"DataFest Oregon is a celebration of data in which teams of undergraduates work around the clock to find and share meaning in a large, rich, and complex data set. The American Statistical Association’s Datafest is a nationally coordinated data analysis competition that brings together the data science community. It was held at Oregon State University on April 15-17, 2016, and featured nine teams of 37 students and faculty from OSU, University of Oregon and Reed College. The competitions kicked off at 7:30 pm Friday, April 15 in Weniger Hall and continued through Sunday, April 17 at 4 pm. Students came prepared with laptops locked and loaded with data analysis software and tools. ...»

PhD student Luke Maurer has been awarded the Intern Top Up Award from Microsoft Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Professor Zena Ariola will be the recipient of the award of $10,000 for the purpose of supporting Maurer in his work on GHC as described below. To optimize functional programs, GHC uses a time-tested intermediate language called Core, based on the simple but powerful lambda calculus. In a summer 2015 internship, we investigated the suitability of a new intermediate language based instead on the sequent calculus, which comes equipped with a precise account of control flow without requiring to name each intermediate value, as it happens in a continuation-passing style form. ...»

CIS Undergraduate Maria Laura Rodriguez was awarded the 2016 GEICO Achievement Award for $2,500 in recognition of her dedication to academic success, leadership, and service. Originally from Venezuela, Rodriguez is in her second year of studies at the University of Oregon. She currently works as a 100-level teaching assistant in the Computer and Information Science Department by assisting instructors during class and helping grade homework assignments. As part of the International Cultural Service Program (ICSP), Rodriguez contributes 80 hours per year of cultural and educational presentations to local schools and community groups. Topics of her presentations range from the Venezuelan ...»

Jun Li, an associate professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science and director of the UO Center for Cyber Security and Privacy, was awarded a $507,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for research examining online social network (OSN) fraud and attacks. The collaborative project includes researchers at the University of Arkansas and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and totals $1.2 million in funding. The project focuses on an area of research, dubbed, oSAFARI (Online SociAl network Fraud and Attack Research and Identification). Researchers are seeking to better understand and prevent attacks and frauds by simulating more dynamic attacks... Continue ...»

"The UO Mock Trial team recently wrapped up its most successful season to date, placing 10th in its division and 19th overall out of 48 teams at the National Championship Tournament of the American Mock Trial Association. The tournament, held April 15-17 in South Carolina, was the team’s first time at nationals. More than 600 collegiate mock trial teams started the competitive season, and only 48 teams advanced to the national championship. Among the top 10 percent of teams nationally, UO Mock Trial was in prestigious company in South Carolina, including such seasoned competitors as Stanford, Harvard, Berkeley and Cornell." “I could not be more proud of the team” said Trond Jacobsen, ...»

CIS first-year PhD student Shreeya Khadka was awarded the A. Richard Newton Young Student Fellow Award in April 2016. This award was set up to honor the memory of A. Richard Newton, a pioneer in electronic design automation and integrated circuit design. The fellowship encourages and supports students at the beginning of their research career in Electronic Design Automation and Embedded Systems by providing them financial support to attend Design Automation Conference (DAC) and present their work. DAC is the premier conference devoted to the design and automation of electronic systems (EDA), embedded systems and software (ESS), and intellectual property (IP). With these awards, Shreeya ...»

CIS first-year PhD student Brian Gravelle was awarded the A. Richard Newton Young Student Fellow Award in April 2016. This award was set up to honor the memory of A. Richard Newton, a pioneer in electronic design automation and integrated circuit design. The fellowship encourages and supports students at the beginning of their research career in Electronic Design Automation and Embedded Systems by providing them financial support to attend Design Automation Conference (DAC) and present their work. DAC is the premier conference devoted to the design and automation of electronic systems (EDA), embedded systems and software (ESS), and intellectual property (IP). With these awards, Brian ...»

Ph.D. student Paul Downen has been awarded a UO College of Arts and Sciences Dissertation Research Fellowship, which will fully fund his tuition for the 2016-2017 academic year. The award is highly competitive and recognizes Downen's significant and original contribution to his discipline. Downen's research expands a relatively new "proofs as programs" approach in which programming and proving properties are seen not just as complementary activities, but as the very same activity. It is known that there is a duality between logic and computation. It is difficult, though, to find an adequate, clear and useful expression in logic of several programming language features that are important ...»

Monday, June 13, 2016 University of Oregon Duck Grad Parade and Commencement Ceremony Matthew Knight Arena 9:00am – 11:00am CIS Department Ceremony Deschutes Lawn Time: 12:00pm The department commencement ceremony is for both undergraduate and graduate majors. Graduates from the following terms are welcome to participate in the ceremony: Fall 2015, Winter 2016, Spring 2016, Summer 2016, or Fall term 2016 Note: If you are graduating at the end of Summer 2016 or Fall 2016, you are invited to walk in the 2016 ceremonies. However, your name will appear in next year's commencement booklet in Spring 2017. Tickets are not required for these events. Friends and family are welcome to attend ...»

The 20th Annual Eugene Luks Programming Contest took place this year on Saturday, April 30 in Deschutes 100. The CIS Department holds this contest every year as an opportunity for current undergraduate and graduate students to have fun while challenging their programming skills. During the three hour contest, student teams competed against each other with the goal of programming correct solutions to as many of the six problems as possible. Programming was done in Java and C++. The turnout almost doubled that of the previous few years with 47 undergraduate students on 17 teams and 4 grad students on 2 teams. Contest Winners Undergraduate Division First place team vacca (Rui Tu and Yueqi Zhu) ...»

UO undergraduate Zoe Olson blazed a new trail recently when she became the first UO student to take part in Harvard’s annual Women Engineers’ Code Conference, where she also was the only woman from the Pac-12. For Olson, a computer science major and member of the Women in Computer Science Club, representing the UO at the conference validated an increasingly inclusive computer science culture on the UO campus. The UO now offers the Women in Computer Science Club, has hosted networking events in the field and has, overall, taken many steps towards building a positive environment for women in the science, technology, engineering and math fields. “My representation of the UO at the ...»

UO employees will take on the annual Governor’s State Employees Food Drive challenge starting Feb. 1, and they’re hoping that creativity and determination will help them meet their goal of 100,000 pounds of donated food. According to Karen Scheeland, alumni program manager and former director of the food drive at the UO, the university has donated more than 800,000 pounds of food in the last five years. Donation barrels are being distributed around campus for this year’s drive, and preferred foods include shelf-stable milk, canned meats, whole-grain pasta, pasta sauce, rice, canned fruit or vegetables, and canned meals — but not in glass containers. Cash donations — or better ...»

As part of the Governor’s State Employee’s Food Drive this year, the CIS department hosted the 2016 CIS Sweet and Savory Bake-Off Competition as a fundraiser to benefit Food For Lane County (FFLC). FFLC is a division of the Oregon Food Bank Network that strives to alleviate hunger by creating access to food in the Lane County area. The event was held on Friday, Feb 19, and brought together 25 undergraduate students, graduate students, faculty, staff, and friends to enjoy a delightful spread. Though donations, the event raised $230 and 10 lbs of food, all of which benefit Food For Lane County. Attendees donated either $10 or 3 non-perishable food items to act as "Tasting Judges" ...»

Focusing on the importance of hands-on experience, the University of Oregon Security Club is giving students an opportunity to learn cybersecurity skills – skills that are in very high demand. With cyber attacks becoming more prevalent and receiving more attention in recent years, Frank Arana, president of the club, says that the lack of focus on teaching security is “both a state and national problem.” Arana says that Edward Snowden’s uncovering of government surveillance and recent cyber attacks on Sony and Target has highlighted security and brought it to the national spotlight. However, the amount of time that cybersecurity was ignored has been problematic for the state. ...»

"There's more to drones that getting them off the ground. You could say that Jack Ziesing’s research really took off. His lab experience as a student in computer and information science has given him entry into the growing industry of “unmanned aerial vehicles”—you know them as drones. Working with assistant professor Michel Kinsy, a new member of the faculty, Ziesing, who graduated earlier this year, studied communications and control systems for drones. He put together the memory chips, processors, and circuit boards that control drones during flight. Kinsy’s lab is trying to solve problems that could ground the drone industry. One of them is getting all parts of the drone ...»

Professor Michel Kinsy was highlighted in the article, Young Scholars Program Boosts Student Confidence, College Prep on "Around the O". Read more to check out the great work that he is doing to improve the accessibility of computer science to young students. ...»

CIS undergraduate students held an inaugural and very successful HackTown Hackathon from 10.48a Saturday, 10/24, until 1p Sunday, 10/25 (26.2 hours), in Room 100 Deschutes. Forty CIS undergraduate students signed up for the hackathon, filling all available spots. Participants included students from Dev Club, Security Club, WiCS, and ACM, and ranged from 200-level to senior students. Participants pitched project ideas to the entire group on Saturday at noon, and then organized themselves into teams and launched into designing and implementing web applications pulling data from published APIs, such as Google Maps, Twitter, and many others. On Sunday morning just before noon, teams ...»

Fifth-Year CIS Ph.D. Student Shangpu Jiang and his research advisors, Professor Dejing Dou and Professor Daniel Lowd, won the Best Paper Award at DEXA 2015 from among 128 papers. DEXA is a well-known international conference in database, information, and knowledge systems. This year is its 26th edition. Jiang is the first author on the paper "Ontology Matching with Knowledge Rules," with Prof. Lowd and Prof Dou as co-authors. An ontology represents the formal structure of a domain, such as the types of data it contains and the relationships among them. Ontology matching allows data and knowledge from different sources to be integrated together in a single representation. In their paper, ...»

The UO has upped its game on the issue of online security, landing a federal designation as a National Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense Research and launching a Center for Cyber Security and Privacy. The article UO Launches New Center and Gains Federal Cyber Research Recognition, featured in the online publication Around the O, has more details. The article UO Launches New Cyber Security Center, featured on the Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation website, further expands the role of research conducted by the CCSP. Professor Jun Li, the director of CCSP, and his colleagues also host an annual Oregon Cyber Security Day, which draws speakers and participants ...»

The New York Times and NPR featured a story in June 2015 on a study linking heartburn medicine to heart attacks. The story is based on a journal paper co-authored by Paea LePendu, who finished his PhD at UO with CIS Associate Professor Dejing Dou in 2010. His research report, Proton Pump Inhibitor Usage and the Risk of Myocardial Infarction in the General Population, was published in the Open Access journal, PLOS ONE. ...»

It is our pleasure to announce that Professor Steve Fickas has been awarded a Williams Fellowship. This is to acknowledge faculty members who have demonstrated an extraordinary commitment to undergraduate education by challenging their students academically, creating an engaged learning environment, striving to improve the learning process, and fostering interdepartmental collaboration. The fellowship comes with a stipend of $10,000; $5,000 for the direct use by the fellow, and $5,000 for use by the department to support the fellow’s activities. Congratulations to Professor Fickas for all his hard work and continued success! ...»

Assistant Professor Daniel Lowd has recently received the Army Research Office's (ARO) Young Investigator Award for his proposal on "Inferring Trustworthiness and Deceit in Adversarial Relational Models". This award will fund Lowd's project for $360,000 over three years. This project will develop methods for detecting malicious behavior such as social network spam and fake reviews. To better distinguish honest from dishonest behavior, these methods will exploit relational structure. For example, social network spammers are more likely to be friends with other spammers, and users who have posted one fake review tend to post several more. Thus, evidence of malicious behavior can be ...»