Monthly Archives: November 2020

Fellowship Fuels Ph.D. Student Nika Nour’s Study of Deepfakes

November 30, 2020

This summer, informatics Ph.D. student Nika Nour was awarded $4,000 after receiving the Joseph and Dorothy Fischer Memorial Endowed Fellowship. Directors of the Trilog Corp. established the fellowship in 1982 in honor of their founder, Joseph Fischer. The first-generation American was a self-made man who embodied the spirit of entrepreneurship, and his wife, Dorothy, was a lifelong educator whose values of commitment, hard work and determination were an example to all she knew. The Fischers valued mentorship to further the education of young people and to help others, and Nour was more than grateful for the assistance.

Continue reading →

Bloomberg: “Where the Teens Are Hanging Out in Quarantine ” (Mimi Ito quoted)

For some teens, especially in urban areas or low-income families, private hangout spaces were hard to find even before the pandemic, and digital spaces were long considered a place of refuge. “Teens were under surveillance all the time and didn’t have options other than the digital and mobile space to have private communication in the home,” says Mimi Ito, director of the Connected Learning Lab at the University of California, Irvine, and co-founder of the nonprofit Connected Camps. For other teens, accessing these digital spaces or costly gaming devices is another obstacle.

Read the full article at Bloomberg.

Professor Malek Receives Test of Time Award for Work on Self-Adaptive Software Systems

November 24, 2020

At the ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 2020), held Nov. 13-16, Informatics Professor Sam Malek received the Test of Time Award. The award was in recognition of a paper he co-authored a decade ago with Ahmed M. Elkhodary and Naeem Esfahani. That work, “FUSION: A Framework for Engineering Self-Tuning Self-Adaptive Software Systems,” introduced a novel framework for constructing systems that can autonomously change their behavior at runtime to achieve certain objectives, such as mitigating security attacks or optimizing resource usage.

Continue reading →

MSWE Student Xinyi Hu Takes the Gold at the Global AI Innovation Challenge

November 14, 2020

When Xinyi Hu learned that her team had won the top prize at the Alibaba Cloud Global AI Innovation Challenge (AI Challenge 2020), she was thrilled. Hu, a first-year student in UCI’s Master of Software Engineering Program (MSWE), served as a machine learning engineer on the seven-person Simei team. “I was super happy,” says Hu. “Many judges told us that our application is the best they’ve ever seen.”

Continue reading →

Program Upgrade: Introducing ‘Game Design and Interactive Media’

November 3, 2020

The Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) first launched its Computer Game Science (CGS) degree in 2011, the same year Minecraft was released, and it has served students well over the years. By 2017, College Magazine had named UCI the #1 school for gamers. However, as the degree now enters its second decade on campus, the Department of Informatics knew it was time for an upgrade.

Continue reading →