Cybersecurity

The UC Noyce Initiative has reached a significant milestone in its mission to advance digital innovation for the public good. Today, (May 13) the Initiative announced the launch of a new graduate student fellowship program designed to support the next generation of interdisciplinary researchers across five University of California campuses.

The UC Noyce Initiative has announced a new round of research awards totaling nearly $3.4 million to support collaborative teams advancing computational health and cybersecurity across the University of California system.

The room hummed with energy as clusters of faculty, researchers and students leaned into conversation, gesturing toward posters, exchanging ideas and making connections in real time.

On April 16, some of the country’s foremost experts in cybersecurity and artificial intelligence (AI) convened at UC Davis to explore how collaborative research can address the most urgent digital security challenges of our time. The event, hosted by the UC Noyce Initiative, brought together faculty from UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC Irvine, UC San Francisco and UC Santa Barbara to identify shared priorities and shape future funding opportunities in AI and cybersecurity.

UC Noyce Initiative-funded researcher Gene Tsudik was recently (April 11) awarded a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship. He joins 186 other American and Canadian scientists and scholars receiving this highly competitive honor this year.

Tsudik is a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at UC Irvine. His research interests include many topics in computer security, privacy and applied cryptography. Some of his recent work is focused on security (especially, malware-resistance) for the burgeoning global ecosystem of so-called Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices.

UC Noyce Initiative researcher Chen-Nee Chuah was recently (April 18) selected to be a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, or AAAS, the world's largest multidisciplinary scientific society. The prestigious honor is a lifetime achievement and is reserved for researchers who have made significant advancements to science or its applications.

A few years ago, UC Noyce Initiative researcher and UC Berkeley public health scholar Ziad Obermeyer found that an algorithm that affected health care for millions of patients routinely gave wealthier, white patients better access to care for chronic conditions compared to sicker, less affluent Black patients. 

In honor of International Women’s Day on March 8, the University of California, Davis, College of Engineering recognized some key female engineers  in recognition for how they inspire inclusion in engineering. Among those recognized were two researchers from the UC Noyce Initiative: Child Family Professor in Engineering Chen-Nee Chuah and Associate Professor Marina Radulaski.

The following are excerpts from the Q&A featuring Chuah and Radulaski:

Two UC Noyce Initiative researchers are co-authors of a recently published a collaborative study investigating the extent to which interactions with smart speakers, like Amazon's Echo devices, are being used for ad targeting.

In mid-2022, Instagram began asking an assortment of its users to complete a survey about their race, ethnicity and gender. By the end of the year, a huge number of people had filled out the survey, which was part of a new effort to ensure that the social media platform was fair and inclusive.

Behind the scenes, Professor Dawn Song, PhD, an expert in computer security and privacy, was helping ensure that the sensitive data was staying safe while still enabling researchers to analyze it.