Join Yahoo! web experts including Rasmus Lerdorf, the creator of PHP, Parand Darugar, Director of Architecture, Kevin Haas,
Senior Engineering Manager, and Matt Plummer, Director of Engineering and UCSD CSE Alumnus, for a week of learning, hacking
and fun October 13 thru 17! You'll hear interesting
tech talks, hacking tips and lessons, and get hands-on coding workshops
where you'll work with cutting-edge technology.
The week's events will culminate with our University Hack Day competition
--a 24 hour day-long festival of coding, camaraderie, demos, awards, food, music and jollity (it's a real word, look it up).
It's not about perfect code, just your creativity, a cool idea and a working prototype. You'll have access to tons of APIs
and tools in the Yahoo! Developer Network (check out Pipes, the YUI Library, SearchMonkey and BOSS just to name a few).
No rules or limitations - just show up and hack for your opportunity to win cool prizes, a spot in the gallery, street cred
and the chance to represent your school at the University Hack Showdown in California in next spring. This is your shot to
develop something that will revolutionize the industry, make the world a better place or at least make the judges laugh
(trust us, that goes a long way!). See you there!? There is plenty of great stuff to read about
past university hacks.
The competing institutions are UIUC, University of Waterloo, Stanford, CMU, and UC Berkeley.
Free Software Helps You Track Your Laptop If Stolen or Lost
Researchers at the University of Washington and the University of California, San Diego have created a laptop theft-protection
tool that will help you locate your lost or stolen laptop while at the same time ensuring that no third party can use the
system to monitor your whereabouts.
The tool, named Adeona, works by using the Internet as a homing beacon. It will help you find the location of a lost or
stolen laptop, but only after someone connects it to the Internet. Cryptographic safeguards built into the system prevent
anyone but you from monitoring your whereabouts.
The primary creators of Adeona are Thomas Ristenpart, a doctoral student at UC San Diego, who worked on this project as a
UW visiting student in summer 2007; Gabriel Maganis, who recently received his UW undergraduate degree in computer
engineering; Tadayoshi Kohno, a UW assistant professor of computer science and engineering who received his computer science
PhD from UCSD; and Arvind Krishnamurthy, a UW research assistant professor of computer science and engineering.
Unlike commercial systems, in which users surrender their location information to a company, Adeona scrambles the information
so it must be deciphered using a password known only by the person who set up the account. If the laptop is stolen, only the
original owner can access the location data. The owner can then bring this information to the police to aid in tracking down
the stolen machine. Even if the free OpenDHT storage network was hacked, the information would remain private.
Named Adeona after the Roman goddess of safe returns, the system can be downloaded for free at the
Adeona website.
NSF Awards $12M to Temporal Dynamics Learning Center
The Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center, founded at UC San Diego in 2006 as one of six National Science Foundation Science
of Learning Centers, has just been awarded an additional $12 million for the next three years to expand its important
work studying the role of time and timing in learning.
More than 40 researchers, working closely together through a unique "network of research networks" collaboration,
are focused on the role of time in learning across multiple time scales -- from the exquisite sensitivity to firing time
between neurons that causes them to link together more tightly, through the timing of social interactions between teachers
and students that leads to effective teaching, to the scale of months in spacing effects in learning.
Computer Scientists Propose New Data Center Architecture Based on Commodity Network Elements
Computer scientists at the UC San Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering have proposed a new way to build data centers that
could save companies money and deliver more computing capability to end-users. "Large companies are putting together
server farms of tens of thousands of computers - even approaching 100-thousand, and the big challenge is to interconnect
all these computers so that they can talk to each other as quickly as possible, without incurring significant costs."
said Amin Vahdat, a professor of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) in UC San Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering.
"We are proposing a new topology for Ethernet data center connectivity."
The innovation is outlined in a paper, titled "A Scalable, Commodity Data Center Network Architecture," presented
at the annual meeting of SIGCOMM, the Special Interest Group on Data Communications. SIGCOMM is the premier academic conference
for researchers in the fields of communications and computer networks.
Vahdat, who also directs UCSD's Center for Networked Systems (CNS), co-authored the paper with two CSE graduate students,
Mohammad Al-Fares and Alexander Loukissas.
New Algorithm Significantly Boosts Routing Efficiency of Networks
In a paper submitted to SIGCOMM Kirill Levchenko, Geoff Voelker, Mohan Paturi and Stefan Savage presented a new link-state
routing algorithm called Approximate Link state (XL)
the algorithm increases network routing efficiency by suppressing updates from parts of the system -- updates which force
connected networks to continuously re-calculate the paths they use in the great matrix of the Internet.
"Routing in a static network is trivial," say the authors in their paper, which was presented at ACM SIGCOMM
conference. "But most real networks are dynamic -- network links go up and down -- and thus some nodes need to recalculate their routes in response.
The traditional approach, said Stefan Savage, a computer science professor from the Jacobs School, "is to tell everyone;
flood the topology change throughout the network and have each node re-compute its table of best routes -- but that requirement
to universally communicate, and to act on each change, is a big problem."
