RADIUS) protocol and found a vulnerability they call Blast-RADIUS that has been present for decades. The widely used security protocol has vulnerabilities that could expose large numbers of networked devices to an attack and allow an attacker to gain control of traffic on an organization’s network. Researchers from Cloudfare, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, BastiionZero and Microsoft Research contributed to the paper that was presented at the USENIX Security 2024 conference.
A UC San Diego-led research team that includes computer science PhD student Hosein Yavarzadeh and Professor Dean Tullsen found two novel types of attacks that target the conditional branch predictor found in high-end Intel processors, which could be exploited to compromise billions of processors currently in use. The paper, “Pathfinder: High-Resolution Control-Flow Attacks Exploiting the Conditional Branch Predictor,” is based on findings from scientists from UC San Diego, Purdue University, Georgia Tech, the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and Google. Intel and AMD issued security alerts based on the findings.
CARMEN, short for Cognitively Assistive Robot for Motivation and Neurorehabilitation, is a small, tabletop robot designed to help people with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) learn skills to improve memory, attention, and executive functioning at home. Unlike other robots in this space, CARMEN was developed by UC San Diego researchers, led by computer science and emergency medicine professor Laurel Riek, in collaboration with clinicians, people with MCI, and their care partners. To the best of the researchers’ knowledge, CARMEN is also the only robot that teaches compensatory cognitive strategies to help improve memory and executive function.
A Smartphone’s unique Bluetooth fingerprint could be used to track the device’s user–until now. A team of researchers at UC San Diego have developed a simple firmware update that can completely hide the Bluetooth fingerprint, eliminating the vulnerability. The same team discovered the vulnerability caused by Bluetooth fingerprints in a study they presented at the 2022 IEEE Security & Privacy conference. They presented the fix to this vulnerability two years later at the 2024 IEEE Security & Privacy conference.
UC San Diego computer scientists including professor Dean Tullsen and alumna Sankara Prasad Ramesh (MS ’23) are working to untangle a complex bottleneck impacting modern high-performance processors.
They are part of a team that includes researchers from Princeton University and Intel that has proposed a novel instruction prefetching technique to target instruction cache misses and improve processing performance. Their paper, “PDIP: Priority Directed Instruction Prefetching,” received one of six best paper awards recently at the 2024 ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS).
A joint academic and industry research team led by computer scientists from the UC San Diego have proposed a simple and transformative extension to existing processors to mitigate security breaches.
A team of eight professors, students, and alumni from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and their co-authors were honored during the 2024 USENIX Security Symposium at an event recognizing the top papers in hardware security for the previous year. They were one of just three teams to receive an Intel Hardware Security Academic Award, earning honorable mention for their paper, “Going beyond the Limits of SFI: Flexible and Secure Hardware-Assisted In-Process Isolation with HFI.”
Professor Ranjit Jhala and alumni Niki Vazou (PhD ’16) and Eric L. Seidel (M.S., PhD ’16, ’17) were among those recognized for the transformative paper Refinement Types for Haskell at the 29th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP). The paper received the Most Influential Paper Award and was selected from 10 years of ICFP research for its influence over the past decade and for solving real-world problems in Functional Programming.
Nearly 90% of researchers who develop robots for autistic people didn’t bother to ask autistic people if they need the technologies, says Naba Rizvi, a computer science Ph.D. student and a self-identifying autistic woman. Rizvi raises this point in her work that investigates the stereotypes about neurodiversity perpetuated by computer science research. She is the first author of a new study, “Are Robots Ready to Deliver Autism Inclusion?: A Critical Review,” presented recently at the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
UC San Diego researchers have proposed a novel rendering technique that could increase rendering efficiency and produce more visually appealing images.
PhD student Bing Xu – part of a joint team of computer scientists from the UC San Diego Center for Visual Computing (VISCOMP) and industry partner, Adobe – has developed a theoretical framework that sheds light on scene re-rendering with moving objects and material authoring. The paper, Residual Path Integrals for Re-Rendering, received a best paper award at the 2024 Eurographics Symposium on Rendering (EGSR) held recently in London
CSE faculty continue the legacy of receiving national and international recognition
CSE Associate Professor Rose Yu is a 2024 Innovator of AI in the new MIT Technology Review, cited for applying the rules of physics and making “AI systems more practical.”
Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science Fan Chung Graham was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, one of the highest honors bestowed on U.S. scientists and engineers.
Professor Rob Knight, an international leader in the study of microbiomes, was elected this year to the National Academy of Engineering– the highest professional recognition afforded to engineers and computer scientists.
Renowned bioinformatics researcher Vineet Bafna was among the 68 scientists worldwide named this year as Association of Computing Machinery fellows for transformative contributions to computing science and technology.
Computer graphics pioneer Ravi Ramamoorthi earned a Frontiers of Science Award – his second in two years – at the 2024 International Congress of Basic Science, which recognizes groundbreaking papers published in the last 10 years.
For the third year in a row, CSE researchers Rob Knight and Pavel Pevzner were named among the world’s most influential in their fields in this year’s Clarivate listing of Most Highly Cited Researchers in the World.
Professors Stefan Savage and Geoff Voelker are among the UC San Diego authors to receive the Test-of-time Award from the Association for Computing Machinery’s Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) for the widely influential 2013 paper on Bitcoin crime fighting research.
Cryptographer Nadia Heninger received the prestigious IAC Test of Time Award for introducing the go-to tool for side-channel attacks on CRT-RSA that played a pivotal role in helping secure the Internet in a seminal 2009 paper.
Arun Kumar was recognized at the conference with the VLDB Early Career Research Contribution Award for his impact in the field. He also spoke on a panel discussion titled, “Data Science Challenges and Opportunities in the LLM Era,” exploring the far-reaching implications of LLMs on data science.
Associate Professor Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick, Professor Stefan Savage, and Assistant Professor Kristen Vaccaro are among the inaugural group of 15 academic researchers worldwide to receive Google’s Trust & Safety Research Award, recognized for their efforts to create positive societal impact with technology.
Associate Professor Rose Yu was honored with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Young Faculty Award for research aimed at improving the ability of large language models (LLMs) to solve complex real-world tasks with unseen scenarios.
Assistant professors Earlence Fernandes and Amy Ousterhout were two of 70 early-career professors worldwide recognized for their efforts to create positive societal impact with technology.
Associate Professors Yufei Ding, Sicun Gao and Nadia Heninger are part of a 98-member cohort, representing 51 universities in 15 countries, honored with Amazon Research Awards this year.
Seven new members joined the distinguished community of CSE faculty in the last two years
Raj Ammanabrolu
Ph.D from Georgia Tech
Expertise: Machine Learning, Language Models
Ammanabrolu works to create trustworthy and responsible language-based AI agents that can align to human preferences after getting feedback, and can use neurosymbolic world models to guide their actions in grounded environments. He aims to imbue these agents with the ability to understand and generate contextually relevant natural language.
Trevor Bonjour
Ph.D. from Purdue University
Expertise: AI Education, Machine Learning
Bonjour’s work focuses on AI and AI education, with interests in machine learning, reinforcement learning, and causal inference. His current research focuses on developing reinforcement learning techniques for adaptive agents in novel, multi-agent environments. He also works on creating evidence-based approaches to enhance student learning of complex AI concepts.
Loris D’ Antoni
Ph.D. from University of Pennsylvania
Expertise: Software, Machine Learning
D’Antoni focuses on helping people write software they can trust. His research combines formal techniques and machine learning approaches to generate computer programs that match human intents and to help people understand what the software they wrote does. His work has been applied to decisionmaking software, network confi gurations, and personalized education.
Yufei Ding
PhD from North Carolina State University
Expertise: Quantum Computing
Ding specializes in programming systems, influencing realms from machine learning to quantum computing. As a leader in intelligent programming, her work delves deeply into domain-specific language innovations, GPU-optimized library development, and cutting-edge compiler and architecture designs.
Deepak Kumar
PhD from University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Expertise: Online Saftey
Kumar’s research takes an empirical approach to studying the security and digital safety threats that emerge when people interact with sociotechnical systems at scale. Using large-scale, data-driven measurements and human-centered studies, he tries to understand how threats ranging from phishing to online abuse are operationalized in practice and how people experience them
Qipeng Liu
PhD from Princeton University
Expertise: Quantum Computing
Liu focuses on quantum computing, quantum information and cryptography in a quantum world. His research includes analyzing and understanding how safe existing cryptographic systems will be once quantum computing becomes widely available. He also works to build cryptography powered by quantum computing and information.
Lianhui Qin
PhD from University of Washington
Expertise: Machine Learning, Language Models
Qin’s research seeks to draw connections between reasoning and language generation. Her interests lie in natural language processing and machine learning, especially commonsense reasoning in text and conversation generation.
I am pleased to welcome these new faculty members who will join the ranks of acclaimed CSE faculty dedicated to impactful research, serving our students and improving society. They will also help further our important mission to foster a diverse and inclusive community.”
Haojian Jin
Jin’s research helps developers create systems with enhanced privacy and security features and helps users safeguard their privacy and security.
Yu-Xiang Wang
Wang’s research applies math and computing to design faster, stronger and more efficient ML algorithms with provable guarantees and to solve societal challenges that emerge in the AI era.
Hao Zhang
Zhang studies the intersection of machine learning and systems, with an interest in designing/building scalable, practical distributed systems and algorithms that can support real-world machine learning workloads.
Alex Gantman
Gantman is the Vice President of Security Engineering and Head of Product Security at Qualcomm. He is responsible for Secure Systems Development and Product Security at Qualcomm. He engages in CSE through teaching, mentoring and in an advisory role on issues related to security/privacy.
Quantum Computing
Online Safety
Quantum Computing
Rose Yu
Fan Chung Graham
Rob Knight
Rob Knight, Pavel Pevzner
Vineet Bafna
Ravi Ramamoorthi
Computing is becoming safer and more secure with the work of our researchers. See how we are driving computing for the greater good.
Our researcher’s are influencing the realm of Artificial Intelligence. See their latest work that is helping to shape this world-changing revolution.
CSE's impact Is showcased in the work of our accomplished students and alumni. See how they are continuing the tradition of excellence.
As we end another year, we look back on the impact of our research and educational enterprise. Our department continued serving students and alumni, continued hiring, and continued growing. We started a renovation of our building, to build a new server room in the basement that can host more high-end AI computers, while at the same time creating more space for students, faculty and staff. In cooperation with the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute, we are making preparations for a new AI major to launch in Fall 2025. As we continue to shape the future of computing, we look forward to an exciting new year ahead.
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