In a paper that will appear at the 30th International Conference on
Distributed Computing Systems in Italy this summer, graduate student
Jong Park and his advisor, Jed Crandall, describe their results from
testing Internet censorship performed by routers in a nation's
backbone. These results can help us understand the technical aspects
of how global Internet censorship is coming into form. Their study
focused on China's filtering of HTML responses on a national scale,
implemented in the backbone of the country's Internet. In this form
of censorship, the censors inject special reset packets to interrupt
connections where banned keywords are transferred. Park and Crandall
found that this centralized form of filtering web pages is not very
effective, and that the censors abandoned their efforts to do this
some time between August 2008 and January 2009. Within the context of
many governments around the world implementing filtering systems that
are on local networks and not centrally controlled, such as Australia
and now China (in light of their failed efforts to perform censorship
in a centralized fashion), the story of a failed attempt at a
national-scale filtering system that Park and Crandall's data shows
provides a valuable data point for making predictions about what
global Internet censorship will look like
in the coming years and
decades. For further details, see the ICDCS paper or a recent
article at newscientist.com.
An article is
available at UNM Today.
Congratulations Jong!
Related links: ICDCS2010; Jong Park; Prof. Jed Crandall; Green Dam Youth Escort; Blue Shield provokes fresh China censorware row; ICDCS paper; Article at newscientist.com; UNM Today
CS Department PhD student Soumya
Banerjee has been awarded the 2010 UNM Student Award for Innovation in
Informatics. The award is given to a UNM graduate or undergraduate student for
the best paper describing innovation or research in the field of biomedical
informatics. He will present his work at the Biocomputing@UNM
Workshop on April 16th, 2:30 PM.
His research interest is in computational immunology- a field that uses
techniques from computer science to solve problems in immunology and which also
takes inspiration from immunology to solve problems in computer science. He is
advised by Prof. Melanie Moses
and collaborates with Prof. Alan
Perelson at Los Alamos National Laboratories. One of his current research
projects uses mathematical models to predict the rate at which pathogens will
replicate within organisms and the rate at which the immune system will
neutralize pathogens (paper).
He also looks at how a modular decentralized detection network of biological
"detectors" called lymph nodes can help the immune system conduct very efficient
detection and response. Taking inspiration from the immune system, he and his
collaborators were able to show that such a modular strategy can be used to
decrease search times in distributed systems like peer-to-peer resource location
systems and wireless sensor networks (paper).
The broad goal of his research will be to investigate how the seemingly
disparate fields of immunology and computer science can learn from one
another.
Congratulations Soumya!
Related links: Soumya Banerjee; Biocomputing@UNM Workshop ; Prof. Melanie Moses; Prof. Alan Perelson
On April 8th, the Computer Science Graduate Student Association hosted the 6th
annual student conference highlighting active research areas within the
department. 12 student talks were delivered in the areas of security, immune
system strategies for distibuted systems, causal learning, Bayesian network
structure search, network learning methods, agent-based modeling
inspired by ant colony optimization, and expansion of OpenSolaris
networking features to support large scale virtual machine networks.
Additionally, Nicholas Pattengale and Jun Zhang, two PhD students graduating this Spring, presented their respective doctoral achievements
in the areas of phylogenetic consensus techniques which handle rogue taxa
and Gibbs random field modeling of cell membrane proteins. Dr. Melanie
Mitchell delivered a spirited and interactive keynote address outlining
her new research on bridging the gap between low-level perception and higher-level image understanding. Conference proceedings are available at
the conference website.
CS Department student Ronnie Garduno has been accepted into the 2009-10 cohort
of the Ronald E. McNair
Post-baccalaureate Achievement Program. The program is part of the
Federally-funded and mandated TRIO program for assisting under-represented
minorities and first-generation
college students in their academic undertakings. Ronnie is among the 26 undergraduate students to get the opportunity to participate in an intense research and graduate preparation program.
Ronnie had been working since last summer on ConceptDoppler project with Prof. Jedidiah Crandall, Assistant Professor of the
Computer Science Department at UNM. In the future he wants to pursue a Ph.D. in
Computer Science. His research interest lies in the fields of AI, ALife, Machine
Learning, and Cognitive Science.
Congratulations Ronnie!
Related links: Ronald E. McNair Program; ConceptDoppler; Prof. Jedidiah Crandall;
Qforma, an advanced analytics and
predictive modeling company, has awarded its first-ever Qforma Lectureship
Award, in the amount of $5,000, to Professor Shuang Luan,
assistant professor of computer science and assistant joint professor of
radiology at the University of New Mexico.
"We are delighted that Dr. Luan has been chosen to receive the first Qforma
Lectureship" said Stephanie Forrest, professor and
chairman of computer science at the University of New Mexico and research
professor at the Santa Fe Institute. "Dr.
Luan's research on computational methods for therapeutic radiation oncology is
exciting and promises to improve the clinical care of patients."
Professor Luan's current research emphasizes on the design and development of
efficient and effective computer algorithms and software for radiation oncology
and interventional radiology. His research interests include computational
medicine and biomedical engineering, algorithms design, analysis and
implementation, and computational geometry. Professor Luan's research has been
sponsored by the National Science Foundation
and National Cancer Insititute. He has
received an NSF award earlier this year for his research on "Computer-Aided
Treatment Planning for Antiproton Therapy"
Congratulations Professor Luan!
Related links: National Science Foundation; National Cancer Insititute; Santa Fe Institute; Qforma; Professor Stephanie Forrest; Professor Shuang Luan
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