A new study from UC Davis suggests that AI recommendation algorithms on sites like YouTube and Tik Tok can play a role in political radicalization. If the algorithm sees that a user is watching a lot of biased political videos, the researchers found that it can trap them in a “loop effect,” recommending similarly biased and potentially more extreme content on their homepage and sidebar.
Professor Dipak Ghosal has been named the next Bucher Family Chair of the UC Davis Department of Computer Science, effective July 1. Ghosal will bring his experience as an award-winning researcher, chair of the Computer Science Graduate Group and an advocate for innovation and entrepreneurship to the role. He succeeds Professor Matt Farrens, who has led the department for the past five years.
In 2012, UC Davis Computer Science Distinguished Professor Prem Devanbu and his collaborators Zhendong Su, Abram Hindle, Earl Barr and Mark Gabel changed the field of software engineering with their paper, “On the Naturalness of Software.” Ten years later, the paper’s legacy has been recognized with a Most Influential Paper Award from the 2022 International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE).
Computer Science Assistant Professor Jiawei Zhang is developing a neural network that can potentially find, flag and stop inaccurate or misleading articles posing as fact before they spread.
Over the next four years, UC Davis students will be designing the car of the future as part of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s EcoCAR Electric Vehicle (EV) Challenge. The competition challenges students to convert a Cadillac LYRIQ EV into an autonomous, next-generation battery-electric vehicle with vehicle-to-everything connectivity so it can interact with devices and the environment.
Computer Science Distinguished Professor Prem Devanbu received the prestigious Alexander von Humboldt Research Award in recognition of his accomplishments in research and teaching. Each year, the award recognizes world-renowned researchers from all disciplines whose fundamental discoveries, theories and findings have had a lasting effect on their field. The awardees are then invited to German institutions as visiting scholars.
Doctors already rely on a patient’s medical history to prescribe the right treatments and medications, but Computer Science Distinguished Professor Kwan-Liu Ma and Dr. Shin-Ping Tu at the UC Davis School of Medicine think they can also use it to improve how the entire medical system works together.
Enabling anyone to see the site's code is "a bit senseless," said Vladimir Filkov, a computer science professor at the University of California, Davis, because very few people can understand how Twitter's code base works to produce what they see on their screens.
The face already plays an important role in communication, but a group of UC Davis computer scientists led by Ph.D. student Shuyi Sun is taking this to the next level. The team is designing facial jewelry that can use signals from a person’s facial muscles to send wireless commands to at-home devices like Alexa and Google Home. By reading a user’s conscious and unconscious gestures, the technology has the potential to help silently operate lights or other devices or discreetly send messages to get out of potentially dangerous situations.
