Student Achievements

Helping supercomputers communicate efficiently was the aim of Rohit Zambre’s doctoral dissertation, which won the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on High Performance Computing 2021 Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award. Zambre’s dissertation is titled “Exascalable Communication for Modern Supercomputing.” It analyzes the problem of supercomputing applications’ slow multithreaded communication and eliminates the communication bottleneck by bridging the two ends of the HPC stack – message passing interface library developers and domain experts – that typically do not directly talk to each other.

“My research focused on enabling applications to utilize the capabilities of modern network hardware since communication between the nodes of a supercomputer occupies a significant portion of an application’s runtime at scale,” said Zambre. “The technologies from this research have been incorporated into the most widely used communication library in supercomputing.”

Zambre earned his doctorate in computer engineering and currently works at AMD Research as an HPC architecture researcher in Washington.

Judit Giró Benet was awarded the James Dyson International Award for her biomedical device innovation, The Blue Box, a breast cancer detection system. Giró Benet, a recent graduate of the UCI master’s program in embedded cyber-physical systems beat out more than 1,800 entries to win the international competition, which awarded her $35,000.

The Blue Box, which Giró Benet expects to cost about $80, is reusable and user friendly. The pain-free, non-irradiating, point-of-care system for home use includes a device – a small blue box – and a corresponding cell phone app. Users slide a urine sample into a drawer in the device, which then uses eight chemical sensors to scan it for specific biomarkers associated with breast cancer. The information is sent to a cloud-based server, where software uses an artificial intelligence algorithm – modeled on a dog’s sensory system, which has successfully sniffed out cancer – to assess it. Results are sent directly to the user’s cell phone.

Giró Benet is now a researcher at UCI’s Center for Embedded Cyberphysical Systems with EECS Professor Fadi Kurdahi.

The Institute of Navigation awarded Samueli School recent graduate Kimia Shamaei the 2020 Bradford Parkinson Award for her doctoral dissertation, “Exploiting cellular signals for navigation: 4G to 5G.” The annual award recognizes outstanding graduate students in the field of positioning, navigation and/ or timing whose dissertations represent significant innovations in the technology, application or policy of modern navigation systems.

Shamaei graduated with her doctorate in electrical engineering and computer science and her dissertation research addressed the challenges of exploiting cellular signals for navigation purposes, specifically longterm evolution and 5G signals. She currently works as a software engineer at Apple Inc.

Janus Varmarken, doctoral student in the networked systems program, was invited to present his research on “SmartTV Tracking & Advertising” at the Federal Trade Commission’s flagship event PrivacyCon 2021. The online presentation included work completed through the ProperData Frontier project directed by Professor Athina Markopoulou, EECS department chair.

Varmarken’s work aims to increase privacy and transparency in smart homes in general and smart TVs in particular. Varmarken analyzed network traffic from residential gateways and found smart TVs connect to platform-specific advertising and tracking devices. By examining two popular platforms, Roku and Amazon Fire TV, he found evidence that some apps send the advertising ID alongside static personally identifiable information values, effectively eliminating the user’s ability to opt out of ad personalization.

A group of UCI graduate students took second place in the U.S. Department of Energy’s 2021 Solar District Cup. Organized by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the collegiate design competition requires student teams to design an optimized energy system for a campus or urban district. This year, 59 student teams from 57 different colleges participated, and 35 teams were selected as finalists.

Weixi Wang, a doctoral student in electrical engineering with a focus in energy distribution systems, led the team who designed distributed photovoltaic and energy storage systems for the University of Central Florida. The goal of the University of Central Florida challenge was to maximize photovoltaic self-generation and to strategically deploy battery storage to enable higher penetrations of solar power. Team UCI came up with a solution composed of rooftop, carport and ground mount photovoltaic systems. As finalists, they presented their solution to a panel of judges at the event’s virtual conference.

Undergraduate student Armand Ahadi-Sarkari earned top honors at the Association for Computing Machinery SIGBED Student Research Competition held May 21, 2021. The competition was part of the Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things Week sponsored by ACM and Microsoft.

Ahadi-Sarkani won the Gold Award for his project, “ADAS-RL: Adaptive Vector Scaling Reinforcement Learning for Human-in-the-Loop Lane Departure Warning.” Its goal is to improve existing advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) by incorporating the human factor into the loop of computation to provide a personalized experience.

Ahadi-Sarkani graduated with a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering. He worked with Salma Elmalaki, EECS assistant professor of teaching, on the research. They published their findings in CPS-IoT Week, and Ahadi-Sarkani is the first author.