Scott Anderson
I'm always open to students who would like to do independent research with me. At this point, my interests are wide-ranging and eclectic, so feel free to chat with me about ideas you have. I have always been interested in artificial intelligence, especially natural language processing. I teach courses in computer graphics and in simulation, and I'm very interested in pursuing those areas, particularly where they overlap. I also administer the department's computers, so I'm very interested in system programming (mail servers, web servers and such) and in computer security. For more thoughts and suggestions, see the research section of my home page.

Ellen Hildreth
My research focuses on the study of human visual processing, using an interdisciplinary approach that combines the design and testing of computer models with observations from human behavioral experiments. Over the past two decades, my work addressed many aspects of the analysis of visual motion. I pursued both modeling and experimental work related to the measurement of movement of features in the changing visual image, and the use of information about image motion to determine the three-dimensional (3-D) structure and movement of objects in the environment, and motion of the observer through space. Most recently, I worked on the visual guidance of driving. In collaboration with researchers at Nissan Research and Development, Inc. in Cambridge, I developed models of how visual information is used to control steering and speed while driving, and conducted experiments with human drivers using a driving simulator. Currently, I am interested in how the human visual system integrates information from multiple visual cues, and how the task that is currently being performed by the observer influences this integration of visual information. Similar to my past work, I am exploring problems in this area both from a computational and experimental perspective.

Opportunities for students: In addition to projects related to my research, students can do independent study work on the implementation of computer vision algorithms in MATLAB. Please contact me if you are interested in doing a research or implementation project. In the Fall of 2005, I will be teaching the course CS332 Human and Computer Vision, which provides excellent background for doing research in my area.

Sohie Lee
My research interests focus on the neural mechanisms underlying short-term memory and motor control from both computational and neurophysiological perspectives. A sampling of my publications include "Connectionist contributions to population coding in the motor cortex," in Progress in Brain Research, special issue on Population Coding, 2001, M. Nicolelis, ed. and "A model that accounts for activity prior to sensory inputs and responses during matching-to-sample tasks," J. Cognitive Neuroscience, 2000. I am currently not available for summer research projects.

Panagiotis T. Metaxas
Recently, my research interests lie on Web Information Trust (aka CyberTrust), and development of expert systems for medical applications.

CyberTrust
The Web is omnipresent, but the information we find when we search is not always reliable. In my research I am trying to tackle questions such as

• "How do you know whether you should trust the contents of some web page, or web site?"
• "Can a search engine, such as Google, give you trustworthy results when you use it?"
• "What kinds of tools does your browser need in order to help you sort out the quality of web sites?"

• Measure the degree that people are confused by misinformation on the web.
• Define 'social trust' and find ways to approximate it computationally
• Explore the relation between social propaganda and web spam
• Explore web neighborhoods and identify non-trustworthy communities
• etc.

It is a large and fascinating project that is recently getting a lot of attention. I have worked with both Social Science and Computer Science students to address some of these problems. Students sometimes will take on a summer project with me during their rising senior summer which will evolve into a thesis.

Expert Systems for Medical Applications
I am working with group of researchers at the Harvard Medical School on creating computerized tests for diagnosing mental disorders. One of the problems that I am interested in, is the development of an expert system that will help physicians come up with the right diagnosis and determine the appropriate treatment regime.
The medical test results can be complex, involving more than a dozen parameters. An associated project is the development of the right interfaces for simplifying and communicating the test results to both clinicians and patients.

Parallel Computing and Multimedia
I have also done research in the past, and always interested in working on new exciting projects, on Parallel Computing and Multimedia Systems.

Feel free to contact me (email is best, but visit my office if you are around) for a more detailed explanation of the problems.
See my publications page for more information.

Eni Mustafaraj
Under Construction...

Orit Shaer
Under Construction...

Mark Sheldon
My research interests are in the programming languages and systems area of computer science. I am particularly interested in investigating link-time optimization for separately compiled programs. Why is this interesting? Programming language researchers have, over the years, developed a broad array of program analysis and optimization techniques that apply in a whole program setting, i.e., these tools work when they are given the entire program in source form. These techniques are of little practical value because software development is normally done in a setting in which different program components are developed relatively independently (perhaps even in different countries) and then linked together as separate object files. The goal of this research is to find ways to represent, in a compact and usable form, partial analyses of program source code that would support further analysis and optimization when program components are linked together.

I also have long-standing interests in programming language type systems and distributed information systems, and I welcome interesting proposals from students.

Randy Shull
I work in combinatorics and algorithmic graph theory. This year my research focuses on the study of the fractional weak discrepancy of a partially ordered set. This work is done in collaboration with Professors Ann Trenk and Alan Shuchat of the Mathematics Department, Wellesley College. The idea was motivated by problems like the following: A manager who partially orders her employees according to their value to the company needs to assign a salary level to each employee. It is necessary to ensure that a more valuable employee gets a higher salary than less valuable one. On the other hand, fairness considerations restrict the salary discrepancies between pairs of incomparable employees. Fractional weak discrepancy is a measure of the 3fairness2 of her assignment. We have formulated a linear program that determines the fractional weak discrepancy of a poset and have obtained an interpretation for the dual of this program as a network flow that relates the fractional weak discrepancy to the notion of forcing cycles. Currently we are working to characterize important classes of partial orders according to their fractional weak discrepancy.

Jennifer Stephan
My research interests concern the identification and characterization of software errors, mechanisms for tolerating and recovering from software errors, and methods for and architectures for increasing reliability of software. Specifically, I am interested in applying these ideas to create recovery mechanisms for control systems. In the area of control systems, my focus is optimal and reliable control.

I have advised student projects on a wide range of topics including operating systems curriculum development, the relationship between gender and video games, the design of an interactive storytelling toy, the development of rocket flight data processing software, and the history of computer hardware. I'm open to working with a student on any project that interests her.

Brian Tjaden
My research focuses on the analysis, design, and implementation of computer algorithms with applications in molecular biology and genomics. Many problems which arise naturally in the field of genomics can be solved using classic computer science algorithmic techniques, such as dynamic programming, expectation maximization, and hidden Markov modeling. For instance, one project which I am currently working on involves the identification of patterns in DNA and RNA. More specifically, I am interested in non-coding RNA genes which act by binding to mRNAs to regulate these genes post-transcriptionally. We have developed a dynamic programming algorithm to search genomes for the mRNA targets of these non-coding genes' action. Another project involves developing algorithms to analyze very large data sets generated from DNA microarrays - a technology which allows a researcher to assay the expression of thousands of genes simultaneously. We are investigating computational approaches, such as clustering, for extracting meaningful biological insight from this wealth of data.

Franklyn Turbak
I encourage all computer science students to undertake at least one long-term independent project during their undergraduate years. This can be done in the context of a summer internship or as an independent study project during a semester. The skills learned in such projects are valuable for both the working world and for graduate school. Because I think these projects are important, I am willing to entertain the possibility of supervising any creative project, even though it may not be directly in my research area.

The focus of my research is the evaluation, design, and implementation of programming languages and frameworks for analyzing and transforming programs. I am particularly interested in techniques that help to resolve a fundamental tension between expressiveness (e.g., features that support abstraction and modularity) and efficiency. For example, many programs can be elegantly expressed as the composition of processes that produce and consume tree-shaped data structures. The time and space utilization of these programs can be improved by automatically eliminating some of the intermediate trees via a technique known as deforestation. As another example, type and flow information can be used to efficiently represent higher-order functions in function-oriented languages like Scheme, OCaml, and Haskell.

In my work, I do a lot of meta-programming --- writing programs (such as interpreters, translators, and analyzers) that manipulate other programs. I am eager to mentor students in projects that involve meta-programming. If you are interested in learning meta-programming, you should first take CS251 (Programming Languages) and then consult with me about undertaking an independent study project or thesis project.

Another area that excites me is visualizing the execution of computational processes. If you would like to work on a system for animating process execution, please contact me.

I have a budding interest in computer security. I am particularly interested in techniques for analyzing the robustness of protocols developed for secure communication between remote parties. I am also interested in electronic voting, computer viruses, automatically detecting security vulnerabilities in code, and techniques for tracking the flow of sensitive information through programs.