Departmental laboratories and centers for instruction and research include:
Adnan Y. Darwiche, Director
The laboratory focuses on research in probabilistic and logical reasoning and their applications to problems in science and engineering disciplines. On the theoretical side, research involves formulation of various tasks such as diagnosis, belief revision, planning, and verification as reasoning problems. On the practical side, focus is on development of efficient and embeddable reasoning algorithms that can scale to real-world problems, and software environments that can be used to construct and validate large-scale models.
Judea Pearl, Director
The laboratory targets research areas concerned with evidential reasoning, the distributed interpretation of multisource data in networks of partial beliefs; learning, the structuring and parameterizing of links in belief networks to form a representation consistent with a stream of observations; constraint processing, including intelligent backtracking, learning while searching, temporal reasoning, etc.; graphoids, the characterization of informational dependencies and their graph representations; and default reasoning, use of qualitative probabilistic reasoning to draw plausible and defeasible conclusions from incomplete information.
Joseph J. DiStefano III, Director
This interdisciplinary research typically involves integration of theory with real laboratory data, using biomodeling, computational, and biosystems approaches. Problem domains are physiological systems, disease processes, pharmacology, and some post-genomic bioinformatics. Laboratory pedagogy involves development and exploitation of the synergistic and methodologic interface between structural and computational biomodeling with laboratory data, or computational systems biology, with a focus on integrated approaches for solving complex biosystem problems from sparse biodata e.g., in physiology, medicine, and pharmacology), as well as voluminous biodata (e.g., from genomic libraries and DNA array data).
Eleazar Eskin, Director
The laboratory is comprised of a computational genetics group affiliated with both the Computer Science and Human Genetics departments. Research interests are in computational genetics, bioinformatics, computer science, and statistics. The laboratory focuses on developing techniques for solving the challenging computational problems that arise in attempting to understand the genetic basis of human disease.
Yuval Tamir, Director
The Concurrent Systems Laboratory is used for investigating the design, implementation, and evaluation of computer systems that use state-of-the-art technology to achieve high performance and high reliability. Projects involve both software and hardware, and often focus on parallel and distributed systems in the context of general-purpose as well as embedded applications.
Milos D. Ercegovac, Director
The Digital Arithmetic and Reconfigurable Architecture Laboratory is used for fast digital arithmetic (theory, algorithms, and design) and numerically intensive computing on reconfigurable hardware. Research includes floating-point arithmetic, online arithmetic, application-specific architectures, and design tools.
Majid Sarrafzadeh, Director
The ER Lab goal is to use technology in health care to reduce the cost of providing high-quality care to the chronically ill, estimated (by Milken Institute Center for Health Care Economics) to be over $1 trillion per year. The laboratory strives to improve global and local public health surveillance, with a resultant reduction in epidemics, increased control over infectious disease, and improved drug safety. Other goals are diminished rate of medical errors; ongoing preventive health, with attendant reductions in morbidity, mortality, and cost of care; and consumer engagement in health and self-management.
Jason Cong, Director
The VAST Laboratory is used for computer-aided design of VLSI circuits and systems. Areas include high-level and logic-level synthesis, technology mapping, physical design, interconnect modeling and optimization of various VLSI technologies such as full-custom designs, standard cells, programmable logic devices (PLDs), multichip modules (MCMs), system-on-a-chip (SOCs), system-in-a-package (SIPs), and design for nanotechnologies.
Song-Chun Zhu, Director
The laboratory is affiliated with the Computer Science and Statistics departments. Research begins with computer vision and expands to other disciplines. The objective is to pursue a unified framework for representation, learning, inference, and reasoning; and to build intelligent computer systems for real-world applications. Its projects span four directions: vision (object, scene, events, etc.); cognition (intentions, roles causality, etc.); learning (information projection, stochastic grammars, etc.); and art (abstraction, expression, aesthetics, etc.).
Demetri Terzopoulos, Director
The laboratory conducts research on computer graphics, especially targeted towards the video game and motion picture industries, with emphasis on geometric, physics-based, and artificial-life modeling and animation, including motion capture techniques, biomechanical simulation, behavioral animation, and graphics applications of machine learning, AI, and robotics.
The Collective brings together researchers from multiple departments at UCLA, including Mathematics, Statistics, Computer Science, Brain Mapping, Computational Biology, Neuro Imaging, Image Informatics, Psychology, and Radiology.
Stefano Soatto, Director
Researchers investigate how images — i.e., measurements of light — can be used to infer properties of the physical world such as shape, motion, location, and material properties of objects. This is key to developing engineering systems that can “see” and interact intelligently with the world around them. For example, images captured by a car-mounted video camera can be processed by computers to infer a model of the car’s surroundings, e.g., other vehicles, pedestrians, etc. This technology can also be used to analyze images captured in the environment to understand the effects of climate change by monitoring the behavior of animals and plants. Analysis of images of the human body can be used both for diagnostic purposes and for planning interventions.
(Multiple Faculty)
The group is a collaboration of all UCLA faculty from the information and data management field. It is interested in multiple research areas including big data, archival information systems, knowledge discovery and data mining, Earth Science Partners’ private network, genomics graph database development, multimedia information stream system technology, Smart Space middleware architecture, and technologically based assessment of language and literacy, to name just a few.
Carlo A. Zaniolo, Director
This research group investigates Web-based information systems and seeks to develop enabling technology for such systems by integrating the Web with database systems. Current research efforts include the DeAL system, a next-generation datalog system; SemScape, an NLP-based framework for mining unstructured or free text; EARL (Early Accurate Result Library) for Hadoop; Panta Rei, a study of support for schema evolution in the context of snapshot databases and transaction-time databases; Stream Mill, a complete data stream management system; and ArchIS, a powerful archival information system.
Lixia Zhang, Principal Investigator
The laboratory's research areas include fault tolerance in large-scale distributed systems, Internet routing infrastructure, inter-domain routing (BGP), and protocol design principles for large-scale, self-organizing systems. It is also involved in Internet security projects that include development of monitoring tools for DNS security deployment and the enabling of cryptographic defenses in large-scale distributed systems.
Peter L. Reiher, Principal Investigator
The laboratory engages in research to develop advanced operating systems, distributed systems, middleware, and security systems.
Mario Gerla, Director
The laboratory supports research projects in a broad range of topics in network communications including network protocols and architectures, modeling and analysis, wireless networks, sensor networks, car-to-car networks, peer-to-peer techniques, medical networks, and network measurement. It focuses on the use of modeling and analytical techniques to study challenging problems.
Songwu Lu, Director
The laboratory's research areas include wireless networking, mobile systems, and cloud computing. Its focus is on design, implementation, and experimentation of protocols, algorithms, and systems for wireless data networks. The goal is to build high-performance and dependable networking solutions for the wireless Internet.
The Compilers Laboratory is used for research into compilers, embedded systems, and programming languages.
(Multiple Faculty)
The group is a collaboration of faculty from the software systems and network systems fields. It conducts research on the design, implementation, and evaluation of operating systems, networked systems, programming languages, and software engineering tools.
The center was established in 2001 with researchers from several laboratories in the Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering departments. It serves as a forum for intelligent-agent researchers and visionaries from academia, industry, and government, with an interdisciplinary focus on fields such as engineering, medicine, biology, and social sciences. Information and technology are exchanged through symposia, seminars, short courses, and collaboration in joint research projects sponsored by government and industry.
Research projects include use of unmanned autonomous vehicles, coordination of vehicles into computing clouds, and integration of body sensors and smart phones into m-health systems. Ongoing research encompasses personal and body networks, cognitive radios, ad hoc multihop networking, vehicular networks, dynamic unmanned backbone, underwater unmanned vehicles, mobile sensor platforms, and network coding.
CDSC was established in 2009 with the support of a $10 million grant from NSF’s Expeditions in Computing program to develop high-performance, energy-efficient, customizable computing that will revolutionize the way computers are used in health care and other important applications. Domain-specific computing uses customizable architectures and high-level computer languages tailored to particular application domains.
The center is a collaborative effort between UCLA’s Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mathematics, and Radiological Sciences departments, as well as the Computer Science and Engineering departments of Rice University, UC Santa Barbara, and Ohio State University. Its objectives are to develop a general (and largely reusable) methodology for creating novel and highly efficient customizable architecture platforms and the associated compilation tools and runtime management environment to support domain-specific computing. Health care is a significant domain because it has such a major impact on issues of national economy and quality of life; a major focus for the center is on medical imaging and hemodynamic modeling.
The center was established in 2003 to promote all aspects of research and education in cryptography and computer security. It explores novel techniques for securing national and private-sector information infrastructures across various network-based and wireless platforms as well as wide-area networks. The inherent challenge is to provide guarantees of privacy and survivability under malicious and coordinated attacks.
The center has raised federal, state, and private-sector funding, including collaboration with Israel through multiple U.S.-Israel Binational Science Foundation grants. It has also attracted multiple international visiting scholars. ClCS explores and develops state-of-the-art cryptographic algorithms, definitions, and proofs of security; novel cryptographic applications such as new electronic voting protocols and identification, data-rights management schemes, and privacy-preserving data mining; security mechanisms underlying a clean-slate design for a next-generation secure Internet; biometric-based models and tools, such as encryption and identification schemes based on fingerprint scans; and the interplay of cryptography and security with other fields such as bioinformatics, machine learning, complexity theory, etc.
The institute was established in 2013 with a focus on the continuing growth of data and demand for smart analytics to mine that data. Such analytics are creating major transformative opportunities in science and industry. To fully capitalize on these opportunities, computing technology must solve the three-pronged challenge created by the exploding size of big data, the growing complexity of big data, and the increased sophistication of analytics that can be used to extract patterns and trends from the data.
Benjamin M. Wu, D.D.S, Ph.D. (Bioengineering), Director; Bruce Dobkin, M.D. (Medicine/Neurology), William Kaiser, Ph.D. (Electrical and Computer Engineering), Gregory J. Pottie, Ph.D. (Electrical and Computer Engineering), Co-Directors
WHI is leading initiatives in health care solutions in the fields of disease diagnosis, neurological rehabilitation, optimization of clinical outcomes for many disease conditions, geriatric care, and many others. WHI also promotes this new field in the international community through the founding and organization of the leading Wireless Health conference series.
WHI technology always serves the clinician community through jointly developed innovations and clinical trial validation. Each WHI program is focused on large-scale product delivery in cooperation with manufacturing partners. WHI collaborators include the UCLA schools of Medicine, Nursing, and Engineering and Applied Sciences; Clinical Translational Science Institute for medical research; Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center; and faculty from many departments across UCLA. WHI education programs span high school, undergraduate, and graduate students, and provide training in end-to-end product development and delivery for WHI program managers.
WHI develops innovative, wearable biomedical monitoring systems that collect, integrate, process, analyze, communicate, and present information so that individuals become engaged and empowered in their own health care, improve their quality of life, and reduce burdens on caregivers. WHI products appear in diverse areas including motion sensing, wound care, orthopaedics, digestive health and process monitoring, advancing athletic performance, and many others. Clinical trials validating WHI technology are underway at 10 institutions. WHI products developed by the UCLA team are now in the marketplace in the U.S. and Europe. Physicians, nurses, therapists, other providers, and families can apply these technologies in hospital and community practices. Academic and industry groups can leverage the organization of WHI to rapidly develop products in complete-care programs and validate in trials. WHI welcomes new team members and continuously forms new collaborations with colleagues and organizations in medical science and health care delivery.
In summarizing the resources now available to conduct experimentally based research in the UCLA Computer Science Department, it is useful to identify the major components of the research environment: the departmental computing facility, other hardware and software systems, administrative structure, and technical support staff.
Computing facilities range from large campus-operated supercomputers to a major local network of servers and workstations that are administered by the department computing facilities (DCF) or school network (SEASnet).
The departmental research network includes Oracle servers and shared workstations, on the school ethernet TCP/IP local network. A wide variety of peripheral equipment is also part of the facility, and many more research-group workstations share the network; the total number of machines exceeds 1000, the majority running the Linux operating system. The network consists of switched 10/100/1000 ethernet to the desktop with a gigabit backbone connection. The department LAN is connected to the campus gigabit backbone. An 802.11n wireless network is also available to faculty, staff, and graduate students.
The central facilities and wide-area networking are operated by the campuswide Information Technology Services. Access to the departmental and SEASnet machines is controlled so as to maximize the usefulness of these computers for education and research, but no direct charges are involved.
The support staff consists of hardware and software specialists. The hardware laboratory supports network connections, configures routers, switches, and network monitoring tools. The software group administers the department UNIX servers, providing storage space and backup for department users.