Columbia Computer Science News

Prof. Nayar's Little Camera Is a Big Idea for Children Around the World

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 22:43:10 EDT

Prof. Nayar also worked with a group of students, led by Guru Krishnan, An Tran and Brian Smith, to create a website, www.bigshotcamera.org, that walks children and teachers through the workings of the camera. The website also allows young photographers from around the world to share their pictures. �The idea here was not to create a device that was an inexpensive toy,� says Nayar. �The idea was to create something that could be used as a platform for education across many societies.� Visit the Bigshot website. Read more about the Bigshot project.

Bigshot: A Digital Camera for Education

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 17:28:58 EDT

Prof. Jebara Delivers Keynote Speech at the 21st ICTAI Conference

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 12:10:55 EDT

21st International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence November 2-5, 2009, Newark Liberty International Airport Marriott Newark (NYC Metropolitan Area), New Jersey, USA Learning from Data using Matchings and Graphs (pdf version) Tony Jebara Columbia University Many machine learning problems on data can naturally be formulated as problems on graphs. For example, dimensionality reduction and visualization are related to graph embedding. Given a sparse graph between n high-dimensional data nodes, how do we faithfully embed it in low dimension? We present an algorithm that improves dimensionality reduction by extending semidefinite embedding methods. But, given only a dataset of n samples, how do we construct a graph in the first place? The space to explore is daunting with 2^(n^2) graphs to choose from yet two interesting subfamilies are tractable: matchings and b-matchings. By placing distributions over matchings and using loopy belief propagation, we can efficiently and optimally infer maximum weight subgraphs. Matching not only has intriguing combinatorial properties but it also leads to improvements in graph reconstruction, graph embedding, graph transduction, and graph partitioning. We will show applications on text, network and image data. Time permitting, we will also show results on location data from millions of tracked mobile phone users which lets us discover patterns of human behavior, networks of places and networks of people.

Prof. Shree Nayar receives Carnegie Mellon University's 2009 Alumni Achievement Award

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:08:49 EDT

Prof. Shree Nayar has been awarded Carnegie Mellon University's 2009 Alumni Achievement Award, which recognizes an individual for exceptional accomplishments that have brought honor to the receipient and to Carnegie Mellon. He is being recognized for his "pioneering research contributions and teaching in the field of computer vision."

Scan of Internet Uncovers Thousands of Vulnerable Embedded Devices

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 18:36:07 EDT

Scan of Internet Uncovers Thousands of Vulnerable Embedded Devices Wired News (10/23/09) Zetter, Kim A scan of the Internet by Columbia University researchers searching for vulnerable embedded devices has found that nearly 21,000 routers, Webcams, and VoIP products are vulnerable to remote attack. They say there could be as many as 6 million vulnerable devices on the Internet. The scan also found that the devices' administrative interfaces are viewable from anywhere on the Internet, and their owners have not changed the devices' passwords from the manufacturer's default. The study scanned networks belonging to the largest Internet service providers (ISPs) in North America, Europe, and Asia, and vulnerable devices were found in significant numbers in all parts of the world. Since starting the project last December, the researchers have scanned 130 million IP addresses and found nearly 300,000 devices whose administrative interfaces were remotely accessible from anywhere on the Internet. Devices with default passwords are most vulnerable, but others are theoretically vulnerable to brute-force password-cracking attacks. The researchers have provided ISPs with their findings, but Columbia professor Salvatore Stolfo says product manufacturers are the real culprits. He says that they need to hide their administrative interfaces by default and give customers clear instructions on how to alter the configuration to protect themselves. Stolfo also says that vendors should be more vocal in encouraging customers to change default passwords. View Full Article | Return to Headlines

Ilias Diakonikolas wins Honorable Mention in the 2009 Nicholson Competition of the INFORMS society.

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 10:53:17 EDT

The George Nicholson Student Paper Competition is held each year to honor outstanding papers in the field of operations research and the management sciences written by a student. Ilias Diakonikolas received an Honorable Mention Award in the 2009 Nicholson Competition for his paper "Small Approximate Pareto Sets for Biobjective Shortest Paths and Other Problems", coauthored with Prof. Mihalis Yannakakis. The paper is published in the SIAM Journal on Computing.

Steve Henderson receives best paper award at IEEE ISMAR 2009

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 20:28:33 EDT

IEEE ISMAR (International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality) is the premier conference in its field. The paper, "Evaluating the Benefits of Augmented Reality for Task Localization in Maintenance of an Armored Personnel Carrier Turret," was coauthored by Steve Henderson and Prof. Steve Feiner. It presents the design, implementation, and user testing of a prototype augmented reality application to support military mechanics conducting routine maintenance tasks inside an armored vehicle turret. The prototype uses a tracked head-worn display to augment a mechanic's view with text, labels, arrows, and animated sequences documenting tasks to perform. A formal human subject experiment with military mechanics showed that the augmented reality condition allowed them to locate tasks more quickly than using when two baseline conditions (an untracked head-worn display, and a stationary display representing an improved version of existing electronic technical manuals).

Prof. Stolfo to Chair National Cyber Defense Financial Industry Workshop

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 13:35:12 EDT

The National Cyber Defense Industry Workshop will take place on October 28-29, 2009 at the Financial Services Roundtable in Washington, DC. The workshop is sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and will be limited to senior experts from the financial services industry, academia and government agencies. The workshop is one in a series organized by the National Cyber Defense Initiative Steering committee with support from several government organizations and leaders.

Prof Yemini Delivers Keynote Speech at the IEEE/IFIP IM2009 conference

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 19:38:09 EDT

Title: Can Genomic Networks Teach Integrated Network Management?

Prof. Gravano receives a Yahoo! Faculty Research and Engagement Gift

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 11:59:08 EDT

Professor Luis Gravano was awarded a Yahoo! Faculty Research and Engagement Gift, for "User-Specific Extraction of Entity Lists and Attributes."

Prof. Ross is Awarded NSF Grant for Research on Avoiding Contention on Multicore Machines

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 18:06:18 EDT

Prof. Kenneth Ross has been awarded an NSF grant to study how to effectively use multicore machines to perform data intensive computations typical of database systems. The project aims to provide a generic, programmer-friendly framework for performing certain kinds of concurrent operations in parallel. The system will automatically detect and respond to hotspots and other performance pitfalls.

Prof. Feiner receives Microsoft Research Award to explore multitouch user interfaces.

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 19:23:14 EDT

Their research will address the design and development of hybrid user interfaces that put multiuser tabletop user interface into a rich context of additional displays and devices, ranging from hand-held, to head-worn, to stationary. They will be supplementing the display and interaction plane established by and anchored on the tabletop with the capability to visualize and interact with information in the volume above and around it.

NSF funds Prof. Junfeng Yang, Prof. Gail Kaiser, and Prof. Jason Nieh to explore new software checking mechanisms

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 12:05:54 EDT

Software reliability affects virtually everyone. Thorough software checking is unquestionably crucial to improve software reliability, but the checking coverage of most existing techniques is severely hampered by where they are applied: a software product is typically checked only at the site where it is developed, thus the number of different states checked is throttled by those sites' resources (e.g., machines, testers/users, software/hardware configurations). To address this fundamental problem, we will investigate mechanisms that will enable software vendors to continue checking for bugs after a product is deployed, thus checking a drastically more diverse set of states. Our research contributions will include the investigation, development, and deployment of: (1) a wide-area autonomic software checking infrastructure to support continuous checking of deployed software in a transparent, efficient, and scalable manner; (2) a simple yet general and powerful checking interface to facilitate creation of new checking techniques and combination of existing techniques into more powerful means to find subtle bugs that are often not found during conventional pre-deployment testing; (3) lightweight isolation, checkpoint, migration, and deterministic replay mechanisms that enable replication of application processes as checking launch points, isolation of replicas from users, migration of replicas across hosts, and replay of identified bugs without need for the original execution environment; and (4) distributed computing mechanisms for efficiently and scalably leveraging geographically dispersed idle resources to determine where and when replicas should be executed to improve the speed and coverage of software checking, thereby converting available hardware cycles into improved software reliability.

Prof. Carloni was elevated to "Senior Member" of IEEE and ACM

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 11:43:46 EDT

Prof. Carloni was named a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) on July 1, 2009 . According to the IEEE, only about 12% of the approximatley 382,000 members hold the Senior Member grade of IEEE. Prof. Carloni was also named a Senior Member of the the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) on July 21, 2009. According to the ACM website, "the Senior Member grade recognizes those ACM members with at least 10 years of professional experience and 5 years of continuous Professional Membership who have demonstrated performance that sets them apart from their peers."

Prof. Stolfo receives NSF grants to explore fundamental means of measuring the security

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 11:18:56 EDT

The proposed project explores fundamental means of measuring the security posture of large enterprises. The project is intended to devise metrics and measurement methods, and test and evaluate these in a real institution, to evaluate how human users behave in a security context. To develop computer security as a science and engineering discipline, metrics need to be defined to evaluate the safety and security of alternative system designs. Security policies are often specified by large organizations but there are no direct means to evaluate how well these policies are followed by human users. The proposed project explores fundamental means of measuring the security posture of large enterprises. Risk management and risk mitigation requires measurement to assess alternative outcomes in any decision process. The project is intended to devise metrics and measurement methods, and test and evaluate these in a real institution, to evaluate how human users behave in a security context. Financial institutions in particular require significant controls over the handling of confidential financial information and employees must adhere to these policies to protect assets, which are subject to continual adversarial attack by thieves and fraudsters. Hence, financial institutions are the primary focus of the measurement work. The technical means of measuring user actions that may violate security policy is performed in a non-intrusive manner. The measurement system uses specially crafted decoy documents and email messages that signal when they have been opened or copied by a user in violation of policy. The project will develop collaborations with financial experts to devise risk models associated with users of information technology within large enterprises. This line of work extends traditional research in computer security by opening up a new area focused on the human aspect of security.

NSF funds Prof. Feiner to explore using augmented reality to explain everyday tasks

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 18:45:36 EDT

The project is titled "HCC: Medium: Collaborative Research: Generating Effective Dynamic Explanations in Augmented Reality." To survive and flourish, people must interact with their environment in an organized fashion. To do so, they need to learn, imagine, and perform an assortment of transformations on and in the world. Primary among these are manipulation of objects and navigation in space. This project integrates research in computer science and cognitive science to develop and evaluate augmented reality tools to create effective dynamic explanations that enhance manipulation and navigation, in conjunction with identification and visualization. Augmented reality refers to user interfaces in which virtual material is integrated with and overlaid on the user's experience of the real world; for example, by using tracked head-worn and hand-held displays. Dynamic explanations are task-appropriate sequences of actions, presented interactively, with appropriate added information. The tools will be created in collaboration with subject matter experts for exploratory use in indoor and outdoor real world domains: navigating and identifying landmarks in a wooded park area, assembling a piece of furniture, and navigating and visualizing for planning the site of a new urban campus. Cognitive science research will determine the best ways to convey explanations and information to people. Computer science research will address the design and implementation of systems that embody the best candidate approaches for identifying objects and locations, specifying actions, and adding non-visible information. In situ experiments will be used to assess and refine the systems. Manipulation, navigation, identification, and visualization are representative of important things that people do every day, ranging from fixing broken equipment to reaching a desired destination in an unfamiliar environment. The ways in which we perform these tasks could potentially be improved significantly through augmented reality systems designed using the principles to be developed by this project. Both the cognitive principles and the augmented reality tools will have broad applicability. The systems developed will inform the design of future systems that can aid the general public, for educational and recreational ends, as well as systems that can assist people with auditory, visual, or physical impairments.

Prof. Keromytis receives a Google research award

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 09:34:49 EDT

Routing attacks against BGP have been demonstrated for years, and have recently been used in the wild to both disrupt service and capture trafﬁc. A variety of mechanisms have been proposed and implemented in an ad hoc fashion and with varying degrees of diligence by ISPs. Due to the decentralized nature of the routing infrastructure, it is impossible to know how effective these measures (or future techniques) are. In this project, Prof. Keromytis will develop an infrastructure for evaluating the susceptibility of the Internet to BGP hijacking attacks and for determining the effectiveness of deployed mechanisms to counter them.

Prof. Gravano and Prof. Nieh win a Google research award

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 09:33:02 EDT

"Google Desktop Meets DejaView: Display-Centric Desktop Search" State-of-the-art desktop search tools are valuable for searching various forms of individual user documents -�interpreted broadly and including user files, email messages, web pages, and chat sessions. Unfortunately, focusing on individual, relatively static documents in isolation is often insufficient for important search scenarios, where the history and patterns of access to all information on a desktop �-static or otherwise�- are themselves of value and, in fact, critical to answer certain queries effectively. We propose to design, implement, and evaluate new mechanisms for enabling users to search all information that has been displayed on their desktops, preserving and exploiting the same personal context and display layout as in the original desktop computing experience. Our next-generation desktop search system will rely on a virtualization record-and-play architecture that enables both display and application execution on a desktop to be recorded (and, in fact, replayed) efficiently without user-perceived degradation on application performance. Our system will capture and index all activity on the desktop, and will exploit this aggregate desktop information to produce effective, display-centric search results.

NSF supports research of Prof. Nieh and Prof. Keromytis into exploiting software elasticity

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 12:28:24 EDT

Software failures in server applications are a significant problem for preserving system availability. In the absence of perfect software, this research focuses on tolerating and recovering from errors by exploiting software elasticity: the ability of regular code to recover from certain failures when low-level faults are masked by the operating system or appropriate instrumentation. Software elasticity is exploited by introducing rescue points, locations in application code for handling programmer-anticipated failures, which are automatically repurposed and tested for safely enabling fault recovery from a larger class of unanticipated faults. Rescue points recover software from unknown faults while maintaining system integrity and availability by mimicking system behavior under known error conditions. They are identified using fuzzing, created using a checkpoint-restart mechanism, and tested then injected into production code using binary patching. This approach masks failures to permit continued program execution while minimizing undesirable side-effects, enabling application recovery and software self-healing.

NSF funds Prof. Keromytis to track information flows

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 17:15:07 EDT

Personally identifiable or sensitive information (PII) has become a target of attackers seeking financial gain through its misuse. With the trend toward storing and processing PII on complex and insecure systems, the need for improved protection has become a goal of enterprise policy and legislative efforts. In this project, Prof. Keromytis and his lab will investigate Concatenated Dynamic Information Flow Tracking (CDIFT), an architecture for performing dynamic information ﬂow analysis at various system levels and across multiple processes in a distributed enterprise. CDIFT will allow administrators to �map� the enterprise business logic (applications, network, storage) and determine where information of interest is stored or transmitted. The same mechanism can also be used to enforce an information ﬂow policy, restricting where and by whom such information can be viewed. CDIFT will complement and enhance current compliance and auditing efforts, which require considerable recurrent effort and a large number of man-hours spent by administrators and auditors on understanding existing systems. The project will develop and experimentally evaluate novel techniques for conducting fine-grained tracking of information of interest (as deﬁned by the system operator or, in the future, by end-users, in a flexible, context-sensitive manner) toward mapping the paths that such information takes through the enterprise and providing a means for enforcing information ﬂow and access control policies. Prof. Keromytis' hypothesis is that it is possible to create efficient fine-grained information tracking and access control mechanisms that operate throughout an enterprise legacy computing infrastructure through appropriate use of hypervisors and distributed tag propagation protocols.

NSF funds Prof. Schulzrinne to investigate security service architectures in mobile networks

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:38:42 EDT

The nature of telecommunications networks is rapidly changing. Commodity smart mobile phone frameworks such as Android and Openmoko invite developers and end users to build applications, modify the behavior of the phone, and use network services in novel ways. However, while simultaneously spurring incredible innovation, the move to open systems alters the underlying performance and security assumptions upon which the network was designed. Such changes invite vulnerabilities ranging from merely vexing phone glitches to catastrophic network failures. The current infrastructure lacks the basic protections needed to protect an increasingly open network, and it is unclear what new stresses and threats open systems and services will introduce. This research analytically and experimentally investigates defensive infrastructure addressing vulnerabilities in open cellular operating systems and telecommunications networks. In this, we are exploring the requirements and design of such defenses in three coordinated efforts; a) extending and applying formal policy models for telecommunication systems, and provide tools for phone manufacturer, provider, developer, and end-user policy compliance verification, b) building a security-conscious distribution of the open-source Android operating system, and c) explore the needs and designs of overload controls in telecommunications networks needed to absorb changes in mobile phone behavior, traffic models, and the diversity of communication end-points. This research symbiotically supports educational goals at the constituent institutions by supporting graduate and undergraduate student research, and is integral to the security and network curricula. This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).

National Science Foundation funds Prof. Allen's work on robotic hands

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 11:14:40 EDT

The project is titled "Robotic Hands: Understanding and Implementing Adaptive Grasping". The project is defining the basis for lower-complexity hands that can grasp a wide variety of objects in noisy and unstructured environments. The new generation of mobile and humanoid robots still lack basic �hands� that can reliably grasp objects. Robot hands have been traditionally built as anthropomorphic, high degree-of-freedom (DOF) mechanisms that are expensive and difficult to control. The approach in this project is based on defining hand mechanisms that capture two key features of human grasping, versatility and low dimensionality of hand postures. Reducing complexity brings major benefits. Determining the minimal number of hand joints, sensors and actuators can reduce costs and speed research as low-complexity hands can be easily fabricated, designs can be quickly iterated, and control can be simplified. These ideas are used to build a low-cost, low degree-of-freedom grasping device that is based on hard human grasping data. Further, the new hand designs are being tested in simulation so as to build hardware that is functionally proven for robotic grasping tasks. Important research outcomes include the development of a new low-dimensional, low-cost robotic hand; experiments to gain insights from human grasping and adaptive compliance; and machine learning algorithms for grasping.

Prof. Itsik Pe'er wins National Science Foundation CAREER award on genomics

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 15:45:13 EDT

High throughput sequencing is transforming human genetics: several disruptive technologies are coming of age and now enable resequencing throughput of megabases per dollar, in short segments. Specifically, hundreds and thousands of individuals can now be sequenced for targeted regions of the genome, in pools of individuals. The complete spectrum of common and rare alleles thus revealed is a key resource for understanding origins, genomics, and heritable traits of our species. The project tackles the recovery of individual identity of mutation carriers from pooled sequencing data, as well as using such individual-level mutation data for scoring of association to multiple variants in a locus. Prof. Pe'er proposes Bayesian scoring for genomic intervals containing functional variants, using comparative genomics to guide a prior distribution for functionality. The association score is further decomposed to contributions of each sample and each site, with Markovian dependency between such contributions along the genome.

Blake Shaw and Prof. Jebara win best paper award at major machine learning conference

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 17:51:32 EDT

Structure Preserving Embedding (SPE) is an algorithm for embedding graphs in Euclidean space such that the embedding is low-dimensional and preserves the global topological properties of the input graph. Topology is preserved if a connectivity algorithm, such as k-nearest neighbors, can easily recover the edges of the input graph from only the coordinates of the nodes after embedding. SPE is formulated as a semidefinite program that learns a low-rank kernel matrix constrained by a set of linear inequalities which captures the connectivity structure of the input graph. Traditional graph embedding algorithms do not preserve structure, and thus the resulting visualizations can be misleading or less informative. SPE provides significant improvements in terms of visualization and lossless compression of graphs, outperforming popular methods such as spectral embedding and Laplacian eigenmaps. The paper finds that many classical graphs and networks can be properly embedded using only a few dimensions. Furthermore, introducing structure preserving constraints into dimensionality reduction algorithms produces more accurate representations of high-dimensional data.

Prof. Feiner receives Google Research Award

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 19:27:01 EDT

Prof. Feiner and his students will be designing, developing, and evaluating mobile augmented reality systems on Android smartphones. Their research will investigate new ways to effectively integrate relevant information with the user's view of the surrounding environment, taking advantage of the GPS, compass, accelerometer, and camera built into Android smartphones such as the G1.

NSF supports research of Prof. Bellovin into learning security policies

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 23:09:25 EDT

As both corporate and consumer-oriented applications introduce new functionality and increased levels of customization and delegation, they inevitably give rise to more complex security and privacy policies. Yet, studies have repeatedly shown that both lay and expert users are not good at configuring policies, rendering the human element an important, yet often overlooked source of vulnerability. This project aims to develop and evaluate a new family of user-controllable policy learning techniques capable of leveraging user feedback and present users with incremental, user-understandable suggestions on how to improve their security or privacy policies. In contrast to traditional machine learning techniques, which are generally configured as �black boxes� than take over from the user, user-controllable policy learning aims to ensure that users continue to understand their policies and remain in control of policy changes. As a result, this family of policy learning techniques offers the prospect of empowering lay and expert users to more effectively configure a broad range of security and privacy policies. The techniques to be developed in this project will be evaluated and refined in the context of two important domains, namely privacy policies in social networks and firewall policies. In the process, work to be conducted in this project is also expected to lead to a significantly deeper understanding of (1) the difficulties experienced by users as they try to specify and refine security and privacy policies and of (2) what it takes to overcome these challenges (e.g., better understanding of policy modifications that users can relate to, better understanding of how many policy modifications users can realistically be expected to handle, and how these issues relate to the expressiveness of underlying policy languages, modes of interactions with the user, and the topologies across which policies are deployed).

Prof. Hirschberg and Owen Rambow to convert text into 3D scenes

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 14:25:49 EDT

The researchers are developing new theoretical models and technology to automatically convert descriptive text into 3D scenes representing the text�s meaning. They do this via the Scenario-Based Lexical Knowledge Resource (SBLR), a resource they are creating from existing sources (PropBank, WordNet, FrameNet) and from automated mining of Wikipedia and other un-annotated text. In addition to predicate-argument structure and semantic roles, the SBLR includes necessary roles, typical role fillers, contextual elements, and activity poses which enables analysis of input sentences at a deep level and assembly of appropriate elements from libraries of 3D objects to depict the fuller scene implied by a sentence. For example, �Terry ate breakfast� does not tell us where (kitchen, dining room, restaurant) or what he ate (cereal, doughnut, or rice, umeboshi, and natto). These elements must be supplied from knowledge about typical role fillers appropriate for the information that is specified in the input. Note that the SBLR has a component that varies by cultural context. Textually-generated 3D scenes will have a profound, paradigm-shifting effect in human computer interaction, giving people unskilled in graphical design the ability to directly express intentions and constraints in natural language -- bypassing standard low-level direct-manipulation techniques. This research will open up the world of 3D scene creation to a much larger group of people and a much wider set of applications. In particular, the research will target middle-school age students who need to improve their communicative skills, including those whose first language is not English or who have learning difficulties: a field study in a New York after-school program will test whether use of the system can improve literacy skills. The technology also has the potential for interesting a more diverse population in computer science at an early age, as interactions with K-12 teachers have indicated.

Prof. Keromytis to give keynote at International Conference on Information Systems Security (ICISS)

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 09:23:23 EDT

Prof. Angelos Keromytis was invited to give a keynote talk on VoIP security at the 5th International Conference on Information Systems Security (ICISS), to be held December 16-18, 2008 in Kolkata, India.

David Elson recognized for outstanding teaching with Presidential Award

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 10:23:02 EDT

David Elson was lauded at the convocation: "You are, at heart, an educator, passionately committed to guiding students to an understanding of the material you teach. You make computer science come alive for them, regardless of whether they are students in your Department of non-majors.... You teach more than is required of a doctoral student in Computer Science and actively look for opportunities to reach wider audiences." According to the award web page, "Established in 1996, the presidential awards honor the best of Columbia's teachers for the influence they have on the development of their students and their part in maintaining the University's longstanding reputation for educational excellence." David Elson is working on his dissertation in natural language understanding, advised by Prof. Kathleen McKeown.

Prof. Feiner receives Faculty Mentorship Award

Sun, 31 May 2009 21:18:29 EDT

Jen Amizade, the graduate student council president, lauded Prof. Feiner: "The Faculty Mentorship Award is given every year by the students to faculty who have gone above and beyond their duty to assist, guide and nurture their students along their path of learning and personal development. This award recognizes and shows appreciation for faculty members who have provided exceptional support to the graduate students. They truly exemplify excellence in graduate education in their role as advisor, advocate, mentor and friend. I am honored to have the pleasure of presenting this year�s award for outstanding mentorship for faculty in the Affiliated Schools of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences to Steve Feiner, Professor of Computer Science. His students describe him as an �attentive�, �genuinely warm and caring person� who has never caused his students to feel �unappreciated or unrecognized� but has held them to the highest standards and has tirelessly fought for their success. �His enduring personalized support� and his belief in his students has inspired them and given them additional strength to meet his �impeccable� standards and obtain highly coveted positions after graduation."

Prof. Adam Cannon receives first departmental teaching award

Wed, 27 May 2009 21:39:45 EDT

The award recognizes Prof. Adam's dedication to teaching the introductory computer science courses in the Department, COMS 1001 (Introduction to Information Science) and COMS 1004 (Introduction To Computer Science And Programming In Java). He has also helped create programs to mentor beginning computer science students. Prof. Cannon is a lecturer-in-discipline in the Department of Computer Science and also serves as associate chair for undergraduate affairs.

Prof. Julia Hirschberg wins Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award

Tue, 19 May 2009 17:14:37 EDT

Professor Julia Hirschberg was recognized with the 2009 Columbia Engineering Alumni Association Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award.

Computer Science and Computer Engineering students receive departmental awards

Fri, 15 May 2009 10:46:21 EDT

Michael Rand (CC) was awarded the Computer Science Department Award for Scholastic Achievements as acknowledgment of his contributions to the Department of Computer Science and to the university as a whole.

Brian Smith (SEAS) garnered the Computer Science Department Scholarship Award, awarded to an undergraduate Computer Science degree candidate who demonstrated scholastic excellence through projects or class contributions

Peter Tsonev (SEAS) was awarded the Computer Engineering Award of Excellence, for demonstrating scholastic excellence.

The Andrew P. Kosoresow Memorial Award for Excellence in Teaching and service is awarded to students who demonstrated outstanding teaching and exemplary service. This year, it was given to Tristan Naumann (SEAS), Dokyun Lee (CC), Jae Woo Lee (GSAS), Paul Etienne Vouga (GSAS), and Oren Laadan (GSAS).

The Russell C. Mills Award for Excellence in Computer Science recognizes academic excellence in the area of Computer Science and went to Joshua Weinberg (GS) and Eliane Stampfer (CC).

The Theodore R. Bashkow Award for Excellence in Independent Projects is awarded to Computer Science seniors who have excelled in independent projects. This year, Adam Waksman (CC) and Kimberly Manis (SEAS) were recognized.

The Paul Charles Michelman Memorial Award recognizes PhD students in Computer Science who have performed exemplary service to the department, devoting time and effort beyond the call to further the department's goal, and went to Matei Ciocarlie (GSAS) and Chris Murphy (GSAS).

The Certificate of Distinction for Academic Excellence is given at graduation to Computer Science and Computer Engineering majors who have an overall cumulative GPA in the top 10% among graduating seniors in CS and CE: Michael Rand (CC), Brian Smith (SEAS), Daniel Weiner (GS), Peter Tsonev (SEAS), Adam Waksman (CC), Eliane Stampfer (CC).

The Computer Science Service Award is awarded to PhD students who were selected to be in the top 10% in service contribution to the Department: Hila Becker, Matei Ciocarlie, Gabriella Cretu-Ciocarlie, Kevin Egan, David Elson, Jin Wei Gu, David Harmon, Bert Huang, Maritza Johnson, Gurunandan Krishnan, Chris Murphy, Kristen Parton, Paul Etienne Vouga, John Zhang and Hang Zhao.

Professor Feiner receives ONR grant to develop Augmented Reality for Immersive Training

Thu, 14 May 2009 15:52:28 EDT

Augmented reality overlays 3D graphics on the user's view of the real world, using a head-worn display for the research being conducted for this grant. The user interface design process that Prof. Feiner's team will follow takes into account information filtering, to determine what is displayed to the user; user interface component design, to determine the form in which that information is presented; and view management, to lay out static and dynamic information effectively on the display, in context of the real world.

Professors Bellovin, Keromytis and Stolfo work to improve defenses against botnets

Wed, 13 May 2009 10:17:59 EDT

Research objectives include the statistical and algorithmic analysis of network adversaries involving the design and implementation of massive-dataset algorithms that can recognize anomalous data streams generated by distributed, strategic adversaries in large-scale networks. The project will involve data collection and analysis involving the design of succinct representations for large-scale traffic matrices, methods for privacy-preserving sharing and cross-correlation of network-traffic datasets. and the use of real-world traffic datasets, containing a mixture of benign and malicious traffic, to generate realistic workloads for testing performance of new defenses.

Miklos Bergou receives Intel Fellowship

Sun, 10 May 2009 12:52:53 EDT

Miklos Bergou's research develops theory and systems for physical simulation and interactive design processes by combining physically motivated assumptions with mathematical rigor to search for accurate and efficient models of physical phenomena. His first SIGGRAPH paper introduced a new approach to artistic control of physical systems. In the future, he is interested in identifying what the right notions of "control" are in various contexts and develop tools built on a mathematical foundation that are appropriate within each context. That way, he hopes to be able to create novel techniques that are powerful enough to accommodate the needs of their users as well as simple and intuitive enough to be widely adopted. In pursuit of this goal, he has developed models for flexible surfaces (clothing, sheet metal) and curves (hair, sutures) that combine ideas from the budding area of Discrete Differential Geometry with simple physical insights. Because these models lead to fast, accurate simulations, they are now adopted by film studios such as Pixar and Weta Digital and software companies such as Adobe. Prof. Eitan Grinspun is Miklos Bergou's advisor.

Joseph Traub elected SIAM Fellow

Sun, 26 Apr 2009 17:46:46 EDT

Traub is also a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the New York Academy of Science, and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in 1985.

Michele Merler wins Yahoo Key Scientific Challenges Award

Sun, 12 Apr 2009 20:48:02 EDT

The grant provides unrestricted seed funds for research and for participation in a national graduate student research workshop. Mr. Merler work is on unedited videos, such as those taken of professor's lectures or of students' presentations. He focuses on ways to segment, analyze, and index the written content within them, and to display this content in crisper form, superimposed on cleaned mosaics images of the local environment. A browser driven by semantic key-word indexing of these doubly (foreground- and background-) enhanced videos is under construction. He began his studies at Columbia in Fall 2007 and is advised by Prof. John Kender.

Rubenstein and Colleagues in Electrical Engineering win Vodafone Competition

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 12:02:14 EDT

Professor Dan Rubenstein and Electrical Engineering colleagues Gil Zussman, Peter Kinget, John Kymissis, and Xiaodong Wang took first place in Vodafone's "Wireless Innovation Project" competition, which had nearly 100 university and non-profit applicants. The competition identifies and funds unique innovations using wireless related technology offering the best potential to address critical social issues around the world. The Columbia team will receive $300,000 to support their research project, "Active Networked Tags for Disaster Recovery Applications", which is developing a system that uses wireless devices to track and locate survivors trapped by fires and structural collapse. The system is based on energy harvesting tags using ultra low power communications. The project draws upon the team's diverse research expertise in networking, communications, energy harvesting materials and devices, and ultra low power electronics. More information can be found at http://www.vodafone-us.com/web%20innovation/index.html

Prof. Pe'er wins 30 billion DNA bases for studying obesity in Micronesia

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 19:54:17 EDT

Prof. Pe'er's lab has been studying data on a unique population from the Island of Kosrae, in the Federated States of Micronesia, where collaborators at Rockefeller University have collected DNA and blood profiles for 3000 individuals, which make up most of the adults on the island. HIs lab has recently developed computational machinery for tracing the patterns of inheritance in such populations, and impute genomic sequence of many individuals given on of them. Applied Biosystems have awarded 30 gigabases of DNA sequence from a select group of islanders, from which the investigators intend to impute sequence of hundreds of other individuals. This data will allow to investigate statistical associations of genetic variation with traits related to the obesity epidemic on the island.

Rebecca Collins receives IBM PhD fellowship

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 15:35:58 EDT

Rebecca Collins' research explores ways to harness the potential power of multi-core processor systems for general purpose programming. As multi-core systems scale up to hundreds and thousands of processing cores, there is a need for new models and abstractions that ease the difficulty of explicitly programming many individual cores together with the on-chip communication network. Moreover, scalable and automatic solutions to scheduling, synchronization and load balancing are essential in order to fully utilize these powerful architectures. She has focused on addressing these challenges for two important classes of parallel applications: divide-and-conquer programs and stream programs. For the former, she has developed a tool that automatically generates parallel code which integrates distributed scheduling and adaptive memory management into SPMD-like threads running on the cores. For stream programs, she is developing a method that combines static task deployment with dynamic runtime schedules to flexibly balance the computational load among unbalanced stream tasks and increase the overall processing throughput. Mrs. Collins began her PhD studies at Columbia in the fall of 2005 and is advised by Prof. Luca Carloni.

New compute cluster supports research in traffic analysis, parallel programming, secure computer deployment and virtual machines

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 13:08:45 EDT

The funds will be used to deploy a new compute cluster capable of continuous line-speed capture and near-online analysis of network traffic and for storage and analysis of large traces generated from run-time profiling of (legacy) applications. The computational capabilities provided by this cluster will allow detailed modeling and in depth analysis of real world scenarios. The proposed cluster, called Secure Cyber Operations and Parallelization Studies cluster (SCOPS), when fully operational will have peak throughput of nearly 1.2 Teraflops, 1.6TB of RAM, 52 TB of disk storage and state-of-the-art Cisco 1002 ASR routers. SCOPS, in addition to being used for the three projects will be used to train research students in parallel programming, secure computer deployment and virtual machines.

Prof. Keromytis to speak at Critical Infrastructure Protection Conference

Wed, 11 Mar 2009 13:58:42 EDT

This two-day conference is a policy and technical seminar presented by the Center of Information Networking and Telecommunications (CINT), the Grove School of Engineering at the City University of New York, City College, and the Institute of Strategic Studies (SSI), at the Army War College. The conference invites prominent academic, government and industrial researchers in the fields of information systems security, networking and telecommunications infrastructure protection to present their work to the audience with the purpose of helping policy makers and researchers keep abreast of the latest research and foster greater contact with both researchers and policy makers.

Prof. Keromytis gives keynote address at 2nd European Workshop on Systems Security (EuroSec)

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 14:50:36 EDT

EuroSec is a new workshop associated with the Annual ACM SIGOPS EuroSys conference. The workshop aims to bring together researchers, practitioners, system administrators, system programmers, and others interested in the latest advances in the security of computer systems and networks. The focus of the workshop is on novel, practical, systems-oriented work.

Sean White to speak at Columbia convocation for doctoral candidates on May 18

Thu, 05 Mar 2009 11:18:53 EDT

CUCS PhD candidate Sean White will speak on behalf of his fellow candidates at the convocation for doctoral candidates in the schools of Architecture, Business, Engineering, Journalism, Law, Nursing, Physicians and Surgeons, Public Health, and Teachers College. The convocation will be held on Monday, May 18, 2009, at 3:30 PM in the Chapel.

PhD alumni is 2009 Sloan Research Fellow

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 17:59:50 EDT

The Sloan Foundation named 118 fellows for 2009. Prof. Eskin works in the area of molecular biology and was advised by Prof. Sal Stolfo at Columbia University.

Snehit Prabhu wins Microsoft Research and Live Labs PhD Fellowship

Tue, 03 Feb 2009 15:23:58 EDT

Snehit Prabhu's research involves the application of computational models to high throughput DNA sequencing. Snehit developed a method to analyze DNA from pooled sets of individuals, using error-correcting codes to identify each person. The work has been accepted to RECOMB 09 and selected as one of four papers considered for the Genome Research special issue for the conference. In addition to method development, Snehit got involved in applied analysis of sequenced organisms, and is a joint-first-author on the publication describing the first animal mutant whose genome was assembled - a worm with two right "brains" (Nature Methods 08). Snehit interned this summer at the Broad Institute of MIT, expanding his application to study yeast populations. He won the MSR fellowship with his proposal on inferring fitness and complexity of the population genome. Snehit came to Columbia in the fall of 2007 after two years at IBM. He transitioned from the MS to the PhD track in January 2008.

DHS supports faculty in anonymizing network traces

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 07:39:57 EDT

The team will develop a next-generation network-trace anonymization tool that preserves individual and organizational privacy while still allowing cross-trace correlation for detection, understanding, and prevention of complex attacks and other network behavior. The tool will rely on three techniques that will be developed at Columbia University: (1) Hidden Markov Model (HMM)-based clustering will be used to divide raw network traces into groups for which statistical and other properties can be preserved across the anonymized equivalents; (2) more aggressive application- and definition-specific anonymization will prevent recovery and attribution of private topology, flow, and content information under attack; and (3) efficient and application-specific secure computation will allow this clustering and anonymization without centralizing or revealing the contents of individual raw traces during the clustering stage. These anonymization techniques will be evaluated against large sets of real-world traces, implemented and ruggedized. The resulting tool, which will be released under an open-source license for use in DHS PREDICT and other public cooperative-security efforts, will make next-generation anonymization broadly available to the security community, and will encourage greater sharing of useful trace data, without compromising privacy.

Prof. Jebara introduces research at SEAS Annual Fund Sponsors Lecture

Mon, 29 Dec 2008 11:56:41 EDT

"We all generate location information," says Jebara, "and we can use algorithms to generate visualization." Jebara creates 2D images from 3D images and, using information generated from mobile devices, can create visualizations of "hot spots" where people are congregating.

Taking data from GPS-equipped taxis and other vehicles, cell phones and other devices, Jebara's Citysense can tell you, in real time, where the action is.

Prof. Ramamoorthi wins 2007 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 09:16:13 EDT

The awards are the nation�s highest honor for faculty members that are beginning their independent research careers. Prof. Ravi Ramamoorthi was named one of 15 nominated by the Department of Defense (DoD) as winners of the 2007 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) and one of 67 overall.

Sixty-seven researchers were honored on December 19 in a ceremony presided over by Dr. John H. Marburger III, Science Advisor to the President and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

"The Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers, established in 1996, honors the most promising researchers in the Nation within their fields. Nine federal departments and agencies annually nominate scientists and engineers who are at the start of their independent careers and whose work shows exceptional promise for leadership at the frontiers of scientific knowledge. Participating agencies award these talented scientists and engineers with up to five years of funding to further their research in support of critical government missions."

StackSafe, founded by faculty, wins national competition

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 17:17:28 EDT

StackSafe, based in Vienna, Virginia, leverages virtualization technology to reduce costly IT production problems and downtime. StackSafe's flagship product, Test Center, enables IT departments to stage their existing software infrastructure, conduct pre-deployment tests, and predict IT complications in a secure environment. "Beating out more than 400 entrants from across the country, StackSafe was awarded first prize after a rigorous assessment by an online panel of over 300 venture capitalists, angel investors, and university judges."

Symantec supports Prof. Keromytis and Stolfo research on software security

Sun, 07 Dec 2008 23:25:29 EDT

Prof. Sal Stolfo and Prof. Angelos Keromytis received a research gift from Symantec to aid their studies and investigations on techniques for scalable program whitelisting, for common software vulnerability discovery across large software installations, and for vulnerability-oriented analytics for risk assessment.

NIH funds Prof. Pe'er to study the genetics of schizophrenia

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 22:14:04 EDT

The PIs are conducted a genomewide study for the association between genetic variants and schizophrenia, a highly heritable disease, but without clear common genetic factors. The research project started in May 2008.

Prof. Pe'er participates in consortium to study severe adverse reactions to medications

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 21:57:54 EDT

The consortium brings together major pharmaceuticals (Abbott, Daiichi Sankyo, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Novartis, Pfizer, Roche, Sanofi Aventis, Takeda, Wellcome Trust and Wyeth) with joint interest in safely prescribing drugs by means of personalized medicine. On the academic side, Columbia is serving as the informatics center, with Aris Floratos (C2B2) and Prof. Pe'er. Additional academic consultants on the analysis side include Mark Daly from Harvard and David Goldstein from Duke, while medical-academic partners that include many physicians focused at collecting patient samples.

Prof. Pe'er uses novel computational technique to process signals from tumor DNA

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 21:55:10 EDT

Cancer is a genetic disease in two levels: First, like many diseases inherited mutations at the individual level may contribute to disease risk and susceptibility in families. Second, and more specific to cancer, it is a genetic disease of cells, that acquire mutations during the lifetime of the patient, transforming the cells from normal tissue into tumors. Prof. Pe'er proposes a novel computational method to process signals from tumor DNA to detect interaction between these two kinds of mutations.

Prof. Pe'er to reconstruct a genealogy of the human species

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 21:51:45 EDT

The project is driven by a novel approach for detecting relatedness of individuals from high throughput data of DNA variation across millions of genetic markers and tens of thousands of individuals. The approach is based on a new linear-time algorithm that stores words of marker data in a dictionary of genetic variants. This framework will handle the diversity of human genetic data in terms of populations and experimental platforms culminating in a complete map of human genetic genealogy.

Sahar Hasan and Ian Vo selected for 2009 Honorable Mention by CRA

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 09:28:59 EDT

Sahar Hasan worked with Prof. Gail Kaiser on a project which was accepted for presentation at SIGCSE 2009, the annual conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education. The paper is entitled "Retina: Helping Students and Instructors Based on Observed Programming Activities". The paper found that "it is difficult for instructors of CS1 and CS2 courses to get accurate answers to such critical questions as 'how long are students spending on programming assignments?', or 'what sorts of errors are they making?'. At the same time, students often have no idea of where they stand with respect to the rest of the class in terms of time spent on an assignment or the number or types of errors that they encounter." In the paper, the authors present a tool called Retina, which collects information about students' programming activities, and then provides useful and informative reports to both students and instructors based on the aggregation of that data. Retina can also make real-time recommendations to students, in order to help them quickly address some of the errors they make. In addition to describing Retina and its features, they also present some of the initial findings during two trials of the tool in a real classroom setting, involving 48 volunteers in our COMS 1004 introductory computer science class. Ian Vo wrote a paper titled "Quality Assurance of Software Applications Using the In Vivo Testing Approach", which has been accepted for publication at ICST 2009, the 2nd IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation. According to its abstract, "software products released into the field typically have some number of residual defects that either were not detected or could not have been detected during testing. This may be the result of flaws in the test cases themselves, incorrect assumptions made during the creation of test cases, or the infeasibility of testing the sheer number of possible configurations for a complex system; these defects may also be due to application states that were not considered during lab testing, or corrupted states that could arise due to a security violation. One approach to this problem is to continue to test these applications even after deployment, in hopes of finding any remaining flaws." The authors present a testing methodology they call in vivo testing, in which tests are continuously executed in the deployment environment. They discuss the approach and the prototype testing framework for Java applications called Invite and provide the results of case studies that demonstrate Invite's effectiveness and efficiency. Invite found real bugs in OSCache, Apache JCS and Apache Tomcat, with about 5% overhead. The project was supervised by Prof. Kaiser. The CRA honored a total of 22 female and 44 male students in this year's competition.

Paper on ubiquitous device personalization receives VDE ITG prize

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 23:02:49 EDT

The ITG is the computing society of the VDE, the German electrical engineering society. The paper appeared in the May 2007 edition of the ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications (TOMCCAP). Service usage in emerging ubiquitous environments includes seamless and personalized usage of public and private devices discovered in the vicinity of a user. In our work, we describe an architecture for device discovery, device configuration, and the transfer of active sessions between devices. The presented architecture uses the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) as a standardized, widely used signaling protocol for IP-based multimedia services. Our solution includes support of simple existing devices, split of sessions between devices, user-control of location-based behavior, and handling of security and privacy concerns. We present the implementation and show the feasibility of our work with analytical evaluation and measurements.

Charles Han receives ATI fellowship

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 22:51:04 EDT

ATI's highly selective panel awards between four and six fellowships each year to outstanding doctoral students studying a broad range of topics spanning computer graphics, multimedia, chip or system design, or related research. Charles Han is a doctoral student in the Columbia Computer Graphics Group, co-advised by Profs. Eitan Grinspun and Ravi Ramamoorthi. His research focuses on finding principled representations and efficient algorithms that operare well across a wide range of visual scales.There are many instances in graphics where one would like to render the same object at different scales: for example, an architect designing a building may want to preview the entire structure at once or may want to zoom in on individual parts; characters and terrain in computer games may be seen at extremely close distances or as distant pixels on the horizon. Current techniques in computer graphics are generally tailored to perform well at a particular physical scale, and often to not translate well to coarser or finer scales. In work presented at SIGGRAPH 2007, Han presented a solution to the long-standing problem of normal map filtering. By reinterpreting normal mapping in the frequency-domain as a convolution of geometry and BRDF, this work has enabled accurate multiscale rendering of normal maps at speeds orders of magnitude faster than previously possible. More recently, Han has developed a framework for the efficient example-based synthesis of very large textures, with features spanning a wide (or infinite) range of physical scales. He continues to extend this work to add further expressive power and intuitive user control.

Mikl�s Bergou receives Autodesk Research Fellowship Award

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 22:10:03 EDT

His research seeks out principled and efficient discrete models that mirror the key geometric properties of the physical system. Bergou is also interested in developing intuitive tools that can be used to control the behavior of these systems, with applications in engineering and entertainment. His work on thin shell simulations is currently used by special-effects studios. Bergou's work builds on the ideas of Discrete Differential Geometry (DDG), whose goal is to identify the root from which the desirable properties of a continuous system stem and then to build discrete models using an appropriate discrete version of that root. This led to his work on discrete models for cloth and elastic rods. His work on artistic control of a physical system builds on constrained Lagrangian mechanics, in which constraints define the allowable states that a system may be in. Within the context of directing a physical simulation, this framework can be used to define constraints that allow for entirely physical motions for the system being simulated while still closely obeying the intent of the user controlling the simulation. Mikl�s is a Ph.D. candidate in the Columbia Computer Graphics Group, advised by Prof. Eitan Grinspun.

Patrick Lee, Prof. Misra and Rubenstein co-author award-winning paper at major networking conference

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 10:23:28 EDT

Currently deployed IEEE 802.11 WLANs (Wi-Fi networks) share access point (AP) bandwidth on a per-packet basis. However, the various stations communicating with the AP often have different signal qualities, resulting in different transmission rates. This induces a phenomenon known as the rate anomaly problem, in which stations with lower signal quality transmit at lower rates and consume a significant majority of airtime, thereby dramatically reducing the throughput of stations transmitting at high rates. The paper proposes a practical, deployable system, called SoftRepeater, in which stations cooperatively address the rate anomaly problem. Specifically, a higher-rate WiFi stations opportunistically transform themselves into repeaters for stations with low data-rates when transmitting to/from the AP. The key challenge is to determine when it is beneficial to enable the repeater functionality. The authors analyze this problem, and propose a protocol that ensures that repeater functionality is enabled only when appropriate. They also describe a novel, zero-overhead network coding scheme that further alleviates undesirable symptoms of the rate anomaly problem. They evaluate our system using simulation and testbed implementation, and find that SoftRepeater can improve cumulative throughput by up to 200%.

Prof. Steve Nowick named IEEE Fellow

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 20:22:12 EDT

According to the IEEE, "[t]he grade of Fellow recognizes unusual distinction in the profession and shall be conferred by the Board of Directors upon a person with an extraordinary record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest. The accomplishments that are being honored shall have contributed importantly to the advancement or application of engineering, science and technology, bringing the realization of significant value to society."

Prof. Traub gives distinguished lecture at Georgia Tech

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 16:02:54 EDT

Professor Joseph Traub, Edwin Howard Armstrong Professor of Computer Science, gave a College of Computing Distinguished Lecture at Georgia Tech. The title of his lecture was "Exponential Improvement in Qubit Complexity".

Steve Henderson receives Best Paper Award

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 18:05:29 EDT

The paper "Opportunistic controls: Leveraging natural affordances as tangible user interfaces for augmented reality" was coauthored by Steve Henderson and Steve Feiner. It presents a class of interaction techniques, called opportunistic controls, in which naturally occurring physical artifacts in a task domain are used to provide input to a user interface through simple vision-based processing. Tactile feedback from an opportunistic control can make possible eyes-free interaction. For example, a ridged surface can be used as a slider or a spinning washer as a rotary pot.

Searching without peeking: Security group funded to investigate secure encrypted search

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 14:39:46 EDT

The goal of the program is to develop and demonstrate practical, sound methods for the use of private information retrieval techniques in Intelligence Community systems, allowing a client to search a database for information of interest, while providing privacy to both sides: protecting other data of the information provider, and the nature of the client's interests. Specifically, the objective of this project is to investigate algorithms and systems that enable secure searches over encrypted data, and that are simultaneously practical and usable while providing concrete, provable security and privacy guarantees. In particular, we will investigate: (a) mechanisms for secure encrypted database searches; (b) theoretical foundations and new definitions of security for private information retrieval that offer different security/efficiency tradeoffs; (c) searchable secure email that protects messages-at-rest while allowing for private searches, resistant against even active adversaries; and (d) encrypted document comparison and tracking using n-grams encoded in encrypted Bloom filters. According to the IARPA mission statement, "The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) invests in high-risk/high-payoff research that has the potential to provide our nation with an overwhelming intelligence advantage over future adversaries."

Prof. Julia Hirschberg named Fellow of International Speech Communication Association (ISCA)

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 17:02:54 EDT

According to its web site, the purpose of ISCA is to promote, in an international world-wide context, activities and exchanges in all fields related to speech communication science and technology. The association is aimed at all persons and institutions interested in fundamental research and technological development that aims at describing, explaining and reproducing the various aspects of human communication by speech, that is, without assuming this enumeration to be exhaustive, phonetics, linguistics, computer speech recognition and synthesis, speech compression, speaker recognition, aids to medical diagnosis of voice pathologies. ISCA has about 1500 members. Professor Hirschberg has also served as past president of ISCA.

Profs. Traub and Wozniakowski to study quantum and classical complexity of continuous problems

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 22:11:20 EDT

The investigators are studying the following general question: If physicists and chemists succeed in building quantum computers, which continuous problems arising in science and engineering can be solved much faster on a quantum computer than on a classical computer? Examples of continuous problems are path integration, the Schr�dinger equation, high-dimensional approximation, continuous optimization, and integral equations. To obtain the power of quantum computation for continuous problems one must know the computational complexity of these problems on a classical computer. This is exactly what the investigators have studied for decades in the field of information-based complexity.

The classical complexity of many continuous problems is known due to information theoretic arguments. This may be contrasted with discrete problems such as integer factorization where one has to settle for conjectures about the complexity hierarchy. Among the issues the investigators will study are the following: For the foreseeable future the number of qubits will be a crucial computational resource. The investigators have shown that modifying the standard definition of quantum algorithms to permit randomized queries leads to an exponential improvement in the qubit complexity of path integration. The investigators propose to exploit the power of the randomized query setting. For example, are there exponential improvements in the query complexity for other important problems? A basic problem in physics and chemistry is to compute the ground state energy of a system. The ground state energy is given by the smallest eigenvalue of the time-independent Schr�dinger equation. If the number of particles in the system is p, the number of variables is d = 3p. In the worst case classical setting, the problem we study suffers the curse of dimensionality. The curse is broken in the quantum setting. The investigators want to determine if the randomized classical setting suffers the curse of dimensionality. If it does, a quantum computer enjoys exponential speedup for this problem. This would mark the first example of proven exponential quantum speedup for an important problem. The Schr�dinger equation is fundamental to quantum physics and quantum chemistry. Solving this equation for quantum systems with a large number of variables would have a huge payoff for many applications. The investigators propose to study algorithms and initiate the study of the computational complexity of the Schr�dinger equation in the worst case and randomized settings on a classical computer and in the quantum setting.

Virtualizing networks: NSF funds joint GATech, Bell Labs and Columbia next-generation Internet project

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 15:43:02 EDT

Despite or because of the Internet�s great success, it has shown itself to be very resistant again attempts to add new functionality to the network core. This dilemma lead to the recent trend in networking to implement services using overlay networking; overlay networking provides an opportunity for end systems to collaborate with others to achieve enhanced functions without having to modify routers. However, since overlay networks operate at the application layer, they cannot effectively use the resources that are available to network services. To address the limitations of services in the current Internet, this work presents a clean slate Internet architecture, called NetServ, based on the concepts of service virtualization. NetServ strives to break up the functions provided by Internet services and to make these functionalities available as modular building blocks for network services. A building block effectively encapsulates a network resource or function realized by a network node, such as link monitoring data or routing tables, and provides tunable parameters for easy configurability. These building blocks form a foundation for the implementation of full-fledged network services, which can then be used by applications. Furthermore, the new framework handles aspects of service discovery, distribution and management, thereby making new services more readily deployable. This project addresses five major research challenges in the new service architecture: i) the definition of requirements for a service-virtualized Internet architecture, ii) the design of an architectural framework for modular, virtualized services, iii) the identification of an initial set of key building blocks, which together can provide a foundation for common network services, iv) the development of mechanisms and protocols for service discovery and service distribution, and v) the design and implementation of a content distribution service based on the NetServ architecture. The feasibility of the NetServ approach will be demonstrated by building the prototype of a content distribution service. This service will interwork with two other services that are crucial for a variety of applications: a generalized naming service and a network monitoring service. The naming service is capable of naming a variety of network entities (like content, users, services, and devices), while obeying policy constraints. The network monitoring service provides makes network performance data available to applications. Overall, the objective of this work is to develop an architecture that provides an efficient and extensible architecture for core network services, to implement a prototype of the new architecture, design and implement a prototype of a content distribution service to demonstrate the feasibility of NetServ, and to evaluate the new architecture in a simulation environment as well as on a GENI-like test bed.

NSF supports project to tamper-proof cryptographic operations

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 19:28:27 EDT

This research project focuses on the development of cryptographic mathematical models and constructions that address realistic security requirements at the implementation level. This is a fundamental problem as cryptographic security formalisms are often criticized for lack of relevance given the wide range of attacks available at the implementation level. Indeed, traditional cryptographic attacks are restricted in the way private data can be accessed; hence, the security of systems relying on such constructs is contingent on external non-cryptographic means for enforcing the necessary tamper resilience. Unfortunately, this physical tamper resistance is either too expensive or unreliable. The research extends models of cryptographic attacks to include various forms of private data tampering and access and brings the theory of cryptographic constructions closer to security concerns in practice. In particular, the tamper proofing of a wide set of cryptographic primitives is considered in an extended adversarial setting, such as digital signatures, public key encryption, secure function evaluation, as well as arbitrary cryptographic functions. This research thus explores the boundaries of what is achievable algorithmically and practically through cryptographic means.

Mimicking real users: Prof. Hirschberg funded to investigate entrainment in spoken dialogue systems

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 09:30:22 EDT

Participants in human-human conversation often entrain to one another, adopting the vocabulary and other behaviors of their partners. Evidence of this has been found from laboratory studies and observations of real life situations. The project will be investigating many types of entrainment in two large corpora of human-human conversations to improve system behavior in Spoken Dialogue Systems (SDS). Prof. Hirschberg and Nenkova want to discover which types of entrainment occur generally across speakers and which seem to be speaker-specific, which types of entrainment can be reliably linked to task success and perceived naturalness, and which types of entrainment can be automatically modeled in SDS. This research has importance for the construction of better SDS. Currently, research SDS have attempted to entrain users to system vocabularies to improve speech recognition accuracy: Since users are likely to employ the same vocabulary in their answers that systems use in their queries, systems have a better chance of recognizing user input correctly if they can predict word usage. However, there has been little attempt to create SDS that entrain to user behavior, despite evidence that human beings rate humans and systems that behave more like them more highly than those that do not. The project focuses on determining which types of system entrainment to users will be most important to users and most feasible for SDS. The team will also provide publicly available annotated corpora for future research by others. Prof. Nenkova received her doctorate from Columbia University in 2006.

Going beyond keyword search: Prof. Gravano receives NSF grant

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 20:20:06 EDT

The text available on the Web and beyond embeds unprecedented volumes of valuable structured data, "hidden" in natural language. For example, a news article might discuss an outbreak of an infectious disease, reporting the name of the disease, the number of people affected, and the geographical regions involved. Keyword search, the prevalent query paradigm for text, is often insufficiently expressive for complex information needs that require structured data embedded in text. For such needs, users (e.g., an epidemiologist compiling statistics, as reported in the media, on recent foodborne disease outbreaks in a remote country) are forced to embark in labor-intensive cycles of keyword-based document retrieval and manual document filtering, until they locate the appropriate (structured) information. To move beyond keyword search, this project exploits information extraction technology, which identifies structured data in text, to enable structured querying. To capture diverse user information needs and depart from a "one-size-fits-all" querying approach, which is inappropriate for this extraction-based scenario, this project explores a wealth of structured query paradigms: sometimes users (e.g., a high-school student in need of some quick examples and statistics for a report on recent salmonella outbreaks in developing countries) are after a few exploratory results, which should be returned fast; some other times, users (e.g., the above epidemiologist investigating foodborne diseases) are after comprehensive results, for which waiting a longer time is acceptable. The project develops specialized cost-based query optimizers for each query paradigm, accounting for the efficiency and, critically, the result quality of the query execution plans. The technology produced will assist a vast range of users and information needs, by enabling efficient, diverse interactions with text databases --for sophisticated searching and data mining-- that are cumbersome or impossible with today's technology. The research and educational components of the project will rely on --and encourage-- a tight integration of three complementary Computer Science disciplines, namely, natural language processing, information retrieval, and databases. The project will also provide data sets and source code, for experimentation and evaluation, to the community at large over the Web, at http://extraction.cs.columbia.edu/.

Prof. Dana Pe'er opens new computational biology lab

Sat, 09 Aug 2008 10:47:53 EDT

The goal of the lab is to develop and apply complex tools that can probe and derive meaning from mountains of data now being created in the rapidly expanding field of systems and computational biology. The Pe'er-Bussemaker Lab is using high-throughput genomics data to infer a universal protein-DNA recognition code. Shown are the positions of protein side-chains contacting a Watson-Crick base-pair in a variety of protein-DNA complexes. The data is the result of research efforts such as the Human Genome Project and revolutionary sequencing technologies that are capable of reading over 100 billion letters of DNA in just a few days. Such technologies include high-density microarrays, which measure and analyze the activity within a cell and are capable of quantifying the levels of more than a million unique RNAs in a single experiment, and multi-laser flow cytometry, which measures the abundance of multiple signaling molecules in over 100,000 individual cells in a just few minutes. "Vast amounts of data are being produced in super-exponential rates; novel ground-breaking technologies are being invented so much faster than the rate at which scientists can understand and leverage them to gain biological insights," adds Pe'er. "It's like buying a whole pie, eating a tiny piece and throwing the rest away. Most of the data is only looked at on the very, very surface. And most of the data is only scarcely being used, leaving the rest untouched." Professors Pe'er and Harmen say their new lab reflects Columbia's support for computational biology, a commitment Pe'er says can be seen in the Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (C2B2), established in 2006 at the Medical campus. "Columbia has seen a very dramatic elevation in status in systems and computational biology with the initiation of the C2B2, which is fast becoming one of the best computational centers around," said Pe'er. "The activity between the uptown medical campus and here on Morningside makes Columbia one of the top five computational biology centers in the world." (from the University press release of July 25, 2008)

Charles Shen receives best student paper award

Sat, 09 Aug 2008 10:42:56 EDT

The paper "SIP Server Overload Control: Design and Evaluation" was co-authored by Charles Shen and Henning Schulzrinne. It describes and evaluates mechanisms so that VoIP servers can continue to operate at full capacity even under severe overload. Such overload may occur during natural disasters or mass call-in events, such as voting for TV game show contestants. Without these measures, servers are likely to suffer from congestion collapse.

National Science Foundation to support Prof. Nowick's design tool work for asynchronous commmunication fabrics for parallel processors

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 17:35:02 EDT

The grant is part of the Computing Processes and Artifacts (CPA) program; only about 10-15% of the proposals in the "Design Automation for Micro and Nano Systems" topical area were funded. While the current reality is that the jury is still out on how the processor-of-the-future will look, one clear certainty is that it will be parallel. All major commercial processor vendors are now committed to increasing the number of processors (i.e., cores) that fit on a single chip. However, there are major obstacles of power consumption, performance and scalability in existing synchronous design methodologies. This proposal focuses on a particular existing easy-to-program and easy-to-teach multi-core architecture. It then identifies the interconnection network, connecting multiples cores and memories, as the critical bottleneck to achieving lower overall power consumption. The target is to substantially improve the power, robustness and scalability of the system by designing and fabricating a high-speed asynchronous communication mesh. The resulting parallel architecture will be globally-asynchronous locally-synchronous (i.e. GALS-style), that gracefully accommodates synchronous cores and memories operating at arbitrary unrelated clock rates, while providing robustness to timing variability and support for plug-and-play (i.e. scalable) system design. Unlike most prior GALS architectures, this one will have significant performance and power requirements in a complex pipelined topology. In addition, computer-aided design (i.e., CAD) tools will be developed to support the design of this new mesh, as well as simulation, timing verification and performance analysis tools to be applied to the entire parallel architecture. This work will be performed in collaboration with a separate NSF CPA proposal under Prof. Ken Stevens (University of Utah). The two proposals will be linked together into a larger framework: the Utah group will coordinate to provide and refine their commercial-based physical design tool development and support, while the Columbia/Maryland group will provide a new substantial test case for their asynchronous tool applications. The work is expected to have broad impact. First, while it is targeted to one parallel architecture, several other architectures will benefit from this work, since the interconnection network can be applied to them as well. Second, the work is expected to demonstrate the benefits and role of asynchronous design for complex high-performance systems. Finally, the outcome of the work could make a step in the paradigm shift from serial to parallel that the field is now undergoing; the resulting first-of-its-kind partly-asynchronous high-end massively-parallel on-chip computer could push the level of scalability beyond what it currently possible and have a broad impact in supporting parallel applications in much of computer science and engineering.

NCWIT supports emerging scholars program through the Academic Alliance Seed Fund

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 16:54:20 EDT

The emerging scholars program mentors women in their early college years interested in computer science, encouraging them to pursue computer science as a major or minor. The grant proposal was prepared by Chris Murphy, Kristen Parten, two Computer Science graduate students, and Prof. Adam Cannon, based on a trial run during the spring 2008 semester. The Academic Alliance Seed Fund was established in 2007 to provide members of NCWIT�s Academic Alliance with startup funds (up to $15,000 per project) to develop and implement projects for recruiting and retaining women in computing and information technology. Funding for the Seed Fund is provided by Microsoft Research. The NCWIT Academic Alliance includes more than 75 computer science and IT departments across the country � including research universities, community colleges, women�s colleges, and minority-serving institutions � dedicated to gender equity and institutional change in higher education computing and information technology.

Prof. Wozniakowski receives honorary doctorate from Jena University and is elected to Polish Academy of Sciences

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 09:32:55 EDT

The Polish Academy of Sciences (http://www.pan.pl/english/) "is a state scientific institution founded in 1952. From the very beginning, it has functioned as a learned society acting through an elected corporation of top scholars and research organizations, via its numerous scientific establishments. It has also become a major scientific advisory body through its scientific committees." It currently has 346 Polish members, 18 of whom are mathematicians. The honorary doctorate (Dr. rer. nat. hc) cited Prof. Wozniakowski foundational contribution to numerical methods, particularly the deep insights due to the new discipline of information-based complexity and the work on the "curse of dimensionality" that helps determine which high-dimension problems are solvable. The Friedrich-Schiller University in Jena was founded in 1588.

Prof. Angelos Keromytis appointed to CERTH scientific advisory board

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 06:39:33 EDT

"The Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CE.R.T.H.), the largest research centre in Northern Greece, was founded in March 2000. CERTH is a non-profit organization that directly reports to the General Secretariat for Research and Technology (GSRT), of the Greek Ministry of Development. The mission of CERTH is to carry out fundamental and applied research with emphasis on development of novel products and services of industrial, economic and social importance in the fields of chemical and biochemical processes and advanced functional materials, informatics and telecommunications, land, sea and air transportation, agrobiotechnology and food engineering, environmentally friendly technologies for solid fuels and alternative energy sources, as well as biomedical informatics, biomedical engineering, biomolecular medicine and pharmacogenetics."

NSF funds Prof. Carloni to study photonic interconnection networks

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 20:25:58 EDT

The impact of communication on the performance of computer systems continues to grow both at the macro-level, for blade servers and clusters of computers, and at the micro-level in multi-core processors. Meanwhile the tight on-chip power dissipation constraints have forced practically all major semiconductor companies to move to multi-core or chip multiprocessor (CMP) architectures. The emergence of CMPs has in turn placed increased challenges on the communications infrastructure as the growing number of processing cores integrated on each chip exacerbates the bandwidth requirements for both intra-chip and inter-chip communication.

This research project aims to harness the recent extraordinary advances in nanoscale silicon photonic technologies for developing optical interconnection networks that address the critical bandwidth and power challenges of future CMP-based system. The insertion of photonic interconnection networks essentially changes the power scaling rules: once a photonic path is established, the data are transmitted end-to-end without the need for repeating, regeneration or buffering. This means that the energy for generating and receiving the data is only expended once per communication transaction anywhere across the computing system. The PIs will investigate the complete cohesive design of an on-chip optical interconnection network that employs nanoscale CMOS photonic devices and enables seamless off-chip communications to other CMP computing nodes and to external memory. System-wide optical interconnection network architectures will be specifically studied in the context of stream processing models of computation.

Google supports local event search project

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 21:52:50 EDT

The project focuses on two problems associated with local event search, namely, how to identify events of all sizes --including small, not-so-prominent events not necessarily covered in mainstream sources-- and how to determine the "geographical scope" of events --beyond their explicit location. The project will use the wealth and variety of sources that are available over the Web to identify and characterize events, in turn to produce expressive, high-quality local event search results.

Prof. Schulzrinne appointed to Internet2 advisory council

Fri, 30 May 2008 11:45:38 EDT

"The Applications, Middleware, and Services Advisory Council (AMSAC) is responsible for advising the Board and management on matters relating to the support and adoption of applications, middleware, security and other capabilities across the Internet2 membership and its collaborators around the globe. The AMSAC is responsible for interacting directly with other key advisory committees on technical and service issues. It will also provide advice on Internet2s efforts to support applications and middleware for teaching and learning as well as for research, and for advice on the investment of resources for current and future initiatives."

Prof. Keromytis funded to track sensitive information flows in enterprises

Tue, 27 May 2008 15:25:46 EDT

The project will investigate mechanisms for implementing information accountability and visualization in large-scale distributed enterprise environments. Specifically, Prof. Keromytis' research group will investigate the use of Virtual Machine Monitors (VMMs) and distributed coordination protocols to efficiently track the flow of sensitive information (or, more generally, information of interest to the administrator) throughout a distributed system. Although much work has been done on VMMs in recent years, the focus has been on more efficient resource utilization and (from a security standpoint) component isolation; little to no work has been done on fine-grained information flow tracking within a single system and across system boundaries.

Prof. Ken Ross honored for distinguished teaching

Thu, 22 May 2008 21:39:51 EDT

Prof. Ross teaches courses in databases and problem solving at Columbia University. Professor Ross has been selected as one of the two recipients of this year's Columbia Engineering School Alumni Association (CESAA) Distinguished Faculty Teaching Awards. Mr. Lee presented the award to Professor Ross at Class Day ceremonies on Monday, May 19. "The Columbia Engineering School Alumni Association created this award more than a decade ago to recognize the exceptional commitment of members of the SEAS faculty to undergraduate education," said Mr. Lee. "This year, I am pleased to present these awards to two senior faculty members, a testament to their continuing faithfulness to the central mission of teaching undergraduates." The awardees were selected by a Committee of the Alumni Association chaired by Eric Schon '68, with representation from the student body, and based on nominations from the students themselves. The Board of Managers of the Columbia Engineering School Alumni Association voted unanimously to approve the selection. Students enthusiastically wrote that courses taught by these professors were the best they have taken at Columbia. The qualities that both professors share and the ones most frequently mentioned by students are their enthusiasm for the subject matter, caring attitude, approachability, responsiveness to student concerns, and the ability to make complex subject matter understandable.

Melinda Agyekum and Ryan Overbeck win Intel fellowship

Thu, 22 May 2008 08:50:41 EDT

Melinda Agyekum, advised by Prof. Steven Nowick, has been selected for the Intel PhD Fellowship for her work in asynchronous digital systems. Asynchronous digital circuits perform synchronization and communication without using a global clock, and thereby can provide greater flexibility and timing-robustness in handling on-chip and off-chip communication. The goal of her work is to provide low-power encoding techniques that will allow asynchronous communication to become more tolerant of dynamic variability (e.g., soft-errors, cross-talk, noise, etc.) which has become an increasing problem due to device scaling. Ryan Overbeck's, advised by Prof. Ravi Ramamoorthi, focuses on real-time ray tracing. Ray tracing is the core of many physically-based algorithms for rendering 3D scenes with global illumination (shadows, reflections, refractions, indirect illumination, and other effects), but has not been fast enough for interactive rendering on commodity computers until recently. He develops algorithms to ray trace 3D scenes with high quality shadows, reflections, and refractions providing a higher degree of realism to interactive content.

Carlos-Ren� P�rez wins National Physical Science Consortium fellowship

Wed, 21 May 2008 21:02:19 EDT

Carlos-Ren� P�rez is working on automatic software healing with his PhD advisors, Prof. Angelos Keromytis and Prof. Jason Nieh. The NPSC fellowship is sponsored by the National Security Agency. "The NPSC has one primary objective: Increase the number of qualified U.S.-citizen Ph.D.'s in the physical sciences and related engineering fields, emphasizing recruitment of a diverse applicant pool of women and historically underrepresented minorities. ... Since inception in 1989, NPSC has awarded 374 graduate fellowships. Of those fellows, 148 have received a PhD, 79 have received a Master�s Degree, and 78 are currently enrolled. Ninety-two percent of NPSC fellows have been female or members of underrepresented minority groups or both."

Traub Elected to the Marconi Society Board of Directors

Tue, 13 May 2008 14:25:18 EDT

The Society is best known for the Marconi Prize, considered the most prestigious award in the field of communications and the Internet. Among its other activities, the Society holds regular forums on topics of societal importance.

New project explores next-generation emergency calling

Wed, 07 May 2008 18:00:58 EDT

Traditional 9‐1‐1 systems, which date back to 1970s, support only voice, while non‐emergency communications now feature other media. Adding additional media for 9‐1‐1 presents opportunities and challenges. Text messages, images captured by cell phones, video clips, and automatic crash notification messages can dramatically enhance the 9‐1‐1 services by expediting emergency responses and reducing crash clearance times. The rapid increase of residential, nomadic and mobile VoIP usage requires the development of VoIP‐based next generation 9‐1‐1 systems and services that will replace the current circuit‐switched 9‐1‐1 systems. Beyond limitations in media and mobility support, existing systems are inefficient and cannot easily accommodate new functionality. The project will develop a testbed that will enable research on understanding and analysis of next generation 9‐1‐1 services. This is particularly important as both state and federal governments are in the process of planning next‐generation emergency communication platforms, unfortunately often without adequate vendor‐neutral testing and evaluation. This project is a collaborative proposal involving the University of North Texas, Columbia University, Texas A&M University with support from the Denco, Brazo and College Station county 9‐1‐1 centers. The project plans to investigate issues related to locating 9‐1‐1 callers, securing Public Safety Answering Points, ensuring continuous availability of 9‐1‐1 services during large‐scale emergencies, predicting emergencies, providing citizen alerts (�reverse 9‐1‐1�), improving inter‐agency coordination and enhancing 9‐1‐1 services for the deaf and hearing‐impaired using video phones and instant messaging. The research results will translate into engineering guidelines and be disseminated across government organizations, standards bodies such as IETF and National Emergency Number Association (NENA) and 9‐1‐1 centers.

Stolfo, Sethumadhavan, Locasto and August win DARPA seed grant

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 08:35:13 EDT

This research effort will leverage recent discoveries of latent parallelism in sequential codes and improvements in machine learning to create a new automatic parallelization system. The parallelization system may offer dramatic performance improvements for legacy software (on multi-cores) without requiring prohibitively expensive software rewrites.

Prof. Belhumeur and Nayar to participate in NSF MURI project on human recognition

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 16:22:37 EDT

The grant is for $1.5 million per year for three years with the potential for two additional option years at $1.5 million per year. The MURI project will be coordinated by team of researchers from University of Maryland with partnering institutions in Columbia University, University of California at Colorado Springs and University of California at San Diego, and international researchers from University of Southampton, UK and University of Queensland, Australia. The team will design and develop novel sensors, algorithms and systems for maritime biometrics. Columbia University's share of the grant will be $1.39 million over the five year period and will be shared by Columbia PIs Peter Belhumeur and Shree Nayar.

Oliver Cossairt and Alexander Gusev receive NSF graduate fellowships

Sat, 05 Apr 2008 20:14:40 EDT

Olivier Cossairt, advised by Prof. Shree Nayar, has been selected for the NSF Graduate Fellowship to further his work on intelligent displays. Intelligent displays are new types of visualization systems that sense and react to their physical environment. Using these displays, real and digital objects are indistinguishable in appearance, enabling new possibilities for rich user interaction in fields as diverse as medical imaging, military visualization, and entertainment.

Alexander Gusev, advised by Prof. Itsik Pe'er, has been awarded an NSF Graduate Fellowship for his research work in computainal genetics. Genetic evidence shows that many pairs of individuals purported as unrelated to one another actually share an ancestor within the last few generations. Unfortunately, the computational barrier of comparing all pairs to one another prevented such analysis on a large scale. Sasha developed a linear time method for such all-against-all comparison, becoming the first to analyze ancestry of thousands of individuals, and finding surprising results with implications to population genetics and disease research.

Professors Allen, Bellovin, Keromytis, Servedio and Stolfo receive Google Research Awards

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 22:20:18 EDT

Prof. Allen will be investigating semantically searchable dynamic 3D databases, developing new methods to take an unstructured set of 3D models and organize them into a database that can be intelligently and efficiently queried. The database will be searchable, tagged and dynamic, and will be able to support queries based on whole object and partial object geometries.

In the project titled "Safe Browsing Through Web-based Application Communities", Profs. Keromytis and Stolfo will investigate the use of collaborative software monitoring, anomaly detection, and software self-healing to enable groups of users to browse safely. The project seeks to counter the increasingly virulent class of web-bourne malware by exchanging information among users about detected attacks and countermeasures when browsing unknown websites or even specific pages.

In the project "Privacy and Search: Having it Both Ways in Web Services", Prof. Keromytis will investigate techniques for addressing the privacy and confidentiality concerns of businesses and individuals while allowing for the use of hosted, web-based applications such as Google Docs and Gmail. Specifically, the project will combine data confidentiality mechanisms with Private Information Matching and Retrieval protocols, to develop schemes that offer different tradeoffs between stored-data confidentiality/privacy and legitimate business and user needs.

Rocco Servedio was awarded a Google Research Award to develop improved martingale ranking algorithms. Martingale ranking is an extension of martingale boosting, a provably noise-tolerant boosting algorithm from learning theory which was jointly developed by Rocco and Phil Long, a researcher at Google. Rocco will work to design adaptive and noise-tolerant martingale rankers that perform well 'at the top of the list' of items being ranked, which is where accurate rankings are most important.

Prof. Carloni receives Sloan Fellowship

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 17:13:51 EDT

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation named 118 outstanding young scientists, mathematicians, and economists as Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellows. The winners are faculty members at 64 colleges and universities in the United States and Canada who are conducting research at the frontiers of physics, chemistry, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, computer science, economics, mathematics and neuroscience. The Sloan Research Fellowships have been awarded since 1955.

Prof. Stolfo to participate in National Academies National Research Council committee

Sat, 16 Feb 2008 17:03:59 EDT

At the request of the Chief of Naval Operations, the Naval Studies Board of the National Academies is planning to conduct a 12-month study entitled "Information Assurance for Network-Centric Naval Forces." The study will review the Department of Defense and the Department of the Navy responsibilities for information assurance, review recent information assurance-related studies conducted by and for the Department of Defense and Department of the Navy, examine the Department of Defense and Department of Navy research, development, and acquisition process for information assurance, and recommend alternative approaches to the process that allow for greater flexibility, assess potential information assurance vulnerabilities for network-centric naval forces, review and recommend information assurance best practices, recommend investment analysis approaches for managing cyber attack risks to network-centric naval forces that address the consequences of possible cyber attacks, the likelihoods of these attacks actually occurring, and the uncertainties surrounding assumptions about these risks.

Prof. Nayar elected to the National Academy of Engineering

Fri, 08 Feb 2008 22:40:19 EDT

Election to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is the highest professional distinction accorded to an engineer. Academy membership honors those who have made outstanding contributions to "engineering research, practice, or education, including, where appropriate, significant contributions to the engineering literature," and to the "pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering, or developing/implementing innovative approaches to engineering education." The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) has elected a total of 65 new members and nine foreign associates spanning all disciplines of engineering and applied sciences. Members are elected to the NAE by their peers (current NAE members). All members have distinguished themselves in technical positions, as university faculty, and as leaders in government and business organizations. They serve as "advisers to the nation on science, engineering, and medicine," and perform an unparalleled public service by addressing the scientific and technical aspects of some of society�s most pressing problems. The NAE was established in 1964 as an independent, nonprofit organization and is one of four United States National Academies.

Prof. Hirschberg receives honorary doctorate from KTH, Stockholm

Tue, 18 Dec 2007 22:46:23 EDT

The full citation reads, translated from the Swedish original: "Julia Hirschberg, professor in computer science, is active within the area of speech communications at Columbia University, USA. She belongs to the leading researchers in this field, having performed research in both industry and academia. In her work at AT&T, she contributed to the development of several voice-controlled telephone services. Julia Hirschberg has performed leading research on a variety of topics related to human-to-human and human-to-machine interaction. Specifically, within the area of prosody, she studied how people use other means than speech to communicate focus, turn-taking and emotions in a dialogue. She has also studied how this knowledge can be applied to various speech-based services. Julia Hirschberg has been president of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) since 2005. As such she is responsible for the yearly conference Interspeech that attracts more than 1000 attendee each year."

CS major Rajesh Ramakrishnan selected as CRA Undergraduate Award finalist

Wed, 28 Nov 2007 20:37:34 EDT

The Computing Research Association (CRA) is an association of more than 200 North American academic departments of computer science, computer engineering, and related fields; laboratories and centers in industry, government, and academia engaging in basic computing research; and affiliated professional societies.

Prof. Schulzrinne selected as IEEE Communications Society Distinguished Lecturer

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 09:57:20 EDT

Distinguished lecturers visit IEEE Communications Society chapters to discuss new developments in communications and networking.

Prof. Misra receives IBM faculty award

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 12:55:15 EDT

Prof. Misra proposal seeks to develop and analyze Adaptive Sharing Mechanisms (ASMs) in which the mechanism used to share resources adapts dynamically to both the set of available resources and the current needs of the consumers, such that the system is truly autonomic. The project proposes to modularize the ASM into separate components, and then design the various components using both cutting edge novel control theoretic and scheduling analyses.

Profs. Yemini and Schulzrinne honored by Center for Advanced Technology in Telecommunications and Distributed Information Systems (CATT)

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 12:49:06 EDT

According to the citation, "Prof. Yechiam Yemini is that rare individual who embodies excellence in research, innovation and entrepreneurship. He was already a successful entrepreneur before he joined CATT. He then started System Management Arts or SMARTS, a company with over 150 employees that developed network management solutions. This company was acquired by EMC Corporation. He is now working on yet another start up called Arootz. In all his ventures he brings technological innovation and an unerring vision of the market."

Henning Schulzrinne was cited a pioneer in the development of Voice over IP technology that is supplanting circuit-switched voice, which has been the basis of phone service since the days of Alexander Graham Bell. He is a co-inventor of the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and the Real-Time Transport Protocol (RTP), which form the basis of VOIP, and additional standards for multimedia transport over the Internet.

In addition, Verizon Communication was honored for a joint project conducted with the lab of Prof. Schulzrinne.

The Center for Advanced Technology in Telecommunications and Distributed Information Systems (CATT) is a research and education group at Polytechnic University, long-recognized as one of the best engineering schools in the country. CATT researchers are leaders in the fields of electrical engineering and computer science. The Center also draws on the expertise of key researchers at Columbia University.

Prof. Dana Pe'er receives NIH Innovator Award

Sun, 30 Sep 2007 23:11:08 EDT

"NIH New Innovator Dana Pe�er is looking forward to building her lab team and working on the next phase of her research, which seeks to illuminate how a cell's regulatory network processes signals, and how this signal processing goes wrong in cancer. As one of the world�s leading computational biologists, Pe�er develops highly sophisticated computational �machine learning� methods that analyze genomic data and detect patterns that underlie interactions and influences between molecules in a cell. With the NIH award funding, Pe�er and her team will seek to understand the general underlying principles governing how cells process signals, how molecular networks compute, and how genetic variations alter cellular functioning. Specifically, she wants to understand how changes in DNA codes modify a cells response to its internal and external cues, which then leads to changes throughout the entire body. These changes, or malfunctions, can cause anything from autoimmune disease to cancer." (Columbia News)

Prof. Kender receives grant to study semantics of structured and unstructured videos

Sat, 22 Sep 2007 13:14:02 EDT

This project explores three new related approaches to making the indexing and retrieval of videos more efficient, meaningful, and humanly navigable, even when the videos have little editor-imposed structure. The first is the exploration and refinement of a novel, highly efficient machine learning technique for data-rich domains, which selects small and fast subsets of multimedia features that are most indicative of a given high-level concept. Speed-ups of three decimal orders of magnitude are possible. The second is the development of new methods and tools for refining user concepts and domain ontologies for video retrieval, based on statistical analyses of their collocation and temporal behavior. The goals are the determination of video synonyms and hypernyms, the verification of temporal shot patterns such as repetition and alternation, and the exploitation of a newly recognized power-law decay of the recurrence of content. The third is the demonstration of a customizable user interface, the first of its kind, to navigate a library of videos of unedited and relatively unstructured student presentations, using visual, speech, facial, auditory, textual, and other features. These features are shown to be more accurately and quickly derived using the results of the first investigation, and more compactly and saliently presented using the results of the second.

Joshua Reich demos delay-tolerant networks on Roomba, wins ACM Mobicom demo prize

Wed, 12 Sep 2007 21:21:17 EDT

Joshua Reich, a PhD student in the Department, just won the student demo contest at ACM Mobicom/hoc for his Roombanet system (you might have seen vacuum cleaners roaming around the courtyard). His project was titled "MadNET: DTNs on Roombas". Mobicom is the flagship wireless conference and this year it was joint with Mobihoc. Joshua Reich is being advised by Prof. Vishal Misra and Prof. Dan Rubenstein.

Prof. Servedio and Malkin receive NSF grant on cross-leveraging cryptography and learning theory

Tue, 04 Sep 2007 15:42:58 EDT

The project proposes a detailed study of the connections between cryptography and learning. Very roughly speaking, cryptography is about manipulating and encoding information so that it is difficult to reconstruct the initial information, while learning theory is about efficiently extracting information from some unknown object. This duality means that ideas and results from each area can potentially be leveraged to make progress in the other area. The first main goal of the project is to obtain new cryptographic results based on the presumed hardness of various problems in computational learning theory. Work along these lines will include constructing and applying cryptographic primitives such as public-key cryptosystems and pseudorandom generators from learning problems that are widely believed to be hard, and exploring the average-case learnability of well-studied concept classes such as decision trees and DNF formulas. The second main goal of the project is to obtain new learning results via cryptography. The PIs will work to develop privacy-preserving learning algorithms; to establish computational hardness of learning various Boolean function classes using tools from cryptography; to obtain computational separations between pairs of well-studied learning models; and to explore the foundational assumptions of what are the minimal hardness assumptions required to prove hardness of learning.

Prof. Ramamoorthi receives NSF grant to improve rendering quality

Tue, 21 Aug 2007 19:49:37 EDT

Computer graphics is commonly used for interactive visualization and rendering in video games, electronic commerce or scientific visualization. These applications often demand real-time results, including multiple bounces of light (global illumination), material changes and spatially-varying local lighting. Computer graphics is also increasingly used to prototype or design illumination and material properties, for industries as diverse as animation, entertainment, automobile design, and architecture. A lighting designer on a movie set wants to pre-visualize the scene lit by the final illumination and with objects having their final material properties, be they paint, velvet or glass. An architect wants to visualize the reflectance properties of building materials in their natural setting. In many applications, much greater realism and faithfulness can be obtained if the lighting or material designer could interactively specify these properties. The project will develop the theoretical foundations and next generation practical algorithms for high quality real-time rendering and lighting/material design.

Prof. Ramamoorthi receives SIGGRAPH Significant New Researcher Award

Tue, 31 Jul 2007 15:43:09 EDT

The citation reads: "ACM SIGGRAPH is proud to recognize Ravi Ramamoorthi as this year�s recipient of the Signifi cant New Researcher Award for his groundbreaking work on mathematical representations and computational models for the visual appearance of objects. Ravi�s work has had enormous impact in areas ranging from real-time rendering to acquisition and representation of visual appearance. In the tradition of the best graphics researchers, Ravi combines foundational mathematical analyses with novel practical algorithms. His discoveries have not only led to a deeper understanding of appearance: a number of them are being adopted by industry. Ravi obtained his B.S. and M.S. degrees in computer science and physics from Caltech in 1998, publishing two SIGGRAPH papers from his work there with Al Barr and Jim Arvo. He then received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2002, under Pat Hanrahan. He joined the faculty at Columbia University in August 2002, where he is now an associate professor of computer science. He is well known for his seminal SIGGRAPH 2001 paper and Ph.D. dissertation that used ideas from signal processing to establish a firm mathematical framework to describe reflection in terms of convolution, where the incident radiance plays the role of the signal, and the bidirectional reflectance distribution function of the surface plays the role of a filter. He went on to derive an explicit convolution product formula in the frequency domain using spherical harmonics. This work represents a mathematical tour de force, addressing long standing problems in graphics and computer vision. His SIGGRAPH 2004 paper with Ren Ng and Pat Hanrahan on triple product integrals continued his study of the reflection operator, a theme that has continued with several subsequent papers, two of which appear in this year�s proceedings. Much of Ravi�s recent work has turned to data-driven methods, including five papers with a wide array of collaborators in SIGGRAPH 2006 that deal with a variety of issues, from the measurement and representation of complex time varying phenomena, to real-time editing of BRDFs. In summary, Ravi has made deep and broad contributions to the twin fields of graphics and computer vision. He has shown exceptional levels of productivity, being one of the most prolific recent contributors to SIGGRAPH. Indeed, his research accomplishments make it easy to forget that he is only at the beginning of his career, having received his doctorate just five years ago. With such a quick start to his career, we look forward to many more productive years to come." A video introduces Ravi and his work. The press release is available.

Prof. Allen to develop robotic tool for minimal-access surgery

Tue, 31 Jul 2007 04:40:00 EDT

This project focuses on the development of a newly conceived insertable robotic effector platform and the integration of that platform with a recently developed insertable, remotely controlled camera system to be used for minimal access surgery. The project will involve the actual design and construction of the platform for tools and the integration of the imaging platform (insertable camera system) with the tools into a fully functional image guided system for minimal access surgery. This may also include the addition of various sensors on the tools, so that the resultant data stream from both the imaging platform and the tools can be processed to control the intervention. The overall aim is to develop a disruptive technology that includes an insertable image source, a wide range of surgical tools, and a computer to integrate the function of all components.

Profs. Kaiser and Nieh to receive grant to reduce computer downtime

Mon, 30 Jul 2007 15:01:37 EDT

The project investigates and develops autonomic mechanisms for reducing system downtime due to software maintenance and upgrades. The project addresses operating system upgrades and also application upgrades, focusing on standalone binary-executable applications. The main goal is to lessen the possibility that patches and updates will "break" expected functionality of the environment that worked fine together with the old version -- overall maximizing availability and reliability both during and after maintenance while imposing little management overhead. The contributions stem primarily from a virtualization architecture that decouples application instances from operating system instances, enabling either to be independently updated. The results, disseminated via web download, will improve availability of legacy applications, with no source code access, modification, recompilation, relinking or application-specific semantic knowledge, and perform efficiently and securely on commodity operating systems and hardware.

Prof. Schulzrinne elected as vice chair of ACM SIGCOMM

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 22:19:24 EDT

"SIGCOMM is ACM's professional forum for the discussion of topics in the field of communications and computer networks, including technical design and engineering, regulation and operations, and the social implications of computer networking. The SIG's members are particularly interested in the systems engineering and architectural questions of communication."

Prof. Vishal Misra elected to Board of Directors for ACM SIGMETRICS

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 20:14:23 EDT

"Besides being the rockin'est ACM SIG, it is also widely revered as the most universal. Go ahead, try naming any SIG at all that isn't obsessed with performance. (No fair picking on SIGART, "The Art of AI." Just because they're decades late in delivering on their promises of functionality doesn't mean they wouldn't be talking performance if they could.)"

SIGMETRICS promotes research in performance analysis techniques as well as the advanced and innovative use of known methods and tools. It sponsors conferences, such as its own annual conference (SIGMETRICS), publishes a newsletter (Performance Evaluation Review), and operates a network bulletin board and web site.

Prof. Edwards wins NSF grant to develop new computer design methods

Sat, 30 Jun 2007 10:32:24 EDT

This project proposes to reintroduce timing predictability as a first-class property of embedded processor architectures. To fully exploit such timing predictability, however, would require a significant redesign of much of computing technology, including operating systems, programming languages, compilers, and networks. Obviously, a three-year NSF project cannot address the full breadth of the problem. We propose, therefore, to tackle the problem from the hardware design perspective. Our approach will be to develop precision timed (PRET) machines as soft cores on FPGAs, and to show that using such machines software components can be integrated with what would traditionally have been purely hardware designs. We expect that this will first greatly improve the expressiveness and usability of FPGA-based design flows, and second will provide a starting point for a decades-long revolution that will once again make timing predictability an essential feature of processors.

Prof. Keromytis receives grant to investigate new communications mechanisms against denial-of-service attacks

Fri, 15 Jun 2007 17:50:25 EDT

Network denial of service attacks occur with increasing frequency and devastating economic and psychological effects for the targeted sites and their users. Addressing the problem has proven difficult, primarily due to deployment and complexity concerns about previously proposed mechanisms. In particular, receiver-controlled capabilities are an elegant way for preventing communication interference, but are difficult to deploy in practice and are susceptible to control-channel attacks. This project will investigate a new communication paradigm, named PacketSpread, which makes feasible the use of capability-like mechanisms on the current Internet, without requiring architectural modifications to networks or hosts. The high-level hypothesis of the research is that practical network capability schemes can be constructed through the use of end-point traffic-redirection mechanisms that use a spread-spectrum-like communication paradigm enabled by an overlay network. To test this hypothesis, the project will prototype and experimentally validate the resistance of such a scheme against attacks launched by realistic adversaries, while minimizing the impact of the approach to end-to-end communication latency and throughput. The results of this research will enable a better understanding of how network-capability schemes can be deployed and used to provide robust and secure communications under both normal operation and in times of crisis. Improvements in the security and reliability of large-scale systems on which society, business, government, and individuals depend on will have a positive impact on society.

Adjunct Professor W. Bradford Paley's "Map of Science" published in Nature, SEED, Discover

Thu, 24 May 2007 17:29:25 EDT

Page 14 of this month's (June's) Discover magazine shows an analysis of some 800,000 scientific papers, courtesy of work done by Columbia Department of Computer Science Adjunct Professor W. Bradford Paley. W. Bradford Paley, an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science, worked with two collaborators to produce an illustration that seems itself to have become news. Working with Kevin Boyack (of Sandia National Labs) and Dick Klavans (of SciTech Strategies, Inc.), he developed a way of visualizing the relationships among 776 different scientific paradigms--labelling each node with ten unique descriptive phrases--on a small two-foot square print. The image (originally four feet square) was part of an "Illuminated Diagram," a visual display technique Mr. Paley first presented at IEEE InfoVis 2002. It was part of an exhibit called "Places and Spaces: Mapping Science" installed in the New York Public Library Science Industry and Business Library, then the New York Hall of Science; it is now travelling worldwide. The journal Nature noticed the image in that exhibit and opened its annual "Brilliant Images" image gallery of 2006 with a very reduced version. It was picked up by both SEED and Discover magazines and has been mentioned in dozens of news sites and blogs, including Slashdot, Reddit, Complexity Digest, Education Futures, and StumbleUpon. Mr. Paley's site (didi.com/brad) describes his new label layout algorithm, as well as the rest of the project.

Prof. Malkin receives grant from Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL) on privacy-preserving learning

Wed, 25 Apr 2007 09:17:13 EDT

As part of the grant, Prof. Malking will study secure protocols allowing two or more parties to apply vision algorithms on their inputs, without revealing any additional information. For example, consider a client holding data which he would like classified by a server (e.g., applying a face detection algorithm). However, the client does not want to reveal any information on his data to the server, and the server does not want to reveal any information to the client, beyond the classification result. While general cryptographic techniques for secure multiparty computation may be applied, these often entail a performance overhead that is prohibitive for the real-world applications we address. Prof. Malkin and her team will work to design efficient privacy preserving protocols for common information classifiers including density estimation using Parzen windows, K-NN classification, neural networks, and support vector machines. We will also design privacy preserving protocols for other useful vision and learning problems, such as oblivious matching protocols, allowing two parties to find whether they are holding an image of the same object or not, without disclosing any additional information on their images.

Claire Lackner, project student in Computer Science, to be valedictorian

Thu, 12 Apr 2007 22:37:33 EDT

Claire is a Rabi Scholar majoring in Physics.� She has undertaken research at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and in the Robotics laboratory (Prof. Peter Allen) of the Computer Science department, where she developed software to improve the grasping ability of a simulated robotic hand.� At Cal Tech and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as an undergraduate research fellow, she studied images of gullies on Mars and created a model for their formulation.� Together with Professor Peter Allen, Claire has also done field work in France with the Art History department assisting in the three dimensional imaging of Romanesque churches.� A recipient of both the Goldwater Scholarship and the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship, Claire will pursue a Ph.D. in Astrophysics at Princeton University this fall.

Sean White, Dominic Marino and Prof. Feiner win Best Note award at CHI 2007

Fri, 06 Apr 2007 17:15:15 EDT

PhD student Sean White, Dominic Marino (MS, '07), and Professor Steve Feiner won the Best Note award at CHI 2007 for their short paper, "Designing a Mobile User Interface for Automated Species Identification." CHI 2007 is the top conference in human-computer interaction, and will be held in San Jose, April 28-May 3, 2007. For more information, see www.chi2007.org.

DHS grant for Prof. Stolfo, Keromytis, Hershkop to investigate insider threats

Thu, 05 Apr 2007 22:13:29 EDT

The project, titled "Human Behavior, Insider Threat, and Awareness", will focus on investigating, developing, and experimentally evaluating methods and models for detecting malicious insider activity and behavior on a host computer system. The approach taken will be twofold. First, to create a system of host-based anomaly sensors to learn models of normal user behavior, such that significant behavior differences can be indicative of a security breach or malicious intent. Second, to create proactive honeypot technology, extending current honeypot technology with the introduction of controlled and realistic-looking bait traffic of various types to entice attackers and malicious insiders.

Hila Becker noted as finalist in 2007 Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship Winners

Tue, 03 Apr 2007 13:14:03 EDT

Hila Becker is a Computer Science PhD student at Columbia University in New York City. Her research interests include machine learning theory and applications, data mining and information extraction. She currently works in the Center for Computational Learning Systems (CCLS).

The Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology and Google sponsor the 2007 Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship. The Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship was established to honor the legacy of Anita Borg and her efforts to encourage women to pursue careers in computer science and technology. Finalists receive a cash award. For the 2006-2007 academic year, the institute received over 250 applications from students at 115 different universities across the country. Eligible students must be going into their final year of study at a US university or college. Selection criteria includes academic performance, letters of recommendation, answers to short essay questions and interviews with members of the review committee. After three rounds of review, the committee selected 50 finalists. [from the press release]

Department ranked #2 in 2005 Scholarly Productivity Index

Sun, 01 Apr 2007 22:48:08 EDT

The ranking has been compiled by Academic Analytics and includes grants, awards, citations and journal publications. Details about the methodology can be found at http://chronicle.com/stats/productivity/page.php?primary=4&secondary=34&bycat=Go

Matei Ciocarlie wins best student paper award at 2007 World Haptics Conference

Mon, 26 Mar 2007 13:24:29 EDT

Matei Ciocarlie won the best student paper award at the 2007 World Haptics Conference in Tsukuba, Japan for his paper Soft Finger Model with Adaptive Contact Geometry for Grasping and Manipulation Tasks. The paper was co-authored by Claire Lackner, a Computer Science undergraduate student, and Prof. Peter Allen. The prize carries an award of $1,000.

Professors Keromytis, Nieh and Stolfo win MURI grant on automatic recovery

Mon, 19 Mar 2007 13:17:26 EDT

This project will develop autonomic recovery and regeneration mechanisms that will enable commodity systems to detect attacks, corruptions, and failures, then self-regenerate to a known good state, for both program and data, while increasing the reliability and security of the software to be more resistant and less vulnerable to attack. The project will adopt a "health care" model for computing systems, where failing systems are "triaged" either locally or through a centralized Enterprise Health Care Center (EHCC) to bring these systems back to health while other systems provide their services for non-stop enterprise computing. The approach will address both unintentional failures caused by software flaws and intentional attacks that exploit vulnerabilities in software applications.

Prof. Ramamoorthi wins Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Program fellowship

Mon, 19 Mar 2007 11:47:45 EDT

ONR YIP is a very competitive program. This year, ONR received 214 proposals for the YIP competition and 33 were selected for award. Professor Ramamoorthi is a member of the Columbia Computer Science Computer Graphics group. The images that objects produce are heavily influenced by the interplay between natural lighting conditions, complex materials with non-diffuse reflectance, and shadows cast by and on the object. Modeling these effects, which are omnipresent in natural environments, is critical for image understanding and machine perception. For example, to deploy face recognition systems in airport security or in the outdoors, we must account for uncontrolled illumination, developing lighting-insensitive recognition methods. Recognizing and tracking vehicles requires understanding the bright highlights produced by metallic car bodies. Robotic helpers that provide assistance to the infirm must interpret highlights and shadows from household objects. Unmanned automated vehicles surveying battle scenarios can also benefit from improved image interpretation algorithms, allowing them to understand and build 3D models of their environs. Therefore, compact mathematical models of illumination and reflectance are essential, to develop robust vision and image interpretation systems for uncontrolled conditions. We will pursue two main avenues. First, we analyze the frequency-domain properties of lighting and reflectance, extending our previous results to specular objects, describing a theory of frequency domain identities, analogous to classical spatial domain results like reflectance ratios. Second, we analyze a general light transport operator that by definition includes arbitrary reflectance and shadowing. We develop a locally low-dimensional representation, even for high-frequency highlights and intricate shadows. This enables a new level of accuracy in appearance-based lighting-insensitive recognition and other applications.

Prof. Keromytis receives ONR grant to develop Quantitative Trust Management

Thu, 15 Mar 2007 21:39:59 EDT

The goal of this project, funded by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) under the Multi-University Research Initiative (MURI) program is to develop Quantitative Trust Management as the basis for a scalable decentralized approach to dynamic, mission-based access control (MBAC). The dynamic trust management technique will address the inabilities of current capabilities to maintain security policies at the operational tempo required for network-centric warface, to scale to emerging nation-state threats, and to manage heterogeneous computing and network elements supporting Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA). MBAC will introduce a new generation of policy languages that will allow composition and quantification of the effects of dynamically changing policies, and the theoretical foundations to support composition of complex policies using cost-benefit analysis under compositional reasoning on quantitative measures of trust to make access-control decisions. These theoretical foundations will provide a basis by which access-control policies can be made "situation-aware" and thus adaptive to both local and global mission dynamics.

Prof. Grinspun receives NSF CAREER award to help understand and model complex mechanical systems

Wed, 07 Mar 2007 21:17:27 EDT

Software that helps to develop intuition will help engineers to produce better designs, spur scientists to poise more likely hypotheses, and give artists better control over the process of computer animation. Physical simulations have already achieved remarkable goals, enabling the prediction of systems that are too costly or dangerous to study empirically; however, current simulation technologies are built for precision, not intuition. The investigators will develop simulation techniques that address the vision of a rapid, interactive design cycle, with a specific focus on the physical simulation of thin shells--flexible surfaces such as air bags, biological membranes, and textiles, with pervasive applications in automotive design, biomedical device optimization, and feature film production. The work will focus on qualitatively-accurate, but not precise, simulation. The research will yield novel methods that quickly but coarsely resolve the physics, skipping over irrelevant data to capture only the coarse variables that drive design decisions. The project will train young scientists with a deep understanding of computation, mathematics, and application domain areas��despite being in high demand, this combination of skills remains rare. A technical goal of this project is to develop a principled, methodical approach to coarsening an existing discrete geometric model of a mechanical system, using adaptive, multiresolution decompositions. Whereas adaptivity is commonly studied in the context of error estimators for mesh refinement, interactivity suggests a focus on how best to give up precision in a simulation. Therefore, this research will (i) build on early work in the field of discrete differential geometry to formulate coarse geometric representations of physical systems that preserve key geometric and physical invariants, (ii) investigate the convergence, resolution- and meshing-dependence of discrete differential operators, and (iii) contribute toward a software platform for interactive design space exploration with concrete applications in automotive, biomedical, and feature-film engineering.

Prof. Shortliffe to become Dean of University of Arizona College of Medicine - Phoenix

Tue, 20 Feb 2007 15:56:33 EDT

Prof. Shortliffe's is a professor in the departments of medicine and of computer science at Columbia as well as chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons.

Prof. Jebara receives grant to match data from heterogeneous databases

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 20:37:18 EDT

The research proposal explores matching, b-matching and permutation within statistical learning, for applications including constraining social networks using graphs and b-matchings, visualizing large social networks, minimum volume embedding and merging social networks across heterogeneous databases. The applications will be explored via several novel algorithms and scientifically advance the areas of b-matching, permutation, metric learning, structured prediction, invariance and graph embedding.

Prof. Servedio to participate in DARPA Computer Science Study Panel

Wed, 10 Jan 2007 09:32:43 EDT

The objective of the Computer Science Study Panel is to rapidly identify ideas in the field of computer science that will provide revolutionary advances, rather than incremental benefit, to the Department of Defense. Areas of special interest include pattern recognition, computer vision, probabilistic reasoning, biologically inspired exploitation, abnormal behavior analysis, cognitive psychology, machine learning, and other advanced disciplines in computer science. Participation in the panel, which lasts for one year, involves travel throughout the United States to government and industry sites. Panelists are eligible to submit a proposal for a Year 2 Computer Science Research Project. Prof. Servedio specializes in machine learning.

Profs. Keromytis and Stolfo to investigate protection of software system with Google Research Award

Tue, 09 Jan 2007 22:00:58 EDT

Application Communities is a new paradigm for protecting software systems. Community members running independent instances of the same application will continuously exchange information that allows them to collectively identify new faults and attacks (collaborative monitoring), and to automatically develop, test and apply fixes (heal). The PIs propose to apply these techniques to the problem of detecting new web-bourne malware (e.g., malicious attachments or active content) through a collaborative method that utilizes (a) the users' actions (to drive the browsers and "explore" new pages, in a manner similar to but more comprehensive and less error-prone than other proposed work that uses automated web-crawlers to scan suspicious web sites), (b) new detectors that are either already running on the users' systems (e.g., a host-based anomaly detector) or are easily deployable over the web, (c) a browser extension that communicates with Google to send information about locally found anomalies and to receive information about the threat-level ("maliciousness") of content downloaded or about-to-be downloaded from the web, and (d) Google itself, as the broker of said information. In addition, Google or a third party can act as the "validator" of alerts, using techniques the PIs have developed for protection of servers, albeit applied to the desktop/browser environment.

Prof. Carloni wins NSF CAREER award to study communication-based design methodology for distributed embedded systems

Tue, 19 Dec 2006 08:50:52 EDT

The grant is titled "Integrating Control, Computation, and Communication - A Design Automation Flow for Distributed Embedded Systems". Steady advances in such enabling technologies as semiconductor circuits, wireless networking, and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) are making possible the design of complex distributed (networked) embedded systems that could benefit several application areas such as public infrastructure, industrial automation, automotive industry, and consumer electronics. However, the heterogeneous and distributed nature of many such systems requires design teams with a composite skill set spanning automatic control, communication networks, and hardware/software computational systems. Computer-aided design, a traditionally interdisciplinary research area, will be instrumental in making these systems feasible and in enhancing the productivity of the design process. The grant will allow the PI to develop new modeling techniques, optimization algorithms, ommunication protocols and interface processes that combined will yield a novel 'design automation flow for distributed embedded-control applications' such as automotive ``X-by-wire systems'' and integrated buildings. The goal is to enable the integrated design and validation of these systems while assisting the typically multidisciplinary engineering teams that are building them. Intermediate contributions include methods for the robust deployment of real-time embedded software on distributed architectures and for the synthesis of a distributed implementation of an embedded control application where performance requirements are met while the usage of communication and computational resources is well-balanced. The education plan is motivated by the belief that the academic curricula for both computer and electrical engineers need to be updated in order to overcome the artificial and historical boundaries among those disciplines in electrical engineering and computer science that lie at the core of embedded computing.

Adam Aviv honored with Computing Research Association's Outstanding Undergraduate Award

Thu, 30 Nov 2006 14:21:14 EDT

Each year, the CRA selects outstanding undergraduates based on nominations from Departments across the United States and Canada. This year, there were about 65 winners, including honorable mentions.

Dean Zvi Galil to become President of Tel Aviv University

Sat, 11 Nov 2006 23:16:06 EDT

He earned his undergraduate degree at Tel Aviv University and began his teaching career at Tel Aviv University in 1976. Prof. Galil was chair of the Department of Computer Science at Columbia from 1989 to 1994 before becoming Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science in 1995.

Seung Geol Choi wins best student-paper award at International Workshop on Security

Fri, 10 Nov 2006 15:54:08 EDT

The paper is titled "Short Traceable Signatures Based on Bilinear Pairings".

Steven Bellovin to Receive NIST/NSA Security Award

Sat, 04 Nov 2006 23:21:09 EDT

The prestigious honor, first awarded in 1988, recognizes individuals for scientific or technological breakthroughs, outstanding leadership, highly distinguished authorship or significant long-term contributions in the computer security field. Bellovin, currently a professor of computer science at Columbia University, was one of the originators of USENET as a graduate student at the University of North Carolina in the late 1970s. During more than 20 years of research at Bell Labs and AT&T Labs Research, Bellovin was one of the first researchers to recognize the importance of firewalls to network security, explore protocol failures, discuss routing security and utilize encrypted key exchange protocols. Bellovin has served on numerous National Research Council computer security committees, was an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) security director from 2002-2004, and was a member of the now-defunct Department of Homeland Security's Science and Technology Advisory Board. He is the co-author of "Firewalls and Internet Security: Repelling the Wily Hacker," and holds several patents on cryptographic and network protocols. [quoted from the ACSAC announcement]

Prof. Nowick receives grant to design asynchronous interconnect fabrics for parallel processors

Tue, 24 Oct 2006 23:00:27 EDT

The proposal is titled "Designing a Flexible High-Throughput Asynchronous Interconnect Fabric for Future Single-Chip Parallel Processors". The goal is to design a high-throughput, flexible and low-power digital fabric for future desktop parallel processors, e.g., those with 64+ processors per chip. The fabric will be designed using high-speed asynchronous pipelines, handling the communication between synchronous processor cores and distributed memory. The asynchrony of the fabric will facilitate lower power, handling of heterogeneous interfaces, and high access rates (with fine-grained pipelining). This work is in collaboration with the parallel processing and CAD groups at the University of Maryland, including Prof. Uzi Vishkin.

Department recruiting faculty in Computer Engineering and Software Systems

Mon, 23 Oct 2006 19:53:51 EDT

The Department of Computer Science is seeking applicants for two tenure-track positions at either the junior or senior level, one each in computer engineering and software systems. Applicants should have a Ph.D. in a relevant field, and have demonstrated excellence in research and the potential for leadership in the field. Senior applicants should also have demonstrated excellence in teaching and continued strong leadership in research.

Our department of 32 tenure-track faculty and 2 lecturers attracts excellent Ph.D. students, virtually all of whom are fully supported by research grants. The department has close ties to the nearby research laboratories of AT&T, IBM (T.J. Watson), Lucent, NEC, Siemens, Telcordia Technologies and Verizon, as well as to a number of major companies including financial companies of Wall Street. Columbia University is one of the leading research universities in the United States, and New York City is one of the cultural, financial, and communications capitals of the world. Columbia's tree-lined campus is located in Morningside Heights on the Upper West Side.

Applicants should submit summaries of research and teaching interests, CV, email address, and the names and email addresses of at least three references by filing an online application at www.cs.columbia.edu/recruit. Review of applications will begin on January 1, 2007.

Columbia University is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer. We encourage applications from women and minorities.

Prof. Carloni to Contribute to Gigascale System Research Center

Tue, 17 Oct 2006 13:27:45 EDT

The Microelectronics Advanced Research Corporation (MARCO) funds and operates university-based research centers in microelectronics technology. Its charter initiative, the Focus Center Research Program (FCRP), is designed to expand pre-competitive, cooperative, long-range applied microelectronics research at U.S. universities. Each Focus Center targets research in a particular area of expertise. The GSRC Focus Center brings together 41 faculty from 17 American universities to focus on pertinent problems the semiconductor industry faces in the next decade in the areas of system design, integration, test, and verification. The GSRC web site is http://www.gigascale.org/; the MARCO web site is http://fcrp.src.org/.

Prof. Allen to participate in building anthropomorphic prosthetic arm

Tue, 10 Oct 2006 23:10:10 EDT

The team includes researchers from the University of Pittsburth, University of Minnesota, CMU, Arizona State University and Columbia University. The goal of this project is to build and demonstrate an anthropomorphic prosthetic arm and hand that is controlled by cortical output.

Prof. Grinspun receives best paper award at Eurographics

Mon, 25 Sep 2006 15:39:28 EDT

Eurographics considered 246 submitted papers, and accepted 42.

Jackson Liscombe wins Best Student Paper award at INTERSPEECH 2006

Mon, 25 Sep 2006 15:34:56 EDT

INTERSPEECH is the annual conference of the International Speech Communication Association (http://www.isca-speech.org), which has about 1500 members. The conference is held annually, this year in Pittsburgh. There are usually about 1100 attendees and approximately 1000 submissions. ISCA is one of the major speech science and technology organizations internationally.

Prof. Grinspun awarded NSF grant to develop parallel architectures for interactive scientific computing

Sat, 16 Sep 2006 11:43:14 EDT

Scientists and engineers are increasingly interested in conducting computational studies comprising large numbers of computational experiments (runs of simulation software) in domains ranging from automotive design-space exploration to biomedical device optimization and customization. Most such studies require interactivity, with the user continuously monitoring and steering how the study unfolds, based on partial results. This project develops foundations for a system that facilitates interactive computational studies involving a multitude of simulation experiments. The researchers specifically target engineering design applications, focusing on small-to-medium size simulation problems running on tightly-coupled parallel machines. Specific points of focus include (1) higher-level user control of the overall study (as opposed to individual experiments); (2) reuse of data from prior experiments in carrying forward new computations; (3) dynamic management of system resources by relying on a tighter coupling between application and system software; and (4) software reuse based on common component architecture (CCA) compliance and standardization of a more permeable system-/solver-level interface. The architecture will be evaluated on real-world biomedical applications, with a specific focus on natural incorporation of existing simulation, solver, and domain-specific codes. Prof. Eitan Grinspun (Columbia) brings expertise in adaptive multiresolution methods for physical simulation, working as part of a team led by NYU. Prof. Vijay Karamcheti (NYU) offers expertise in application-aware mechanisms for parallel computing, and Prof. Denis Zorin (NYU) provides expertise in interactive geometric modeling and simulation. Finally, Prof. Steve Parker (Utah) brings his expertise in the development of the SCIRun and SCIRun2 platforms for scientific computing.

Prof. Bellovin and Schulzrinne to participate in International Technology Alliance

Fri, 11 Aug 2006 15:51:45 EDT

The alliance will perform research in the four areas of network theory, security across system of systems, sensor information processing and delivery and distributed coalition planning and decision making.

Alex Haubold wins best-poster award at multimedia conference

Sun, 16 Jul 2006 22:30:25 EDT

This annual conference, one of the most significant and largest in the area of multimedia, featured over 270 posters. Alex, who is Prof. John Kender's student, won for his paper reporting on research he did as part of his IBM internship last summer: "Semantic Multimedia Retrieval using Lexical Query Expansion and Model-Based Reranking".

Profs. Stolfo, Keromytis and Kaiser win NSF CyberTrust grant to study collaborative self-healing systems

Thu, 13 Jul 2006 10:16:49 EDT

Collaborative Self-healing Systems (COSS) is a new paradigm for protecting software systems. Software monocultures are widely used applications that share common vulnerabilities. Hence, any attack that exploits one instance of a vulnerable application provides the means for wide-spread damage. The emerging concept of collaborative security, wherein independent but cooperative entities form a group to improve their individual security, provides the opportunity to exploit the homogeneity of a software monoculture for collective and mutual protection. Monocultures can be leveraged to improve an application�s overall security and reliability. COSS members running independent instances of the same application will continuously exchange information that allows them to collectively identify new application faults and attacks (collaborative monitoring), identify the core vulnerability shared by all instances of the application (vulnerability identification), and to automatically develop, test and apply fixes (heal the application). Identifying the application vulnerability requires potentially substantial costs in instrumentation and monitoring in each application instance. We leverage the size of a COSS to amortize the cost of monitoring the application�s behavior on a per-instance basis by distributing the monitoring task across a large population; each instance only monitors a portion of the common application but collectively the entire application is covered. COSS may be viewed as a large-scale, diverse software-testing facility that allows its members to identify how a potentially large and complex host application behaves at a very fine level of granularity. This project develops, prototypes and evaluates technologies for automatically building collaborative, self-securing software systems, enabling reliable and secure commodity software.

Prof. Misra and Rubenstein obtain NSF CyberTrust grant to study routing security

Sun, 09 Jul 2006 08:12:08 EDT

The grant extends over three years and is entitled "Understanding Control Plane Security: The Method of Strong Detection". The research seeks to further development of a methodology for measuring the inherent security of the control plane component of existing and future network routing protocols. The approach has a significant theoretical component: it looks at general classes of routing protocols and show how they can be analyzed for their ability to monitor themselves. It uses our proposed technique of Strong Detection to reveal bounds on the kinds of errors that these classes of routing protocols can detect. Hence, the research will be identifying complexity classes of routing protocols in terms of their self-monitoring abilities.

Prof. Schulzrinne receives grant to study VoIP spam

Sat, 08 Jul 2006 12:06:45 EDT

The research will focus on using trust paths to determine whether unknown callers are likely to be telemarketers or other spammers. Trust paths capture transitive trust in a friend-of-a-friend model, with trust established by having a person send email or call another person. Such trust paths are suitable for low-risk decisions, such as whether to accept an email or phone call, rather than high-risk decisions such as whether to loan money or reveal private information.

Alp Atici and Prof. Servedio win best paper award at learning theory conference

Wed, 05 Jul 2006 22:46:30 EDT

This award is given to the best student paper at the conference; the award is for the paper "Learning Unions of omega(1)-Dimensional Rectangles" which is co-authored by Prof. Rocco Servedio. The E. M. Gold Award comes with a scholarship of approximately 550 Euros.

Prof. Kender to participate in DTO project to analyze news broadcasts

Tue, 20 Jun 2006 21:20:38 EDT

The project pursues research on statistical modeling techniques that will characterize video contents in large semantic spaces, using open source international news broadcasts. It emphasizes cross-domain and cross-cultural scalability, faster than real-time performance, and the exploitation of the temporal evolutionary aspects of video contents. It will build a retrieval workbench with video mining, topic tracking, and cross-linking capabilities, along with other video understanding services.

Profs. Nieh and Hirschberg receive IBM Faculty Award

Wed, 14 Jun 2006 12:05:08 EDT

Prof. Julia Hirschberg and Prof. Jason Nieh received the IBM Faculty Award for 2006.

Profs. Misra, Rubenstein, Coffman and colleagues win NSF grant to study adaptive sharing mechanisms

Mon, 12 Jun 2006 20:45:56 EDT

A wide variety of systems, including web farms, virtual machines, multi-tasking OSes, GRID computing systems, and sensor networks improve their accessibility, availability, resilience and fairness by �sharing� resources across the consumers they support. However, research that explores how to share resources generally derives point solutions, where different resource/consumer configurations require separately-designed sharing mechanisms. For instance, a scheduler often has implemented separately a single policy (e.g., FCFS, PS, FBPS, SPRT) optimized for a particular load setting, and cannot easily be switched to another policy when the situation changes. This project seeks to develop and analyze Adaptive Sharing Mechanisms (ASMs) in which the mechanism used to share resources adapts dynamically to both the set of available resources and the current needs of the consumers, such that the system is truly autonomic. We initiate our study with a modularization of the ASM into separate components, and then study the various components using both cutting edge novel control theoretic and scheduling analyses. The study ends with prototype and testing ASMs within a server farm environment. The grant extends over three years and is part of the NSF Computer Systems Research (CSR) program. Only approximately 10% of all grant applications were funded.

Prof. Malkin gives distinguished lecture at UT Austin

Sun, 11 Jun 2006 17:23:45 EDT

The talk discussed Prof. Malkin's ongoing research program, expanding the traditional foundations of cryptography to withstand stronger attacks which are more appropriate in light of the way cryptography is used today. In particular, her research rigorously addresses cryptographic applications used in a complex and vulnerable environment such as the Internet, or on small portable devices, where a variety of new, powerful and unexpected attacks become possible. The talk took place in December 2005.

NYSTAR supports Prof. Stolfo to analyze social networks and document flow

Sun, 11 Jun 2006 17:21:31 EDT

The goals of the project are to identify anomalous events worthy of investigation, as well as the identification users who exhibit potential insider threats. The award initiates research in the IDS lab that has also been proposed to other agencies for joint support with two companies, Symantec and Secure Decisions, Inc. The project starts in June 2006 and lasts for 6 months.

Prof. Stolfo to investigate malware detection with help of Disruptive Technology Office (DTO)

Sun, 11 Jun 2006 17:19:28 EDT

Stealthy malware is considered the next wave of serious security threat whereby unknown vulnerabilities in common COTS word processing software is used to deliver malcode that is beyond the reach of the detection capabilities of standard Anti-virus scanners. The research focuses on methods to identify anomalous data embedded within documents. The grant was awarded in January of 2006.

Prof. Stolfo wins grant to investigate insider threats and network anomalys

Sun, 11 Jun 2006 16:53:42 EDT

This grant extends a previous ARO grant for research into Counter Evasion techniques. The objectives of the grant are to investigate techniques for the rapid exchange of security alert information among thousands of computers that sense anomalous network events. The rapid sharing of information may provide for the early detection of targeted attacks, including attacks that are sourced inside the defended network. Other techniques are investigated to profile the typical behavior of users within the network, in order to detect anomalous activities indicating the onset of an insider attack. The Army Research Office (ARO) awarded the grant under a MIPR with the NSA. The projects started in May 2006 and lasts for approximately 40 months.

Profs. Bellovin, Keromytis and Stolfo funded to study large-scale systems security

Sun, 11 Jun 2006 16:47:43 EDT

The objective of the research is to investigate novel techniques to secure networks of hundreds to thousands of commodity computers using automated patch generation, patch distribution management, distributed and dynamic firewalls, advanced content-based anomaly detectors and artificial diversity for collaborative security. The Disruptive Technology Office (DTO, formerly ARDA) awarded the grant, while AFRL provides grant administration. The grant duration is 18 months.

Prof. Malkin wins NSF CAREER award

Sun, 11 Jun 2006 16:35:10 EDT

The project challenges the traditional cryptographic assumptions about the limitations of the adversary, such as the assumption that the adversary has no access whatsoever to the legitimate parties' secret keys. The project will investigate the strongest existing models, design new models, develop protocols, and explore the limits of what is possible to achieve, for several types of strong and realistic attacks, including chosen ciphertext attack, key tampering attacks, and key exposure attacks.

Prof. Malkin awarded grant to study key-evolving signatures

Sun, 11 Jun 2006 13:12:37 EDT

Digital signatures play an essential role in securing financial Internet transactions, including private and authenticated communication, electronic commerce and other applications. However, all signature-based systems are vulnerable to the key exposure problem, which in practice is a far more likely cause of compromise than cryptanalysis. The objective of the project is to investigate the feasibility, performance, and correct use of key-evolving signatures, a new type of signatures which has recently emerged in the cryptographic community as a potentially realistic way to mitigate key exposure attacks. In particular, the project will study intrusion resilient signatures, the strongest key-evolving mechanism to date, which allows to contain the damage to a single time period, with no other consequences for earlier or later uses of the key.

Prof. Malkin receives grant to study web server security

Sun, 11 Jun 2006 13:09:09 EDT

The SSL/TLS protocols are used to ensure integrity of on-line financial transactions, establishing a "secure connection" between the consumer (or client) and the financial institution (or server). The goal of the project is to analyze whether and how often best practices are being used in current Internet transactions, by sampling a set of well known and less well known secure servers and exposing common weaknesses and pitfalls. In the process, the project will also develop and release a toolkit for probing and testing the security of these servers.

Prof. Gravano and students win SIGMOD best-paper award

Fri, 26 May 2006 21:11:15 EDT

Panos Ipeirotis and Eugene Agichtein are CS PhD alumni, and Pranay Jain is a graduating MS student. SIGMOD is one of two premier database conferences; SIGMOD 2006 received 446 research paper submissions, out of which 58 (or 13%) were accepted for publication.

The paper puts text-searching and crawling on a sound foundation. Text is ubiquitous and, not surprisingly, many important applications rely on textual data for a variety of tasks. As a notable example, information extraction applications derive structured relations from unstructured text; as another example, focused crawlers explore the web to locate pages about specific topics. Execution plans for text-centric tasks follow two general paradigms for processing a text database: either they scan, or "crawl," the text database or, alternatively, they exploit search engine indexes and retrieve the documents of interest via carefully crafted queries constructed in task-specific ways. The choice between crawl- and query-based execution plans can have a substantial impact on both execution time and output "completeness" (e.g., in terms of recall). Nevertheless, this choice is typically ad-hoc and based on heuristics or plain intuition. This paper presents fundamental building blocks to make the choice of execution plans for text-centric tasks in an informed, cost-based way. Towards this goal, the paper shows how to analyze query- and crawl-based plans in terms of both execution time and output completeness. The paper adapts results from random-graph theory and statistics to develop a rigorous cost model for the execution plans. This cost model reflects the fact that the performance of the plans depends on fundamental task-specific properties of the underlying text databases. The paper identifies these properties and presents efficient techniques for estimating the associated parameters of the cost model. Overall, the paper's approach helps predict the most appropriate execution plans for a task, resulting in significant efficiency and output completeness benefits.

Prof. Carloni awarded NSF grant to study communication networks for multi-core systems-on-chip

Mon, 22 May 2006 23:12:17 EDT

During the past decade, interconnects have replaced transistors as the dominant determiner of integrated circuit performance by imposing primary limits on latency, energy dissipation, signal integrity and design productivity for giga-scale systems integration. Scalable networks made of carefully-engineered links are expected to replace traditional on-chip communication schemes by providing higher bandwidth with lower power dissipation. Further, on-chip networks offer the opportunity to mitigate the complexity of system-on-chip design by facilitating the assembling of multiple processing cores through the emergence of standards for communication protocols and network access points. This project will investigate the design of low-power scalable on-chip networks for multi-core systems-on-chip by combining a new low-latency, low-energy, current-mode signalling techniques with the design of latency-insensitive protocols extended to support fault-tolerant mechanisms.

The project is funded by the NSF Foundations of Computing Processes and Artifacts (CPA) Cluster. In 2005 the NSF CPA cluster received 532 proposals and funded approximately 10% of them.

The NSF CPA cluster supports research and education projects to advance formalisms and methodologies pertaining to the artifacts and processes for building computing and communication systems. Areas of interest include: topics in software engineering such as software design methodologies, tools for software testing, analysis, synthesis, and verification; semantics, design, and implementation of programming languages; software systems and tools for reliable and high performance computing; computer architectures including memory and I/O subsystems, micro-architectural techniques, and application-specific architectures; system-on-a-chip; performance metrics and evaluation tools; VLSI electronic design and pertinent analysis, synthesis and simulation algorithms; architecture and design for mixed media or future media (e.g., MEMs and nanotechnology); computer graphics and visualization techniques.

Prof. Edwards wins NSF grant to develop embedded systems environment with deterministic concurrency

Fri, 19 May 2006 20:24:39 EDT

Prof. Edwards proposes to create the SHIM (software/hardware integration medium) development environment for the software in next-generation embedded systems. It will improve designer productivity by making it easier to design correct systems and will facilitate architectural exploration by providing automatic software synthesis.

The SHIM model of computation provides deterministic concurrency with reliable communication, simplifying validation because behavior is reproducible. Based on asynchronous concurrent processes that communicate through rendezvous channels, SHIM can handle control,multi- and variable-rate dataflow, and data-dependent decisions. The components consist of a high-level language based on SHIM, an efficient simulator for SHIM, a software synthesis system that generates C, a formal analysis tool for SHIM and libraries for the SHIM environment.

Prof. Hirschberg wins NSF grant to study rhythm and intonation in language learning

Mon, 15 May 2006 14:20:48 EDT

Prosody is an integral part of human communication, but one that second language (L2) learners rarely learn. Topic shifts, contrastive focus, and even simple question/statement distinctions, cannot be recognized or produced in many languages without an understanding of their prosody. However, 'translating' between the prosody of one language and that of another is a little-studied phenomenon. This research addresses the 'prosody translation' problem for Mandarin Chinese and English L2 learners by identifying correspondences between prosodic phenomena in each language that convey similar meanings. The work is based on comparisons of L1 and L2 prosodic phenomena and the meanings they convey. Computational models of prosodic variation suitable for representing these phenomena in each language are constructed from data collected in the laboratory, with results tested on L1 and L2 subjects. The models are tested in an interactive tutoring system which takes an adaptive, self-paced approach to prosody tutoring. This system modifies training and testing examples automatically by imcremental enhancement of distinctive prosodic features in response to student performance. The success of the system is evaluated via longitudinal studies of L2 students of both languages to see whether the new techniques improve students' ability to recognize and produce L2 prosodic variation. By providing a method and computational support for prosody tutoring, this work will not only enable students to attain more native-like fluency but it will provide a model for training students in other pragmatic language phenomena --- beyond learning the words and the syntax of a new language.

Prof. Ross awarded grant to study database systems software on modern processors

Sat, 13 May 2006 14:48:46 EDT

This project, titled "Cache-Aware Database Systems on Modern Multithreading Processors", studies how to best utilize the resources available in modern processors in the development of database system software. A primary objective is avoiding cache interference between threads in multithreaded and multi-core processors, so that performance scales well as the number of cores/threads increases. A variety of techniques are considered, including multi-threaded algorithm design, threads explicitly devoted to resource management, and scheduling algorithms that are aware of thread interference patterns. Simulations and implementations on real hardware are used to measure the effectiveness of each approach.

The project will result in the development of algorithms designed for the global management (and minimization) of processor- and memory-related delays in database systems. Performance improvements would enhance the experience of database system users, and reduce hardware requirements for a given level of performance. Project-related information can be found at http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~kar/fastqueryproj.html

This project was one of only eleven funded in the Database Management Systems program in 2006 and lasts through August 2008.

PhD alumni Regina Barzilay wins Microsoft New Faculty Fellowship

Mon, 01 May 2006 20:14:10 EDT

"Research today named the five newest members of its highly prestigious Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellowship Program. Because new faculty members are essential to the future of academic computing, Microsoft Research honors early-career professors who demonstrate the drive and creativity to develop original research while continually advancing the state of the art of computing." "Regina Barzilay, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Barzilay is up to the challenge. She is focusing her research on computational modeling of linguistic phenomena. She is exploring the ability of a computer to summarize information found in multiple documents that contain related information, such as news articles covering the same event. This will help readers find meaning in the ever-increasing body of information available today." Prof. Barzilay graduated from Columbia University in 2002, where she was advised by Prof. McKeown.

Prof. Nayar named as 2006 Great Teacher

Mon, 01 May 2006 17:56:12 EDT

The award is bestowed by the Society of Columbia Graduates. Its Board of Directors has named Prof. Nayar for this award because it feels that he exemplifies the greatest traditions of teaching at Columbia and have earned the recognition of his students and his peers as a dedicated and inspired undergraduate teacher and mentor. As one of the Society�s Great Teachers, he will join the ranks of Columbia�s finest and most beloved professors, such as Mark Van Doren, Lionel Trilling, Mario Salvadori, Morton Friedman, Rene Testa, and others. The Great Teachers Award Dinner will be held in Low Library on the evening of Thursday, October 19, 2006. The Society was formed in 1909, and it will soon be celebrating its own 100 year anniversary. Throughout much of its existence, the Society�s principal mission has been to recognize great service to Columbia by its alumni and by its faculty.

CS grad students and Prof. Servedio win best paper award at COLT 2006

Tue, 25 Apr 2006 15:15:45 EDT

Homin Lee and Andrew Wan will receive the Mark Fulk Best Student Paper award at the 19th Annual Conference on Learning Theory (COLT 2006), held in Pittsburgh, PA, in July. The award is for their paper titled "DNF are Teachable in the Average Case," which is joint work with Rocco Servedio. COLT is the top conference in computational learning theory, with more than 100 papers submitted per year for the last several years.

Profs. Keromytis and Stolfo win DARPA grant for securing mobile ad-hoc networks

Sun, 16 Apr 2006 10:40:22 EDT

Through this grant, they will develop a new, behavior-based mechanism for authenticating and authorizing new nodes in wireless MANETs. Rather than only granting access to a network, or to services on a network, by means of an authenticated identity or a qualified role, we propose to require nodes to also exchange a model of their behavior to grant access and to assess the legitimacy of their subsequent communication. When a node requests access, it provides its pre-computed egress behavior model to another node who may grant it access to some service. The receiver compares the requestor's egress model to its own ingress model to determine whether the new device conforms to its expected behavior. Access rights are thus granted or denied based upon the level of agreement between the two models, and the level of risk the recipient is willing to manage. The second use of the exchanged models is to validate active communication after access has been granted. As a result, MANET nodes, will have greater confidence that a new node is not malicious; if an already admitted node starts misbehaving, other MANET nodes will quickly detect and evict it.

Prof. Jebara receives grant to use learning to match people, multimedia and graphs via permutation

Sat, 08 Apr 2006 23:39:34 EDT

This proposal undertakes a novel research direction that explores matching and permutation within statistical learning. These research tools have applications in national security as a way to identify and match people from text and multimedia and discover links between them. More specifically, this proposal addresses the following key application areas: Matching authors: permutational clustering methods and permutationally invariant kernels are used to compute the likelihood the same person wrote a given publication or text. Matching text and multimedia documents: permutational algorithms and permutationally invariant kernels to perform text, image and word matchings of descriptions of people to known individuals in a database. Matching social networks and graphs: social network matching tools from permutational algorithms which find a subnetwork in a larger network that has a desired topology.

Columbia's Computer Graphics dominates SIGGRAPH conference

Sat, 08 Apr 2006 23:35:46 EDT

SIGGRAPH is the most prestigious conference for computer graphics, with the 2006 conference to take place in Boston, Massachusetts in August 2006. A total of 86 papers were accepted from 474 submissions. Authors from Columbia University include Prof. Ramamoorthi, Prof. Nayar, Prof. Grinspun, and Prof. Belhumeur, along with their graduate students. More information about the Columbia Vision + Graphics Center can be found at http://www.cs.columbia.edu/cvgc/

Alumni Simon Lok to be honored at Urban Visionaries Dinner

Fri, 17 Feb 2006 20:52:29 EDT

The dinner "Honor[s] distinguished figures whose outstanding contributions to city life exemplify the values championed by The Cooper Union."

Rean Griffith wins IBM PhD fellowship

Sat, 11 Feb 2006 11:58:55 EDT

Rean Griffth is a 7th semester PhD student who had previously received his MS at Columbia and his BS from the University of the West Indies, Barbados, and has worked as an intern the past two summers at IBM Almaden as well as at Microsoft. He has to date published or had accepted for publication half a dozen papers joint with IBM Watson researchers, including an IEEE Transactions journal article and a book chapter in a forthcoming CRC Autonomic Computing 'handbook'. His tentative thesis proposal title is "An Approach to Retro-fitting and Evaluating the Self-Healing Capabilities of Legacy Systems". He expects to propose later this spring. Rean's thesis topic concerns developing technologies to dynamically inject self-healing capabilities into legacy software systems without available source code, to perform adaptations while those systems continue running, and devising benchmarks to qualitatively and quantitatively compare alternative autonomic self-healing algorithms that can be injected in in this fashion. As stated by the IBM Ph.D. Fellowship Program, "Award Recipients are selected based on their overall potential for research excellence, the degree to which their technical interests align with those of IBM, and their progress to-date, as evidenced by publications and endorsements from their faculty advisor and department head."

Regina Barzilay (PhD'02) among IEEE Intelligent Systems "Ten to Watch"

Wed, 25 Jan 2006 10:58:24 EDT

The article states: "IEEE Intelligent Systems is pleased to announce that we have completed the selection of our first ever 'IEEE IS Ten to Watch' awardees to be included in a �AI Ten to Watch� article which will be featured in a forthcoming special issue we are publishing to coincide with the 50th Anniversary of the Dartmouth Workshop (generally considered the birthplace of modern AI). Nominations of the top AI researchers to have received their PhD in the past few years were solicited from a wide range of well-known AI researchers and department chairs. We received over 50 nominations from the US, Europe and Asia, and a committee of senior members of the IEEE Intelligent Systems Advisory Board picked the top ten. All the nominees were eminently qualified and doing exciting work, and the ten winners represent the very best of the field of AI."

Prof. Keromytis wins NSF grant to investigate flow-based computing

Tue, 03 Jan 2006 04:31:39 EDT

The project will explore a new operating system architecture that removes the memory and CPU from the data path of applications that handle high-bandwidth data flows (e.g., multimedia servers). The role of the OS becomes that of a data-flow manager, while applications are concerned purely with signaling. This design parallels the evolution of modern network routers and has the potential to enable high-performance I/O in current and next generation computer systems, while also exploiting recent trends toward programmable peripheral devices. Such devices are composed into virtual processing pipelines, completely removing the CPU and main memory from data-intensive tasks that can be offloaded. Our architecture abandons the concept of memory-centric computing, which has been a mainstay of computer science education and practice since its inception.

Shaya Potter and Prof. Nieh win Best Paper award at LISA 2005

Mon, 12 Dec 2005 21:33:20 EDT

Shaya Potter and Jason Nieh received the Best Student Paper Award at the 19th Large Installation System Administration Conference (LISA 2005) held last week in San Diego, CA for their paper titled: "Reducing Downtime Due to System Maintenance and Upgrades".

Prof. Schulzrinne named IEEE Fellow

Tue, 29 Nov 2005 19:47:18 EDT

Prof. Henning Schulzrinne was elected to the grade of IEEE Fellow "for contributions to the design of protocols, applications, and algorithms for Internet multimedia."

Claire Lackner and Catherine Lennon honored by Computing Research Association

Tue, 29 Nov 2005 19:40:15 EDT

Claire Lackner and Catherine Lennon are both students in Columbia College.

Prof. Yannakakis receives Knuth Prize

Fri, 28 Oct 2005 10:02:33 EDT

The Donald E. Knuth prize for outstanding contributions to the foundations of computer science is awarded every 1.5 years by the ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computing Theory (SIGACT) and the IEEE Technical Committee on the Mathematical Foundations of Computing. The Prize includes a $5000 award and a $1000 travel stipend (for travel to the award ceremony) paid by ACM SIGACT and IEEE TCMFC. The Prize is awarded for major research accomplishments and contributions to the foundations of computer science over an extended period of time. The Prize is named in honor and recognition of the extraordinary accomplishments of Prof. Donald Knuth, Emeritus at Stanford University. Prof. Knuth is best known for his ongoing multivolume series, The Art of Computer Programming, which played a critical role in establishing and defining Computer Science as a rigorous, intellectual discipline. Prof. Knuth has also made fundamental contributions to the subfields of analysis of algorithms, compilers, string matching, term rewriting systems, literate programming, and typography. His TeX and MF systems are widely accepted as standards for electronic typesetting. Prof. Knuth's work is distinguished by its integration of theoretical analyses and practical real-world concerns. In his work, theory and practice are not separate components of Computer Science, but rather he shows them to be inexorably linked branches of the same whole.

Ph.D. Student Matei Ciocarlie Wins $5,000 in 3D Vision Contest

Mon, 24 Oct 2005 14:55:16 EDT

Ph.D. Student Matei Ciocarlie from the Columbia Robotics Lab was chosen as the second place winner in the CanestaVision 3D Vision Contest The prize includes a $5,000 cash award and an electronic perception development kit worth $7,000. Matei's entry was a real-time "Eye-in-Hand" range sensor for robotic grasping. Matei was one of ten finalists, who were then given 6 months to develop their 3D vision application. Congratulations to Matei!

Columbia Robotics Lab receives Grant to Develop Insertable Cameras for Minimally Invasive Surgery

Mon, 24 Oct 2005 14:16:41 EDT

Peter Allen and Dennis Fowler M.D, Surgery have received a 2 year $425K NIH Exploratory/Developmental Research Grant for Insertable Imaging and Effector Platforms for Surgery. The grant is to construct small, mobile, multi-function platforms that can be placed inside a body cavity to perform robotic minimal access surgery. The robot will be based upon an existing prototype device developed at the Columbia Robotics Lab.

Department recruiting in computational biology and software systems

Sat, 22 Oct 2005 16:39:39 EDT

Our department of 32 tenure-track faculty and 3 lecturers attracts excellent Ph.D. students, virtually all of whom are fully supported by research grants. Our department maintains close ties with other on-campus research centers that are actively involved in computational biology including the Center for Computational Learning Systems, the Department of Biomedical Informatics, and the Columbia Genome Center. We also have close ties to the nearby research laboratories of AT&T, IBM, Lucent, Siemens, Verizon, Telcordia Technologies, NEC, and other leading industrial companies including the financial companies of Wall Street. Columbia University is one of the leading research universities in the United States, and New York City is one of the cultural, financial, and communications capitals of the world. Columbia's campus is located in Morningside Heights on the Upper West Side.

Note that the computer engineering position has a starting date of January 2007.

Columbia University is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer. We encourage applications from women and minorities.

Bill Gates visits Columbia

Fri, 14 Oct 2005 17:52:31 EDT

Bill Gates' presentation can be viewed at http://www.microsoft.com/events/executives/billgates.mspx

NIH funds National Center for Multi-Scale Study of Cellular Networks at Columbia University

Fri, 30 Sep 2005 21:54:08 EDT

Funded through the National Centers for Biomedical Computing (NCBC) program, a component of the National Institutes of Health Roadmap for Medical Research, the National Center for the Multiscale Analysis of Genomic and Cellular Networks (MAGNet) will address this challenge through the application of both knowledge-based and physics-based methods. The Center will provide an integrative computational framework to organize molecular interactions in the cell into manageable context dependent components. Furthermore, it will develop a variety of interoperable computational models and tools that can leverage such a map of cellular interactions to elucidate important biological processes and to address a variety of biomedical applications. Details about MAGNet can be found at http://magnet.c2b2.columbia.edu/index.html

Prof. Malkin's work featured in congressional testimony

Fri, 23 Sep 2005 23:24:42 EDT

Part of the testimony read: "The most pertinent is a project undertaken by Dr. Tal Malkin and her team in the Computer Science Department at Columbia University, in partnership with researchers from IBM, related to the cryptographic security of Internet servers. Cryptography is an essential component of modern electronic commerce. With the explosion of transactions being conducted over the Internet, ensuring the security of data transfer is critically important. Considerable amounts of money are being exchanged over the Internet, either through shopping sites (e.g. Amazon, Buy.com), auction sites (eBay), online banking (Citibank, Chase), stock trading (Schwab), and even the government (irs.gov). Dr. Malkin and her team made a systematic study of the cryptographic strength of thousands of "secure" servers on the Internet. Servers are computers that �host� the main functions of the Internet, such as Web sites (Web servers), email (mail servers), and other functions. Communication with these sites is secured by a protocol known as the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or its variant, Transport Layer Security (TLS). These protocols provide authentication, privacy, and integrity. A key component of the security of SSL/TLS is the cryptographic strength of the underlying algorithms used by the protocol. Dr. Malkin�s study probed 25,000 secure Web servers to determine if SSL was being properly configured and whether it was employed in the most secure way. Improper configuration can lead to attacks on servers, stolen data identity theft, break-ins, etc. Dr. Malkin�s project is the most extensive study of actually existing server security on the Internet. The team�s findings, relevant to these hearings, included some serious weaknesses in how Web servers, including eCommerce servers employed by financial service companies, are currently being configured. The most prevalent is that an old, outdated version of SSL, known as SSL 2.0, is still being supported on over 93% of these �secure� servers. SSL 2.0 has many flaws, including a vulnerability to �man in the middle� attacks, which are commonly used for identity theft. While most of these servers also employ a more advanced version of SSL, the incoming communication can choose to use Version 2.0 and thus breach the defenses of the server. Another serious problem is the use of 512 bit �public keys� (1,024 bits are recommended), which can be broken readily, thus compromising all of the data on the server using this key length. Over 5% of the �secure� servers are using this key length. These security shortcomings are quite serious, and pose risks both to the consumers and the providers in the financial services industry. Financial server security can be increased both by popularizing the correct configurations and, possibly, by greater government oversight in this area."

Movie Night Starts Tonight 9/21/05 7 PM

Wed, 21 Sep 2005 16:20:11 EDT

Movie Night kicks off again for the Fall 05 semester tonight, Wednesday Sept. 21st at 7 PM with Napoleon Dynamite.

Prof. Grinspun wins NSF grant to study simulating physical systems at multiple resolutions

Mon, 19 Sep 2005 11:23:38 EDT

The work will be performed by researchers at Columbia University, led by Prof. Grinspun, and Caltech and was funded jointly by the NSF math and computer science directorates. The proposal is titled "Computational and Mathematical Foundations for the Synthesis of Multiresolution Representations with Variational Integrators and Discrete Geometry". Physical phenomena such as the crushing of a car or the evolution of a storm system are governed by effects ranging from very small to very large scales. Accurately predicting these by resolving the finest scales in a computer simulation is prohibitively expensive. The investigators study how fine scale information impacts coarse scale behavior and vice versa. In effect "summarizing" these relationships allows the researchers to model coarse scale effects accurately and efficiently without the need to explicitly resolve the finest scales in a computation. A key to this study lies in the careful transfer of structures present in the mathematical models of these phenomena (which in essence have infinite resolution) to the computational realm with its finite resolution and finite computational resources. The methods being developed will allow rapid assessment of overall effects with the ability "to drill down" computationally where additional detail is required. Physical systems are typically described by a set of continuous equations using tools from geometric mechanics and differential geometry to analyze and capture their properties. For purposes of computation one must derive discrete (in space and time) representations of the underlying equations. Theories which are discrete from the start (rather than discretized after the fact), with key geometric properties built in, can more readily yield robust numerical simulations which are true to the underlying continuous systems: they exactly preserve invariants of the continuous systems in the discrete computational realm. So far these methods have not accounted for effects across scales. Yet both physics and numerics require such multiresolution strategies. This research project is developing a multiresolution theory for discrete variational methods and discrete differential geometry to apply it to applications in thin-shell and fluid modeling. Its innovative aspect lies in tools to conserve symmetries across computational scales.

Prof. Mishra and Rubenstein elected to IFIP working group

Sun, 18 Sep 2005 14:11:49 EDT

The work of the Group is directed toward improving the art of analyzing and optimizing performance and costs of data processing systems through the use of analytical models. The group play san important and active role in fostering education and research in these areas. It organizes or coorganizes a conference every eighteen months. The group is chaired by Prof. Don Towsley, UMass.

Prof. Schulzrinne to participate in NSF wireless network project

Wed, 14 Sep 2005 20:21:46 EDT

The WORKIT project addresses the need for wireless network tools and platforms as recommended in the 2003 NSF Wireless Network Workshop report. The project will build on the IOTA (Integration of Two Access Technologies) project at Bell Labs. The PI's will enhance and develop IOTA for a software and systems package in a distributable form called the Wireless Open Research Kit (WORKIT). WORKIT will include source code and documentation and also be embodied in low-cost off the shelf hardware. WORKIT will be an enabler for research in mobility management, interlayer awareness, software algorithms for optimal network selection, reconfiguration, security, accounting, authentication, policy download and enforcement, and hybrid wireless networking. Broader impacts of this project include use of WORKIT in education and enabling stronger university/industry collaborations in this area of emerging importance at colleges and universities.

Prof. Hirschberg elected president of International Speech Communication Association

Wed, 14 Sep 2005 17:29:44 EDT

The International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) is the major international organization devoted to speech science and technology, with approimately 1500 members. ISCA runs annual conferences which draw 1000-1300 participants. The main goal of the Association is "to promote Speech Communication Science and Technology, both in the industrial and Academic areas", covering all the aspects of Speech Communication (Acoustics, Phonetics, Phonology, Linguistics, Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science, Signal Processing, Pattern Recognition, etc.).

Regina Barzilay (PhD 02) recognized as top young technology inventor

Wed, 14 Sep 2005 15:53:42 EDT

She is being recognized for her work in teaching computers to read and write. "For her doctoral dissertation at Columbia University, computer scientist Regina Barzilay led the development of Newsblaster, which does what no computer program could do before: recognize stories from different news services as being about the same basic subject, and then paraphrase elements from all of the stories to create a summary."

Prof. Traub named chair of Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB)

Sun, 11 Sep 2005 11:22:19 EDT

The CSTB deals with critical issues facing the nation in the area of computer science and telecomuniations. Projects include cybersecurity research, biometrics, IT to enhance disaster management, and building certifiably dependable systems. For more information, visit www.cstb.org.

Prof. Traub's appointment marks his return to the CSTB, as he was also its founding chair. "In 1986, along with Marjory Blumenthal, Joe's vision and dedication established the model that has made CSTB one of the strongest boards at the Academies. At this particular point in CSTB's history, I could not think of another person better suited to assume the chair and to guide CSTB to new heights," said Bill Wulf, President of the National Academy of Engineering.

CUCS family BBQ October 1

Wed, 31 Aug 2005 20:38:43 EDT

All members of the Columbia Computer Science community are invited, including students, alumni, staff and faculty, along with their families and significant others. Please RSVP by September 21 to rosemary@cs.columbia.edu (Rosemary Addarich). There is no fee.

Dora the Explorer will appear from 12 - 1:00, followed by a Harry Potter Magician from 1:00 - 2:00.

Prof. Nowick to participate in major asynchronous digital design project

Fri, 26 Aug 2005 22:05:15 EDT

There were 20 large-scale proposals submitted, and only one funded, headed by Boeing, with participation of Philips Semiconductors, two asynchronous startups and two smaller academic efforts. The two goals of the project are to build a large-scale asynchronous demonstration chip (for Boeing) and design an asynchronous CAD tool for use future asynchronous designs.

Prof. Nowick and his former PhD student Montek Singh (currently an assistant professor at UNC), will play a key role in transferring their high-speed asynchronous pipeline style, MOUSETRAP, to the Philips commercial asynchronous tool flow, and providing optimizations for several of the other CAD tools.

Dan Phung, Guiseppe Valetto and Prof. Gail Kaiser Present Best Paper at International Conference

Wed, 10 Aug 2005 08:21:48 EDT

The increasing popularity of online courses has highlighted the lack of collaborative tools for student groups. In addition, the introduction of lecture videos into the online curriculum has drawn attention to the disparity in the network resources used by students. The paper presents an e-Learning architecture and adaptation model called AI^2TV (Adaptive Internet Interactive Team Video), which allows virtual students, possibly some or all disadvantaged in network resources, to collaboratively view a video in synchrony. AI^2TV upholds the invariant that each student will view semantically equivalent content at all times. Video player actions, like play, pause and stop, can be initiated by any student and their results are seen by all the other students. These features allow group members to review a lecture video in tandem, facilitating the learning process. Experimental trials show that AI^2TV can successfully synchronize video for distributed students while, at the same time, optimizing the video quality, given fluctuating bandwidth, by adaptively adjusting the quality level for each student.

Columbia Natural Language Group and CCLS win large DARPA grant

Thu, 23 Jun 2005 22:14:38 EDT

The grant was awarded to a team lead by SRI and consisting of researchers at Columbia University, University of Massachusetts Amherst, University of California San Diego, University of California Berkeley, University of Washington, Technical University Aachen (Germany), and Systran.

The research to be conducted at the Center for Computational Learning Systems (CCLS) will center on building natural language processing tools for Arabic and its dialects, concentrating on leveraging linguistic knowledge when few resources (annotated corpora or even unannotated corpora) are available. Mona Diab, Nizar Habash, and Owen Rambow will build on work accomlished under an existing NSF grant. In addition, Nizar Habash will continue his work on generation-heavy hybrid machine translation.

Prof. Schulzrinne wins Sputnik prize

Wed, 22 Jun 2005 22:38:32 EDT

Prof. Schulzrinne received the award at the 2005 forward2business conference in Halle, Germany.

A New Generation of Collaborative Cross-domain Security Technology: Worminator and Payl

Sat, 18 Jun 2005 12:06:30 EDT

These projects aim to research and develop a new generation of collaborative, cross-domain security technologies to detect and prevent the exploitation of network-based computer systems. The core concept is to deploy a number of strategically placed sensors across a number of participating networks that collaborate by sharing information in real-time to defend the entire network and each of its members. A novel content-based anomaly detector, PAYL, identifies likely new exploits targeting vulnerable systems. The Worminator project has developed a new generation of scalable, collaborative, cross-domain security systems that exchange alert information including profiled behaviors of attacks and privacy-preserving anomalous content alerts to detect severe zero-day security events. The work is a joint collaboration with CounterStorm, a New York City based company spun out from the DHS and DARPA-sponsored Columbia IDS lab, headed by Prof. Sal Stolfo.

Prof. Servedio wins NSF grant on connections between quantum computation and computational learning

Sat, 18 Jun 2005 08:36:07 EDT

Professor Rocco Servedio was awarded a grant from the NSF program on Emerging Models and Technologies for Computation (EMT). The EMT cluster seeks to advance the fundamental capabilities of computer and information sciences and engineering by capitalizing on advances and insights from areas such as biological systems, quantum phenomena, nanoscale science and engineering, and other novel computing concepts. The award will support Rocco's research on connections between quantum computation and computational learning theory. Rocco's research in this area will focus on the fundamental abilities and limitations of quantum learning algorithms from an information-theoretic perspective, as well as on developing computationally efficient quantum learning algorithms.

Paper on HTML content extraction wins best poster award at WWW2005

Sun, 15 May 2005 21:31:33 EDT

The paper "Extracting Context To Improve Accuracy For HTML Content Extraction" by Suhit Gupta, Prof. Gail Kaiser and Prof. Salv Stolfo, all from the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University, won the Best Student Poster Award at WWW 2005 in Japan.

Database and Information Retrieval Day at Columbia

Tue, 10 May 2005 16:55:23 EDT

The database research group hosted the first DB/IR Day at Columbia University on April 15, 2005 to bring together researchers in database and information retrieval. More than 120 researchers and students from academic and research institutions across the greater New York area attended this inaugural workshop, making it a very successful event.

The program consisted of three technical keynote lectures from Alon Halevy (University of Washington), Craig Nevill-Manning (Google Inc.) and Michael Stonebraker (MIT), and a poster session for graduate students to present their latest research. The event was sponsored by IBM research, with additional funding from Columbia's Graduate Student Advisory Council.

Dean Galil elected as Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Sun, 08 May 2005 14:34:05 EDT

Dean Zvi Galil, Professor of Computer Science and Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science, was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences elected 196 new Fellows and 17 new Foreign Honorary Members. The 213 men and women are leaders in scholarship, business, the arts, and public affairs.

Prof. Gravano and Panos Ipeirotis (PhD'04) win ICDE best-paper award

Wed, 06 Apr 2005 17:14:42 EDT

The "Modeling and Managing Content Changes in Text Databases," by Panos Ipeirotis (a Fall 2004 Columbia PhD graduate, now an assistant professor at NYU), Alexandros Ntoulas (a PhD student at UCLA), Junghoo Cho (an assistant professor at UCLA), and Prof. Luis Gravano, won the Best Paper Award at the 21st IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE) 2005 conference held April 2005 in Tokyo. ICDE is a highly selective and prestigious database conference.

Fall 2004 extraordinary TAs named

Mon, 04 Apr 2005 09:05:59 EDT

Sebastian Enrique, Alpa Shah, Mark Threshock, Eugene Ie, William Beaver, Abhinav Kamra, and Joshua Weinberg were named as "extraordinary TAs" for the 2004 fall semester, based on the evaluation of students in their classes.

Jim Kurose and Prof. Henning Schulzrinne recognized for service to networking community

Tue, 15 Mar 2005 15:58:25 EDT

Prof. Jim Kurose (PhD'84) and now professor of computer science at UMass Amherst, and Prof. Henning Schulzrinne were recognized with the 2005 IEEE Communications Society Technical Committee on Computer Communications Outstanding Service award, recognizing their continuing contributions to the network research community.

Prof. Aho and Prof. McKeown receive named chairs

Tue, 15 Mar 2005 14:27:26 EDT

Both are recognized for their distinguished contribution to computer science, their service to the profession, the University and the School.

Yoav Freund wins ACM Paris Kanellakis award

Sun, 06 Mar 2005 20:51:44 EDT

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, today announced the winners of four prestigious awards honoring advances in computing technology. The awards reflect outstanding achievements ranging from improving Internet communications to innovative programming language and software designs to creative applications of computer science in the fine arts. This year's winners represent innovative research teams and new luminaries as well as renaissance thinkers in the computing field. ACM will present these and other awards at the annual ACM Awards Banquet on June 11, 2005, in San Francisco, CA.

Profs Ramamoorthi and Servedio win distinguished Sloan Research Fellowships

Thu, 24 Feb 2005 11:36:19 EDT

The Sloan Research Fellowships are intended to enhance the careers of the very best young faculty members in specified fields of science. Currently a total of 116 fellowships are awarded annually in seven fields: chemistry, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, computer science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience, and physics. Only 14 of these fellowships were awarded in Computer Science in 2005.

IEEE Async Symposium 2005 at Columbia

Mon, 31 Jan 2005 20:23:31 EDT

Async-05 Symposium is the top symposium on advances in asynchronous (i.e., clockless) circuits and systems. The symposium typically has 100-120 attendees, and over 60 submitted papers. This year, the symposium will be hosted at Columbia University in Davis Auditorium, with Prof. Nowick as general co-chair. Invited speakers include Turing award-winner Ivan Sutherland with Robert Drost (Sun Microsystems Lab), Bob Colwell (the former Intel manager of several Pentium projects), and a tutorial on high-speed clocking with Prof. Ken Shepard (EE Department) and Phil Restle (IBM T.J. Watson).

Columbia Robotics Laboratory Wins Phase I of 3D Vision Contest

Mon, 24 Jan 2005 17:34:02 EDT

A proposal from the Columbia Robotics Lab was chosen as one of ten winners for the CanestaVision 3D sensing design competition. Columbia Ph.D. student Matei Ciocarlie and Research Scientist Andrew Miller headed the proposal which focuses on developing an "Eye-in-Hand" range sensor for robotic grasping.

Each of the winners will receive a $7,500 development kit that consists of a CanestaVision 3-D sensor chip, a USB interface, and application program interface (API) software. These hardware and software development kits will be used to actually build the applications, and enter them in the "implementation" phase of the contest which boasts a $10,000 first prize for best use of the technology. Stay tuned for the Phase II winners in June!

Michelle Zhou receives Outstanding Paper Award

Thu, 06 Jan 2005 17:02:43 EDT

Michelle Zhou, a recent PhD graduate from the Department, just received the IUI 2005 (International Conf. on Intelligent User Interfaces) Outstanding Paper Award for "A Graph-Matching Approach to Dynamic Media Allocation in Intelligent Multimedia Interfaces" by Michelle X. Zhou, Zhen Wen, and Vikram Aggarwal (IBM TJ Watson).

Prof. Ramamoorthi wins NSF CAREER award

Mon, 03 Jan 2005 14:54:03 EDT

Much of human perception is driven by the visual appearance of the world. People are captivated by the effects of natural lighting and shading patterns, such as the soft shadows from the leaves of a tree in skylight, the glints of sunlight in ocean waves, or the shiny reflections from a velvet cushion. In computer graphics, it is important to be able to accurately reproduce these appearance effects, to create realistic images for applications like video games, vehicle and flight simulators, or architectural design of interior spaces. However, it is still very difficult to accurately model complex illumination and reflection effects in interactive applications like games, in image-based rendering applications like e-commerce, or in computer vision applications like face recognition. In the past, the above applications have been addressed separately, by devising particular algorithms for specific problems. In this project, the research focuses on the mathematical and computational fundamentals of visual appearance, seeking to understand the intrinsic computational structure of illumination, reflection and shadowing, and develop a unified approach to many problems in graphics and vision. The main thrust of the research will be to develop appropriate mathematical representations for appearance, along with computational algorithms and signal-processing techniques such as Clebsch-Gordan expansions, wavelet methods with triple product expansions, and radial basis functions. A major advantage of this approach is that the same representations, analysis and computation tools can then be applied to many application domains, such as real-time and image-based rendering, Monte Carlo sampling and lighting-insensitive recognition. This research philosophy builds on the investigator's dissertation, where he developed a signal-processing framework for reflection, leading to new frequency domain algorithms for both forward and inverse rendering.

Prof. Jebara wins KDD grant for research into learning algorithms

Sun, 02 Jan 2005 16:53:02 EDT

This effort aims to embed the concept of correspondence or permutation into learning algorithms and statistical data representations. This includes statistical modeling of images, text and networks while matching their subcomponents (pixels, words or nodes). Permutation algorithms are combined with learning algorithms to more accurately model realistic data. Experiments focus on face and identity recognition problems.

Microsoft provides funding to further instruction on trustworthy computing

Sat, 04 Dec 2004 22:10:24 EDT

The goal of this project will be to develop educational material that promote awareness of four pillars of Trustworthy Computing: security, privacy, reliability, and business/societal integrity. The project will develop a new course on Trustworthy Computing, integrate relevant material into COMS W3157, COMS W4156, and other courses as appropriate, and develop a student programming competition specifically focused on trustworthy computing. The overarching aim is to create a multi-year, integrated curriculum on Trustworthy Computing.

Three students recognized as Computing Research Association's Outstanding Undergraduates

Thu, 02 Dec 2004 19:23:02 EDT

Bhargav Bhatt, Bogdan Caprita and Aaron Roth were recognized with the Computing Research Association's (CRA) Outstanding Undergraduate Award for 2005. Aaron and Bhargav received Honorable Mention, while Bogdan was one of only ten finalists in the United States. The winners will receive their award at an upcoming CRA conference. The CRA noted: "This year's nominees were a very impressive group. A number of them were commended for making significant contributions to more than one research project, several were authors or coauthors on multiple papers, others had made presentations at major conferences, and some had produced software artifacts that were in widespread use. Many of our nominees had been involved in successful summer research or internship programs, many had been teaching assistants, tutors, or mentors, and a number had significant involvement in community volunteer efforts. It is quite an honor to be selected as one of the top members of this group."

Network Computing Lab group wins best-paper award at Mobicom

Wed, 29 Sep 2004 11:27:18 EDT

Ricardo Baratto, Shaya Potter, Gong Su, and Jason Nieh received the Best Student Paper Award at the 10th International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom 2004) held this week in Philadelphia, PA for their paper titled: "MobiDesk: Mobile Virtual Desktop Computing". The PC Chairs noted that paper was also the highest rated paper of the conference as per the original review scores.

MobiCom is the top conference in the field of mobile computing and networking with a typical acceptance rate of less than 10%. This year the conference received 326 submissions, of which 26 papers were accepted. 65% of the accepted papers had a student as first author.

Prof. Ramamoorthi and Prof. Chang (EE) win grant to detect digital photograph tampering

Thu, 09 Sep 2004 23:11:25 EDT

Trustworthy photographs play an important role in many applications such as news reporting, intelligence information gathering, and criminal investigation. However, with the advent of the digital age, the trustworthiness of pictures can no longer be taken for granted. This project will develop a completely blind and passive system for detecting digital photograph tampering. We take an innovative approach integrating techniques from signal-processing and computer graphics. The signal processing method involves effective use of higher-order signal statistics to identify tampering artifacts at the signal level, while the computer graphics approach includes novel techniques for 3D geometry estimation, illumination field recovery and relighting, and scene reconstruction to detect inconsistencies at the scene level like shadows, shading and geometry. The three-year project was funded at $740,000 as part of the NSF CyberTrust program.

Prof. Misra, Rubenstein and others win NSF award to study funneling impulses in sensor networks

Wed, 08 Sep 2004 20:40:16 EDT

There are many types of sensor networks, covering different geographical areas, using devices with a variety of energy constraints, and implementing an assortment of applications. One driving application is the reporting of conditions within a region where the environment abruptly change due to an anomalous event, such as an earthquake, terrorist attack, flood, or fire. During and immediately following these events, sensor networks can provide scientists, rescue workers, and even victims with crucial information such as exit routes, danger spots, and areas that demand additional rescue and recovery resources. This will facilitate and expedite recovery procedures and identify the source of the problem.

This proposal focuses specifically on sensor systems that are to be designed to efficiently deliver information during and immediately following an event that triggers an abrupt change. The novelty of this proposal is its focus on sensor networks that must deal with a sudden impulse of data. The impulse will move the sensor network almost instantaneously from a state with a light load to a state with an overloading body of data to report. This data needs to be delivered through the sensor network quickly to a relatively small number of sink points that attach to the regular communication infrastructure. The flow of data out of the network has similarities to the flow of people out of a large arena after a sporting event completes: this large impulse of data that is suddenly on the move must be funneled out through what is typically a small number of collection sink points.

The project was funded for $750,000 over three years.

Profs. Nieh, Kaiser and Keromytis win highly competitive NSF award for secure remote computing

Wed, 08 Sep 2004 20:36:01 EDT

The proposal is one of only three proposals that are being funded in the NSF ITR cybertrust program, with an overall acceptance rate of between 5 and 10%.

The Secure Remote Computing Services (SRCS) project will develop critical information technology (IT) infrastructure. SRCS will move all application logic and data from insecure end-user devices, which attackers can easily corrupt, steal and destroy, to autonomic server farms in physically secure, remote data centers that can rapidly adapt to computing demands especially in times of crisis. Users can then access their computing state from anywhere, anytime, using simple, stateless Internet-enabled devices. SRCS builds on the hypothesis that a combination of lightweight process migration, remote display technology, overlay-based security and trust-management access control mechanisms, driven by an autonomic management utility, can result in a significant improvement in overall system reliability and security. The results of this proposed effort will enable SRCS implementations to provide a myriad of benefits, including persistence and continuity of business logic, minimizing the cost of localized computing failures, robust protection against attacks, and transparent user mobility with global computing access. SRCS in time of crisis specifically addresses a major concern of national and homeland security. The substantially lowered total cost of ownership of applications running on SRCS is anticipated to dramatically reduce the gap between IT haves and have nots.

The proposal was funded at $1,200,000 over three years.

New undergraduate curriculum

Sun, 05 Sep 2004 12:09:32 EDT

You may have noticed some changes in the undergraduate curriculum for Computer Science majors, as published in the SEAS bulletin. This year is a transition year, as the CS department is phasing in the new curriculum, so please bear with us.

How does this affect you now? Please read this message to find out!

Note that the changes will affect ALL COMPUTER SCIENCE MAJORS, MINORS and CONCENTRATORS, in all schools, not just SEAS. The bulletins for Columbia College (CC), General Studies (GS) and Barnard will not reflect the changes until 2005-06, so please refer to the Computer Science department web pages for the most up-to-date information.

The new sequence of programming courses is as follows: CS-I (COMS W1004): Introduction to Programming (for computer science and other science and engineering majors who have little or no programming experience.) This course introduces basic computer science concepts underlying modern information technology along with algorithmic problem-solving techniques using Java. This course or AP/CS becomes a prerequisite for coms-w1007 starting in Spring 2005. CS-II (COMS W1007): Introduction to Computer Science (for students who have programmed before and/or taken AP Computer Science in high school). This course is taught in Java and covers computer science concepts and intermediate programming skills. CS-III (COMS W3157): Tools and Techniques for Advanced Programming. Pre-requisite: coms-w1007. This course covers C, C++, internet programming skills and Unix utilities. CS-IV (COMS W3137): Data Structures and Algorithms. Pre-requisite: coms-w3157. Pre- or co-requisite: coms-w3203 (Discrete Math). Introduction to classic data structures and algorithms. Taught in C/C++ (starting in Spring 2005).

This semester (Fall 2004) will be the last semester that Data Structures (3137) is taught in Java. Starting in Spring 2005, it will be taught in C/C++. For this reason, Advanced Programming (3157) is now a pre-requisite for Data Structures.

Due to errors in scheduling, there unfortunately has been a conflict between Discrete Math (3203) and Advanced Progamming (3157). If you are currently enrolled in Discrete Math (W 3203), but have not already taken COMS W3157, this it is advised that you take COMS W3157 this term.

To work around the time conflict, we have added a second section of 3157, which meets on Monday and Wednesday mornings. (Note that the Wednesday is a lab section which will appear on the registrar's web site on Tuesday next week.)

If this second section of 3157 is a conflict for you as well, then it is recommended by the department that you drop 3203 for this term and pick up section 1 of 3157; and take 3203 in the Spring.

Also note that if took Introduction to Computer Science (1007) last year, you have the option of taking Data Structures (3137) this term in Java or taking Advanced Programming (3157) now and then taking Data Structures in C/C++ in the Spring.

For equestions, please contact Prof Elizabeth Sklar (sklar@cs.columbia.edu) or Prof Alfred Aho (aho@cs.columbi.edu) or Simon Bird (birds@cs.columbia.edu).

CS graduate orientation

Mon, 30 Aug 2004 15:23:26 EDT

An orientation session for all new CS MS and PhD students will be offered on September 1, starting at 9 am in the Interschool Laboratory (750 CEPSR).

CS 25th Anniversary

Fri, 13 Aug 2004 16:13:17 EDT

Please join us! There will be plenty of opportunity for socializing with your classmates, for hearing about the latest research and activities of CS alums, and for catching up on news. The events are open to all friends of the Department, including students and alumni, current and former staff members, current and former faculty and research colleagues.

Prof. Nayar wins best paper award at 2004 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Thu, 01 Jul 2004 13:40:23 EDT

CVPR is one of the two top international conferences in the field of Computer Vision. This year the conference received 873 submissions, of which 59 papers were accepted as oral presentations and 200 papers were accepted as posters.

Prof. Andrew Kosoresow Memorial Fund accepting donations

Mon, 14 Jun 2004 11:49:57 EDT

The Prof. Andrew Kosoresow Memorial Fund is accepting donations to endow the Andrew P. Kosoresow Memorial Award for Excellence in Teaching and Service. This award is given each year by the Department of Computer Science to up to three Computer Science students for outstanding contributions to teaching in the Department and exemplary service to the Department and its mission. Donations can be made on-line by credit card.

Prof. Malkin receives IBM Faculty Award

Thu, 10 Jun 2004 19:30:14 EDT

Prof. Tal Malkin received the prestigious IBM Faculty Award, a cash-only award intended to recognize outstanding faculty and to promote innovative, collaborative research in disciplines of mutual interest to IBM and the researcher. Prof. Malkin's research focuses on cryptography, with a project titled "The Next Generation of Cryptography: Removing Unrealistic Assumptions About the Adversary." She plans to expand the traditional cryptographic foundations so as to withstand attacks by stronger, more realistic adversaries. In particular, we will study security in a complex Internet-like environment with multiple protocol executions, and will address security against attackers who can obtain or tamper with the secret keys. The IBM Faculty Award is highly competitive: in 2002 IBM granted about 50 such awards across he mathematics and computer science disciplines.

Successful Theory Day at Columbia

Sat, 15 May 2004 14:52:36 EDT

More than 280 people attended the Columbia Theory day on May 14th. Columbia CS faculty organized the event and contributed talks, including contributions by Profs. Malkin, Yannakakis, Servedio and Stein.

Prof. Jason Nieh receives 2004 SEAS Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award

Thu, 25 Mar 2004 22:26:17 EDT

Prof. Jason Nieh will receive the 2004 School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS) Faculty Teaching Award. Prof. Nieh teaches Operating Systems and other popular classes in the Department.

Prof. Luis Gravano joins editorial board of the Transactions on Database Systems

Thu, 25 Mar 2004 17:21:03 EDT

Prof. Luis Gravano will join the editorial board of the ACM Transactions on Database Systems, the most prestigious journal in the area of database theory and applications.

Bogdan Caprita selected as Finalist for CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Award

Thu, 11 Mar 2004 13:37:19 EDT

Bogdan Caprita was named as one of ten finalists for the CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Award for 2004. CRA's Outstanding Undergraduate Award program recognizes undergraduate students who show outstanding research potential in an area of computing research.

Professor Galil elected as member of National Academy of Engineering

Mon, 08 Mar 2004 23:08:03 EDT

The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) has elected 76 new members and 11 foreign associates, NAE President Wm. A. Wulf announced today. This brings the total U.S. membership to 2,174 and the number of foreign associates to 172. Election to the National Academy of Engineering is among the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer. Academy membership honors those who have made "important contributions to engineering theory and practice, including significant contributions to the literature of engineering theory and practice," and those who have demonstrated accomplishment in "the pioneering of new fields of engineering, making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering, or developing/implementing innovative approaches to engineering education."

Prof. Rocco Servedio wins NSF Career Award on Efficient Learning Algorithms

Tue, 24 Feb 2004 15:46:54 EDT

The goal of the research project is to design and analyze provably effective and efficient algorithms for well-defined computational learning problems. The two main goals are: To develop algorithms which can efficiently learn rich classes of Boolean functions in well-studied models of computational learning. Anticipated research directions here include learning DNF formulas, learning various classes of Boolean circuits, and learning in the presence of irrelevant information. To develop and analyze new well-motivated models for computational learning, and to design efficient learning algorithms for these new models. Anticipated research directions here include developing average-case learning algorithms, developing a theory of learning from nonmalicious random examples, and studying the role of quantum computation in learning theory.

An important aspect of the proposed research methodology is to explore and exploit connections between learning problems and complexity-theoretic structural questions about Boolean functions.

I2-NEWS: Joint Techs Attendees Experience Rich Presence and Location Services

Tue, 10 Feb 2004 20:47:15 EDT

JOINT TECHS ATTENDEES EXPERIENCE RICH PRESENCE AND LOCATION SERVICES WASHINGTON, D.C. - February 3, 2004 - Internet2(R) today announced that its Presence and Integrated Communications (PIC) Working Group successfully completed an experimental communications trial during the advanced networking, Joint Techs Workshop in Hawaii last week. The trial demonstrated SIP-based (Session Initiation Protocol) voice, video, and instant messaging over wireless fidelity (WiFi), and SIP voice conferencing - all in the context of rich presence derived from WiFi location service and enterprise calendaring. "The rich presence efforts at Internet2 point the way towards next-generation communication services, reaching far beyond the limited presence and phone systems in use today," said Henning Schulzrinne, professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Columbia University. "Beyond the old goal of reachable anywhere, anytime, rich presence gives control back to users, so that communications becomes planned and desired instead of disruptive and haphazard." Participants downloaded and installed one of several integrated communications clients onto their laptops allowing them to initiate voice, instant messaging, and video calls to other participants - using the receiver's email address as a single, converged electronic identity. With the inclusion of rich presence services, participants were able to see not only which of their buddies were online or offline, but also, for each buddy, a current location, activity, and expected call quality. As participants used the meeting's wireless LAN infrastructure and moved from one meeting room to another, their locations were tracked by WiFi location technology from HP. "The open-source SIP Express Router (SER) provided a solid base for this demo," said Jiri Kuthan, member of the Internet2 PIC Working Group and director of engineering at iptel.org. "We were able to extend SER to perform as a SIP presence agent serving rich location, calendar, and expected call quality presence to clients." "Location services can add enormous value to integrated communications applications and can provide life-saving location information to emergency responders," said Ben Teitelbaum, Internet2 program manager for voice and integrated communications. "Internet2 is working to ensure that these technologies are designed and deployed to protect users' privacy and allow users to control and filter what information about them is published." Participants were also able to experience placing SIP voice calls to any user at a SIP.edu-enabled institution (http://voip.internet2.edu/SIP.edu/) and were able to eavesdrop on meeting sessions by calling special "room buddies." "The result of this experiment, as well as the results of future experiments, is a critical means of helping to determine what presence and integrated communications means to the end user," said Jamey Hicks, member of the Internet2 PIC Working Group and principal member of the technical staff, HP Labs. "Our goal is to develop an improved mode of communication with a focus on location-based services using 802.11 - for people constantly on the go and requiring constant contact, such as healthcare providers or those in the business community." The individuals who contributed to the success of this experiment are from the following Internet2 member institutions (in alphabetical order): + Columbia University + Ford Motor Company + HP + University of Hawaii + University of Pennsylvania + Wave Three Software + Yale University # # # About the Internet2 Presence and Integrated Communications Working Group The Presence and Integrated Communications (PIC) working group will foster the deployment of network-based communication technologies through demonstrations, tutorials, and initiatives in collaboration with both the private sector and open-source initiatives. This growing area will have an effect on nearly every individual within higher education and also have the potential to be a significant driver for network design, security, and middleware. For more information, visit: http://pic.internet2.edu. About Columbia University's IRT Laboratory The Internet Real-Time Lab (IRT) in the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University conducts research in the areas of: + Internet telephony; + Streaming Internet media; + Internet quality of service; + Network measurements and reliability; + Service location; + Ad-hoc wireless networks; + Scalable content distribution; and + Ubiquitous and context-aware computing and communication. About HP Labs Cambridge HP Labs Cambridge (HPLC) is the primary advanced research facility for HP on the East Coast. For more information on HP Labs, please visit http://www.hpl.hp.com. About iptel.org Based in Berlin, Germany, iptel.org is a leading innovation organization in SIP technology. iptel.org is a consultant to vendors and network operators and is known for having created a unique open-source SIP server with premium service in flexibility and high performance. iptel.org's server, SIP Express Router, has been powering public VoIP services of numerous providers around the world. For more information, visit http://www.iptel.org/. About Internet2(R) Led by more than 200 U.S. universities, working with industry and government, Internet2 develops and deploys advanced network applications and technologies for research and higher education, accelerating the creation of tomorrow's Internet. Internet2 recreates the partnerships among academia, industry, and government that helped foster today's Internet in its infancy. For more information about Internet2, visit: http://www.internet2.edu/.

Andrew P. Kosoresow Memorial Fund established by the Columbia CS Department

Thu, 05 Feb 2004 11:29:15 EDT

A new award, The Andrew P. Kosoresow Memorial Award for Outstanding Performance in TA-ing and Service, will be given annually. Those who wish to give in Andrew's name should contact the Department at 212.939.7007.

Henning Schulzrinne to participate in 4-year NSF grant to construct next-generation wireless testbed at Rutgers University

Mon, 12 Jan 2004 11:18:40 EDT

The project is called the Open Access Research Testbed for Next-Generation Wireless Networks. Its nickname "ORBIT" draws an analogy between planetary orbits and the trajectories of mobile devices in a wireless network.

Profs. Edwards, Keromytis, Misra, Sklar join Computer Science faculty

Sat, 10 Jan 2004 10:26:37 EDT

Prof. Stephen A. Edwards researches software for embedded systems; Prof. Angelos D. Keromytis focuses on computer security, cryptography, and networking; Prof. Vishal Misra works on communication networks, while Prof. Elizabeth Sklar's interest lie in human and machine learning. Prof. Misra's has a joint appointment with Electrical Engineering.

Peter Belhumeur and Tony Jebara join faculty

Sat, 10 Jan 2004 10:21:27 EDT

Prof. Belhumeur works in the area of computational vision and image processing; Prof. Jebara focuses on machine learning, user interfaces, computer vision and bioinformatics.

Julia Hirschberg and Ravi Ramamoorthi join faculty

Sat, 10 Jan 2004 10:18:32 EDT

The department welcomes two new faculty members for the Fall 2002 semester. Julia Hirschberg explores computational linguistics, while Ravi Ramamoorthi's research area is computer graphics and vision.

Al Aho honored with the SOCG Great Teacher Award

Sat, 10 Jan 2004 10:12:56 EDT

The author of many textbooks, he is cited by his students as one of the best computer science teachers they have ever encountered.

Prof. Jason Nieh wins Xigma Xi Young Investigator Award for 2004

Wed, 07 Jan 2004 12:11:37 EDT

Prof. Jason Nieh has won the Xigma Xi Young Investigator Award for 2004, which is awarded to one person in the physical sciences and engineering once every two years. More information is available at sigmaxi.org.

Henning Schulzrinne receives the Mayor's Award for Excellence in Science and Technology from NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg

Mon, 01 Dec 2003 16:55:09 EDT

The annual award is given for "Outstanding contributions to the development or commercialization of significant technology, resulting in, for example, beneficial impacts on the economy, environment, infrastructure, communications, or social well-being".