Research Facilities

The Computer Science laboratories and Department offices are headquartered in the Computer Science building, which has more than 20,000 square feet of lab space. The departmental research facilities are extensive and convenient; more than $1 million was spent just in 2002–2004 on lab expansion and renovation. The Department’s main backbone network runs on Gigabit Ethernet, and is connected to the Internet via fast 155Mbps network. We also provide secure wireless network access using 802.11 protocols. In addition, plans are being drawn for a new state-of-the-art Computer Science building extension as well as a separate Center of Excellence in Wireless and Information Technology (CEWIT) building (see below).

Public facilities include machines in student offices and in four public labs. Graduate students also have access to a dedicated lounge, study room, and a game room. Student offices contain many Sun SPARC and Intel-based workstations. Students can access several printers (color and black/white), copier machines, and fax machines. The Department includes a computer cluster for CPU-intensive jobs, as well as many dedicated servers: Web, FTP, e-mail, virus protection, software distribution, and more. The public facilities provide access to hundreds of software packages (Unix and Windows), many of which are commercial packages.

The Department of Computer Science enjoys one of the few dedicated Computer Science libraries in the nation. Our extensive library resides in our building and holds more than 15,000 books, conference proceedings, technical reports, and 350 journal titles. In addition, the library has an impressive digital collection of electronic books, journals, and databases that are accessible on-site as well as remotely.

We have three major centers and 14 well-equipped research labs, described below. Members of these labs typically get a dedicated workstation. The labs cumulatively provide the following: thousands of software packages running on more than a dozen operating systems; several Terabytes of disk space; wireless and Gigabit networks; hundreds of machines from more than 10 architectures, ranging from small wireless handhelds and laptops, to mid-range Intel Xeon and Itanium2 servers, to high-end multiprocessor PC clusters. Specific details are available at http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/facilities/index.html.

Research Centers
The Center of Excellence in Wireless and Information Technology’s (CEWIT) mission is to keep the region at the forefront in wireless and information technologies: software development, wireless infrastructure, sector-targeted applications, e-business/e-commerce/cybersecurity, health-care/biocomputing, transportation, and workforce development. This center has more than $200 million dollars of funding, $50 million of it pledged by New York State Governor George Pataki. See www.cewit.org for more details.

The Center for Cybersecurity’s mission is to advance research and education in computer, network, and information security and assurance; to foster research collaborations between information assurance and traditional computer science areas such as database systems, operating systems, programming languages, formal methods, and verification.

The Center for Visual Computing was established to advance visual computing studies and computer human interaction at Stony Brook University, to promote research and education in Visual Computing, to collaborate with industry, and to foster interdisciplinary interaction. Visual computing research activities include: visualization, computer graphics, image processing, computer vision, medical imaging, virtual reality, user interfaces, computer-supported collaborative work, computer-aided design, multimedia, and computational geometry.

Research Labs
The Applied Algorithms Lab studies the design and analysis of algorithms, in particular: theoretical and experimental analysis of string, graph, and combinatorial algorithms, including applications in computational biology and combinatorial computing; randomized algorithms, with applications to scheduling; and computational geometry and approximation algorithms, particularly with applications to computer graphics and manufacturing.

The Applied Logic Lab studies the principles and applications of logic-based methods in databases, verification of concurrent systems, data mining, agent-based systems, and Web information systems. Members of the Lab are engaged in three major projects: FLORA, a declarative object-oriented language for programming knowledge-intensive applications; The LMC (Logic Programming-Based Model Checking); and XSB, a high-performance logic programming and deductive database system.

The Computer Vision Lab focuses on 3-D computer vision problems such as shape reconstruction, illumination and reflectance estimation and representation, deformable models, 3-D tracking, and image-based modeling. Application areas include human-computer interaction (face recognition and face and hand tracking) and biomedical applications. The lab, which shares the Center of Visual Computing infrastructure, has a number of high-end Pentium PCs and state-of the-art conventional and stereo CCD cameras.

The Concurrency and Verification Lab conducts research in, and creates integrated toolsets for, the specification, simulation, verification, and implementation of concurrent systems such as communication protocols and process control systems. Past accomplishments include the development of the Concurrency Factory, Concurrency Workbench; and PIOATool suites; and the modeling and verification of real-life applications such as the Rether real-time Ethernet protocol and the Java virtual machine meta-locking algorithm.

The Design and Analysis Research Lab develops methods and tools for constructing reliable and efficient computer systems. The lab has projects in modeling and specification, analysis and verification, design and optimization, code generation, and testing. These projects are for reactive systems, embedded systems, database applications, and Web information retrieval.

The Experimental Computer Systems Lab performs research in computer systems areas including networking, media processing, distributed systems, operating systems, computer and network architectures, and databases. Among the projects are Rether, a real-time protocol; Ethereal, a real-time Ethernet switch; and the Stony Brook Video Server (SBVS), an Ethernet-based distributed video server that can function over a LAN.

The File-Systems and Storage Lab performs research in operating systems including file systems and storage, security, and networking. An emphasis is placed on balancing system security, performance, and usability; improving portability of operating system code; and improving programmer and system administrator productivity. Past projects include FiST, a comprehensive portable stackable file system: a cryptographic file system, versioning file system, a unification file system, a virus-detection file system, a tracing file system, and more. Additional projects include CoSY: techniques to run unmodified user-level code in the kernel, efficiently and securely, as well as detecting run-time kernel bugs.

The Geometric and Graphical Modeling Lab shares the computing infrastructure and desktop equipment of the Center of Visual Computing. Current research topics span CAGD, CAD/CAM, geometric algorithms, graphical and visual modeling, physics-based simulation and animation, shape deformation and reconstruction, finite element simulation and analysis, haptic interface, reverse engineering, medical imaging, and other applications in graphics, vision, and scientific visualization.

The Graphics Hardware Lab provides a workspace and the tools necessary for the assembly of processors and graphics emulators designed by the Center for Visual Computing to further the Center’s research. Examples of such emulators are the ones used in the Cube project, the vg500 rendering engine, and eye tracking device.

The Natural Language Processing Lab is dedicated to studies of human-computer interaction and natural language processing. Members conduct engineering and experimental research on spoken and multimodal dialog, natural language generation, reference resolution, mobile conversational agents, and information extraction.

The NET Lab conducts research on massively parallel computing networks; simulation of ultra-fast (PetaByte/sec) computer networks and massively parallel computer data exchanges; memory latency reduction in parallel RSFQ superconducting computers; grid computing; super compilation of Java programs; and extraction of gene expression cascade trigger events.

The SAMSON Lab mission is to create a network RAM server that will function in a similar manner as a network fileserver does for user files, and to develop a system that provides huge quantities of memory for user applications over a fast, low latency network (1Gbps).

The Secure and Reliable Systems Lab conducts research on techniques for making network and software systems highly secure and reliable. Current work includes network or software-based attacks, detection and confinement, and software analysis and debugging tools to detect defects in complex systems.

The Wireless Networking and Simulation (WINGS) Lab is engaged in research on multihop wireless networks (ad-hoc networks), wireless local area networks, and sensor networks. It also has research activities in modeling and simulation of large-scale computer networks, particularly using parallel and distributed processing techniques. The laboratory has a cluster of high-end Linux workstations on a high-speed interconnect for simulation studies. It also has a large number of various commodity wireless networking systems including laptops and palmtops with wireless interfaces, various wireless access points, embedded platforms with wireless interfaces, and also a sensor network testbed.

The Virtual Reality Lab’s mission is to develop virtual reality systems for various design and testing applications such as mechanical CAD fly-throughs, architectural walk-throughs, and biomolecular drug design. The lab provides access to unique hardware such as Immersive Workbench, haptic feedback, 3-D audio, head-mounted displays, 6-D Spaceball, VPL Data Glove, flying mouse, Isotracks, and a Wacom digitizing tablet.

The Visualization Lab develops volume rendering techniques for use in scientific and information visualization applications. Among the projects are architectures for volume rendering, parallel methods for volume rendering (regular and irregular grids), development of tools and software for volume visualization, medical imaging applications, and flow visualization.

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