Irvine : Grant for New UCI Lab Called Boon to Research

UC Irvine Chancellor Jack Peltason said that a $3.1-million grant recently awarded by the National Science Foundation proves the university’s national stature as a research center.

The five-year grant to UCI’s department of information and computer science will be used to finance a software research laboratory. The money was awarded after a nationwide competition conducted by the NSF’s Coordinated Experimental Research Program.

“This is a major step forward for the department and for the university,” said Peltason. “It’s one way of saying that we’ve broken into the small circle of universities conducting nationally recognized research in computer science.”

The lab will develop new techniques for software production and devise ways to evaluate the techniques, said department Chairman John King.

“Establishing controlled methods of production and evaluation through experimentation will move us into a new threshold of computer science that merges science with practice,” King said.