A diverse group of scholars have chosen to pursue the next phase of their academic careers at UC Santa Barbara—and they’ll do so as prestigious UC President’s and Chancellor’s postdoctoral fellows.“These fellowships are extraordinarily competitive,so we are delighted to welcome such astrong cohort to campus this year,”said Interim Graduate Dean Leila J.Rupp.“As their stories make clear,these are incredibly accomplished scholars whose diverse interests and experiences add to the richness of our community.Along with our many faculty members who started their careers as President’s Postdoctoral Fellows,they model giving forward in their research,teaching and mentoring.”Established in 1984,the President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program(PPFP)was created to encourage Ph.D.recipients from underrepresented communities to pursue academic careers at the University of California.The Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program(CPFP)selects awardees from the PPFP pool of applicants to offer postdoctoral research fellowships and faculty mentoring to outstanding scholars in all fields.“The PPFP reflects the UC’s commitment to advance opportunities for underrepresented scholars by identifying outstanding talent early,building community and providing supportive career mentoring,”said Maria Teresa Napoli,who serves as the director of strategic research initiatives in the UCSB Office of Research.“UC Santa Barbara is excited to welcome our new fellows,whose research will enhance our campus and scientific community.”Originally from Los Angeles and aUCLA alum,Baig was working on his advanced degrees at Yale before returning to California.He hopes to adapt his dissertation into abook manuscript under his mentor Sherene Seikaly’s guidance.“I am particularly eager to contribute to institutional initiatives that increase access to higher education for historically underrepresented learners as well as courses,mentorship and programming designed to expose students to topical issues of race,gender and class from aglobal perspective,”he said.“Baig’s position as aChancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UCSB opens new horizons on revolutionary thought and practice in Middle East and African history,”said Seikaly,an associate professor and director of the UCSB Center for Middle East Studies.“His long experience and engagement with US-based abolition movements,his anti-imperial commitments,and his work on Algeria as acrossroads of Arab,African and South Asian politics,position him to be an exceptional partner and leader in initiatives that critically imagine what an internationalist abolitionist agenda might look like.”Last year’s Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow,Eupha Jeanne Daramola,a postdoctoral scholar at the Gevirtz School of Education,was able to renew her placement and continue her research on how racism and racial dynamics shape K–12 policy design and implementation. 查看详细>>

Across California,home of Silicon Valley,half of all high school students are Hispanic.Yet according to the 2022 State of Computer Science Education Report,only 22%of Advanced Placement(AP)exam takers in computer science are Hispanic.This data suggests atroubling trend:California’s largest high school demographic population is not participating in the computing education pathway at arate equivalent to their peers.To address this equity gap,Richert Wang,an associate teaching professor of computer science in the UC Santa Barbara College of Creative Studies,has been awarded aNational Science Foundation(NSF)Broadening Participation in Computing–Demonstration Project grant for aproposal that he co-authored with Kevin Buffardi of California State University Chico.At the heart of their project is adigital platform that prioritizes marginalized identities while offering free lessons and tutorials in computer programming.“By providing this platform as an accessible free public resource,we are hoping to create apathway where any student,regardless of what high school they attend,can have an opportunity to learn coding at their own pace,and relate with students currently studying computer science,”said Wang,who also teaches in the UCSB College of Engineering. 查看详细>>

Employing atechnique called microarchitectural checkpointing to redesign computer processors for cloud-based serverless computing—a new paradigm favored by cloud developers—Jonathan Balkind is developing anew application for cloud computing.An assistant professor of computer science at UC Santa Barbara,he is doing so with funding from the National Science Foundation,by way of afive-year,$630,000 NSF Early CAREER Award.“It’s really an honor to receive the CAREER award,”Balkind said.“This is my first funded NSF proposal and was the first time Imade asubmission for the CAREER.I’ve had to pinch myself at least once to believe that it really happened.I’m looking forward to driving this project over the next five years.”The long and short of application run times While applications created for servers run for up to weeks at atime,the new serverless apps run for as little as ahundredth of amillisecond—meaning many existing processor technologies cannot keep up.“We have spent several decades optimizing processors for long-lived applications,so that the processor could learn their behavior over time in order to predict future behavior and,thus,operate more efficiently,”Balkind explained.“With today’s very short-running applications,like those in serverless,there simply isn’t enough time for our processors to learn the behavior.This makes it inefficient to run serverless applications on existing servers.“But with microarchitectural checkpointing,”he continued,“you save what you learn each time the application runs,and then when you run it again later,you retrieve what you saved and then save at the end of that step,and so on.The result is that the processor learns only what it needs to,across instances of the application over time.The checkpointed information from each application is siloed,so you avoid polluting the information from one application with that of another.We will use microarchitectural checkpointing to improve the efficiency of serverless apps.”Open-sourcing acustomized serverless processor Key to Balkind’s CAREER award research is the OpenPiton platform,which he will use to enable prototyping for his open-source framework for building processors.“We have adesign for aprocessor,”he said,“and people can make modifications to it,either to add afeature they want or to test things as they change the parameters of that processor,such as the number of cores or the amount of cache.”The system has evolved from work that began in 2013,when Balkind and fellow Princeton University Ph.D.students designed it to serve as aresearch platform that would enable users to add their own components to validate particular research ideas.“We give out just about every component that‘s needed to design anew processor,and as aresult,we‘ve seen users be very productive—more than 60 research projects have used the platform,”he said.Additionally,a number of companies have adopted OpenPiton,including Intel,which used the platform to develop an 8-core processor chip to demonstrate the effectiveness of its new fabrication facilities.Balkind is asignificant contributor to the open-source hardware space,where,he said,“We’re providing these designs and trying to build acommunity and make better products in the future.”He received an Open Source Hardware Association Trailblazer Fellowship for his work in that field.Making and customizing processors for specific applications is an important part of the evolution of computing.“In industry,companies routinely customize their processors for new applications as they emerge,”Balkind said.His proposal for microarchitectural checkpointing will be demonstrated as acustomization of OpenPiton,which can benefit serverless applications.By open-sourcing this processor design and providing aconcrete implementation of the idea,he and his team hope that it will see easier adoption into other industrial processors. 查看详细>>