Newsletter for 03/15/2021

New Announcements

Announcements

Gesher Group Consulting Applications

Application Opening Soon for Gesher Group

We are a Pro Bono Business Consulting Org, who work with real clients in three sections of service: Data Analytics, Marketing Strategy, and Business Consulting. If you are interested in a career in any of these three sectors, Gesher Group allows the application of these skills in a real professional field.

You do not need any previous work experience in applying and prefer candidates who have at least 1 year left at UC Santa Cruz.

If you are interested in applying, early applications will be available next Friday, February 19. For those applicants who submit their form any time between February 19 and March 1, will qualify for an automatic interview with Gesher.

Make sure to follow @geshergroup on IG/LinkedIn/Facebook to stay tuned in for more updates and events!

Deans' & Chancellor's Award Information

The Deans and Chancellor wish to encourage and stimulate outstanding scholarship and creativity among undergraduate students, based on work developed in courses or programs in the normal pattern of 2020-2021 academic activity at UCSC. 

All materials, including the faculty letter of support, must be received by March 24, 2021.

DEANS' UNDERGRADUATE AWARDS

Fifty undergraduates, 10 from each of the academic divisions will receive a Dean's Award of $100 for outstanding achievement in their division.

CHANCELLOR'S UNDERGRADUATE AWARDS

Fifteen Chancellor's Awardees, three from each division, will be selected from theDeans' Award lists to receive the Chancellor's Award of an additional $500.

STECK AWARD

The Steck Award will recognize the most outstanding research project chosen from the fifteen Chancellor's Awardees.  This student will receive an additional $1000.  In addition, his or her research project will be bound and copies given to the student, the research supervisor, the UC Santa Cruz Library, and the Steck Family whose generous contributions have made this award possible.

Winners of the Deans', Chancellor's and Steck awards will be honored during Undergraduate Student Achievement Week, June 2021.  

GUIDELINES

• All research project submissions must include at least one letter of recommmendation by a faculty mentor/sponsor. Once the student submits their application a seperate email to the mentor listed will be generated automatically containing the link for them to submit the letter of recommendation. All undergraduate students applicants must contact their mentor/sponsor before submitting their application in order to confirm that a letter of support will be possible.
• All applications must include either an attachment of a completed thesis or completed project or performance (by URL). Research projects must be finished when the application is submitted. Projects that are still in progress, or are planned to be completed after the application deadline, should be submitted in the following application cycle. Submitted applications that are incomplete, or do not have a project attachment or link, or are projects that are not yet completed, will be rejected.
• The applicant should choose the one faculty mentor/sponsor of their project who is most familiar with the project and who will be able to provide the strongest letter of recommendation. Only one letter of recommendation is required. Mentors should be UCSC faculty/lecturers/post-docs/researchers etc that have a blue CruzID.
• For group projects, only one student in the group (usually the lead in the project) completes an application. They then must list the other students as project students. Each project member must approve of the application that is submitted. 
• When the faculty mentor/sponsor submits their letter of recommendation, they must also approve the submitted project. Faculty sponsor recommendations and approvals must be submitted online immediately after the student application deadline. It is recommended that the mentor/sponsor write the letter as soon as possible after being contacted by the student.
• Foreign language projects must be accompanied by appropriate translation.
• Technical papers must include an abstract in non-technical language.
• Projects completed in spring 2020 (and therefore not submitted in last year’s competition) are eligible for the 2021 awards competition, even if the student has already graduated. 
• Previous award winners are only eligible to submit projects in the current application cycle if those projects are significantly different in scope or topic from the previously awarded project.

• Click Here to Apply for the Deans', and Chancellor's Award 

  Application requires use of your CruzID Gold password

  Please contact  ur_hnrs@ucsc.edu if you have any questions regarding the application or the application guidelines 

NEW Course Offered in Spring 2021! CSE 40: Machine Learning Basics: Data Analysis and Empirical Methods

Description:   This course provides an introduction to the basic mathematical concepts and programming abstractions required for modern machine learning, data science and empirical science.   The mathematical foundations include basic probability, linear algebra and optimization.   The programming abstractions include data manipulation and visualization.  The principles of empirical analysis, evaluation, critique and reproducibility will be emphasized.   Mathematical and programming abstractions will be grounded in empirical studies including data-driven evidential reasoning, predictive modeling and causal analysis.

This course is a great first introduction to machine learning and an ideal preparation for upper division ML and AI classes.

The prerequisites to CSE 40 are: Math 19B or Math 20B, and CSE 30.

Deans' & Chancellor's Award Deadline March 24

The Deans and Chancellor wish to encourage and stimulate outstanding scholarship and creativity among undergraduate students, based on work developed in courses or programs in the normal pattern of 2020-2021 academic activity at UCSC.

All materials, including the faculty letter of support, must be received by March 24, 2021.

DEANS' UNDERGRADUATE AWARDS

Fifty undergraduates, 10 from each of the academic divisions will receive a Dean's Award of $100 for outstanding achievement in their division. Please submit your award for the BSOE Division by March 24th, 2021. For more information on dates and deadlines and submission guidelines look here: https://dca.ue.ucsc.edu/

ACE Recruitment Announcement for Engineering

Apply for ACE CSE 16, CSE 20, CSE 30 in Spring 2021!

ACE is a community of learners who strive for and commit to academic excellence. Students work together in problem solving sessions to help each other master the concepts your professor teaches in class. Students also receive the benefit of 1 hour mentoring sessions each week with fellow peers who previously took the course and received an exceptional grade.

Check out our new Virtual ACE video to see what it’s like to participate in ACE virtually!

ACE students tend to pass their courses at higher rates and earn more A and B grades compared to non-ACE students in the same course. ACE will be supporting CSE 16, CSE 20, and CSE 30 in Spring 2021, and we encourage you to apply! ACE problem solving sessions and mentoring will be held virtually. Check out our student testimonial video to see what students say about ACE!

Visit our website: http://ace.ucsc.edu to learn more about the ACE Program!

To apply, please go to our Application Page 

--- Application Deadline: Thursday March 18^th at 6:00pm ---

Click Here to add this deadline to your calendar

Beginning Monday, March 29th:

ACE CSE 16-01 sessions meet on Mon/Weds 1:00-2:30pm.

Beginning Tuesday, March 30th:

ACE CSE 20 sessions meet on Tues/Thurs 1:30-3:00pm. 

Beginning Tuesday, March 30th:

ACE CSE 30-01 sessions meet on Tues/Thurs 10:00-11:30am.

Register to Participate in Baskin Day 2021

180 Degrees Consulting is Recruiting Consultants this Spring!

Interested in gaining Business Management or Consulting experience? Join 180 Degrees Consulting, UC Santa Cruz! 

We are the world’s largest student-run consultancy for nonprofit organizations! Develop critical industry skills while working to design business solutions for our clients. As a Consultant at 180 Degrees, you’ll gain access to exclusive consulting resources from the 180 Degrees Global Team, training from Catalyst Consulting, and an instant network of like-minded students and industry professionals. 

Applications are out! Apply by March 20th.

https://tinyurl.com/180UCSCAPP 

If you’re interested in learning more or applying, come out to our upcoming recruitment events! Fill out our contact form to receive updates: 180 Degrees Consulting, UCSC Contact Form.

Please email ikharbanda@180dc.org with any questions.

Undergraduate research opportunities in Computational Media for Spring 2021 now available

Hello! The Computational Media department currently has several openings for undergraduate research assistants in various projects ranging from assistive technology to virtual reality to using machine learning to study mental health and more. If you are looking for an exciting opportunity to get involved in research next quarter, please take a look at our project list and apply to projects of interest as soon as possible. If you have any questions about particular projects, feel free to reach out to the person who is hosting that project using the contact information provided on the sheet. 

ECE 104/204

This course can be used to satisfy an elective for the following majors and minors:

EE Major

EE Minor

Bioelectronics & Biophotonics minor

For more information: 

ECE104_204_UCSC.pdf

Events

UCSC Baskin Day

We are so excited to invite you to UCSC’s Baskin Day 2021, a FREE virtual 3 day conference organized by engineering students at UC Santa Cruz to showcase our school of engineering to the community. This event is open to people of all ages and backgrounds to celebrate the UCSC’s Baskin School of Engineering, its students, faculty, and its achievements over the years. This annual event will be held online from April 9th-April 11th. There will be various exciting events for everyone to enjoy, ranging from workshops, speakers, and panels to alumni networking opportunities. We hope alumni, current students, families, prospective students, and engineering enthusiasts can join us for the weekend. Please check out our website and Eventbrite for more information and to secure your spot at this exciting event.

Website: https://sites.google.com/ucsc.edu/baskinday/home?authuser=0

Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/baskin-day-event-free-registration-and-box-order-form-tickets-137237564249?fbclid=IwAR1obv0hYAoiH-W7SORhjMfDw8YYRsjtfBowygyhgJY-GO5bpyqWhNUzYEE

Jobs

Seeking Readers/Tutors for CSE 13S - 01 for Spring 21

Professor Darrell Long is seeking Reader/Tutor applicants for Spring 21 CSE 13S-01 (Computer Systems and C Programming).

If you meet the qualifications listed below and would like to apply, the link is included in the job posting. Thanks and have a nice spring break!

Basic Qualifications for BSOE Reader/Tutor positions

• Must be a current UCSC student.
• Must have taken the course (or a similar course) before and done well in it (B or better).
• Must be in good academic standing as determined by your program.
• Must have a minimum cumulative GPA of 2.7 or higher.

Kontain Cloud Infrastructure Internship and Job Opportunities

Kontain is a stealth mode, VC funded cloud infrastructure startup led by successful serial entrepreneurs.  This internship opportunity is perfect for a grad or upper level undergrad student who is focused on operating systems, virtualization, security, and cloud workload operation.  At a minimum, you'll get to work on an amazing applied computer science product, learn with some extremely skilled systems software engineers, strengthen your resume, and make some money.  Even better, it could inspire or extend your thesis/dissertation work, or lead to more projects and full time employment with Kontain.

Kontain's solution isolates microservices by encapsulating every container instance in its own private virtual machine.  (This by no means is the full scope of Kontain's product, but for purposes of this internship, this is the relevant feature.)  This isolation mitigates the risk of an ill-behaving container harming other containers running on a shared OS kernel.  People who understand virtual machines easily understand how and why Kontain provides this benefit.  We can explain this in a whitepaper as well.  But it is not easy to demonstrate because all known vulnerabilities where Kontain would shine are already fixed!

For example, Kontain mitigates the infamous Meltdown exploit, but Intel silicon and OS kernels shipped in the past couple years have patched the bug that enabled Meltdown, so it's hard to find a machine on which to demonstrate this.  Similarly, all well known security exploits of Docker have also been mitigated.  There are undoubtedly other exploits out there, and there will be more in the future—which why our solution is vital— but the exploits of the future are unknown.

To demonstrate the security isolation benefits of our platform, we want to find a past successful exploit of standard Docker-style containers that, had Kontain been used instead, wouldn't have succeeded.  Then, we'd like to build a side-by side demo showing (a) an unpatched version of Docker being hacked, and (b) the invulnerability of Kontain's version of the container.

This internship project is to (1) find that exploit (e.g. by searching https://us-cert.gov/ and other places), then (2) build the demo.  Bonus points for inventing a new exploit that meets our criteria in lieu of part (1). Our public Github repo is at https://github.com/kontainapp/km-releases

We have other projects for interns, and are also hiring full-time, so this need not be a one-time, short term engagement.  We're looking forward to working with you!

 Please reach out to Mark Davis at mark@kontain.app if interested in applying

Reader for CMPM 177 (Spring term)

We're looking for an undergraduate student who'd like to work as a reader in CMPM 177 (Spring term). It's a requirement that applicants have taken and passed the class before. We expect the student to help with grading class assignments, for around 6h a week for a total of 60h throughout the term. The student will also meet with the TA and/or the instructor on a regular basis, to ensure that the grading process progresses well. Meetings will take place early in the morning (between 8 and 10 am PDT); the student should be ready to adapt to that schedule.

Interested students are encouraged to apply here: https://rta.soe.ucsc.edu/

If you have any questions, please reach out to faltarri@ucsc.edu
 

Reader for course on digital signal processing (ECE153)

There is an opening for a reader for course on digital signal processing (ECE153).  Interested students to apply here: https://rta.soe.ucsc.edu/

If you have questions please contact the instructor  bfriedla@ucsc.edu

Readers and Group Tutors Needed for STAT 05

STAT 05-02 and STAT 05-01 have openings for 2-4 Readers to assist in grading evaluations and 1-2 Group Tutors. Please apply through the RTA System here  https://rta.soe.ucsc.edu/. Undergrads who have taken STAT 05 in the past are preferred, but other undergrad students that have knowledge of Statistics are welcome to apply as well.