CRA Announcement
Here’s the CRA Announcement about Peter Chapman’s Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award:
Peter Chapman – Male Runner-Up
Senior at University of VirginiaPeter Chapman is a Senior at the University of Virginia majoring in Computer Science and Cognitive Science.
Computer security and privacy is a critical concern, especially when medical issues are involved. Peter developed a method for automatically searching web applications to find side-channel vulnerabilities in web applications. He applied new statistical tools to better describe these vulnerabilities. In the end, he determined that 88% of queries to Google Health could be recovered by an eavesdropping adversary.
Peter has also worked on secure computation, where parties collaborate on computing a function of two inputs without exposing the inputs to each other. He has proposed novel applications of secure computation in smartphones, and is working on an improved approach to mobile secure computation, relying on the network carrier to provide suitable streams of randomness.
You can read more about the side-channel analysis work at http://www.cs.virginia.edu/sca/ and about the mobile secure computation work at http://www.MightBeEvil.com/mobile.
The tech jobs hiring boom is real
The tech jobs hiring boom is real — for these skills, InfoWorld, 12 December 2012.
It’s not a myth. The technology industry is in the midst of a hiring surge stronger than any we’ve seen since the days of the dot-com boom. InfoWorld’s interviews with economists, technology executives, job seekers, and hiring board managers indicate that employment in the tech sector is up a solid 10 percent this year — by some bullish estimates, closer to 20 percent. And despite the tendency of the media to fixate on California’s Silicon Valley, the hottest job markets are in places like New York and Washington, D.C., where firms in financial services and the federal government hire droves of IT hands.
The Future of Computing
The New York Times has a special Science Times issue on The Future of Computing. It includes lots of interesting articles including Sebastian Thrun on self-driving cars, Daphne Koller on personalized education, Scott Aaronson on quantum computing, and David Patterson on curing cancer. There’s also an interactive timeline that highlights important past events in computing and gives you a chance to influence predictions about future events.
Who is the real Mark Zuckerberg?
Who is the real Mark Zuckerberg?, BBC News, 3 December 2011.
At Harvard, alongside computer science, Zuckerberg also studied psychology. He says Facebook springs from both disciplines: “Those two things together really represent the DNA of Facebook… There are a lot of great technology companies and there are people who think about social issues, but there aren’t a lot people doing both.”
