Research

Computer Science research at Johns Hopkins University is charting new territory and transforming society through innovation and discovery.  Our faculty are researchers who excel in their respective areas of interest.  Here are brief overviews of centers and laboratories within the department, and links to their respective webpages.

Center for Language and Speech Processing

The Johns Hopkins Center for Language and Speech Processing (CLSP) was established in 1992 with support from the US Government (NSF, DARPA, DoD). Its aim is to promote research and education in the science and technology of language and speech. Research is conducted by faculty, research scientists, and graduate students affiliated with six associated academic departments: biomedical engineering, cognitive science, computer science, electrical and computer engineering, mathematical sciences, and psychology. The research involves work in all aspects of the science and technology of language and speech, with fundamental studies under way in areas such as language modeling, natural language processing, neural auditory processing, acoustic processing, optimality theory, and language acquisition.

Engineering Research Center/Computer Integrated Surgery

The CISST ERC is a collaborative Engineering Research Center for Computer Integrated Surgical Systems and Technology. The Johns Hopkins University with Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, Massachusetts Institute of Technology with Brigham and Women's Hospital, and Carnegie Mellon University with Shadyside Hospital are teamed to develop novel computing methods, interfacial technologies and computer-integrated surgical systems to significantly improve surgical procedures in the 21st Century. The Center's industrial affiliations augment the collaboration by providing systems development infrastructure for rapid prototyping and validation of surgical systems concepts. Together, CISST ERC partnerships address a vital national need to greatly reduce surgical costs, improve clinical outcomes, and improve the efficiency of health care delivery.

Information Security Institute

The Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute (ISI) provides a comprehensive approach to the many issues encompassed by information security. Through a partnership across the divisions of Johns Hopkins, ISI is a well-integrated effort on information security, which addresses all of information security's major concerns. ISI involves a blend of educational, research, business relationship components, and a mixture of academic, business, and government involvement.

The Security and Privacy Applied Research lab

The SPAR Lab is a research group in the Johns Hopkins University Computer Science Department. We are affiliated with the Information Security Institute, an inter-departmental program to foster research, teaching and training into all aspects of information security. The ISI brings together the School of Engineering, School of Arts and Sciences, School of Advanced International Studies, School of Public Health, School of Medicine, Peabody Conservatory, Applied Physics Laboratory, and the School of Professional Studies in Business and Education.

The Hopkins interNetworking Research Lab (HiNRG)

The Hopkins InterNetworking Research Group (HiNRG) lead by Dr. Terzis performs research in the area of computer networks. The main research themes of HiNRG are building networks that are resilient to a wide range of failures and extreme networking, networks consisting of very large numbers of small wireless devices.

Storage Systems Lab

The Hopkins Storage Systems Lab (HSSL -- preferably pronounced hizzle) is dedicated to building distributed and high-performance storage systems and the technologies that make these systems possible. In particular, the lab explores the relationship between storage systems and distributed computing. Research at HSSL designs storage software architectures that are congruent with the networks and hardware systems on which they are deployed in order to improve manageability, reliability, and performance.

Programming Languages Lab

The Programming Languages Laboratory focuses on fundamental problems in programming languages. We are interested in addressing challenging problems which can also have practical impact within a ten year time frame. A common thread of much of our research is the extraction of static (compile-time) properties of programs. This can include type information, flow information, security information, and other program properties. Efforts involve both solving of fundamental problems, and implementation to justify the usefulness of the solution.

Natural Language Processing

Effective natural language interfaces will be an enabling technology for the mass exploitation of the benefits of computing. In conjunction with the Center for Speech and Language Processing, the members of the NLP Lab are committed to finding novel and efficient computational methods that rival human performance in natural language competency tasks. Recent areas of research include: machine translation, transformation based learning techniques, language modeling, syntax acquisition, morphology/phonology and information retrieval.

Computer Graphics

The Computer Graphics group is involved in research in all aspects of computer graphics. Our focus, though, lies at the core of computer graphics and we seek and solve the fundamental problems that prohibit interactive display of real world models. In other words, interactive generation of believable images of real world models sums up the driving motivation of our research. As a result our research path has taken us through massive-model walkthrough, dynamic surface tessellation, view-dependent mesh simplification, visibility computation, collision detection, efficient geometry representation, large-scale volume rendering, parallel rendering, image-based rendering and many other areas. In our lab we try to facilitate independence of research tracks for students, while at the same time moving them all towards the common goal of advancing the speed and quality of rendering. This naturally fosters collaborations and exchange of ideas. In addition, we have regular lab get-togethers, individual research meetings and seminars.

Computational Interaction and Robotics Lab

The Johns Hopkins Interaction Group is a part of Johns Hopkins Computer Science and the NSF Engineering Research Center for Computer-Integrated Surgical Systems and Technology (CISST). We are interested in understanding problems that involve dynamic, spatial interaction at the intersection of vision, robotics, and human-computer interaction.

Distributed Systems and Networks Lab

The Distributed Systems and Networks lab focuses on the interplay between theory and practice in distributed systems and networks. Our vision is to create a paradigm shift in the way distributed systems are designed and built. In contrast to the ad-hoc methods underlying most current systems, the lab is building a small set of general tools that are provably correct and provide high performance. These tools encapsulate the challenging aspects of asynchronous networks and enable people to build scalable distributed applications. The impact of our lab encompasses the whole range of theoretical ideas, prototype academic systems, and commercial-grade tools that are used by industry.

ACCURATE: A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable, and Transparent Elections

ACCURATE is a multi-institution voting research center directed by Prof. Avi Rubin and funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The goals of the center are: to research ways in which technology can be used to improve voting systems and the voting process; to develop the science that will help inform the election community and the public about the tradeoffs among various voting technologies and procedures; to serve as a resource to the elections community, politicians, vendors and the public about issues related to public policy, technology, and law with respect to voting; and, to publish and disseminate our research so that future systems can benefit from the center's work.

Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics

The Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics (LCSR) is an interdisciplinary academic center at the Johns Hopkins University. The mission of LCSR is to foster innovative robotics science and engineering research.

We see robotics as an essential link between computation and action that enhances the health, safety, and efficacy of humans. Computers have already evolved to become essential tools that allow humans to perform myriad “information tasks” that once would have been difficult, impossible, or even unimaginable for the average person. Because robots are designed to use computed information in order to act upon their environment, they have a similar potential to fundamentally alter the way we interact with the physical world.

Institute for Data Intensive Engineering and Science

The IDIES mission is to coalesce data-intensive science efforts at Johns Hopkins into a well-focused center of activity, and to propel various fields towards new discoveries and breakthroughs. By bringing together scholars from the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, the Whiting School of Engineering, and the Sheridan Libraries to form interdisciplinary teams, IDIES aims to facilitate the development of tools and methods to derive knowledge from data in an exponentially expanding world.

Visual Imaging and Surgical Robotics Laboratory

The Visual Imaging and Surgical Robotics laboratory explores applications of computing in surgery and other biomedical areas. This includes augmentation of currently available tele-operated surgical robots and various forms of endoscopic visual imagers, as well as design and development of algorithms and architectures for such  systems.