[120907]

ERC grant to web-security project

Society's critical infrastructures are not ready to meet the challenges in information security. Modern computer systems are increasingly extensible, interconnected and mobile, and it is exactly these trends that make systems more vulnerable to attack.

The world wide web infrastructure is particularly exposed, where allowing the mere possibility of fetching a web page opens up opportunities to deliver potentially malicious executable content past current security mechanisms such as firewalls. A critical challenge is to secure the computing infrastructures without losing the benefits of the trends.

‒ It is our firm belief that the attacks will continue to succeed unless a fundamental security solution is devised, says Andrei Sabelfeld, professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering.

Andrei Sabelfeld has been awarded a Consolidator Grant by the European Research Council, for the project ProSecuToR. ERC Consolidator Grants are designed to support researchers at the stage at which they are consolidating their own independent research team or programme. The scheme will strengthen independent and excellent new individual research teams that have been recently created.

‒ ProSecuToR provides a unique and exciting opportunity to provide a foundation for web application security, and address the web security problem in its entirety – from the formal security model to concrete case studies, says Andrei Sabelfeld.

Language-based security is an innovative approach for enforcing security by construction, and ProSecuToR will develop the technology of programming language-based security in order to secure computing infrastructures. The project aims to deliver policies and enforcement mechanisms for protecting who can see and who can modify sensitive data. Security policies will be expressible by the programmer at the construction phase. Automatic enforcement mechanisms will prevent dangerous programs from executing whenever there is a possibility of compromising desired security properties.

The official start date for ProSecuToR is January 1, 2013.
The ERC Grant provides 1,5million Euro during 5 years.

For further information please contact Andrei Sabelfeld, Department of Computer Science and Engineering.
E-mail: andrei at chalmers dot se
Phone: 031-772 10 18

Information regarding ERC Consolidator Grants

[120613]

Towards Modeling Legitimate and Unsolicited Email Traffic Using Social Network Properties

Best paper award on Social Network Systems to researchers at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering.

Social Network Systems

Farnaz Moradi, Dr. Tomas Olovsson and Professor Philippas Tsigas of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, garnered one of the awards for the best paper presented at the 2012 EuroSys, 5th Workshop on Social Network Systems (SNS ’12) held this year in Bern, Switzerland, for the paper "Towards Modeling Legitimate and Unsolicited Email Traffic Using Social Network Properties".

The finding that the paper discusses is that legitimate email traffic generates communication graphs with different properties than those generated by spam. This gives the opportunity to distinguish spammers from hammers the way that they send messages and not from the message content. This work is supported by The Internet Infrastructure Foundation (.SE).

The Best Paper Awards honor the author(s) of a paper of exceptional quality submitted to SNS 2012 workshop was sponsored by Google.

The EuroSys, Workshop on Social Network Systems is focused to cover novel ideas about computer systems and social networks. Online social networks are among the most popular sites on the Web and continue to grow rapidly. They provide mechanisms to establish identities, share information, and create relationships. The resulting social graphs provide a basis for communicating, distributing and locating content. SNS is sponsored by the SIGOPS ACM Special Interest Group on Operating Systems.

For more information please contact
Professor Philippas Tsigas,
Division of Networks and Systems, Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Phone: 031-772 5409
philippas dot tsigas at chalmers dot se

[120313]

New design techniques enable extremely reliable medical devices

For pacemakers and other implantable medical devices there are three key factors: extreme reliability, small size, and long longevity. In the EU project Desyre, researchers tackle these issues with a new approach: building a reliable system on unreliable components.

Ioannis Sourdis, Assistant Professor in Computer Engineering at Chalmers, is the project leader of DeSyRe (on-Demand System Reliability).

“We focus on the design of future highly reliable Systems-on-Chips that consume far less power than other designs for high reliability systems,” he says. ”This approach allows by design devices that combine high reliability with small batteries and state-of-the-art longevity. It is perfect for safety-critical applications such as in implantable medical devices, for example pacemakers or deep brain stimulators that treat Parkinson’s disease”.

Read the entire press release here.

[111213]

Challenges and Visions Award to CSE-paper

Caroline Olsson's paper on "Standardizing radiation oncology data for future modelling of side effects after radiation therapy" received a "Challenges and Visions Award" at the recent International Workshop on Managing Interoperability and compleXity in Health Systems (MIX-HS'11).

Caroline Olsson is an industrial PhD student from Radiation Physics at the University of Gothenburg, her supervisor is Graham Kemp.
The MIXHS 11 took place in Glasgow, in conjunction with the 2Oth ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2011), and the Challenges and Visions award committee selected the awardees from the accepted papers in the Challenges and Visions track. The decision was made based on reviewers' recommendations.

1. Standardizing radiation oncology data for future modelling of side effects after radiation therapy, by Caroline Olsson; Graham Kemp

2. Telehealth at scale: The need for interoperability and analytics, by Rajib Ghosh ; Juergen Heit ; Soundararajan Srinivasan

3. Assessing Schizophrenia With A Highly Interoperable Architecture, by by Ando Emerencia ; Lian Van Der Krieke ; Nicolai Petkov ; Marco Aiello

The prizes were sponsored by the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) and will take the form of travel reimbursement awards totaling $1,000, $750, and $500 for first, second, and third place, respectively.

[111101]

The Internet as crystal ball: future Business Intelligence

Business intelligence software is evolving from providing a rear mirror view of the world to a focus on real time - by hooking into real time data sources and real time user interaction. Now researchers at Chalmers want to move further ahead. They believe the future focus of business intelligence will be all about looking outside corporations and generating data and analytics for decision making based on the world, not just historical enterprise data.

David Sands, Peter Damaschke, Devdatt Dubhashi, Andrei Sabelfeld and Gerardo Schneider at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering have received a 25 MSEK grant from the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research, to support the research program “Data-Driven Secure Business Intelligence”.

Today the Internet is a veritable mirror of the real world and a fantastic source of dynamic real time information about events as they unfold around the world. Via social networks like Facebook and twitter, blogs and rss feeds it has become an integral part of our lives. This massive store of information can be harvested for valuable nuggets of insight that can be used to provide decision support tools for industry and public authorities and help improve business practices and address important societal needs. This is the vision that drives Recorded Future and its CTO Staffan Truvé, who is leading the industrial consortium that will be closely and directly engaged from the start of the project.

While this massive data source offers many opportunities, it is accompanied by tremendous challenges which will be addressed by a multipronged approach using different concepts, methods and technologies from Computer Science and affiliated disciplines.
‒ We’re cutting through traditional disciplinary boundaries to combine the best of several different areas of strength in our department ‒ algorithms, security, formal methods and software engineering. We hope also to initiate work in important emerging areas like large scale parallel and cloud computing which are important for this project, says Devdatt Dubhashi.

The goal of the project is to develop scalable system architectures, algorithms, development methods and working demonstrators for temporal analysis of the large data sets harvested from open sources (web, social media, etc.) as well as corporate databases (customer data, business intelligence data) to enable new forms of collaborative innovation. In addition to handling very large data sets, these analysis services must have mechanisms for ensuring personal integrity for individuals as well as security for customers.

Planned applications include competitive business intelligence, continuous product development, predictive analytics and many other areas of great importance to Swedish industry, both as providers and users of these services. The project will run for five years.

[110502]

Per Stenström and co-applicants receive 20 million SEK grant for software abstractions for heterogeneous multi-core computers

Professor Per Stenström and colleagues have recived a  20 million SEK grant from the Foundation for Strategic Research (SFF) in the area of software abstractions for heterogeneous multi-core computers. The research project target open questions in three disciplines: computer architecture,distributed computing, and computer graphics.

The objective of the research program is to devise principles and methods for encapsulation of parallelism in software components that can be used by productivity programmers to innovate new functionalities. The abstraction offered should stand technology trends that forecast that future multi/many-core computers will be populated by general-purpose cores (CPUs) as well as GPUs and accelerators for specific computational tasks.

In order to test the approach against requirements from a set of domains that span an interesting spectrum of requirements, research will be driven by requirements from three domains: telecom systems, vehicular design and modeling, and media. By involving stakeholders from these application domains as advisors, the research project will maximize chances for industrial uptake.

The project will be jointly led by Prof. Per Stenström, Prof. Ulf Assarsson and Prof. Philippas Tsigas.

Read more at Foundation for Strategic Research

[110502]

John Hughes and co-applicants receive 25 million SEK in multi-project grant from SSF

[110412]

Alejandro Russo gets a Google Research Award for his research within computer security

Alejandro Russo, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, has been receiving about 100.000 USD as a Google Research Award for his research where the result is a solution for automatically detecting  vulnerabilities in applications developed with Google App Engine. The duration of the project is one year and the research money will be used to finance the salary for a PhD student during that period of time. This is the first Google Research Award that Chalmers gets for the area Computer Science and Engineering.

Title of the project: Securing Google App Engine Application

[110311]

IT students are starting a Mentorship Program

Students within the IT-section from the Göta Student Union are the initiators behind the IT Mentorship program. The IT University has joined as a partner in the project.

The IT Mentorship program

The Department of Computer Science and Engineering gets the rating "outstanding" in the RED10 Research Evaluation

The Department of Computer Science and Engineering is one out of four areas that gets the rating "outstanding" in the RED10 Research Evaluation at the University of Gothenburg.

The rating "outstanding" on the assessment scale in the RED10 Research Evaluation is described as:
Outstandingly strong research, including from an international perspective. Great international interest with a wide impact, normally including publications in leading journals and/or monographs published by leading international publishing houses. The research has world-leading qualities.

Read the report

[101208]

Software Engineering students winners of Stage 1 in Ericsson competition

Team SnowBugs with students from the bachelor programme in Software Engineering and Management won the competition Ericsson Application Awards, stage 1.

Voice of the Jury:
"This is a team I want to know more about!"
"3 different cultural backgrounds with a promise of creating something spectacular."
"I am very eager to see what they can do - the question is of course - will they deliver according to their promise?"

Link to Ericsson Application Awards

Watch the winning film on YouTube
 

[101115]

Pedagogical prize to Software teacher Carl Magnus Olsson

The University of Gothenburg has awarded Carl Magnus Olsson this year's individual pedagogical prize.

Each year the University of Gothenburg awards teachers for excellent pedagogical contributions to education. This year the award goes to Carl Magnus Olsson for his work with developing the project course Industrial IT and Embedded Systems. He was nominated by students from the bachelor programme Software Engineering and Management.

The students themselves take active part in formulating the project within which they get the opportunity to really turn theoretical knowledge into practical solutions when developing software. The university's motivation reads “Carl Magnus Olsson has clear visions on how to improve and develop IT education in order to better inspire students to real challenges and he possesses the ability to turn his ideas into tangible and inspiring teaching”.

We are very proud that Carl is a member of our staff and very happy that we have students so engaged in their education to show their appreciation with their teacher and nominate him for this award.

[101001]

The Chalmers' pedagogical prize to Dag Wedelin

Dag Wedelin, Associate professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, has been awarded the Chalmers pedagogical prize for 2010.

[100930]

"Most Influential ICFP Paper Award" to Koen Claessen and John Hughes

Koen Claessen and John Hughes, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, have received the "Most Influential ICFP Paper Award" of 2010. The award is presented annually to the author(s) of a paper presented at the ICFP conference (International Conference on Functional Programming), held 10 years prior to the award year.

Citation:

This paper presented a very simple but powerful system for testing Haskell programs that has had significant impact on the practice of debugging programs in Haskell. The paper describes a clever way to use type classes and monads to automatically generate random test data. QuickCheck has since become an extremely popular Haskell library that is widely used by programmers, and has been incorporated into many undergraduate courses in Haskell. The techniques described in the paper have spawned a significant body of follow-on work in test case generation. They have also been adapted to other languages, leading to their commercialisation for Erlang and C.

[100930]

Arnar Birgirsson receives Google Europe Doctoral Fellowship

Arnar Birgirsson, doctoral student at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, has received one of Google Europe Doctoral Fellowships for 2010. The prestigious award will finance the receiver's research during three years.

Google Europe Doctoral Fellowship

[100826]

The 20th Haskell anniversary

The hbc compiler was written by Lennart Augustsson, a researcher at the Department of Computer Science at Chalmers University whose programming productivity beggars belief. The hbc was the first compiler written for the Haskell programming language and it was released on the 21 of August 1990.

In the end of the 80’s Lennart Augustsson and Thomas Johnsson were working on development of compilers for lazy functional languages. They called their functional language LML and invented many important techniques that have become standard today. The functional language work involved many other people at the Department of Computing Science at the time, and several PhD students did their doctorates on the issue.

Some researchers were working on similar things at other universities and a committee for people interested in functional languages was founded. The committee included Lennart Augustsson, Thomas Johnsson, and John Hughes for example (John Hughes was at Glasgow University, now at Chalmers University of Technology), and together they designed the Haskell language – the first complete compiler was Lennart’s hbc released in 1990.
The Haskell programming language is now celebrating its 20th anniversary. Haskell has been widely spread in recent years, both within academia and industry, though of course still not as common as Java and C++.

In “A History of Haskell: Being Lazy With Class” Augustsson writes:

“During the spring of 1990 I was eagerly awaiting the first Haskell compiler, it was supposed to come from Glasgow and be based on the LML compiler. And I waited and waited. After talking to Glasgow people at the LISP & Functional Programming conference in Nice in late June of 1990 Staffan Truvé and I decided that instead of waiting even longer we would write our own Haskell compiler based on the LML compiler.

For various reasons Truvé couldn’t help in the coding of the compiler, so I ended up spending most of July and August coding, sometimes in an almost trance-like state; my head filled with Haskell to the brim.

At the end of August I had a mostly complete implementation of Haskell. I decided that hbc would be a cool name for the compiler since it is Haskell Curry’s initials. (I later learnt that this is the name the Glasgow people wanted for their compiler too. But first come, first served.)

The first release, 0.99, was on August 21, 1990. The implementation had everything from the report (except for File operations) and also several extensions, many of which are now in Haskell 98 (e.g., operator sections).”

2010: Lennart Augustsson is back in Gothenburg and Sweden, still working on Haskell, but he is now employed by Standard Chartered Bank in London, who is using Haskell for modeling of financial products. Lennart has close connections to the department of Computer Science and Engineering where Haskell and functional programming still flourishes as a research theme. The Functional Programming group at the department consists of around 15 people.

More about Lennart Augustsson:
Wikipedia
Standard Chartered Bank

[100607]

New EU project makes modern software efficient and portable

The emergence of highly parallel, heterogeneous, many-core processors poses major challenges to the European software industry. Software industries were born and matured in an environment where their software was expected to run much faster in every new generation of processors.

The newly-started European FP7 project PEPPHER (for "PErformance Portability and Programmability of Heterogeneous many-core aRchitectures") is an ambitious research effort that addresses some of these issues. Lasting until the end of 2012, PEPPHER summons the forces of four world-class universities (Universities of Vienna, Chalmers, Linkoeping, and Karlsruhe), a leading research center (INRIA), two innovative European SMEs (Code play and Movidius) and a European lab of a major vendor (Intel).

Contact:
Chalmers research work for the project is coordinated by Prof. Philippas Tsigas.
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Email: philippas dot tsigas at chalmers dot se
Phone: +46(0)317725409