13 September 2023 —  Profs. Belding and Gupta and seven of their students attended Sigcomm'23.  Newly minted Dr. Paul gave a terrific presentation for his paper titled "Decoding the Divide: Analyzing Disparities in Broadband Plans Offered by Major US ISPs", while MOMENT Lab students Nawel Alioua, Jiamo Liu, and Varshika Srinivasavaradhan all gave posters of their recent research.  
12 September 2023 —  Congratulations to Dr. Udit Paul, the MOMENT Lab's 21st PhD graduate!  Paul is off to great things at Ookla!  We are so proud of the work Dr. Paul has done to measure fixed broadband access and affordability around the US.
02 May 2023 —  Congratulations to Moment Lab alum Morgan Vigil-Hayes on receiving tenure at Northern Arizona University!  We are so proud of you!!
24 April 2023 —  Congratulations to Vinothini Gunasekaran, the most recent M.S. graduate of the MOMENT Lab!  Vinothini's project was titled "Analyzing Internet Affordability in Santa Barbara County."  Best of luck to you Vinothini as you embark on your career!
27 October 2022 —  It was so wonderful to see MOMENT Lab alumni Prof. Morgan Vigil-Hayes and Prof. Mariya Zheleva at the NSF Smart & Connected Communities PI meeting in October, where they presented their successful and inspiring S&CC projects!
27 October 2022 —  HUGE Congratulations to MOMENT Lab members Udit Paul and Jiamo Liu on receiving the Distinguished Paper Award (Best Long Paper) at ACM IMC'22!  Wow!!!  This work is so important and timely given the recent focus on crowdsourced speed test measurements for policy-related decision-making. Our paper argues that using these measurements without understanding their context is problematic. Though the community had internalized that speed-test results can be misleading, no one knew the extent of skews in such crowdsourced datasets. One significant roadblock in contextualizing these measurements was... Read more
24 August 2022 —  Congratulations to MOMENT Lab alum Dr. Mariya Zheleva on her promotion to Associate Professor at the University of Albany!!
24 August 2022 —  Congratulations to MOMENT Lab student Udit Paul and Jiamo Liu on the acceptance of their paper titled "The Importance of Contextualization of Crowdsourced Active Speed Test Measurements" to ACM IMC'22!  We hope that this work contributes to better methodologies for assessing broadband Internet connectivity.
24 July 2022 —  Congratulations to Dr. Vivek Adarsh on becoming the 20th Ph.D. of the MOMENT Lab!  
08 October 2020 —  Congratulations to MOMENT Ph.D. student Vivek Adarsh for winning the HP Labs Best in Class summer project.  Vivek's work on smartNICs was selected out of over 400 intern projects.  Read more about his project here.
30 June 2020 —  Congratulations to MOMENT student Dana Nguyen on the successful completion of her MS degree!   We will miss you Dana!
30 April 2020 —  Congratulations to MOMENT PhD student Michael Nekrasov on the successful completion of his Ph.D.  Dr. Nekrasov, whose dissertation is titled "Robust, Resilient Networked Communication in Challenged Environments", is the 19th Ph.D. graduate of the MOMENT Lab.  Who will be graduate #20??
12 January 2020 —  Congratulations to Udit Paul, Vivek Adarsh, Michael Nekrasov and Alex Ermakov on the publication of their paper "#Outage: Detecting Power and Communication Outages from Social Networks" in WWW'20!!!
12 April 2018 —  Congratulations to Esther Showalter, MOMENT Lab PhD student, on her reception of a 2018 NSF Graduate Fellowship!  Hooray!!
01 April 2018 —  Congratulations to MOMENT Lab undergraduate researcher Dana Nguyen on receiving a Google Lime Scholarship!
31 July 2017 —  Congratulations and farewell to the MOMENT Lab's most recent two Ph.D. graduates, Dr. Morgan Vigil-Hayes and Dr. Paul Schmitt!  We wish you a wonderful and successful career!
31 July 2017 —  Congratulations to Moment Lab Ph.D. student Mai El-Sherief on her reception of the 2017 UCSB Fiona and Michael Goodchild Graduate Mentoring Award!  Mai is an outstanding mentor of undergraduate students!  
01 June 2017 —  Congratulations to Moment Lab student Michael Nekrasov on the acceptance of his paper to FOCI'17, and to Morgan Vigil-Hayes on the acceptance of her paper to IMWUT (UbiComp'17)!
07 March 2017 —  Congratulations to Mai El-Sherief and undergraduate researcher Dana Nguyen on the acceptance of their paper "#NotOkay: Understanding Gender-based Violence in Social Media" to the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) 2017!  The acceptance rate was only 14%!
01 March 2017 —  Our 2017 CSCW paper, entitled "#Indigenous: Tracking the Connective Actions of Native American Advocates on Twitter," received an Honorable Mention Best Paper Award!
07 December 2015 —  Congratulations to Paul, Danny, and Moment Lab alum Mariya Zheleva on the acceptance of their paper to Infocom 2016!  The paper uses traces cellular network we collected from the Za'atari refugee camp to motivate alternative cellular network infrastructures for improved connectivity.
09 October 2015 —  Congratulations to Mai on the publication of her first MOMENT Lab paper, titled "The Urban Characteristics of Street Harassment: A First Look", to appear in UrbanGIS 2015!
30 September 2015 —  Congratulations to MOMENT Lab alum Mariya Zheleva, on her appointment to tenure-track assistant professor at SUNY Albany!
22 September 2015 —  Congratulations to Paul on the acceptance of his paper, titled "Internet Media Upload Caching for Poorly-Connected Regions", to ACM DEV 2015!
17 August 2015 —  Congratulations to Morgan on the acceptance of her paper, titled "Repurposing FM: Radio Nowhere to OSNs Everywhere," to CSCW 2016!
16 July 2015 —  Ph.D. student Paul Schmitt quoted in article on Syrian refugees in Za'atari
17 March 2015 —  200,000 Refugees Overtax Cellular 'Lifeline' story published on futurity.org about Moment lab research trip to Za'atari refugee camp.
16 March 2015 —  The January 2015 research trip by Ph.D. students Paul Schmitt and Daniel Iland to the Za'atari refugee camp was recently covered in the UC Santa Barbara Current.
08 July 2013 —  Our recent MobiSys 2013 paper describing our Kwiizya development and deployment in Macha, Zambia was covered in New Scientist.
10 April 2013 —  Congratulations to Dr. David Johnson on the successful defense of his Ph.D. Dissertation, titled "Re-architecting Internet Access and Wireless Networks for Rural Developing Regions."  Dr. DJ will now lead the Cognitive Radios for Emerging Regions group in the Meraka Institute of CSIR, in Cape Town.  The Moment Lab looks forward to continuing collaborations with David in the years to come!
27 November 2012 —  The article describes our work in Africa, collaboration with prof. Amr El Abbadi and prof. Lisa Park's group along with some cool photos we took on our field trips: http://convergence.ucsb.edu/article/bridging-digital-divide
10 July 2012 —  We annouced on the local radio station that we were going to talk about research done on traffic patterns in Linknet inMacha and the new VillageNet project at the outdoor projection wall near the restaurant. We also used the Machaworks Facebook site to advertise the meeting. About 15 local people arrived for the talk and a few western visitors. It was a very unique experience to enjoy the brilliant milky way and talk about the uniqueness of Macha's Internet community. We showed the Facebook social graph with locality of interest that provided strong motivation for the VillageShare and... Read more
09 July 2012 —  After two weeks of fighting with technology going wrong in the bush, we finally have 2 VillageCell GSM base stations up in Macha, Zambia. Phone calls are now being made within a 5km radius between multiple base stations, using an existing Wi-Fi-based backhaul. There were many lessons learnt: If the technology works in the lab, it means very little. Power supply is more complicated than you think. When the software in your box is the result of many open source projects glued together, you can be sure that things will be buggy, but open source software is still going to make the world a... Read more
24 May 2012 —  Our VillageNet work for developing better and more widespread Internet technology in Macha, Zambia has been highlighted in the Spring 2012 issue of UC Santa Barbara's Today Magazine.  Check out pages 8 and 9!
30 April 2012 —  In recognition of her work with her own graduate students, as well as for the work she does on behalf of all the graduate students in the Computer Science department, Prof. Belding won UCSB's Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award 2012!  This includes her work as a Graduate Program Advisor as well as her oversight of the Computer Science graduate program.  Congratulations!
30 April 2012 —  Our senior Ph.D. student, Veljko Pejovic, will graduate this summer and leave us to become a postdoc at the University of Birmingham in the UK.  Congratulations Veljko, we will miss you!
18 April 2012 —  These photos were taken for the UC Santa Barbara Today magazine. They were writing an article on our VillageNet project. From left: Mariya, David and Abigail.   From left: Arghyadip, Maggie and Veljko.
18 April 2012 —  Elizabeth, Veljko and David attended ACM DEV and ICTD 2012 which were co-located in Atlanta. David presented a paper on VillageShare at ACMDEV describing an architecture to localize traffic in an African village when user's are sharing content with each other. Veljko presented a poster at ICTD on VillageCell, a system to... Read more