ICS News and Announcements
See the LIS News and Announcements page for Library and Information Science announcements.
Jordan Takayama wins UROP award
Jordan Takayama, ICS undergraduate honors student, has won funding from the University of Hawaii Undergraduate Research Opportunities (UROP) program. His research project is entitled "Making game design as easy as gaming: Creating an administrative interface to the Kukui Cup." The research will involve creation of an administrative "wizard" for configuring the Makahiki serious game framework, and evaluating its effectiveness through qualitative case studies of users.
Seminar: Geoffrey Voelker, "Exploring the Technical and Economic Factors Underlying Internet Scams"
Today, the large-scale compromise of Internet hosts serves as a platform for supporting a range of criminal activity in the so-called Internet underground economy. In this talk I will start by quickly surveying work that our group has performed over the past decade on the problems posed by these threats, and how our research directions have evolved over time in response to them. In the remainder of the talk, I will go into detail on recent work that our group has performed in an end-to-end analysis of the spam value chain. Using extensive measurements over months of diverse spam data, broad crawling of naming and hosting infrastructures, and product purchases from a wide variety of spam-advertised sites, I'll characterize the modern spam ecosystem including system infrastructure, business models, cost accounting, and consumer demand. I'll end by characterizing the relative prospects for anti-spam interventions at multiple levels, and initial results of interventions in the payment tier.
ICS Ph.D. Defense: Robert Brewer, "Fostering Sustained Energy Behavior Change and Increasing Energy Literacy In A Student Housing Energy Challenge"
Wednesday, March 13, 3:00pm, POST 302. We designed the Kukui Cup challenge to foster energy conservation and increase energy literacy. Based on a review of the literature, the challenge combined a variety of elements into an overall game experience, including: real-time energy feedback, goals, commitments, competition, and prizes. My research has generated several contributions, including: a demonstration of increased energy literacy as a result of the challenge, the discovery of fundamental problems with the use of baselines for assessing energy competitions, the creation of two open source software systems, and the creation of an energy literacy assessment instrument.
Call for participation: the 2013 "Big Splash" CyberDefense Competition
Volunteers needed for the 2013 Big Splash Cyberdefense competition. The “Big Splash” is designed to bring practitioners in industry and government together with students to practice cybersecurity event response, mitigation, and strategy.
CIS Ph.D. Defense: Blanca Polo, "The Virtual Critical Studio: Implementing studio based learning techniques in an online introductory programming course to address common programming errors and misconceptions
This project coins the term virtual critical studio (VCS), and proposes it for proactive online teaching. The VCS consists of three components, the studio-based-learning pedagogy, the precise and critical timing and content of the VCS sessions and the virtual nature of the implementation environment. The implementation of VCS aims to provide a better quality of online computer science courses by promoting student-student interaction focused on the discussion of problematic curriculum issues.
Seminar: Ping Wang, "Community ecology for IT innovation: The case for cloud computing"
Why do some concepts come to be highly popular, significantly reshaping the IT landscape, while others do not? We address this question by exploring the communities of organizations that underlie IT innovations. In an illustrative investigation of the community for cloud computing, we integrate theories of organizational ecology and social networks and apply their associated methods. Substantial support to the theories and the effectiveness of the methods have led us to embark on a promising research program focused on IT innovation concepts and communities.
Seminar: Rajkumar Kettimuthu, "Hosted services and infrastructure aware protocols for bulk data movement and sharing"
Big data is becoming a critical component of science. Researchers need tools that address their end-to-end distributed data management needs. But small and medium research labs often lack the resources to deploy and maintain sophisticated software infrastructures. So, there is a strong need to do data management with modest effort. In this talk, I will present our work on hosted services that enables researchers to move, sync and share data in a simple, yet efficient way.
Seminar: Jason Leigh, "Emerging from the CAVE: Research at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory"
In 1992 the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago invented the CAVE- that created a paradigm shift in virtual reality away from bulky head-mounted displays to light-weight 3D glasses. This presentation will describe EVL's research in visualization technologies since the CAVE, and how they are used everyday for research and education around the world.
Hawaii State Government "Transformation Internship Program"
TIP is a unique opportunity for undergraduate and graduate students to gain training and experience in state government and assist in organization change management, business process re-engineering and/or information technology systems and solutions. Through TIP, students will gain experience in areas such as strategic planning, human capital management, organizational change management, quantitative and qualitative management, and fiscal planning.
Seminar: Aaron Marcus, "Mobile user experience design for work, home, play, and on the way"
What makes a good design? What’s happening worldwide? What is the current state of mobile product/service development, including applications for phones/PDAs, vehicles, and music/consumer electronics; key technology, social, business, cultural, and UI issues, and what are the specific techniques appropriate for designing and analyzing mobile products and services?
Seminar: Mike Byrne, "Why Johnny can't vote: How Usability Compromises Election Integrity"
The U.S. Presidential election in 2000 brought issues of voting system usability to the public consciousness via the “butterfly ballot” and ubiquitous media coverage of hanging chads. This prompted federal legislation which led to widespread adoption of electronic voting systems. However, fundamental questions about voting system usability were not answered before this sweeping change: Just how usable were the technologies being replaced? How do new electronic systems compare to those systems? How do security concerns about electronic voting factor in?
Seminar: Chris Mullins, "Query-Aware Compression of Join Results"
The proliferation of lightweight client devices such as iPhones, iPads, Android phones and tablets, has created an increased demand for cloud-based services. In many of these services, queries over structured data are sent to cloud-based servers for processing and the results relayed back to the client devices. Network bandwidth between client devices and cloud-based servers is often a limited resource and any effort to reduce the amount of data transmitted across the network would not only conserve bandwidth but help with the battery life of the client devices.
Honolulu, HI takes first place in the 2011 Digital Cities Survey
The city and county of Honolulu, Hawaii received a first place rankings in the 2011 Digital Cities Survey, according to the results announced on Wednesday, Nov. 2. The 11th annual survey spotlights the municipalities that best show how information and communication technology are used to enhance public service. The survey is conducted by the Center for Digital Government and Government Technology.
Gazan gets grant from NASA Astrobiology Institute Director's Discretionary Fund
Rich Gazan has received a $30K grant from the NASA Astrobiology Institute Director's Discretionary Fund to investigate the extent to which publications by astrobiology researchers demonstrate actual and potential interdisciplinarity.
Susanna Still's research featured in Nature
ICS Professor Susanna Still and her colleagues are featured in a News article in Nature entitled "Proteins remember the past to predict the future".
Boeing Information Session
Representatives from Boeing Information Systems will be hosting an information system at Marine Sciences Building 114 from 6:00-7:30pm on Tuesday October 9th. Food will be provided
Thermodynamics of Prediction
New publication by Susanne Still with co-authors David Sivak, Anthony Bell, and Gavin Crooks, in Physical Review Letters 109.
Seminar: Henri Casanova, "Random Network Topologies"
As the scales of parallel applications and platforms increase the negative impact of communication latencies on performance becomes large. Fortunately, modern High Performance Computing (HPC) systems can exploit low-latency topologies of high-radix switches. In this talk I'll describe the use of random shortcut topologies, which are generated by augmenting classical topologies with random links. Thursday, August 30, 4:30pm, POST 127.
Seminar: Mike Gowanlock, "Habitability within the Milky Way galaxy"
Studies of the habitability of the Earth, the Solar System and beyond indicate that life may exist in a variety of environments, some of which were previously thought too hostile for life. In this talk I will discuss my research on the Galactic Habitable Zone, which is described in terms of the spatial and temporal dimensions of the Galaxy that may favour the development of complex life. Monday, August 27, 4:30pm, POST 126
Seminar: Susanna Still, "The thermodynamics of prediction"
In this talk I will explore how dissipation of energy is related to a system's information processing inefficiency. Any system that is driven by a stochastic environment can be interpreted as computing, by means of its dynamics, an implicit model of the environmental variables. The system's state retains information about past environmental fluctuations, and a fraction of this information is predictive of future ones. The remaining non-predictive information reflects model complexity that does not improve predictive power, and thus represents the ineffectiveness of the model. I will show that there is a fundamental equivalence between this model inefficiency and thermodynamic inefficiency, measured by dissipation.