Newsletter for 06/05/2023

New Announcements

Announcements

Cybersecurity Workshops From Slug Security!

Are you a hacker at heart? Do you dream of cracking codes, breaking firewalls, and exposing secrets? Have you ever been curious about how the internet stays safe? Tinkered around a site, trying to find exploits? Well, then Slug Security, UC Santa Cruz's Cybersecurity Club, may be for you!

Would you like to learn how to hack into servers, create malware, and avoid detection like a true hacker? Do you want to use a Pringles can to make directional antennas and scan for vulnerable networks? Do you want to compete in national competitions, going against other hackers to see who is the best?

Then join us! We are a student-led cybersecurity club dedicated to fostering a community of hackers who work to improve security.
We host workshops and actively compete in CTF and national competitions such as the NSA Codebreaker Challenge.

We meet every Monday from 2-4 PM at Baskin Engineering 2, Room 506.
Visit our site (https://slugsec.ucsc.edu) for more information. If you have any questions, please visit our FAQ page or email us at slugsec@ucsc.edu.

NSF REU program at SJSU

Only female students can apply for this program. https://etap.nsf.gov/award/1161/opportunity/1387

Target: Undergraduate Women Students

Requirement: US citizens, Enrolled female students

Stipend: $6,000

Living Cost: $3,500

Duration: 10 weeks (May 30 - August 4, 2023) in Summer 2023.

Calling all Baskin Engineering upcoming graduates, come get your Grad bag!

This is an exciting time of year. We wanted to let you know where you can go to get your Baskin Engineering license plate frame as well as your commemorative hat. 

• When: Tuesday, June 6th 9am-4pm
• Where: Baskin Courtyard, near E2 180
• What: Passing out license plate frames, Baskin hat, and honor cords for those who qualify.

Please come by to get your grad bag!! 

Join the Baskin Day team!

Baskin Day is an annual student-run event open to everyone, where we celebrate the Jack Baskin School of Engineering, its students, faculty, and its achievements over the years. We aim to hold Baskin Day 2023-24 on Friday, October 13 (tentative). The event will feature various activities and educational events for everyone to enjoy — highlights of last year's Baskin Day included faculty research panels, a career recruiting event, and an engineering-themed Jeopardy! game, plus cool swag like stickers and T-shirts.

We are looking for enthusiastic and passionate students to join our planning committee over summer break and in fall quarter to help organize our event. If you are interested, please fill out this short application form and we will get back to you!

https://tinyurl.com/baskinday2023 

Open committees:

• Media
• Logistics
• Sponsorship
• Internal 
• External

Hope to meet you soon, and thanks for your interest in helping us with this annual event. Go Slugs!

If you have any questions, feel free to email the organizers: Alison <allasun@ucsc.edu> or Yogita <ysenthil@ucsc.edu>

Baskin Store is NOW OPEN!

Customize your own Baskin Engineering clothes and gear! Personalize your choices by adding your major or club. Graduating seniors: This makes a great gift idea to share with your family!

https://sideline.bsnsports.com/schools/california/santacruz/baskin-engineering

You can see examples in glass display cases located in E2 second floor and JBEB first floor.

[Misfit Lab] Focus Group Participants Wanted!

Misfit lab is conducting a study (Overseen by Kate Ringland, Ph.D.). We are conducting a research study to investigate elements that contribute to safe virtual spaces to foster social growth in individuals.

Join us in an in-person focus group and chat about your experiences in online spaces and co-design an interface
you'd like. Your input will help us in designing a mobile game that will help foster social interactions.

We are looking for any undergraduates over the age of 18 to participate in an in-person focus group/workshop to discuss their experiences in gaming communities as well as social media platforms. The workshop will be approximately 2 hours long. All participants will be compensated with a $30 Amazon Gift Card for their time. 

If interested, visit our Qualtrics survey to fill out our screening form: https://tinyurl.com/prosocial-survey

Questions? Contact Franky at fbdoming@ucsc.edu. 

Research Mentoring Internship Program

The Genomics Institute's Research Mentoring Internship (RMI) program is a research training program for UCSC undergraduates. RMI scholars receive hands-on experience performing wet-lab, computational, or faculty-directed research into the ethical, legal, and social implications of genomic research. Award recipients will also receive a $3,000 quarterly scholarship and professional development and networking opportunities. Application cycles occur twice a year in the fall (transfer students only) and spring. Visit the RMI website to learn more about the program and RMI sponsored workshops that are open to all students.

For more information, contact Alondra Figueroa Olivo at afigue30@ucsc.edu. 

Events

CSE Seminar: I'm SO Glad I'm Uncoordinated!

Speaker: Pat Helland, Software Architecture, Saleforce

Abstract: In my 44 years building software, technology trends have dramatically changed what's difficult and what's hard. In 1978, CPU, storage, and memory were precious and expensive but coordinating across work was effectively free. Running on a single server, networking was infinitely expensive as we had none. Now, there's an abundance of computation, memory, storage, and network with even more on the way! The only challenge is coordination. Year after year, the cost of coordinating gets larger in terms of instruction opportunities lost while waiting. The first half of the talk explains these changes and their impact on our systems. In response, there are many approaches to avoiding or minimizing the pain of coordination. We taxonomize these solutions and discuss how our systems are evolving and likely to evolve as the world changes around us. I am, indeed, a person who's uncoordinated and very likely to drop and/or break stuff. I've adapted to that in my personal life and spend a great deal of my professional life looking for ways our systems can avoid the need to coordinate.

Bio: Pat Helland has been building distributed systems, database systems, high-performance messaging systems, and multiprocessors since 1978, shortly after dropping out of UC Irvine without a bachelor's degree. That hasn't stopped him from having a passion for academics and publication. From 1982 to 1990, Pat was the chief architect for TMF (Transaction Monitoring Facility), the transaction logging and recovery systems for NonStop SQL, a message-based fault-tolerant system providing high-availability solutions for business critical solutions. In 1991, he moved to HaL Computers where he was chief architect for the Mercury Interconnect Architecture, a cache-coherent non-uniform memory architecture multiprocessor. In 1994, Pat moved to Microsoft to help the company develop a business providing enterprise software solutions. He was chief architect for MTS (Microsoft Transaction Server) and DTC (Distributed Transaction Coordinator). Starting in 2000, Pat began the SQL Service Broker project, a high-performance transactional exactly-once in-order message processing and app execution engine built deeply into Microsoft SQL Server 2005. From 2005-2007, he worked at Amazon on scalable enterprise solutions, scale-out user facing services, integrating product catalog feeds from millions of sellers, and highly-available eventually consistent storage. From 2007 to 2011, Pat was back at Microsoft working on a number of projects including Structured Streams in Cosmos. Structured streams kept metadata within the "big data" streams that were typically 10s of terabytes in size. This metadata allowed affinitized placement within the cluster as well as efficient joins across multiple streams. On launch, this doubled the work performed within the 250PB store. Pat also did the initial design for Baja, the distributed transaction support for a distributed event-processing engine implemented as an LSM atop structured streams providing transactional updates targeting the ingestion of "the entire web in one table" with changes visible in seconds. Starting in 2012, Pat has worked at Salesforce on database technology running within cloud environments. His current interests include latency bounding of online enterprise-grade transaction systems in the face of jitter, the management of metastability in complex environments, and zero-downtime upgrades to databases and stateful applications. In his spare time, Pat regularly writes for ACM Queue, Communications of the ACM, and various conferences. He has been deeply involved in the organization of the HPTS (High Performance Transactions Systems - www.hpts.ws) workshop since 1985. His blog is at pathelland.substack.com and he parsimoniously tweets with the handle @pathelland.

References:

• Blog:  Scattered Thoughts on Distributed Systems

Host:  Shel Finkelstein, shel@ucsc.edu

Join us in person or on Zoom: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/99883733479?pwd=UnlFREdSOVAweGRGSnh6NEUxMVZ3UT09

Jobs

Opportunity to participate in a compensated user study

Software research position

This is an exciting software research opportunity for a strong candidate who wants to work on a challenging project. The candidate will contribute to our Phased Array technology at Yektasonics. Our Phased Array is a hardware-software co-designed system, which is an order of magnitude lower cost than other Phased Arrays in the market with performance breakthroughs. 

The technology has applications in a wide range of medical and non-medical fields. In medicine, Focused Ultrasound is a revolutionary medical therapy, which uses harmless sound waves to cure cancer with no chemo-therapy or surgery, and brain treatment without opening the skull, to name a few. Our technology drives the transducers, which generate these sound waves at ultrasound frequencies, with fine phase and power control. We have launched our Power Module successfully, which is the power stage of our Phased Array.

Yektasonics has received numerous awards and recognitions, such as a recent award from the National Science Foundation - Innovation Corps program in 2023, a second prize from the UC Santa Cruz Chancellor at Launchpad 2022, being a finalist of American Heart Association in the Bay Area in 2022, being a finalist of the University of California Big Ideas Competition in 2021, and being part of UC Berkeley Incubator Citris Foundry in 2020, to name a few.

Our Phased Array consists of different software modules, such as our embedded computing interface, our Yektasonics OS, our feedback processor, and more. A strong candidate will mostly code in C/C++ in our challenging environment. If you are highly passionate and looking for a real challenge, please email your resume with your transcript to Navid Gougol at gougol@yektasonics.com. 

You can check out the company website for more information at www.yektasonics.com.