Faculty

The Department of Computer Science boasts an internationally renowned faculty who are actively involved in the academic community in numerous ways. Professors Bernstein, Kaufman, Lewis, Pavlidis, and Warren have been appointed to the highest level of honor as Fellows of IEEE and/or ACM. Professors Cleaveland, Kaufman, Kifer, Ko, Pavlidis, Skiena, Smolka, and Warren have set high standards in their respective fields by acting as editors-in-chief and/or editors of major computer science journals, with Kaufman and Warren having served as heads of their professional organizations.

Apart from research, furthering computer science education is another important mission of the department. Many of our faculty have written books, and Professors Kifer, Skiena, Smolka, and Warren have developed award-winning educational software in use in hundreds of classrooms around the world. Professors Badr, Bender, Mueller, Skiena, Stark, and Zadok have received teaching awards. Most of all, our faculty contribute to the field through teaching the scientists and educators of tomorrow.

In addition, our faculty has made extensive contributions to the computer science research community. Recent recognitions include: Pavlidis receiving the King-Sun Fu Prize in pattern recognition, Kaufman receiving the New York State Entrepreneur Award and IEEE Harold Wheeler Award for developing virtual colonoscopy, and Kifer twice receiving the ACM-SIGMOD Test of Time Award for the most impact over the past decade. Led by Professor Sekar, our Center for Cybersecurity was designated as a Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education by the National Security Agency. Professors Chiueh, Grosu, Mueller, Qin, C.R. Ramakrishnan, Samir, Skiena, Stoller, and Zadok have been awarded Young Investigator and/or NSF Career Awards; Qin received the Honda Initiation Award and was selected as an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow; and Skiena was named a Fulbright Scholar. Our faculty were also awarded seven prestigious NSF-ITR projects between 2001 and 2004.

ESTHER M. ARKIN, Associate Professor
Ph.D. 1983, Stanford University
Esther M. Arkin received her B.S. in Mathematics from Tel-Aviv University in 1981, and her M.S. and Ph.D. in Operations Research from Stanford University in 1983 and 1986. After five years on the faculty at Cornell University’s School of Operations Research and Industrial Engineering, she joined the faculty at Stony Brook in 1991, where she is now Associate Professor of Applied Mathematics and Statistics and a Research Professor of Computer Science. Arkin has won several awards for excellence in teaching, as well as NSF awards and grants for research. Her research interests are the design and analysis of algorithms for a variety of fields, including computational geometry, graphs, network optimization, scheduling, and pattern recognition.
(631) 632-8363, Esther.Arkin@stonybrook.edu, www.cs.sunysb.edu/people/faculty/EstherArkin.html

MICHAEL ASHIKHMIN, Assistant Professor
Ph.D. 2001, University of Utah
Michael Ashikhmin’s main research interests lie in computer graphics, animation, visualization, and visual perception. The focus of his research in computer graphics is on rendering algorithms, understanding of surface appearance, and texture synthesis. This includes developing new techniques for photorealistic rendering aimed at producing images indistinguishable from photographs as well as those for stylized non-photorealistic images similar to paintings and cartoons. To better understand what factors affect the perceived quality of different types of images and use this information to the benefit of computer graphics, he studies issues related to human visual perception such as the problem of displaying high dynamic range images on computer monitors. In computer animation, he concentrates on modeling of natural phenomena, such as ocean waves and smoke using a combination of physics-based and procedural techniques. Ashikhmin received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Utah and M.S. degrees in Chemistry from University of California at Berkeley and in Physics from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.
(631) 632-1728, ash@cs.sunysb.edu, www.cs.sunysb.edu/~ash

 

LEO BACHMAIR, Professor
Ph.D. 1987, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Computational logic studies the computational aspects of logical formalisms and their application to computer science, such as specification and verification, databases, and artificial intelligence. The focus of Leo Bachmair’s research has been on automated reasoning, the investigation of the mechanization of deductive inference systems, and search methods fundamental to these applications. In particular, Bachmair has studied logical systems with equality that is essential in computing applications and developed new deductive calculi that have been implemented in state-of-the-art theorem provers. Bachmair and his colleagues have also introduced the “inference system cum proof ordering” methods to the study of term rewriting-based approaches to equational reasoning. His more recent work has been aimed at developing the methodology of saturation theorem proving and a formal notion of redundancy in proof search that covers special ad hoc techniques used in most theorem provers. This has led to improvements in theorem proving technology, and the methods were a key in the proof of a long-standing open problem in mathematical logic, the Robbins conjecture, by a mechanical theorem prover.
(631) 632-8452, leo@cs.sunysb.edu, www.cs.sunysb.edu/~leo

 

HUSSEIN G. BADR, Associate Professor
Ph.D. 1981, Pennsylvania State University
Hussein Badr specializes in the modeling and performance evaluation of computer systems with a special focus on computer networks. His current research activities center on tele-traffic engineering in high-speed networks with self-similar traffic and on end-to-end protocols for mobile networks. He holds awards for published research (Joint Performance/SIGMETRICS Conference), for Excellence in Teaching (CEAS, Stony Brook University), and for Service to Education (Stony Brook University). Badr joined the Department of Computer Science in 1981. He holds degrees from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland (B.Sc. in Computer Science, 1974) and Pennsylvania State University (M.S. in Computer Science and Operations Research, 1976; Ph.D. in Computer Science, 1981).
(631) 632-8455, badr@cs.sunysb.edu, www.cs.sunysb.edu/~badr

 

MICHAEL A. BENDER, Associate Professor
Ph.D. 1998, Harvard University
Michael Bender conducts research in the algorithmic aspects of computer science. He develops randomized, approximation, online, and parallel algorithms to solve a wide range of problems. Bender is particularly interested in scheduling algorithms and asynchronous parallel and distributed computing. Bender studies scheduling problems appearing in a wide range of applications, including ordering read/write requests to disks, painting cars in factories, controlling the cutters of milling machines, maintaining the consistency of files on mobile hosts, and running parallel programs on asynchronous systems such as networks of workstations. For problems such as these he develops algorithms having provable performance guarantees. Bender has published papers on disk scheduling, job scheduling, asynchronous parallel computing, consensus algorithms, robot exploration, fault-tolerant computing, data structures, and recognition of various classes of partial orders, computational origami, and graph-property testing.
(631) 632-7835, bender@cs.sunysb.edu, www.cs.sunysb.edu/~bender

 

ARTHUR BERNSTEIN, Emeritus Professor
Ph.D. 1962, Columbia University
Arthur Bernstein earned a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University in 1962. He was a member of the faculty of Princeton University and a research scientist at the General Electric Research Laboratory, where he was a designer of an early time-sharing system. His research interests are in the general area of concurrency. His most recent project concerned transaction processing and the use of formal methods in improving the performance of transaction processing systems and demonstrating their correctness. This has led to an interest in the protocols and transactional aspects of electronic commerce. Bernstein has co-authored a graduate text titled Concurrency in Programming and Database Systems and is co-authoring a text on databases and transaction processing systems. He has written numerous research papers and is a Fellow of the IEEE.
(631) 632-8457, art@cs.sunysb.edu, www.cs.sunysb.edu/~art

 

SUSAN BRENNAN, Associate Professor
Ph.D. 1990, Stanford University
Susan Brennan holds joint appointments in Psychology and Computer Science, and is also affiliated with the Department of Linguistics. She received her doctorate from Stanford University in cognitive psychology and her master’s degree from MIT’s Architecture Machine Group, where she worked on computer-generated caricatures and teleconferencing interfaces. She has conducted research in natural language processing and human-computer interaction at Atari, Apple, and HP Labs. She uses behavioral and eye-tracking techniques to study the interpretation, production, and adaptation of spontaneous speech in interactive settings. Her research has been continuously supported by NSF since 1992, totaling more than $3.5 million in research funding. In addition to mentoring graduate students with interests in cognitive science, Professor Brennan teaches cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, and human factors to undergraduates. Recent keynote and plenary addresses include EDILOG 2002 (Scotland) and CHIACS2 (IBM’s Conference on Human Impact and Application of Autonomic Computing Systems, 2004). She serves as consulting editor of Psychological Science; previously she served as associate editor of Discourse Processes and consulting editor of Computational Linguistics.
(631) 632-9145, Susan.Brennan@stonybrook.edu,
www.cs.sunysb.edu/people/faculty/SusanBrennan.html

 

TZI-CKER CHIUEH, Professor
Ph.D. 1992, University of California at Berkeley
Tzi-cker Chiueh’s research focuses on building innovative experimental computer systems from commodity hardware and software components. He studies the fundamental design principles behind computer architecture, operating systems, networking, database systems, and VLSI hardware, and how these ideas are applied to the construction of computer systems in practice. Since joining Stony Brook in 1993, Chiueh has been working on the architectural design, prototype implementation, and performance evaluation of various computer systems in the areas of real-time networking, multimedia indexing and storage servers, cluster-based parallel computing, and high-performance 3-D graphics engines and network routers/switches. The theme that unifies these research projects is a quantitative approach towards computer systems development and a belief that experimental computer science should be studied as a whole, as it is too young a field to be divided into subfields. Chiueh’s group is developing a novel network processor architecture, an automatic Web document classification engine, and an operating system for computational toys.
(631) 632-8449, chiueh@cs.sunysb.edu, www.cs.sunysb.edu/~chiueh

 

SAMIR R. DAS, Associate Professor
Ph.D. 1994, Georgia Institute of Technology
Samir R. Das’s research interests are in wireless and mobile networking protocols, particularly multihop wireless networks, also called ad-hoc networks. His work has primarily considered routing and medium access protocols for such networks—particularly their performance aspects. He co-authored an Internet RFC on a dynamic routing protocol for mobile ad-hoc networks. This protocol, called AODV, is widely used in the research community. He is also interested in applications of ad-hoc networks, notably in sensor networks. Here, he is investigating the use of location information, issues related to connectivity and coverage related, and energy efficiency. Samir Das is also interested in fast simulation of complex discrete event systems, such as large-scale computer and communication networks. He has used parallel and distributed processing techniques to speed up such simulation computations. He won the National Science Foundation’s CAREER Award in 1998. Samir Das has been a speaker in the Distinguished Visitor program of the IEEE Computer Society. He was a co-chair of the technical program committee of the ACM MOBIHOC Symposium in 2001 and the ACM MOBICOM conference in 2004. He is also on the editorial board of the Ad Hoc Networks Journal.
(631) 632-1807, samir@cs.sunysb.edu, www.cs.sunysb.edu/~samir

 

JIE GAO, Assistant Professor
Ph.D. 2004, Stanford University
Jie Gao conducts research on the design and analysis of algorithms, with a special focus on ad-hoc wireless communication and sensor networks. She also works on algorithms for moving objects (a.k.a. kinetic data structures) and their applications in the physical world. In general she is interested in algorithms and data structures for large autonomous systems, in particular the extraction and maintenance of combinatorial information, as well as better understanding of the relationship between local interactions and global behaviors in many complex systems that appear in fields such as networking, computational biology, physical simulation, and robotics. Gao received a B.S. in Computer Science from University of Science and Technology of China in 1999 and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2004.
(631) 632-8470, jgao@cs.sunysb.edu, www.cs.sunysb.edu/people/faculty/JieGao.html

 

RADU GROSU, Assistant Professor
Ph.D. 1994, Technical University of Munich, Germany
Radu Grosu’s primary research interest is to develop methods and tools with mathematical foundation for the specification, design, and analysis of reactive and embedded systems. The aim is to increase the reliability and the security of these systems. Research topics include modeling languages, requirements specification and capture, temporal logics, formal verification, model checking, heuristics for state-space analysis, tools and applications to software engineering, computer-aided hardware design, and embedded controllers. He is involved in the development of several tools exploiting novel engineering concepts to scale up their modeling and analysis power. The model checker Mocha takes advantage of the architectural hierarchy in the development of hardware close discrete systems. The model checker Hermes takes advantage of the behavioral hierarchy in the development of discrete software systems, for example, network protocols. The modeling and simulation language Charon exploits both behavioral and architectural hierarchy in the development of mixed discrete and continuous systems.
(631) 632-9801, grosu@cs.sunysb.edu, www.cs.sunysb.edu/~grosu

 

XIANFENG (DAVID) GU, Assistant Professor
Ph.D. 2003, Harvard University
Xianfeng David Gu conducts research in the systematic application of modern geometry in computer graphics, computer vision, and medical imaging. He has developed the technique of geometry images, which unifies the approaches of studying geometry and images and is applied in efficient rendering, geometric compression, animation, and geometric modeling. He has also invented algorithms to compute Riemann surface structures for real surfaces with arbitrary topologies. His method opens a new interdisciplinary field, computational Riemann surface geometry, which has broad applications in solving fundamental problems such as surface classification, surface matching, and shape analysis. Gu is developing the paradigm of shape space based on Riemann surface theory and differential geometry, which has been applied for conformal brain mapping, heart motion tracking, face recognition, fluid dynamics on surfaces, manifold splines, and surface parameterization. Gu is also interested in computational topology and computational geometry. He generalizes the shortest path algorithm to shortest cycle on surfaces. His invention of computational Riemann surface geometry has been applied in industry, and awarded by NIST advanced technology program in 2004.
(631) 632-8466, gu@cs.sunysb.edu, www.cs.sunysb.edu/people/faculty/DavidGu.html

 

HIMANSHU GUPTA, Assistant Professor
Ph.D. 1999, Stanford University
Himanshu Gupta received a B.Tech. (1992) in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT, Bombay, and an E.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1999. After a couple of years in industry and a year at University of Chicago, he joined the faculty at Stony Brook in 2002. His recent research activities focus on theoretical issues in wireless networking. In particular, he is interested in sensor networks and sensor databases. His other research interests are in database systems and theory, wherein he is interested in materialized views, (multiple) query optimization, and data analysis. He has worked in computational geometry and parallel computing.
(631) 632-1827, hgupta@cs.sunysb.edu, www.cs.sunysb.edu/~hgupta

 

GEORGE W. HART, Research Professor
Ph.D. 1987, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
George W. Hart’s research interests include 3-D modeling, computational geometry, algorithms, and computer-sided sculpture. His current focus is on developing tools for creating geometric sculptures that connect all the stages between the initial mental conception and the final physical realization. His sculpture, generated with novel algorithms, with modern technology such as laser-cutting and solid freeform fabrication, and with his own hands, has been displayed throughout the U.S. and in Europe. Hart was a research scientist at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory and MIT Energy Laboratory and then a professor at Columbia University before coming to Stony Brook. His writings include two books: Multidimensional Analysis (Springer, 1995), and Zome Geometry (with coauthor Henri Picciotto, Key, 2001).
(631) 632-8959, george@cs.sunysb.edu, www.cs.sunysb.edu/~george

 

ARIE E. KAUFMAN, Distinguished Professor and Chair
Ph.D. 1977, Ben-Gurion University, Israel
Arie Kaufman is the Director of the Center for Visual Computing (CVC). He has been conducting research in visualization, computer graphics, virtual reality, user interfaces, multimedia, and biomedical and scientific applications for more than 30 years. Kaufman has been a pioneer and a leader in volume visualization, especially in the areas of volume hardware accelerators (e.g., Cube-4), volume visualization software (e.g., VolVis), biomedical applications (e.g., virtual colonoscopy), volume graphics (e.g., voxel-based flight simulation), and national security (e.g., urban plume modeling). Kaufman was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transaction on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG), 1995-1998. He has been the chair or co-chair for multiple Eurographics/Siggraph Graphics Hardware Workshops, IEEE Visualization Conferences, ACM Volume Visualization Symposia, and Workshops on Volume Graphics. He is the co-founder and member of the steering committee of the IEEE Visualization Conference series. He has previously chaired and is currently a director of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Visualization and Graphics. He is a Fellow of the IEEE.
(631) 632-8428, ari@cs.sunysb.edu, www.cs.sunysb.edu/~ari

 

ROBERT KELLY, Associate Chair
Ph.D. 1991, New York University
Rob Kelly’s research interests include medical informatics, software engineering, systems engineering, image processing, Internet programming, and parallel programming. The primary research focus has been on systems to reduce the incidents of medical errors in acute health-care facilities. This work includes a system for a high-level interface to medical monitors, representation techniques for clinical guidelines as system-independent documents, an anesthesiology clinical support system, a rule-based system for discharge planning, and a system to associate monitor data with outcome data to improve prediction of patient condition in critical care settings. He is also developing systems to process marine science sensor data with the goal of developing inquiry systems for marine features. Rob has published papers on these topics in major journals and conferences. He has been on program committees and chaired invited sessions of a number of international conferences. Rob is also the graduate director of the college-level program in Systems Engineering. Collaborating with an industry partner, he has developed a software application that received the Long Island Software Award for Internet-based software.
(631) 632-7543, robkelly@cs.sunysb.edu, www.cs.sunysb.edu/~robkelly

 

MICHAEL KIFER, Professor
Ph.D. 1984, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
Michael Kifer is working on various aspects of knowledge representation that span the areas of databases, logic programming, expert systems, and artificial intelligence. One of his projects deals with the development of logical foundations for object-oriented database languages. F-logic and Transaction Logic, co-invented by Kifer in collaboration with his colleagues and students, serve as a basis for this study. This work has been recently recognized by the ACM Special Interest Group on Management of Data (SIGMOD) with the prestigious 1999 Test of Time Award. In his theoretical work, Kifer always has practical applications in mind. For instance, the results and tools developed as part of Kifer’s research have been recently applied to the development of workflow management systems and Web information systems.
(631) 632-8459, kifer@cs.sunysb.edu, www.cs.sunysb.edu/~kifer

 

KER-I KO, Professor
Ph.D. 1979, Ohio State University
Ker-I Ko’s research interests are in the area of theoretical computer science; in particular, the study of computational complexity. Computational complexity studies the inherent difficulty of solving algorithmic problems in digital machines. One of the goals of this research is to identify precisely, using formal mathematical tools, the class of feasibly-solvable problems. Ko’s major work in this area is the development of a new mathematical theory of computational complexity for numerical problems. This theory applies the notions and techniques of discrete complexity theory to study continuous problems in numerical computation. It thus provides a unified view of computational complexity on both areas. Ko published a research monograph on this subject in 1991. Before joining Stony Brook in 1986, Ko taught at the University of Houston and University of California at Santa Barbara. His other research interests include the theoretical study of fractals, computational learning theory, and combinatorial mathematics.
(631) 632-8460, keriko@cs.sunysb.edu, www.cs.sunysb.edu/~keriko

 

PHILIP M. LEWIS,Emeritus Professor
Ph.D. 1956, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Philip Lewis conducts research on the correctness of concurrent systems. One approach, developed with Arthur Bernstein, is based on a new definition of semantic correctness of transactions, which allows a significant increase in transaction throughput. Another approach is based on model checking using a state machine model of the concurrent system. He is interested in combining these approaches to study the correctness of Internet transaction protocols involving encryption. Before coming to Stony Brook, Lewis spent 28 years at the General Electric Research and Development Center, where he was Manager of the Computer Science Branch. He did research there on threshold logic, computational complexity, compilers, and transaction processing. He co-invented LL(K) top-down parsing and the Kill-Wait and Wait-Die concurrency controls. Lewis is the author of three books and is a Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE.
(631) 632-8426, pml@cs.sunysb.edu, www.cs.sunysb.edu/~pml

 

JEROME Z. LIANG, Professor
Ph.D. 1987, The City University of New York
Jerome Liang’s research interests include the development of quantitative SPECT imaging modality as a cost-effective means for patient diagnosis; high-resolution PET as a functional research imaging modality; virtual endoscopy as a cost-effective procedure for cancer screening; automatic method for brain-tissue segmentation in diagnosis of disorders methods for effective low-dose CT scanning; and various models, in terms of physics, mathematics, and statistics, to simulate the practical problems above and to validate the models by experiments.
(631) 444-7837, Jerome.Liang@stonybrook.edu, www.cs.sunysb.edu/people/faculty/JeromeLiang.html

 

Y. ANNIE LIU, Associate Professor
Ph.D. 1996, Cornell University
Annie Liu’s primary research interests are in the areas of programming languages, compilers, and software systems. She is particularly interested in general and systematic methods for improving the efficiency of computations. This includes program analysis and transformation techniques for incremental computation and for parallel and concurrent computation; applications in optimizing compilers, language-based interactive systems, real-time and reactive systems, algorithm design, program development, and software maintenance; and supporting tools and user interfaces that allow convenient, efficient implementation of program analyses and transformations and facilitate their applications. Her major research project, “Incrementalization for Efficiency Improvement,” together with derived projects, mainly on program dependence analysis and time and space analysis, encompasses all three aspects above. Liu has other interests in database management, document processing, and distributed systems. These include, in particular, database query optimization, incremental database view maintenance, efficient document processing, efficient property detection for distributed systems, and systematic approaches to improving fault-tolerance. She has also worked on uncertainty reasoning and expert systems.
(631) 632-8463, liu@cs.sunysb.edu, www.cs.sunysb.edu/~liu

 

JOSEPH S.B. MITCHELL, Professor
Ph.D. 1986, Stanford University
Joseph S.B. Mitchell received a B.S. (1981) in Physics and Applied Mathematics and an M.S. (1981) in Mathematics from Carnegie-Mellon University. He received a Ph.D. (1986) in Operations Research from Stanford University while on a Howard Hughes Doctoral Fellowship and working at Hughes Research Labs. From 1986 to 1991, Mitchell served on the faculty of Cornell University. In 1991, he joined the faculty at Stony Brook, where he is Professor of Applied Mathematics and Statistics and Research Professor of Computer Science. Mitchell has received various research awards (NSF Presidential Young Investigator, Fulbright Scholar) and numerous teaching awards, including the President’s and Chancellor’s Awards for Excellence in Teaching. His primary research area is computational geometry, applied to problems in computer graphics, visualization, manufacturing, and geographic information systems. He also has interests in the study of algorithms, particularly approximation algorithms, network algorithms, and scheduling. Mitchell heads the Computational Geometry Lab, which is engaged in an active industrial outreach program of collaboration with industry and government labs on various applied projects.
(631) 632-8366, Joseph.Mitchell@stonybrook.edu, www.ams.sunysb.edu/~jsbm

 

ALEXANDER MOHR, Assistant Professor
Ph.D. 2004, University of Washington
Alex Mohr’s research is primarily on network systems, with a particular focus on peer-to-peer and multimedia networking. He is currently exploring different approaches to real-time multimedia distribution over peer-to-peer and overlay networks, as well as economic mechanism design and incentives for these and other massively distributed systems. Another particularly promising research direction is the recent discovery of new families of error-correcting codes that specifically cater to the needs of multimedia, which may help applications ranging from local cable television distribution to deep space probes. He is also looking at how Personal Video Recorders, such as TiVo, can automatically manage their recorded videos so that recently recorded shows are stored at high resolutions; as they age, however, those shows degrade in quality over time until they are ultimately deleted. Mohr also dabbles in the occasional theory problem.
(631) 632-1805, amohr@cs.sunysb.edu, www.cs.sunysb.edu/~amohr

 

KLAUS MUELLER, Assistant Professor
Ph.D. 1998, Ohio State University
Klaus Mueller’s main research interests reside in the fields of computer graphics, scientific and information visualization, volume rendering, visual data mining, virtual reality, medical imaging, computed tomography, and in the use of graphics hardware to accelerate scientific computations. Mueller has received the National Science Foundation (NSF) Career Award in 2000 and the SBU-CS Graduate Teaching Award in 2002. He has joint appointments at Stony Brook’s Departments of Biomedical Engineering and Radiology and is an affiliate member of the Center for Data Intensive Computing (CDIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory.
(631) 632-1524, mueller@cs.sunysb.edu, www.cs.sunysb.edu/~mueller

 

THEO PAVLIDIS, Emeritus Distinguished Professor
Ph.D. 1964, University of California at Berkeley
Theo Pavlidis is a scientific advisor to Symbol Technologies. He was with Princeton University from 1964 to 1980 and AT&T Bell Labs from 1980 to 1986, and recently his general research interests are in the areas of image analysis, pattern recognition, and computer graphics. His most recent research activities have been in the areas of optical character recognition and related problems of document processing, in bar-coding applications, and in the development of programming tools for imaging and graphics under the X Windows System. He is the co-inventor of the 2-D bar-code PDF417. During his career, he has authored more than 150 technical papers and five books, including Algorithms for Graphics, Image Processing, Interactive Computer Graphics, and Fundamentals of X Programming. He also holds 12 patents on various aspects of bar coding and document analysis. He was the Editor-In-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI) from 1982 to 1986, and he has been a member of the editorial board of many other journals.
(631) 632-8465, theo@cs.sunysb.edu, www.cs.sunysb.edu/~theo

 

HONG QIN, Associate Professor
Ph.D. 1995, University of Toronto
Hong Qin studies physics-based geometric design and modeling, a new interdisciplinary paradigm that marries graphical modeling with the simulation of computational physics and finite element analysis. In particular, Qin had developed Dynamic Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines (D-NURBS), which are a physics-based generalization of industry-standard geometric NURBS. In addition, Qin and his research team are exploring how to effectively apply physics-based modeling principles to a wide range of visual computing applications including computer graphics, scientific visualization, computer-aided design and manufacturing, and medical imaging. Qin also has research interests and activities in computer animation, scientific computing, computer vision, virtual environments, computation geometry, and applied mathematics. Qin is a member of Stony Brook’s Center for Visual Computing. In 1997, he was awarded the Career Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF).
(631) 632-8450, qin@cs.sunysb.edu, www.cs.sunysb.edu/~qin

 

C.R. RAMAKRISHNAN, Associate Professor
Ph.D. 1995, Stony Brook University
C.R. Ramakrishnan performs research in logic programming, specification and verification of concurrent systems, programming languages and compilers, computer system security, and workflow systems. He has worked on developing efficient techniques for evaluating functional and logic programs and analysis of programs. His current research focuses on developing new techniques for manipulating logic programs and applying these techniques for verifying concurrent systems, especially infinite-state or infinite families of systems. This research is central to the verification of real-time and hybrid systems, such as controllers, and parameterized systems, such as families of networks. In addition, it enables new uses of verification technology, such as identifying security flaws in computer systems, and detecting inconsistencies in workflow systems. Ramakrishnan is involved with the LMC project for developing verification systems based on these research efforts, the XSB project for advanced logic programming systems, and the WEAVE project for logic-based workflow systems. His research has been supported by several NSF grants, including the NSF Career Award in 1999.
(631) 632-8218, cram@cs.sunysb.edu, www.cs.sunysb.edu/~cram

 

I.V. RAMAKRISHNAN, Professor
Ph.D. 1983, University of Texas at Austin
I. V. Ramakrishnan received a Ph.D. in Computer Science (1983, University. of Texas, Austin) and a Master of Engineering in Automation and Computer Science (1977, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore) and Bachelor of Technology in Electrical Engineering (1975, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur). He was an assistant professor at University of Maryland, College Park (1983-1985), and has been on the faculty at Stony Brook since 1985. He has done extensive research in computational logic and its applications. For the past six years he has been conducting research and technology development for extracting and transforming data from semi-structured and unstructured sources into knowledge using machine learning. In particular he has been actively engaged in research on the design of algorithms for Web agents, building tools for mining, extracting, and transforming Web data into knowledge.
(631) 632-8451, ram@cs.sunysb.edu, www.cs.sunysb.edu/~ram

 

DIMITRIS SAMARAS, Assistant Professor
Ph.D. 2000, University of Pennsylvania
Dimitris Samaras’s research focuses on deformable models for computer vision,
computer graphics, and medical image analysis. His central interest is in the recovery of 3-D shape information through the combination of a variety of optical cues, such as illumination information, stereo, or optical flow information, into deformable model frameworks. A second area of interest is that of illumination modeling and the extraction of illumination parameters and surface reflectance characteristics from images for object recognition and for use in computer graphics rendering. In particular, he is interested in the extraction of sufficiently precise shape models and accurate descriptions of texture and reflectance properties for image-based photorealistic rendering and animation of a number of surface types, including cloth and skin, with primary applications on the human face and body. He is also interested in applications of the above in face and human body modeling, in image-based motion capture techniques for animation, in human computer interaction, and in modeling structures and simulation of physical properties of biomedical data (e.g., MRI or CT).
(631) 632-8464, samaras@cs.sunysb.edu, www.cs.sunysb.edu/~samaras

 

R. SEKAR, Professor
Ph.D. 1991, Stony Brook University
Sekar’s research interests address the core problem of building high-confidence, distributed software systems, with emphasis on system security as well as reliability. His approach combines static analysis (performed at compile-time or earlier) to improve software quality, runtime monitoring to detect and respond to faults or coordinated attacks, and good software design and development practices. Techniques from several branches of computer science are drawn upon to solve this problem, including networks and operating systems, optimizing compilers, specification languages, and automated verification. Sekar’s research is supported by a grant from the DARPA information technology office. Prior to joining Stony Brook in 1999, Sekar worked as a research scientist in the Networking Research Laboratory at Telcordia research (formerly called Bellcore) from 1991 to 1996. He was an assistant professor of computer science at Iowa State University from 1997 to 1999.
(631) 632-5758, sekar@cs.sunysb.edu, www.cs.sunysb.edu/~sekar

 

RADU SION, Assistant Professor
Ph.D. 2004, Purdue University
Radu Sion received B.Sc. (1998) and M.Sc. (1999) degrees in Computer Sciences from the University of Bucharest, and a Ph.D. in Computer Sciences from Purdue University in 2004. While at Purdue, Sion was a member of the Center of Education and Research in Information Assurance and the Indiana Center of Database Systems. In 2004 he visited the IBM Almaden Research Center as a postdoctoral researcher. Sion’s Ph.D. dissertation analyzes rights protection for generalized discrete data objects and introduces novel ideas in the area of rights protection for streams, structures, and relational data with applications ranging from database watermarking to sensor streams fingerprinting. Sion is very interested in interconnected entities that access data and need to do so with assurances of security, privacy, and functionality, preferably fast. His research lies at the intersection of security, databases, and distributed systems. Applications of his research include: authentication, rights protection and integrity proofs in sensor networks, secure storage in peer-to-peer and ad-hoc environments, and detection of intrusions by access profiling for online Web portals.
(631) 632-8470, sion@cs.sunysb.edu, www.cs.sunysb.edu/people/faculty/RaduSion.html

 

STEVEN S. SKIENA, Professor
Ph.D. 1988, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Steven Skiena’s research interests revolve around the design of efficient graph, string, and geometric algorithms and their applications. He is a recipient of the ONR Young Investigator Award. Skiena is particularly interested in computational biology, the combinatorial problems that arise in obtaining and analyzing DNA sequence data. For example, he has proposed and analyzed new techniques for DNA sequencing by hybridization, by providing strategies that can efficiently sequence large genomes using small numbers of oligonucleotide probes. He has also focused on making tools and techniques from combinatorial computing more accessible for applications. Skiena’s most recent book, The Algorithm Design Manual, has been called “a classic the day it was published.” His Combinatorica Program is widely used for research in combinatorics and graph theory, and it earned an EDUCOM award as distinguished mathematics software for higher education. The Stony Brook Algorithm Repository (www.cs.sunysb.edu/~algorith) is one of the premier algorithmic resources available on the Web and is accessed more than 40,000 times a year.
(631) 632-9026, skiena@cs.sunysb.edu, www.cs.sunysb.edu/~skiena

 

DAVID R. SMITH, Professor Emeritus
Ph.D. 1961, University of Wisconsin at Madison
David R. Smith arrived at Stony Brook in 1966 and (with D. Tycko) established the Department of Computer Science. While at Stony Brook, his publications have explored combinational switching functions, shift register sequences, experimental parallel computer and chip architectures, hardware description languages, and hardware synthesis. He is the author of a forthcoming text from Prentice Hall on Verilog styles for synthesis. The continued exponential increase of chip complexity is straining the ability of computer-aided design technology to create such chips and get them working. In the hardware design languages in current use, there are many different ways of describing even a simple design, and the quality of the final synthesized result now depends entirely on the textual specification. To keep pace, it is essential to find ways of describing such circuits at higher and higher levels and to standardize module interfaces to facilitate re-use.
(631) 632-8443, drs@cs.sunysb.edu, www.cs.sunysb.edu/~drs

 

SCOTT A. SMOLKA, Professor
Ph.D. 1984, Brown University
Scott Smolka’s research interests lie mainly in the areas of computer-aided verification of embedded and safety-critical systems, model checking, concurrency theory, and design of distributed languages and algorithms. He is Principle Investigator on three federally-funded research projects concerning the formal specification and verification of computer systems: the Concurrency Factory, the Logic and Model Checking (LMC) project, and the Probabilistic Input/Output Automata (PIOA) project. Students working with Smolka typically engage in a research program that combines theory with system implementation work with application to real-world systems, such as communication and e-commerce protocols and process control systems. Along with Michael Kifer, Smolka is the developer of the OSP (Operating Systems Project) courseware package. They are also the authors of the OSP textbook published by Addison Wesley Longman. OSP is an implementation of a modern operating system as well as a programming project for undergraduate operating system courses. Professors Kifer and Smolka are leading an ongoing effort to produce the next generation of OSP, which is being implemented in Java.
(631) 632-8453, sas@cs.sunysb.edu, www.cs.sunysb.edu/~sas

 

EUGENE W. STARK, Professor
Ph.D. 1984, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Eugene Stark studies theoretical and practical aspects of concurrency in computer systems. On the theoretical side, he investigates mathematical models, usually algebraic or automata-theoretic, for such systems. The fundamental study of such models can lead to simpler ways of reasoning about concurrency, which would ultimately lead to simpler concurrent programming languages and more robust concurrent programs. Recently, Stark has been developing a method of constructing modular, hierarchical, finite-state descriptions of systems, such as communications protocols, that exhibit concurrent and probabilistic behavior. He has devised and implemented computerized analysis tools that can automatically calculate performance parameters directly from a system description. On the practical side, Stark is engaged in operating systems research involving the construction of a network memory server. Such a server will be a cluster-based facility able to exploit the capabilities of gigabit/second communications networks and intelligent paging heuristics to permit memory-intensive applications to run at nearly full speed on limited-memory client systems.
(631) 632-8444, stark@cs.sunysb.edu, www.cs.sunysb.edu/~stark

 

AMANDA STENT, Assistant Professor
Ph.D. 2001, University of Rochester
Amanda Stent conducts research in the area of natural language processing, particularly spoken and multimodal dialog systems and natural language generation. She has worked on the TRIPS, CommandTalk, and MATCH dialog systems. She is particularly interested in approaches to making dialog systems more flexible and adaptable, so that they can be used by more people, in more environments, more easily. This includes modeling the variety of language use; modeling the user’s needs, tasks and preferences; and modeling the user’s environment. Stent joined the Department of Computer Science in 2002. She heads the Natural Language Processing Lab. Her research is funded by DARPA and the NSF.
(631) 632-8447, stent@cs.sunysb.edu, www.cs.sunysb.edu/~stent

 

SCOTT D. STOLLER, Associate Professor
Ph.D. 1997, Cornell University
Scott Stoller’s primary research is on techniques and tools for design and validation of distributed systems, focusing on the key issues of concurrency, fault-tolerance, and security. Other research interests include program analysis, program optimization, and incremental computation. He is developing testing and verification tools that apply to standard programming languages, currently Java. This is a challenge that brings together techniques for program analysis and algorithms for verification of finite-state and infinite-state systems. Stoller’s research in security aims to bound the resources that are useful in attacks. For example, electronic payment protocols should work correctly even if an attacker combines messages from concurrent executions of the protocol; his work provides bounds on the number of concurrent executions that could be useful in attacks. Stoller is also interested in efficient algorithms for monitoring and testing distributed systems. The algorithms exploit information from logical clocks and approximately synchronized, real-time clocks to help deal with the uncertainty caused by imperfect clock synchronization.
(631) 632-1627, stoller@cs.sunysb.edu, www.cs.sunysb.edu/~stoller

ANITA WASILEWSKA, Associate Professor
Ph.D. 1975, Warsaw University, Poland
Anita Wasilewska earned her Ph.D. in Mathematics from Warsaw University, Warsaw, Poland, in 1975, under the tutelage of Professor H. Rasiowa. She has been a member of Rasiowa’s Logic and Foundation of Computer Science group since 1967, and she remained on the faculty of the Mathematics Institute of Warsaw University until 1983. She came to the United States in 1980 as a visiting Assistant Professor at Wesleyan University in Connecticut before joining Stony Brook’s Department of Computer Science in 1986. Her latest research interests are data mining, knowledge discovery, and applications for the automated theorem provers. Wasilewska has published papers dealing with inductive learning systems, generalized Fuzzy and Rough sets, uncertainties in Expert Systems, formal languages, and automated theorem proving in non-classical logics.
(631) 632-8458, anita@cs.sunysb.edu, www.cs.sunysb.edu/~anita

 

LARRY WITTIE, Professor
Ph.D. 1973, University of Wisconsin at Madison
Larry Wittie earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science for simulation of learning in networks of thousands of cerebellar neurons. Before coming to Stony Brook in 1982, he was a Computer Science faculty member at Purdue University and the State University at Buffalo. From 1978 to 1984, he built the first reconfigurable multicomputer, MicroNet, and a multiplatform distributed operating system, Micros. His specialty is topology of large networks supporting parallel computing. Wittie’s research interests focus on the limits of parallel speed-up of single problems in huge computer systems and networks for rapid distributed-shared memory access among thousands of ultra-fast computers. His most recent projects have been the detection of alterations in written documents, low-latency petabit/second data switching using multi-gigahertz logic, and memory-access in an RFSQ superconducting parallel computer that can
execute a million billion operations per second using only kilowatts of electrical power. He is a past editor of IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, a senior member of IEEE, and a member of ACM, Sigma Xi, and the Society for Neuroscience.
(631) 632-8456, lw@cs.sunysb.edu, www.cs.sunysb.edu/~lw

 

YUANYUAN YANG, Professor
Ph.D. 1992, Johns Hopkins University
Yuanyuan Yang’s research interests include parallel and distributed computing systems, high-speed networks, optical networks, high-performance computer architecture, and fault-tolerant computing. Her recent work focuses on the designs and performance analyses of the networks that can support efficient collective communications, such as broadcast, multicast, and all-to-all communications among a group of network nodes. The research finding has a practical impact on many Internet and collaborative applications, such as video-on-demand services in multimedia systems and teleconferencing. Yang has published more than 60 papers in major journals and refereed conference proceedings related to these research areas. She also holds two U.S. patents in the area of multicast communication networks. Yang’s research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Army Research Office. She has served on the program/organizing committees of a number of international conferences in her areas of research. Yang is a senior member of the IEEE and a member of the ACM, IEEE Computer Society, and IEEE Communication Society.
(631) 632-8474, Yuanyuan.Yang@stonybrook.edu,
www.cs.sunysb.edu/people/faculty/YuanyuanYang.html

 

 

EREZ ZADOK, Assistant Professor
Ph.D. 2001, Columbia University
Erez Zadok’s research focuses on operating systems, with a specialty in file systems and storage. He studies operating systems and file systems from many aspects: security, efficiency, scalability, reliability, portability, survivability, usability, ease-of-use, versatility, flexibility, and more. Special attention is given to balancing three often-conflicting aspects of computer systems: security, performance, and ease-of-use. Since joining Stony Brook in 2001, Zadok and his group in the Filesystems and Storage Lab (FSL) developed many file systems and operating system extensions; examples include a highly secure cryptographic file system, a portable versioning file system, a tracing file system useful to detect intrusions, a compiler to convert user-level C code to in-kernel efficient yet safe code, stackable file system templates, and more. Zadok’s research is supported by several NSF grants among others; his lab exposes students to internals of more than a dozen different operating systems. Zadok is the author of Linux NFS and Automounter Administration (Sybex, 2001). In 2002, Zadok received the NSF’s highest honor for new faculty, the CAREER award.
(631) 632-8461, ezk@cs.sunsyb.edu, www.cs.sunysb.edu/~ezk

 

RONG ZHAO, Research Assistant Professor
Ph.D. 2001, Wayne State University
Rong Zhao’s research interests include information retrieval, data mining, digital library, multimedia information systems, pattern recognition, image and video processing, and human computer interaction. For more than six years he has been working on bridging the semantic gap between low-level features and high-level concepts of multimedia and Web documents. In the multimedia area, he focuses on semantic-based image retrieval, geographic image analysis, shot detection, annotation, and relevance feedback. In the Web area, he studies intelligent searching, clustering and categorization, annotation, and Web usage mining. Zhao has published papers on these topics in major journals and conferences, and has authored chapters in two books, Distributed Multimedia Databases: Techniques and Applications and Handbook of Video Databases: Design and Applications. He has been on program committees and chaired invited sessions of a number of international conferences. Zhao is the computer science coordinator of the Strategic Partnership for Industrial Resurgence (SPIR) program. Collaborating with the industry, he and his students have developed more than a dozen software applications that led to several patent applications and two Long Island Software Awards.
(631) 632-7528, rzhao@cs.sunysb.edu, www.cs.sunysb.edu/~rzhao

 

Rob Johnson Assistant Professor
Ph.D University of California, Berkley
Professor Johnson's research is in computer security, with a focus on software security. Software bugs are endemic, and they frequently render carefully designed systems completely insecure. These bugs come in many forms, from
low-level bugs, like buffer-overflows and format-string errors, to high-level mistakes, such as forgetting to sandbox untrusted Javascript programs when they are loaded from a local disk cache. Developing large systems that are free of these security-critical bugs is a tremendous challenge, but my dissertation research demonstrates significant progress on this goal.
631-632-1643 rtjohnso+web0508@cs.sunysb.edu, www.cs.sunysb.edu/~rtjohnso/

 

M. Alex O. Vasilescu, Assistant Professor
Ph.D , University of Toronto
Professor Vasilescu's interests lie at the intersection of computer graphics, statistical learning and computer vision. My dissertation
introduces a statistical learning model that takes advantage of tensor algebra to address challenging problems in image-based
rendering, human body motion analysis and synthesis and appearance-based face recognition.


Herbert L. Gelernter Professor Emeritus
(631)632-1523
Artificial intelligence, knowledge-based heuristic problem-solving systems, scientific applications

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