Research

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.

Software code is written to be read by both computers and humans. Machines quickly and perfectly understand the computational meaning, while humans read it the same way they read natural language: not as quickly and sometimes incorrectly. With a new $1.2M three-year NSF-funded project, a group of software engineers and social scientists at UC Davis will leverage this bimodality to develop tools that make writing, reading and maintaining code easier and improve the overall programming experience.

Machine-learning algorithms, while not intended to replace human doctors, can be powerful tools to help process and make sense of patient data. Electrical and computer engineering professor Chen-Nee Chuah and computer science professor Xin Liu are preparing sensors and algorithms to work alongside doctors to treat patients.

As of October, Google Flights displays carbon emissions estimates alongside the duration, layovers and price for each flight. New research from UC Davis computer science professor Nina Amenta and Institute of Transportation Studies environmental psychologist Angela Sanguinetti suggests that this new interface will cause small but important changes in how people choose flights and possibly lead to lower emissions.

Whether it’s coding, cooking or calculus, more people are using YouTube and other video sharing websites to learn new things. Computer science Ph.D. student Jingxian Liao, part of associate professor Hao-Chuan Wang’s group, is trying to make this experience better and easier by creating a structured learning experience from a list of video search results.

As Election Day approaches, keeping the voting booth safe is as important as ever. For UC Davis’ Matt Bishop, 2020 is just another year of work to keep electronic voting safe. As a cybersecurity expert and professor of computer science, Bishop helps election officials vet electronic voting systems and the electoral process they’re a part of to find and fix as many security issues as they can to make elections as secure as possible.

Computer science professor Vladimir Filkov and Communication professor Seth Frey are combining social science and computer science to study open source software.

For the second year in a row, CS assistant professor Aditya Thakur is the winner of a Facebook Probability and Programming Research Award. The award, established in 2019, seek proposals from the worldwide computer science community that address problems at the intersection of machine learning, programming languages, statistics and software engineering. Thakur’s proposal was one of 19 selected.