a byte of ICSI, March 2015

the monthly newsletter of

International Computer
Science Institute

2015 Open House Debriefing

 
Scott Shenker
“Software-defined networking was developed over six years ago, amidst much hope
and naiveté.”
- Professor Scott Shenker
 
Julia Bernd of Teaching Privacy demonstrates the team’s app Post and Post Alike, which helps students visualize what type of information they share with whom on Facebook.
Scott Shenker

On Thursday, February 12, ICSI held its annual open house, where Professors Scott Shenker and Eric Friedman and more than 15 other scientists discussed and demonstrated their work. The ICSI annual open house is held in conjunction with the UC Berkeley EECS Department’s Berkeley EECS Annual Research Symposium (BEARS).

International visitors presented demonstrated their work in the Internet of things (Michele Stecca) computer vision (Marcus Rohrbach and Xiao-Yong Wei). Damian Borth, a DAAD-funded postdoctoral fellow, was the author or co-author of three posters on vision and multimedia, including a poster describing ICSI’s work on what is believed to be the largest publicly available multimedia corpus (100 million Creative Commons videos and images). Michael Tschantz, who joined Networking and Security in 2014, presented his work on Google’s user profiles, which it uses to serve relevant ads. The tool he and his colleagues developed has found, for instance, that profiles with the gender set to female receive fewer instances of high-paying job announcements than those with the gender set to male.

Barath Raghavan's "Slightly Odd Talk" Now on YouTube

Barath Raghavan, a senior researcher in Networking and Security, may be best know at ICSI for tending to its lush rooftop garden, but on Thursday, February 19, he spoke about all his work that has made him well known outside of ICSI. His talk, “Communication Under Exogenous Circumstances,”  is now on YouTube.

Raghavan received his bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley in 2002. He went on to graduate school at UC San Diego on a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and received his doctorate in 2009. He was a visiting professor at Williams College in Massachusetts before joining ICSI in 2010. After two years here, he moved to Google, but he returned to ICSI in 2013. He works with Professor Scott Shenker, ICSI’s chief scientist and the director of research initiatives, on refining and fixing problems with software-defined networking, which was developed from Shenker’s work with colleagues at Stanford.

During his last stay at ICSI, Raghavan and a UC Berkeley postdoc published two papers on green networking, one that calculated how much energy the Internet uses and another that explored what might happen in the event of a global energy crisis. The first was featured in the New Scientist, among other publications, and the second won a best paper award at the Workshop on Green Networking at ACM SIGCOMM 2011.

At his “slightly odd talk” on February 19, he discussed green networking as well as networking under oppressive governments, poverty, and resource unavailability and the possible cross-disciplinary aspects of these three lines of research.

Oliver KramerWho's Visiting

Dr. Oliver Kramer is at ICSI for a brief visit.  Dr. Kramer was a DAAD-funded postdoctoral fellow at ICSI from 2009 to 2011, working on evolutionary algorithms. He is currently head of the junior research group Computational Intelligence at the Department für Informatik of the Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg. He'll be speaking on Thursday, March 19 at 4 p.m.