News
'Robots For Real' - IEEE Special Report
The IEEE Spectrum has done a special report called Robots For Real. One of the segments - "Surgeons and Robots Scrub Up" - features the work of the researchers in our Computer-Integrated Surgical Systems and Technology (CISST) lab.
You can see all the segments here.
Have an iPhone? Check out Aves
CS PhD student Omar Ahmad is the co-developer of two revolutionary gaming technologies which debuted on the iPhone in the game Aves. The game has been featured in Apple's New and Noteworthy category of iTunes. Reviews have included comments like 'beautifully detailed graphics', 'technically impressive', 'audio and graphics are world class'.
The JHU Digital Media Center has some additional information about the game and its development here.
Best Paper Award at MICCAI '09
At MICCAI '09, the Best Paper in Computer Assisted Intervention Systems and Medical Robotics Award was presented to Single Fiber Optical Coherence Tomography Microsurgical Instruments for Computer and Robot Assisted Retinal Surgery authored by Marcin Balicki (ERC/CS), Jae-Ho Han (ERC/ECE), Iulian Iordachita (ERC), Peter Gehlbach (JHU Wilmer Eye Institute), James Handa (JHU Wilmer Eye Institute), Russell Taylor (ERC/CS) & Jin Kang (ERC/ECE).
Congratulations to the authors on this notable achievement.
CS Faculty part of $20M award to Sheridan Libraries
NSF has awarded a $20M grant to the Sheridan Libraries for the purpose of 'data curation'. Two CS faculty - Dr. Randal Burns and Dr. Andreas Terzis - will participate in this effort. The JHU Gazette features a story about the project.
Johns Hopkins Engineering Magazine features CS Research
The summer issue of Johns Hopkins Engineering includes articles about the some research being conducted by two CS professors.
The article Modern Prospectors explains research involving wireless sensor networks that is being conducted by Andreas Terzis. Be sure to check out the entire article to understand how research being done in other WSE departments is contributing to the sensor research.
A second article, A Glimpse Into the Future of Medicine, highlights the work of Dr. Russ Taylor and his students using the Intuitive da Vinci Sugical System.
CS Professor receives Robert B. Pond Teaching Award
Professor Rao Kosaraju is the 2009 winner of the Robert B. Pond Sr. Excellence in Teaching Award, which is given for commitment to and excellence in instruction, success in instilling the desire to learn and dedication to undergraduate students.
Congratulations Rao on this notable award.
Terzis miTag Featured on Discovery Channel
Dr. Andreas Terzis and his collaborators are featured in a video on the Discovery Channel website. The story describes the miTag, short for medical information tag. The technology would be used in to monitor vital signs of patients in hospital emergency rooms and other crisis situations until they can be seen by a doctor. Information is transmitted wirelessly to a central monitoring system. If a patient becomes unstable, medical professionals could be alerted more quickly and provide a more immediate response.
Learn more about this device by watching the video on the Discovery Channel web page: http://dsc.discovery.com/videos/tech-emergency-rooms-go-wireless.html.
Randal Burns Wins Best Paper Award
At the 7th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST '09), the award for best paper was presented to "CA-NFS: A Congestion-Aware Network File System" co-authored by JHU graduate Alexandros Batsakis, JHU Associate Professor Randal Burns, and Arkady Kanevsky, James Lentini and Thomas Talpey of NetApp. The conference, held in February 2009 in San Francisco, CA, is the leading conference in storage systems research.
Congratulations to Randal and the other authors!
Russ Taylor Elected Fellow at University of Tokyo
Professor Russ Taylor has been elected a fellow of the School of Engineering at the University of Tokyo. A letter from Kazou Hotate, Dean of the School of Engineering, said this honor is awarded in recognition of "your distinguished contribution to the research and education of our school as well as your outstanding accomplishments in research and education in the field of engineering".
The title of “Fellow, School of Engineering, The University
of Tokyo” is granted to persons who have
their main base of activity at institutions abroad and
who have carried out distinguished achievements in
scholarship or education in the engineering field as well
as meritorious service to the education or research at
this school through exchanges with it and whose continued
support via exchanges can be expected.
Congratulations Russ!
CS student Marcin Balicki to receive 2009-2010 ARCS Scholarship
On March 20, 2009, Vice Provost Jonathan Bagger announced the JHU recipients of the 2009-2010 ARCS Scholarships. Third year Computer Science PhD student Marcin Balicki is among the winners. Marcin is currently studying with Dr. Russell Taylor in the Computer Integrated Surgical Systems and Technology (CISST) Lab. The ARCS Foundation awards scholarships annually to students working in the science and engineering fields who have maintained high scholastic records and have proven abilities in a scientific field. The student winners participated in a site visit on April 1, 2009 during which they gave brief presentations about their work to the foundation representatives. In the fall, there will also be an awards ceremony at the U. S. Supreme Court in Washington D.C. . Congratulations to Marcin on this noteworthy accomplishment.
Rene Vidal Named Sloan Research Fellow
Assistant Professor Rene Vidal has been selected to receive a Sloan Research Fellowship for 2009. Dr. Vidal is among 118 early career scientists selected for fellowships this year. His research areas include biomedical imaging, computer vision, machine learning, dynamical systems theory, and robotics.
These fellowships, awarded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, are given annually to "exceptional young researchers early in their academic careers, and often at pivotal stages in their work," and provide resources for faculty to pursue new areas of interest.
Congratulations Rene!
Local Media Coverage for 'Facebook 101' course
CS PhD students Daniel Mirota and Carol Reiley taught "Facebook 101:
Developing Photo and Video Applications for Online Social Networks" during Intersession 2009. The 13 students enrolled came from various majors and grade levels. In three short weeks, students conceptualized, developed, and began marketing five new applications for Facebook users. To our knowledge, never before has a class been taught focused on teaching software engineering using the Facebook platform. Facebook currently has over 150 million users and 60 million photos uploaded daily. The class had an emphasis on computer vision to utilize the amount of photo data available. The projects include Mosayick (a way to assemble tiny pieces of a friend's photos to create a larger new image, resembling an online mosaic), TextTrade (a method of buying or selling used textbooks with other Facebook users), Admirer (a platform to view the photographs and albums of your friends in one centralized location), FaceMerge ("face morphing" of two friends), and Photo Search (finding mutual pictures of friends). If the new applications become popular enough, they may become a source of revenue for the student inventors.
The course drew the interest of local newspapers. Stories appeared in the JHU Newsletter, the Baltimore Sun, the Washington Post and the Baltimore Business Journal.
CS Student Hassan Rivaz awarded Predoctoral Traineeship Award
PhD student Hassan Rivaz has been awarded a Predoctoral Traineeship from the Department of Defense.
The Breast Cancer Research Program Predoctoral Traineeship Award supports the training of promising graduate students studying breast cancer under the guidance of a designated mentor for careers in breast cancer research. Under this award mechanism, the predoctoral trainee is considered the Principal Investigator (PI) and should write a grant proposal with appropriate direction from the mentor. PI must be a graduate student (Ph.D. or M.D./Ph.D. program). Funding is $90,000 for direct costs for up to a 3 year performance period.
Hassan's mentors and collaborators in his proposal are Dr. Gregory Hager (mentor), Dr. Richard Zellars (mentor), Dr. Emad Boctor (collaborator), Dr. Gabor Fichtinger (collaborator), Dr. Russell Taylor (collaborator), Dr. Ali Khamene (collaborator) and Dr. Theodore DeWeese (collaborator).
Michael Kazhdan Receives NSF CAREER Award
Congratulations to Michael (Misha) Kazhdan who has been named a 2008 recipient of an NSF CAREER Award. The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations. Such activities should build a firm foundation for a lifetime of leadership in integrating education and research.
CAREER: Reconstructing 3D Models from Today's Scanning Devices
Abstract:
In this research project we study the problem of reconstructing watertight 3D models from scanned data. Motivated by the recent improvements in acquisition modalities, we propose a novel out-of-core algorithm for addressing the surface reconstruction problem, focusing on the challenge of defining a principled solution that is capable of processing the multi-gigabyte sized point-sets that have started becoming available recently.
Randal Burns Promoted to Associate Professor with tenure
Congratulations to Randal Burns who has been promoted to Associate Professor with tenure. His new title takes effect July 1, 2008.
Two CS Students Receive NSF Graduate Research Fellowships
PhD students Maria Ayad and Tian Xia have been awarded 2008 NSF Graduate Research Fellowships. The NSF Fellowship program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in the relevant science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based master's and doctoral degrees, including women in engineering and computer and information science. NSF Fellows are expected to become knowledge experts who can contribute significantly to research, teaching, and innovations in science and engineering.
Both Maria and Tian are beginning their 3rd year in the PhD program. Maria is working with the Image Analysis and Communications Lab (IACL)and is advised by Dr. Jerry Prince of ECE and Dr. Gabor Fichtinger of CS. Tian is with the Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics (LCSR). His adviser is Dr. Peter Kazanzides of CS.
Each student has received a 3 year award which will cover their stipends, tuition and fees.
Congratulations to Maria and Tian.
Baruch Awerbuch Wins 2008 Dijkstra Prize
Baruch Awerbuch has been chosen as a recipient of the 2008 Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing. The prize was awarded for his paper "Sparse Partitions" co-authored with David Peleg and published in FOCS 1990.
This Prize, sponsored jointly by the ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC) and the EATCS Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC), is awarded annually. This year it will be presented at PODC 2008.
Congratulations Baruch!
Russ Taylor Receives 2008 IEEE Pioneer Award
Congratulations to Russ Taylor, Professor in Computer Science and Director of the Center for Computer-Integrated Surgical Systems (CISST). He has been selected as a co-recipient of the 2008 Pioneer in Robotics and Automation Award from the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society.
Recipients of this award are being recognized for significant impacts on the fields of robotics and/or automation by initiating new areas of research, development or engineering. Taylor recently began research in the use of imaging, model-based planning and robotic systems to augment human performance in surgical procedures. His other research interests include robot systems, programming languages and model-based planning.
Congratulations Russ!
Susan Hohenberger Receives Microsoft New Faculty Fellowship
Congratulations to Susan Hohenberger, Assistant Professor in Computer Science. She has been selected as a 2008 recipient of a Microsoft New Faculty Fellowship. "Each year, five up-and-coming new faculty members are chosen for these awards from universities throughout North America". Faculty Fellows are awarded a $200,000 (USD) grant to stimulate creative research in their respective fields.
Hohenberger's research focuses on cryptography: the art of securely communicating. She is interested in designing secure solutions for pervasive settings, where devices everywhere are constantly talking to their environments, which may require low energy, short overhead and the ability to quickly process a large number of incoming messages. Her research includes an emphasis on developing privacy-friendly technologies, such as anonymous communication and electronic cash.
Congratulations to Susan.
CS student Hassan Rivaz awarded Link Foundation Fellowship
Congratulations to Hassan Rivaz who has been awarded a fellowship from the Link Foundation for 2008-2009. Hassan is one of four recipients from U.S. and Canadian universities. These particular fellowships are awarded annually for projects related to advanced simulation and training.
Congratulations to Hassan on this noteworthy achievement.
CS student Carol Reiley named to IEEE committee
PhD student Carol Reiley has been selected chair of the Student Activities Committee to serve on the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS) Administrative Committee for a two year term.
For more information regarding the RAS committee, please visit http://www.ieee-ras.org/people/adcom.php
CS student Marcin Balicki to receive 2008-2009 ARCS Scholarship
On March 3, 2008, Vice Provost Ted Poehler announced the JHU recipients of the 2008-2009 ARCS Scholarships. Second year Computer Science PhD student Marcin Balicki is among the winners. Marcin is currently studying with Dr. Russ Taylor in the Computer Integrated Surgical Systems and Technology (CISST) Lab.
The ARCS Foundation awards scholarships annually to students working in the science and engineering fields who have maintained high scholastic records and have proven abilities in a scientific field.
The student winners will participate in a site visit and luncheon on April 2, 2008 during which they will give a brief presentation about their work to the foundation representatives.
Congratulations to Marcin on this noteworthy accomplishment.
Johns Hopkins ENGINEERING Magazine highlights CS faculty
The Winter 2008 ENGINEERING magazine includes stories about a variety of CS activities and research.
See page 11 for 'Beware the Eavesdropper'
See page 28 for 'Information Flow'
See page 36 for 'Final Exam'
Best Paper Award for Terzis
Congratulations to Andreas Terzis and his co-authors who received the Best Paper Award at the Third International Conference on Intelligent Sensor Networks and Information Processing (ISSNIP 2007) held in Melbourne, Australia for their paper Localization in Multi-Modal Sensor Networks by Ryan Farrell (University of Maryland, USA); Roberto Garcia (Johns Hopkins University, USA); Dennis Lucarelli (Johns Hopkins University, USA); Andreas Terzis (Johns Hopkins University, USA); I- Jeng Wang (Johns Hopkins University, USA).
Senior Design Project Students Add Cross-Platform WebDAV Support to Firefox
In the past, users of Firefox who needed to access WebDAV(Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning, see RFC 4918) servers only had one choice: Julian Reschke's OpenWebFolder extension which hooks into Microsoft's WebDAV component and thus only works on Windows. Now there is a second choice.
Under the guidance of Joe Feise, a team of three undergraduate students (Ayse Sabuncu, Benjamin Schuster, and Ryan McLelland) from the Department of Computer Science at The Johns Hopkins University has developed a new, cross-platform WebDAV extension called WebFolder. The extension, developed for their Senior Design Project course, implements the core WebDAV protocol in JavaScript and runs on any platform supported by recent versions of Firefox.
The WebFolder team hopes that their work will lead to more widespread use of WebDAV as an open and user-friendly collaboration infrastructure.
Monrose to be Program Chair of LEET 2008
Professor Fabian Monrose has been selected as the Program Chair of the First USENIX Workshop on Large-Scale Exploits and Emergent Threats (LEET 2008) which will be held in April 2008 in San Francisco, CA.
John Sheppard receives the IEEE Autotestcon Frank McGinnis Award
Dr. John Sheppard received the IEEE Autotestcon Frank McGinnis Professional Achievement Award during the 2007 AUTOTESTCON awards banquet held in Baltimore, September 17 - 20.
This award recognizes outstanding leadership, individual initiative, and technical contributions in the field of automatic test engineering, either for a specific accomplishment or for a body of activities during a career. The award carries a crystal trophy kept for one year, a permanent trophy, and $2,000.
Apple iPhone's Security Flaws Revealed By Professor Avi Rubin-JHU Computer Security Expert
WSE computer science faculty member, Avi Rubin, and other researchers at Independent Security Evaluators, a private company founded by Rubin, have found a way to hack into Apple's popular new iPhone, allowing them to take control of the device. Read about their findings in the New York Times.
CS Programming Languages Lab Receives Best Paper Award
Congratulations to Paritosh Shroff, Scott F. Smith, and Mark Thober, co-authors of Dynamic Dependency Monitoring to Secure Information Flow, which received the Best Paper Award at the 20th IEEE Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF 2007) held in Venice, Italy.
Jason Eisner and Fabian Monrose Promoted To Associate Professor with Tenure
Congratulations to Professor Jason Eisner and Professor Fabian Monrose who have both been promoted to the rank of Associate Professor with tenure. Their new titles take effect July 1, 2007.
"Junking the Joystick," - Professor Russell Taylor's work to create steady-hand robotic surgery devices is featured in this article in Mechanical Engineering Magazine
Jeffrey Winters, Associate Editor at Mechanical Engineering Magazine writes: "When Russell Taylor first started working on surgical robots in the late 1980s, one of the most cumbersome tasks was aligning the device to the patient's body. The joystick controller used to move the business end of IBM's robotic hip-replacement machine, called Robodoc, to the hip was plenty precise. But trying to move the tip of the instrument through x-y-z coordinates was unnatural." More
Articles on The Bot Busters and Wave Relay projects in the recent WSE Engineering Magazine
The recent WSE
Engineering Magazine has an article on the Bot Busters project of
Profs Monrose and Terzis (pp 14-19 of this pdf file), and also an article on the Wireless Lab's
Wave Relay project of a roving wireless network on Hopkins shuttle
buses (pp 6-7).
Congratulations to John Sheppard for his recent election as a Fellow of the IEEE
Congratulations to John Sheppard for his recent election as a Fellow of the IEEE, for his contributions to system-level diagnosis and prognosis.
(From the IEEE website: The IEEE Grade of Fellow is conferred by the Board of Directors upon a person with an extraordinary record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest. A brief citation is issued to new Fellows describing their accomplishments.)
Computer Science BS degree receives ABET accreditation
The Computer Science department has received accreditation of its BS degree by ABET.
ABET, Inc., is the recognized U.S. accreditor of college and university programs in applied science, computing, engineering, and technology.
http://www.abet.org/
Unraveling 'Language of Surgery'
Computer scientists' data could improve surgeons' skills
By Phil Sneiderman
Homewood
Borrowing ideas from speech recognition research, Johns Hopkins computer scientists are building mathematical models to represent the safest and most effective ways to perform surgery, including such tasks as suturing, dissecting and joining tissue.
Johns Hopkins Joins Effort to Boost Smart Tag Security
Johns Hopkins researchers will take part in a new multi-institution project to improve the security of "smart tags," the wireless devices that allow drivers to zip through automatic tollbooths and let workers enter a secured area with the flash of a card.
Carol Reiley won the Baltimore/Washington DC regional Society of Women Engineers (SWE) Scholarship
Carol Reiley won the Baltimore/Washington DC regional Society of Women Engineers (SWE) scholarship and received an award of $1000. She also was selected as a finalist for the SWE National Collegiate Poster Competition for her research titled "Dynamic Augmented Reality for Haptic Display in Robot-Assisted Surgical Systems." As a finalist, she will receive a travel stipend to attend the National SWE conference on October 13th to compete for the top three places.
Giuseppe Ateniese has been promoted to Associate Professor with tenure
Congratulations to Giuseppe Ateniese! Giuseppe Ateniese has been promoted to Associate Professor with tenure.
Three JHU CS students won fellowships (Henry Lin = Link, Sharmishtaa Seshamani = Google, and Carol Reiley = NSF)
Three JHU CS students won fellowships (Henry Lin = Link, Sharmishtaa Seshamani = Google, and Carol Reiley = NSF). For more information, please check out the Computational Interaction and Robotics Lab web page.
Krzysztof Niski of the Computer Graphics Lab has been awarded a 2006-2007 NVIDIA Fellowship
Krzysztof Niski of the Computer Graphics Lab has been awarded a 2006-2007 NVIDIA Fellowship for his proposal, "A GPU-based Level of Detail System." Chris is one of 14 recipients of this fellowship worldwide and is the first Johns Hopkins student to receive this award. Congratulations!
Gabor Fichtinger won the Capers and Marion McDonald Award for Excellence in Mentoring and Advising
Gabor Fichtinger won the Capers and Marion McDonald Award for Excellence in Mentoring and Advising
Wireless sensor networks for monitoring soil
Andreas Terzis,Masaloiu-E, and Josh Cogan are part of an interdisciplinary team working on wireless sensor networks for monitoring soil in various city sites.
Since 1993, about 40 students each year have received PURA grants of up to $3,000 to conduct original research, some results of which have been published in professional journals. The awards, funded through a donation from the Hodson Trust, are an important part of the university's mission and its commitment to research opportunities for undergraduates.
jhu gazette
nature.com
nature.com
Andreas Terzis has won a CAREER award from NSF
The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a Foundation- wide activity that offers the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards in support of the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who most effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their organization. Such activities should build a firm foundation for a lifetime of integrated contributions to research and education.
Towards turnkey sensor networks for the Sciences: Software tools for designing and managing networks of sensors: Andreas Terzis
Abstract
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) offer the promise of revolutionizing the way scientists observe the physical environment. Unfortunately, experience from the networks deployed to date has shown that planning and managing a sensor deployment is a great challenge requiring expertise in multiple areas of Computer Science. However, future sensor networks must be implemented by researchers in other disciplines. For this to happen, the process of deploying and managing sensor networks should be radically simpler. In this project we develop a set of network design tools. These tools use site- specific signal propagation models coupled with detailed physical layer radio models to calculate packet loss rates. Based on these estimates, the tools determine the location of additional relay points and gateways necessary to create a reliable network around the required measurement locations. Furthermore, we develop a network self-monitoring tool that correlates measurements taken by individual sensor nodes to construct a global view of the operational network. Information from the deployment is fed back to the network design tool. Through this coupling, incremental adjustments to the network layout are made until the network reaches the desired level of performance. Using the tools developed by this project, sensor networks will become predictable and robust instruments, empowering scientists to observe phenomena that were previously out of reach. We are working with scientists at Johns Hopkins University as well as high school teachers to bring the results of this project to the broader academic and educational community.
Fabian Monrose has won a CAREER award from NSF
The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a Foundation- wide activity that offers the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards in support of the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who most effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their organization. Such activities should build a firm foundation for a lifetime of integrated contributions to research and education.
Towards Effective Identification of Application Behaviors in Encrypted Traffic: Fabian Monrose
Abstract
Several fundamental security mechanisms for restricting access to network resources rely on the ability of a reference monitor to inspect the contents of traffic as it traverses the network. However, with the increasing popularity of cryptographic protocols the traditional means of inspecting packet contents to enforce security policies is no longer a viable approach as message contents are concealed by encryption. This project encompasses the first major component of a principled investigation into the feasibility of protocol identification based solely on those features that remain intact after encryption---namely, the packet size, inter-arrival and direction. More specifically, this work attempts to provide a better understanding of the limits of protocol recognition based on a thorough statistical analysis and information theoretic assessment of the available features in protocol behaviors observed in the wild. Specifically, this project advances the current state of the art and contributes to the scientific community by building efficient mixture models for detecting protocols with multi-modal behaviors, designing practical tools for visualizing behavioral motifs in TCP sequences, providing new information-theoretic decision policies for assigning protocol class labels to these sequences, and imparting new notions for assessing realistic masquerading attacks and the appropriate defenses.
Senior high student working in the JHU CS Graphics lab has been named a finalist in the 2006 Intel Science Talent Search
Myers Abraham Davis, a senior high school student at the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, has been named a finalist in the 2006 Intel Science Talent Search. 40 finalists are named nation-wide out of 1,558 entrants. Abe worked in the Graphics Lab in the Johns Hopkins University Department of Computer Science under the supervision of Dr. Jonathan Cohen on his project, "Bounding Sphere Images: A Parametric Bounding Volume Hierarchy for Collision Detection on the GPU"
http://www.sciserv.org/sts/65sts/finalists.asp
Research Professor Adam Stubblefield named as one of the Technology Review's top technology innovators under age 35
Research Professor Adam Stubblefield named as one of the Technology Review's top technology innovators under age 35
Their work is a road map to what's hot in emerging technology--and their achievements will shape the world we live in for decades to come.
They are inventors and discoverers and entrepreneurs. They are chemists and biologists and software engineers and chip designers. They create their wonders in universities, startups, and large corporations. They gravitate to the most interesting and difficult scientific and engineering problems at hand, and arrive at solutions no one had imagined. They take on big issues. They are the TR35--Technology Review's selection of the top technology innovators under age 35 (as of October 1, 2005). The winners from previous years (when it was the TR100) have changed your world. So will the people you're about to meet.
--Technology Review's top 35 innovators under the age of 35
Greg Hager has been elected an IEEE Fellow
Greg Hager has been elected an IEEE Fellow, effective January 1, 2006. This highest level of membership is conferred only by invitation of the Board of Directors upon a person of outstanding and extraordinary qualifications and experience in IEEE-designated fields, and who has made important individual contributions to one or more of these fields. Greg was cited by the committee for his contributions to vision-based robotics.
