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.
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.
As the pandemic surged in spring 2021, third-year computer science major Shrey Sheladia used the programming skills he learned at UC Davis to help increase India’s vaccination rate. For four months, Sheladia ran an online notification program that helped more than 40,000 people in India receive COVID-19 vaccines by alerting them when a vaccine appointment was available.
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.
Computer science Ph.D. student Simbarashe Nyatsanga aims to make an impact in animation and computer vision through his groundbreaking research in speech-driven gesture generation. He is one of only 16 recipients worldwide this year of the prestigious IBM Ph.D. Fellowship Award, which recognizes outstanding Ph.D. students with demonstrated academic excellence and expertise in pioneering research in computer science.
“In animation, there’s a lot of room for improvement, so it’s wonderful to see that IBM recognizes the importance of my research,” he said.
This past winter, computer science (CS) majors Akshey Nama and Omar Burney developed, planned and taught their own upper-division CS class at UC Davis. Their project-based app development course covered the principles of programming for Android, brought in experts from the Android developer community and built a network of students interested in the platform.
From April 23 – 25, Davis Women in Computer Science (WICS) and SacHacks co-hosted Lovelace Hacks, UC Davis’ first women-focused hackathon. This hackathon aimed to create a space for people of all majors, backgrounds and experience who identify as women and gender minorities to grow their interest in technology and data science.
Suchita Mukherjee is the first recipient of the annual Master’s Thesis Excellence Award in the College of Engineering. She is graduating from UC Davis this spring with a master’s degree in computer science and will be joining Zillow Group as a software developer.
She was selected for this award based on her research, “Fixing Dependency Errors for Python Build Reproducibility,” under the mentorship of computer science Professor Cindy Rubio-González.
A bench tile in the UC Davis Arboretum was dedicated this spring in honor of Antara Bhowmick ‘19, a computer science (CS) M.S. alumna who passed away in September 2019. Bhowmick is remembered as a dedicated student, teaching assistant and researcher and loyal friend who maintained a tight-knit social group at UC Davis.
