Ph.D. student Rajvardhan Oak stumbled upon an underground market for fake Amazon reviews by accident while scrolling through Facebook. Seedy scam networks are using social media to organize campaigns that influence product ratings. They’re a headache for shoppers—and tough to crack down on.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sung Kook Kim, a third-year Ph.D. student in the Computer Science department advised by assistant professor Aditya Thakur, was awarded the Radhia Cousot Young Researcher Best Paper Award at the 27th Static Analysis Symposium (SAS 2020) for his paper, "Memory-Efficient Fixpoint Computation."
As a part of the Computational Research Division’s (CRD) summer student program at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, four graduate students from UC Davis researched a method that could allow doctors and researchers to leverage valuable health information in the battle against COVID-19 while also preserving patient privacy in COVID-19-related electronic health records.
Likang Yin, a Ph.D. student in the DECAL Lab working with computer science professor Vladimir Filkov, has won a distinguished paper award from the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Software Engineering (ACM/SIGSOFT). Yin received the award at the 35th annual Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)/ACM International Conference Automated Software Engineering, one of the top conferences in software engineering.
