September 30, 2010 –
UC Irvine faculty members affiliated with CALIT2 continue to garner recognition, grants and awards.
Associate Professor of Sociology Carter Butts was one of five UC Irvine sociologists honored by the American Sociological Association at its 2010 annual meeting in August.
Butts received the Leo Goodman Award from the association’s Section on Methodology. The award, established in 2004, recognizes contributions to sociological methodology or innovative uses of sociological methodology. It is the section’s highest honor for researchers who are within 15 years of Ph.D. completion.
Butts’ research focuses on the operation of social networks and how they impact the social fabric of real and virtual worlds.
Computer science professor Aditi Majumder received a Best Paper Award at the IEEE Workshop on Projector and Camera Systems (PROCAMS), held in San Francisco last June. Her paper, “Display Gamut Reshaping for Color Emulation and Balancing,” was co-authored by researchers at Ostendo Technologies Ltd.
Emerging next-generation digital light projectors – commonly known as pico-projectors – use multiple LED/laser sources of light, instead of one white lamp. This results in a much larger color gamut, which can cause color changes in displayed material. The team’s paper presents a hardware-assisted 3D gamut-reshaping method for these projectors.
The PROCAMS workshop is a top international venue for projector-camera systems researchers and practitioners.
The Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Special Interest Group on Multimedia (SIGMM) honored Bren Professor of Information and Computer Sciences Ramesh Jain with its Technical Achievement Award. The award, made in recognition of outstanding contributions over a researcher’s career, cited Jain’s “pioneering research and inspiring leadership that transformed multimedia information processing to enhance the quality of life and visionary leadership of the multimedia community.”
Jain will receive the award in Florence, Italy at the ACM International Conference on Multimedia 2010, scheduled October 25-29.
Informatics professors Paul Dourish and Gillian Hayes have been awarded a $247,000 NSF grant over two years to study “The Persistence of Digital Identity.” The project investigates social media and death, including such questions as: How do people make arrangements for the management of their digital identities? How does the Internet provide a site for others to memorialize the deceased? And how are different “lifetimes” of people and their information managed?
Along with fellow informatics professor Melissa Mazmanian, Dourish also received two grants from NSF. The first is a $201,000 grant to study the scaling of social networks to social movements. Specifically, the two collaborators are exploring the ways in which people get involved in social or political movements through online participation, and whether digital systems can encourage people to see themselves as part of a broader group. The team is focusing specifically on environmental sustainability.
Dourish and Mazmanian also received $400,000 over four years for their project “Innovating Across Cultures in Virtual Organizations.” This research focuses on the ways in which design and creative work are managed in cross-cultural settings. In particular, it looks at how collaboration technologies and material practices shape the design process, and how cultural processes shape production and interpretation of these practices.
Gene Tsudik, professor of computer science, has been awarded $600,000 from the National Science Foundation’s Future Internet Architecture (FIA) program, which seeks to design more effective, trustworthy and robust Internet protocols and techniques. Tsudik is collaborating with UCLA professor Lixia Zhang, and researchers from PARC, Yale, Washington University and Colorado State University on a Named Data Networking (NDN) project focused on developing a new Internet architecture paradigm.
Current Internet communication is based on a client-server model in which communicating parties transfer information in IP packets along one or more paths. The researchers are investigating a new model that will support secure content-oriented functionality, regardless of where the content resides. By naming the data instead of their IP addresses, the protocol secures the content and separates trust in data from trust in hosts and servers.
This project seeks to address technical challenges in creating NDN, including routing scalability, fast forwarding, trust models, network security, content protection and privacy, and new fundamental communication theory.
