The CIS Department congratulates incoming Ph.D. student Kristi Belcher on being awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. This program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students so they can become leaders in research, teaching, and innovation in science and engineering. GRF awards are highly competitive, with a historic funding rate of approximately 10%. The fellowship will support Kristi's research for three years, via stipend, tuition, and travel support. Kristi previously received her B.S. from Texas State University (summa cum laude), and graduated high school from St. Agnes Academy located in Houston, TX. She was inspired to do computer science research by an NSF REU ...»

Monday, June 19, 2017 University of Oregon Duck Grad Parade and Commencement Ceremony Matthew Knight Arena 9:00 a.m., parade, 9:30 a.m., ceremony CIS Department Ceremony Deschutes Lawn Time: 12:30 p.m. The department commencement ceremony is for both undergraduate and graduate majors. Graduates from the following terms are welcome to participate in the ceremony: Fall 2016, Winter 2017, Spring 2017, Summer 2017, or Fall term 2017 Note: If you are graduating at the end of Summer 2017 or Fall 2017, you are invited to walk in the 2017 ceremonies. However, your name will appear in next year's commencement booklet in Spring 2018. Tickets are not required CIS departmental events. Friends and ...»

This BBC Future article discusses vulnerabilities in machine learning and artificial intelligence. Link to Full Article. ...»

Speakers: Ulf Lindqvist, Program Director, SRI International; Kevin Haley, Director, Symantec Security Response; Songwu Lu, Professor, UCLA; Chenxi Wang, Co-founder, Jane Bond Project; Jeff Towle, Global Security Architect Manager, Intel. Date:Thursday, April 20 Time:8:30am - 5:00pm Location:Lee Barlow Giustina Ballroom, Ford Alumni Center, University of Oregon Please join us for the 2017 Oregon Cyber Security Day at the University of Oregon on Thursday, April 20. The venue will be at the spectacular Lee Barlow Giustina Ballroom in the Ford Alumni Center on campus. This event will feature a slate of distinguished speakers from academia, industry, and government, discussing current ...»

For complete information, please read this Around the O article, published Mar. 7th. ...»

For complete information, please read this Around the O article, published Feb. 7th. ...»

The Department of Energy's Exascale Computing Program (ECP) has made three awards totaling over $1.8M over three years to CIS faculty. ECP, a part of President Obama's National Strategic Computing initiative, was established to develop a capable exascale ecosystem, encompassing applications, system software, hardware technologies and architectures, and workforce development to meet the scientific and national security mission needs of DOE in the early-2020s time frame. The awards come out of ECP's Software Technology area, which is tasked with developing a software stack appropriate for exascale architectures. The three awards are: "PROTEAS: PROgramming Toolchain for Emerging ...»

Associate Professor Anthony Hornof accepted an invitation to serve as a Faculty Mentor in the Doctoral Consortium of ASSETS 2016, the Association of Computing Machinery Conference on Computers and Accessibility. The Doctoral Consortium brought together a top Ph.D. students from the U.S., Europe, and South America to present their work on a range of innovative new computer-based devices to assist people with disabilities, such as to help students with visual impairments "see" graphs when learning computer science. Four faculty mentored eleven students, helping the students refine their research questions and goals, improve the validity and impact of their work, and increase the potential for ...»

Thanks to an extraordinary $500 million lead gift, the University of Oregon is proud to announce the Phil and Penny Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact. This game-changing initiative is specifically designed to fast-track scientific discoveries and the process of turning those discoveries into innovations that improve the quality of life for people in Oregon, the nation and beyond. The Knight Campus will reshape the higher education landscape in Oregon by training the next generations of scientists, forging tighter ties with industry and entrepreneurs and creating new educational opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students. This ambitious effort to rethink research, ...»

Professor Reza Rejaie and Professor Sanjay Srivastava of the Psychology Department have received two grants totaling over $1.1M for their cross-disciplinary research. The over-arching theme of their research is to leverage posted content and relationships of individual users in an online social network (e.g. Twitter and Facebook) to study various aspects of their behavior and personality using data-driven approaches. The first grant of $375K was awarded from the National Institute for Health (NIH) for research using Twitter to capture and study the impact of a mass shooting event on the population. Their joint research was featured in the article What's in a Tweet? in the Spring issue of ...»

Associate Professor Anthony Hornof was awarded a $423,000 grant from the National Science Foundation’s Cyber-Human Systems Program to pursue a project entitled “A Theory of Human Microstrategy Selection and Integration in Human-Computer Interaction” (NSF #1619036). The award extends Dr. Hornof’s uninterrupted funding from the National Science Foundation to fifteen years. The project is in collaboration with the University of Michigan, where an additional $77,000 was also awarded. The three-year project, from 2016-2019, will develop the scientific theory that is needed to understand and predict how people will modify their cognitive strategies—the steps that people take to ...»

what is quackcon? A combo hackathon and make-a-thon prototyping event where people come together to build cool stuff. QuackCon is focusing specifically on the theme of sports/tech and participants will be encouraged to build a hack that focuses on 1). athletic enhancement; and/or, 2) fan/audience engagement Who is invited? Any student enrolled in an accredited university or college can participate. We will work at providing travel reimbursement for out-of-state participants where possible. Artists, designers, computer science, product design, business, architecture, journalism, engineers, liberal arts, science majors & more should attend! FREE TO ATTEND! When and where? October 14-16, 2016 ...»

That’s no surprise given Childs is a big-data expert—his students learn high-performance computing in tech-heavy classes on programming and data visualization. But Childs is also having success placing students who take his course on the more creative side of computer and information science: Introduction to Computer Graphics. As taught by Childs (above), the course is basically about making video games. Students have created billiards contests with moving pool balls; self-styled versions of the classic competition Connect Four; even a simulation of airplane flight, from the pilot’s vantage point and complete with exploding targets. What’s a video game got to do with landing a job? ...»

"Prestigious and a great win for the Ducks" is how UO Provost Scott Coltrane describes the university's new partnership with Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. The partnership is also an example of how research collaboration between UO faculty members and colleagues at other institutions can lead to wider opportunities. In this case, the agreement stems from research and teaching interests shared by young Czech scholars and senior UO faculty members, one in computer science and the other in physics. The first began in 1994 with mathematician Jan Kratochvil’s arrival in Eugene on a Fulbright fellowship. Outgoing and eager to pursue new ideas, he spent a year teaching ...»

The human brain can absorb piles of numbers. But it can’t easily convert them into an image of, say, wind speed patterns in a hurricane. It takes powerful computers running complex software to do those conversions. But that presents an ongoing problem: The computer programs that perform these transformations need to be constantly updated to keep up with ever-evolving technical standards. At the UO, “keeping up with the pace of change” could be the mantra of a special division in the computer and information science department. It’s a place where undergraduates work alongside graduate students in what is essentially a research-and-development lab. Undergraduates help design and ...»