Bill Marczak, a PhD student supervised by Networking and Security Director Vern Paxson, studies how repressive regimes around the world use technology to repress activists. He wants to bring international media attention to this practice and develop technical solutions and training to give activists the ability to protect themselves against cyber-attacks from regimes.
“I bring a certain type of research which is so often missing from activism,” Bill said. He noted that activist research often lacks rigorous evidentiary standards.
BFOIT, the Berkeley Foundation for Opportunities in Information Technology, is wrapping up its Summer Institute, providing education and mentoring to local youths interested in pursuing information technology careers.
During the summer program, young people attend classes in computer science, information technology, and related topics, and meet professors from Cal. According to BFOIT director Orpheus Crutchfield, BFOIT serves 60 middle school and high school students annually.
This year, ICSI began collaborating with the Research Center on Computer Platform Engineering (known as CIPI), a joint project of the Universities of Genoa and Padua, on the service composition paradigm for distributed applications. This paradigm is a way of visualizing and organizing the relationships among services that, together, make up a larger service composed by simple basic functionalities (i.e., web APIs) belonging to different domains such as social networks, e-commerce, news, and government data. Researchers from the center will visit ICSI to study how this paradigm can be applied to two areas, the Internet of Things (IoT), a network in which most physical objects we interact with on a daily basis will one day be connected, and Big Data. Michele Stecca, a CIPI researcher, will spend his postdoctoral fellowship working at ICSI on different components of the project.
In January 2005, the International Space Station welcomed a new resident - Clarissa, a voice-enabled computer assistant. Astronauts worked with scientists, including ICSI's Manny Rayner, to develop the program. The program responded to voice commands by astronauts and guided them through some of the 12,000 complex procedures they must perform on board the ISS, such as maintenance on space suits. With Clarissa's help, astronauts did not have to scroll through PDF instruction manuals, leaving their eyes and hands free to complete tasks.
In late May, web analytics company comScore agreed to pay $14 million to settle what is described as the largest Internet privacy lawsuit ever granted class-action certification. Mike Harris and Jeff Dunstan, the two plaintiffs, said that comScore’s analytics software was covertly bundled with other installations such as free screen savers, and that comScore tracked everything they did online, storing information such as web searches, credit card numbers, and even the contents of PDFs, and selling it to the company’s clients.
The archives from 1993 provide a wonderful example of ICSI's twin traditions of first-rate speech research and creative acronyms: the Berkeley Restaurant Project, or BeRP. The Realization Group, which would later be renamed the Speech Group, developed a spoken dialog system that gave restaurant recommendations based on a user's spoken responses to questions asked by the system.
Professor Michael Mahoney joined ICSI earlier this year as a principal investigator working on big data research, a rapidly growing area of computer science. As the sheer amount of available data increases, computer scientists are looking for efficient methods of analyzing and using massive amounts of data. Big data research has the potential to influence many areas of not only computer science, but other scientific disciplines as well.
When ICSI's articles of incorporation were signed and filed on June 26, 1986, nothing quite like it had never been attempted: an independent, nonprofit institute focused on basic computer science research, bridging two continents. In the next two years, the Institute's founders held the first board meeting, found a permanent office, hired a director, and launched the research program.
In case you couldn't make it to talks at ICSI in August, we've posted the videos on our 
