2018 ISR Research Forum: Where Research meets the Real World

ISR held its flagship event, the ISR Research Forum, on Friday June 8. The goal of this day-long event is to foster interaction between industry and ISR researchers, and encourage research collaborations among all. The 2018 Forum – the fourteenth since inception – attracted 135 attendees from thirty-two companies and organizations, and nine regional and national universities.

This year’s Forum featured two engaging keynote speakers. The Forum opened with Dr. Satish Chandra, Software Engineer at Facebook, who spoke on “Bringing ML to the Developer.” In the afternoon, alumnus Dr. Sara Javanmardi, Staff Software Engineer at Google, spoke on the topic of “Google Autocomplete.”

A reception closed the day, and provided a second opportunity for attendees to see select posters.

The program also included six faculty talks on current research topics, including: what makes expert software designers successful; expertise location; cybersecurity, android apps, and anti-malware; privacy and security; checking concurrent data structures written with C/C++ atomics; and missteps in software framework design.

Always a highlight, the poster and demo session held over lunch featured over 25 projects by students and faculty from UCI, USC, Indiana University Bloomington, and a joint project between UCI, Northern Arizona University, and the University of São Paolo, Brazil. The poster/demo session provides an ideal opportunity for attendees to interact with researchers one-on-one and learn about projects firsthand.

Each year the Forum attracts a significant number of alumni, who are keen to stay informed on current ISR projects. Alums frequently say they enjoy getting to know the current crop of student researchers, and networking with other alums and industry colleagues. This year over 20 alumni joined us – some who graduated from as far back as the 1980s, to some who graduated as recently as the past year.

“This year’s ISR Forum was a great opportunity for industry folks like me to connect and re-connect with colleagues working on issues across the entire spectrum of software engineering – and beyond,” said alumnus Dr. Eric Dashofy, Principal Director of Development, Enterprise Information Services, The Aerospace Corporation. “Particularly memorable were talks about how expert designers work, cybersecurity in the mobile environment, and a first ‘behind-the-scenes’ look at Google’s Autocomplete feature. Discussions at the poster sessions about training early-career computer scientists and understanding what makes phishing attacks effective were informative and relevant to realworld issues we’re facing right now.”

For more info, visit the 2018 Forum website: http://isr.uci. edu/isr-events/ forum/2018

Videos of talks by professors Brian Demsky, Joshua Garcia, Sam Malek, and David Redmiles are available on the Forum website and the ISRUCI YouTube channel.