Columbia Computer Science News

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.