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I am an Associate Professor of Computer Science at University of California at Santa Barbara. Before UCSB, I completed my M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science at U.C. Berkeley (2000, 2004), and received my B.S. degree from Yale University (Branford, 1997). My research spans the areas of networking, security and privacy, distributed systems, simulation and modeling. These days, I spend a lot of time gathering, mining and analyzing online social networks, and the rest of the time thinking about software defined radios. I am a recipient of the National Science Foundation's CAREER award, MIT Tech Review's TR-35 Award (Young Innovators Under 35), and ComputerWorld's Top 40 Technology Innovators.

New and Hopefully Useful

  • The "crowdturfing" paper has been accepted to WWW 2012 (12% accept rate, OUCH!), congrats to Gang, Christo, Xiaohan, Yibo and Manish!!
  • Our new work on malicious crowdsourcing has featured in a Boston Globe editorial, Slashdot, and an MIT Technology Review article.
  • Our work on 3D wireless links for data centers is featured in an MIT Technology Review article, and in an New York Times article.
  • We finally got around to releasing code that allows users to generate synthetic graphs that closely match our Facebook measurement datasets in structure and function. Instructions and code here: http://current.cs.ucsb.edu/socialmodels/.
  • Due to time and space constraints, I will not be taking on any Post-docs, visiting scholars, or undergraduate visiting students seeking internships. I am also unable to respond to all e-mails seeking these positions.
  • My Erdos number is 3, Erdos -> Michael Saks -> Kirsten Hildrum -> me.
  • Teaching

    I'm not teaching any classes for a bit. Winter 2012 is paternity leave, and I'll be on sabbatical (but on campus) in Spring 2012. I will be back to my normal load in Fall 2012.
    Future/Past/Other Courses
    [F10] [F09] [F08] [F07] [F06] CS276 - Graduate Networking
    [S11] [S10] [W09] [S08] [S07] [S06] CS170 - Operating Systems
    [W11] [W10] [W08] [W07] CS176B - Network Computing
    [S09] CS290F - Online Social Networks, Applications and Systems
    [S07] CS595N - Anonymous and Privacy-Preserving Systems
    [S06] [W05] CS290F - Large-scale Networked Systems
    [S06] CS176C - Advanced Topics in Networking

    Research

  • At UCSB, I lead the CURRENT lab for research on Secure and Reliable Networking.
  • Dates: Travel and CFPs

    Dates: CFPs and Travel
  • 3/2-3/9: CFP MOBICOM 2012
  • 3/9: CFP WOSN 2012
  • 5/4-5/11: CFP: IMC 2012
  • 6/1-6/8: CFP CoNEXT 2012
  • UCSB Academic Calendar
  • Winter 12: 1/9-3/16-3/23
  • Spring 12: Sabbatical
  • Professional Activities

    Recent TPCs
    IMC 2012, P2P 2012, WOSN 2012, SNS 2012, WWW 2012, CoNEXT 2011, Middleware 2011, SIMPLEX 2011, HotMobile 2011, HotNets 2010, P2P 2010, WOSN 2010, ICDCS 2010, WoWMoM 2010, INFOCOM 2010.
    Other Service
  • Program Co-Chair: SIGCOMM WOSN 2012
  • Steering Committee: IPTPS, 2007 - 2010
  • Program Co-Chair: IEEE P2P 2010
  • Program Co-Chair: IPTPS 2006
  • Web Systems Chair: ICNP 2006
  • Contact Info

    Prof. Ben Y. Zhao
    Department of Computer Science
    University of California
    Santa Barbara, California 93106-5110
    Tel: +1 (805) 893-3417
    Fax: +1 (805) 893-8553
    Find me on Facebook and Twitter