( STUDENT ACHIEVEMENTS ) Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award for Supercomputing Communication Helping supercomputers communicate efficiently was the aim of Rohit Zambre’s doctoral dissertation, which won the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on High Performance Computing 2021 Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award. Zambre’s dissertation is titled “Exascalable Communication for Modern Supercomputing.” It analyzes the problem of supercomputing applications’ slow multithreaded communication and eliminates the communication bottleneck by bridging the two ends of the HPC stack – message passing interface library developers and domain experts – that typically do not directly talk to each other. “My research focused on enabling applications to utilize the capabilities of modern network hardware since communication between the nodes of a supercomputer occupies a significant portion of an application’s runtime at scale,” said Zambre. “The technologies from this research have been incorporated into the most widely used communication library in supercomputing.” Zambre earned his doctorate in computer engineering and currently works at AMD Research as an HPC architecture researcher in Washington.
Researcher Wins International Design Award Judit Giró Benet was awarded the James Dyson International Award for her biomedical device innovation, The Blue Box, a breast cancer detection system. Giró Benet, a recent graduate of the UCI master’s program in embedded cyberphysical systems beat out more than 1,800 entries to win the international competition, which awarded her $35,000. The Blue Box, which Giró Benet expects to cost about $80, is reusable and user friendly. The pain-free, non-irradiating, point-of-care system for home use includes a device – a small blue box – and a corresponding cell phone app. Users slide a urine sample into a drawer in the device, which then uses eight chemical sensors to scan it for specific biomarkers associated with breast cancer. The information is sent to a cloud-based server, where software uses an artificial intelligence algorithm – modeled on a dog’s sensory system, which has successfully sniffed out cancer – to assess it. Results are sent directly to the user’s cell phone. Giró Benet conducted research at UCI’s Center for Embedded Cyberphysical Systems with EECS Professor Fadi Kurdahi. 24 UCI Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Recent Graduate Recognized for Innovation in Navigation The Institute of Navigation awarded Samueli School recent graduate Kimia Shamaei the 2020 Bradford Parkinson Award for her doctoral dissertation, “Exploiting Cellular Signals for Navigation: 4G to 5G.” The annual award recognizes outstanding graduate students in the field of positioning, navigation and/ or timing whose dissertations represent significant innovations in the technology, application or policy of modern navigation systems. Shamaei graduated with her doctorate in electrical engineering and computer science and her dissertation research addressed the challenges of exploiting cellular signals for navigation purposes, specifically longterm evolution and 5G signals. She currently works as a software engineer at Apple Inc.
