Two CSE/CNS Faculty Members Receive Google Research Scholar Awards

Two faculty members from University of California San Diego’s Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) Department and the Center for Networked Systems (CNS) are among the newest cohort of academic researchers to receive Google Research Scholar awards. Assistant professors Earlence Fernandes and Amy Ousterhout were two of 70 early-career professors worldwide recognized for their efforts to create positive societal impact with technology.

Fernandes was honored in the security category for his proposal, “Practical Least-Privilege Authorization with State for Internet Services.” His research uses the principle of least privilege (PoLP) to restrict access rights to the specific data required to perform legitimate functions. Fernandes hopes his work will enable society to gain the benefits of emerging technologies without security and privacy risks.

Fernandes, who joined CSE in 2022, was honored that same year with the prestigious National Science Foundation’s CAREER Award for Secure Trigger-Action Systems. Additionally, his work has been featured in Wired and The Verge, and he has earned two best paper awards, one from IEEE S&P and the other from IEEE SecDev.

Ousterhout, who also joined CSE in 2022, was honored by Google for her proposal, “Preemptive User-Level Scheduling with User Interrupts,” in the Systems and Networking Systems category. Within the broader Sysnet context, her research focuses on improving efficiency of applications in datacenters while maintaining fast response times and supporting high request rates. Specifically, her goal is to achieve high performance while using fewer central processing units (CPUs), less memory, or less energy.

Previously, Ousterhout earned a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and the Hertz Foundation Fellowship. Both Ousterhout and Fernandes are affiliated with the university’s Center for Networked Systems (CNS).

Google’s Academic Research Scholar Program was launched in March 2020 to support early-career professors pursuing world-class research in computer science with real-world applications and potential to significantly impact their fields. Recipients receive gifts of up to $60,000 to support research aligned with Google Research interests.

Story By Kimberley Clementi