Columbia UniversityDepartment of Computer Science

Henning Schulzrinne, ChairDepartment of Computer Science

IBM CAS

Columbia CS

Columbia Computer Science in Numbers• ~34 full-time faculty and lecturers

– + visitors, postdocs, adjunct faculty, joint appointments (EE, IEOR), …

• 125 PhD students (~10 new arrivals)• 221 MS students (120 new arrivals)• 100 CS undergraduate majors (juniors, seniors)

– + 20 computer engineering students

Columbia CS

Faculty: 34 (31 tenure track, 3 lecturers) + 3 joint

Aho Allen Carloni Feiner

Gravano Gross Grunschlag

McKeown

KenderKaiser

Nayar Ramamoorthi

Servedio Schulzrinn

e

Ross Nowick

StolfoShortliffe

Keromytis

NiehMalkin

Hirschberg

Rubenstein

Yemini

Misra

Wozniakowski Unger

Stein

Jebara

Belhumeur Edwards

Traub Yannakakis

Cannon Galil

Grinspun

Bellovin

Columbia CS

Interacting withThe Physical World

(9)

Interacting with Humans

(5 faculty)

Systems(11)

Designing Digital Systems

(4)

Making Sense of Data

(7)

Computer Science Theory

(8)

Columbia Computer Science Researchgraphics, robotics,

vision

UI, NLP, collab work

networks, security, OS,

software eng

CAD, async circuits,

embedded systems

databases, data mining,

machine learning

quantum computing,

crypto, learning,

algorithms

Columbia CS

Research areasInteracting with the Physical World

graphics, robotics, vision Allen, Belhumeur, Feiner, Grinspun, Grunschlag, Jebara, Kender, Nayar, Ramamoorthi

Interacting with Humans

user interfaces, natural language and speech processing, collaborative work, personalized agents

Feiner, Hirschberg, Kaiser, Kender, McKeown

Systems networks, distributed systems, security, compilers, software engineering, programming languages, OS

Aho, Bellovin, Edwards, Kaiser, Keromytis, Malkin, Misra, Nieh, Schulzrinne, Stolfo, Yemini

Designing Digital Systems

digital and VLSI design, CAD, asynchronous circuits, embedded systems

Carloni, Edwards, Nowick, Unger

Making Sense of Data

databases, data mining, Web search, machine learning applications

Cannon, Gravano, Jebara, Kaiser, Ross, Servedio, Stolfo

Computer Science Theory

cryptography, quantum computing, complexity, machine learning theory, graph theory, algorithms

Aho, Galil, Gross, Malkin, Servedio, Traub, Wozniakowski, Yannakakis

Columbia CS

CCLS: A Research Center in CS

The Center for Computational Learning Systems (CCLS) aims to be a world leader in learning and data mining research and the application of this research to natural language understanding, the World Wide Web, bioinformatics, systems security and other emerging areas. CCLS will emphasize interdisciplinary efforts with other departments at Columbia, and will leverage Columbia's CS Department's strengths in learning, data mining and natural language processing, extending the effective size and scope of the Department's research effort.

Columbia CS

Interacting with Humans: Newsblaster

• Automatic summarization of articles on the same event

• Generation of summary sentences• Tracking events across days• Foreign news English summaries

Faculty: Kathy McKeown

Columbia CS

Working with IBM Text-to-Speech Synth. Group

• Joint work between Michael Picheny’s TTS group and Julia Hirschberg and students at CU

• Issue: IBM’s Research TTS system one of the best, but even the best TTS systems often do not sound like humans:

– intonation– ability to convey human emotion to a listener

• Our joint goal: to enhance the IBM system to improve naturalness and expressiveness via

– Better assignment of intonational prominence and phrasing

– Additional flexibility to produce ‘emotional’ speech (certainty/uncertainty, anger/frustration)

Columbia CS

Interacting with Humans: Learning to Match Authors

Entity Resolution of Anonymized Publications7 Teams: UMass, Maryland, Fair-Isaac, Illinois, Rutgers, CMU, Columbia

Columbia

Error rate

Key1 - Permutational Text Kernels2 - Permutational Clustering3 - SVM

Source: 2005 KDD Challenge

1

2

3

Faculty: Tony Jebara

Columbia CS

CEPSR researc

h building

Channel Allocation ProtocolTCP/IP

MCL*

802.11card A802.11card BNDIS** DevCon

Win

dows

XP

Multi-radio mesh node•Channel scarcity need

automated channel allocation in 802.11 mesh networks

•Allocates radios by self-stabilizing algorithm based on graph coloring

Results•First self-organizing mechanism &

implementation•Network self-organizes in seconds•Network throughput

improvement of 20-100% cf. static channel allocationCollaborators: Victor Bahl and Jitendra Padhye

@ MSR

Systems: Distributed Channel Allocation in Mobile Mesh Networks

Faculty: Misra/Rubenstein

Columbia CS

Systems: Creating new services for VoIP

• Old telecom model:– Programmers create mass-

market applications– new service each decade

• Our (web) model:– Users and administrators create

universe of tailored applications• Incorporate human context:

– location, mood, actions, …• “Eclipse for service creation”

– Based on presence, location, privacy preferences

– Learn based on user actions

Faculty: Henning Schulzrinne

Columbia CS

Self-healing Software Systems• Novel techniques for software that repairs its failures

based on Observe-Orient-Decide-Act (OODA) loop

• Demonstrated concept with two experimental prototypes

– One aimed at the problem of worms – One aimed at software survivability in general

• Application Communities: enable large numbers of identical applications to collaboratively monitor their health and share alerts

Columbia CS

Self-patching Architecture• Systems approach to creating

software that:– Detects new attacks/failures– Automatically generates and

applies appropriate fixes

• Developed error virtualization as a generic “band-aid” technique

• Prototypes for open-source and binary-only environments

• Efficient security and high availability mechanism with little performance penalty

• Spin-off: Revive Systems Inc.

Columbia CS

• Minimize need for visual feedback in wearable user interfaces

– E.g., watch bezel serves as “tactile landmarks” to guide user’s finger

Computer Graphics and User Interfaces Lab (Prof. S. Feiner) Cursorless Input for Wearable UIs

Gábor Blaskó

Columbia CS

Columbia/FSTC Relationship

•A group of 6 CS faculty manage the Security Standing Committee

•The CS department hosts the FSTC executive director, and provides facilities for meetings

•Members include most of the largest banks and financial institutions and IT security vendors

•Industry collaborative R&D Projects dealing with security of the IT infrastructure

Columbia CS

Conclusion• Broad-based research motivated by real problems• Breaking new ground in several key areas, e.g.:

– Natural language processing– New network services and models– Network security– Graphics & vision

• Columbia has a growing impact on computer science as demonstrated in successfully bringing new technology to the field

– Start-ups– Standardization– Education