Leveraging the Power of Computational Systems to Serve Humanity
Computing has transformed the way humans live, work, and interact. As one of the youngest academic and research disciplines, computing presents a compelling research frontier, rich in opportunities for advances in theory, systems, and applications.
Our research program in Computer Science and Engineering strives to solve some of the world’s greatest challenges, using the power of computing while also striving to assess, in partnership with other disciplines, the impact of computing on human society.
Data Science and Artificial Intelligence
Research in this area addresses the development of software and software/hardware systems to address problems in acquiring, modeling, processing, and reasoning about data obtained in a variety of formats (text, sounds, images, videos, and other sensor outputs).
Such systems can facilitate the understanding of human language and communications; they can classify and identify items appearing in images and videos and characterize their relationships, sometimes guided by human neurobiological principles. And they can produce useful network models of biological systems, processes, and function, as well as personalized information to guide human well-being.
Faculty in this research area
Laboratories
- Computer Vision Research Laboratory
- Complex Networks (CoNe) Lab
- Data Interference, Analytics, and Learning Laboratory
- DM2 Lab: Data Mining towards Decision Making
- Lucy Family Institute for Data & Society
- Machine Intelligence and kNowledge Engineering (MINE) lab
- Natural Language Processing Group
- Prof. Weninger research team
- Yes-Lab
Computer Architecture and Systems
Research in this area addresses the principles and practice of computing hardware/software systems and their interface to the abstractions afforded by layers of software.
Current research in architecture and systems includes:
- fundamental materials for next-generation computing systems with performance, power, and size constraints
- nontraditional/exotic computing systems, including quantum computing and nanomagnetic computing
- advanced approaches to embedded systems design
- specialized architectures for deep learning and other specific computationally demanding tasks
- mobile systems and technologies for data science and applications
- design of tools and technologies for large scale distributed computing software systems for distributed ledgers and applications
- secure and safe reinforcement learning, assurance of large language models (LLMs)/foundation models (FMs) and LLMs/FMs for assurance, cyber-physical system resilience
Faculty in this research area
Laboratories
Software Engineering, Human-Computer Interaction, and Visualization
Research in this area addresses means for improving the key connections between computer systems and people.
Current projects include:
- safety assurance for cyber-physical systems
- software documentation synthesis using software engineering and natural language processing
- domain-driven designs for user interfaces in complex data analysis applications
- advanced and efficient visualization techniques for complex scientific data
- program analysis and machine learning to improve software security
Faculty in this research area
Laboratories
Theory and Algorithms
Research in this area addresses foundational concepts in computer science, often tied to applications that are computationally demanding or require strong guarantees of correctness or performance.
Current projects include:
- development of algorithms for problems in computational geometry, computational biomedicine, and other domains
- development of algorithms for encryption, provenance tracking, and privacy-preserving computation to problems in data science and machine learning
- development of algorithms and hardness results for problems in topological data analysis and low dimensional topology, as well as the applications towards shape analysis in other domains