Monthly Archives: September 2018

Informatics Professors Weave Sustainability into the Fabric of Computing with Comm. ACM Paper

September 27, 2018

“Computing within Limits,” a new paper appearing in the October issue of Communications of the ACM, starts by recognizing that “humanity is rapidly approaching, or has already exceeded, a variety of planet-scale limits related to the global climate system, fossil fuels, raw materials and biocapacity.” And while the authors go on to argue that computing has a significant role to play in responding to such limits, their argument extends far beyond the topic of green IT. In fact, they point out that the LIMITS community of researchers they have built specifically questions green IT’s “implicit assumption that we can ‘engineer around’ the finiteness of the Earth’s resources and waste capacity.”

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Informatics Students Partner with Team Kids to Help Children Change the World

September 21, 2018

The Irvine-based nonprofit Team Kids aims to “empower children to change the world.” Its flagship program, the five-week Team Kids Challenge, encourages elementary school children to learn about a critical community issue — such as homelessness, hunger or illiteracy — and to work with local leaders to help address it. Since 2001, Team Kids founder and CEO Julie Hudash has worked to “give young people the opportunity to tackle today’s most critical issues and encourage them to become the next generation of compassionate leaders, entrepreneurs and philanthropists.”

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Stew Sutton Enhances Student Learning with Donated Software Licenses

September 19, 2018

Students taking Information Visualization (IN4MATX 143), taught by Professor David Redmiles, have free access to software that they might not realize would normally cost thousands of dollars. Thanks to guest lecturer Stew Sutton, a principal scientist at the Aerospace Corp. who is also a visiting scientist in the Department of Informatics, students can freely use both Tableau and Alteryx, top-of-the-market solutions for discovery-based visual analytics and for data preparation and advanced analytics, respectively. “These are very expensive products that are highly relevant across multiple industries, including healthcare, aerospace, financial services, consumer products, retail and social media services,” says Sutton, who personally reached out to these companies to create a program for higher education.

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Educating the Next Generation about Cybersecurity

September 7, 2018

As reported in a recent Information Age article, the global cost of cybercrime could reach $2 trillion by 2019. This highlights the importance of ensuring that computer science students graduate with basic proficiency in cybersecurity. To address this critical need, Professor Sameer Patil at Indiana University (IU) and UCI’s Informatics Professor Hadar Ziv are collaborating to develop new learning modules with funding from their National Science Foundation grant, “Incorporating Sociotechnical Cybersecurity Learning Within Undergraduate Capstone Courses.”

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