Message from the Chairs The Computer Science Department at Columbia University has grown tremendously in breadth and depth in the last few years. Since 2002, we have added two new senior faculty, both stars in their fields. Peter Belhumeur, a leading researcher in the area of visual appearance, left Yale University to join us in January 2002. Julia Hirschberg, known for her research in spoken dialog systems, came to us from AT&T Research Laboratories in September 2003. In the last two years the department has hired eight new junior faculty: Steven Edwards from Berkeley, Tony Jebara from MIT, Angelos Keromytis from U. Penn, Tal Malkin from MIT, Vishal Misra from U. Mass, Ravi Ramamoorthi from Stanford, Rocco Servedio from Harvard, and Betsy Sklar from Brandeis. These new faculty greatly strengthen the main themes of research in our department: interacting with the physical world (graphics, vision, robot- ics), interacting with humans (user interfaces, natural language and speech, collabo- rative work, personalized agents), systems (networks, security, distributed systems, operating systems, compilers, programming languages, software engineering), design- ing digital systems (digital and VLSI design, CAD, asyn- chronous circuits, embedded systems), making sense of data (databases, data mining, Web search, machine learning applications) and computer science theory (cyptography, quantum computing, complexi- ty, machine learning theory, graph theory, algorithms). Our focus in hiring over the years has been to enlarge our impact in research areas that we think are key to the future. Over the past decade our researchers have had demon- strated impact in several important areas of computer science including natural lan- guage processing, networking, security, computer vision and graphics. We have seen a dramatic increase in research spending, growing from $5.5 million in 1998/99 to $8.7 million in 2001/02. Our new faculty also give us a better ability to address the educational needs of all our students. We have just institut- ed a new Masters program for Computer Engineering which provides the opportunity for advanced study in a combined program of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. (continued on page 6) NEWSLETTER OF THE DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY VOL .1 NO.1 SPRING 2003 CS @ CU CS@CU SPRING 2003 1 Al Aho Kathy McKeown
Transcript
Message fromthe Chairs
The Computer ScienceDepartment at ColumbiaUniversity has growntremendously in breadthand depth in the last few years.Since 2002, we have addedtwo new senior faculty, both stars in their fields.
Peter Belhumeur, a leadingresearcher in the area of visualappearance, left Yale Universityto join us in January 2002.Julia Hirschberg, known for her research in spoken dialogsystems, came to us fromAT&T Research Laboratories in September 2003.
In the last two years thedepartment has hired eightnew junior faculty: StevenEdwards from Berkeley, TonyJebara from MIT, AngelosKeromytis from U. Penn, Tal Malkin from MIT, VishalMisra from U. Mass, RaviRamamoorthi from Stanford,Rocco Servedio from Harvard,and Betsy Sklar from Brandeis.
These new faculty greatlystrengthen the main themes of research in our department:interacting with the physical
world (graphics, vision, robot-ics), interacting with humans(user interfaces, natural language and speech, collabo-rative work, personalizedagents), systems (networks,security, distributed systems,operating systems, compilers,programming languages, software engineering), design-ing digital systems (digital and VLSI design, CAD, asyn-chronous circuits, embeddedsystems), making sense ofdata (databases, data mining,Web search, machine learningapplications) and computer science theory (cyptography,quantum computing, complexi-ty, machine learning theory,graph theory, algorithms).
Our focus in hiring over theyears has been to enlarge ourimpact in research areas that
we think are key to the future.Over the past decade ourresearchers have had demon-strated impact in severalimportant areas of computerscience including natural lan-guage processing, networking,security, computer vision andgraphics. We have seen a dramatic increase in researchspending, growing from $5.5 million in 1998/99 to $8.7million in 2001/02.
Our new faculty also give us abetter ability to address theeducational needs of all ourstudents. We have just institut-ed a new Masters program forComputer Engineering whichprovides the opportunity foradvanced study in a combinedprogram of Computer Scienceand Electrical Engineering.
(continued on page 6)
NEWSLETTER OF THE DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY VOL.1 NO.1 SPRING 2003
CS@CU
CS@CU SPRING 2003 1
Al Aho Kathy McKeown
2 CS@CU SPRING 2003
Professor Nayar's research is focused on three areas: the creation of cameras thatproduce new forms of visualinformation; the modeling ofthe interaction of light withmaterials; and the design of algorithms that recognizeobjects from images.
This past spring ProfessorNayar delivered Columbia’sprestigious University Lectureto a packed audience in LowLibrary, marking the secondtime the University has hon-ored a computer science facul-ty member with this distinc-tion. In his lecture, ProfessorNayar introduced the computa-tional camera, a device thatembodies the convergence ofthe camera and the computer.
The traditional notion of a camera is based on the concept of a pinhole (cameraobscura). It produces an imageby selecting rays of light fromthe scene in a specific man-ner; only those rays that passthrough the iris of the cam-era's lens are captured. Thecomputational camera usesunconventional optics to selectlight rays from a scene in
radically different ways and asuitable algorithm to manipu-late the selected rays to pro-duce new forms of visual infor-mation. Professor Nayar pre-sented examples that demon-strate how the computationalcamera redefines the notion ofan image, and hence has thepotential to impact the verynature of visual communication.
Professor Nayar was born inBangalore, India in 1963. In1990, he received his PhDdegree in Electrical andComputer Engineering fromthe Robotics Institute atCarnegie Mellon University. Hehas received the prestigiousDavid Marr Prize twice (1990and 1995), the David andLucile Packard Fellowship(1992), the National YoungInvestigator Award (1993), theNTT Distinguished ScientificAchievement Award (1994),and the Keck FoundationAward for Excellence inTeaching (1995). He has pub-lished over 100 scientificpapers and has over 30 award-ed and pending patents oninventions related to imaging,vision, and robotics.
Professor Nayar heads theColumbia Automated Vision
Environment (CAVE), a research lab dedicated to the development of advanced computer vision systems.
CS@CU SPRING 2003 3
Alfred AhoAlgorithms & Compilers
Peter Allen Robotics & Graphics
Peter Belhumeur Computer Vision & Graphics
Adam Cannon Machine Learning
Stephen Edwards Embedded Systems
Steve Feiner Computer Graphics
Zvi Galil Algorithms & Cryptography
Luis Gravano Information Systems & Databases
FacultyZeph Grunschlag Algorithms
Julia Hirschberg Speech Processing
Tony Jebara Machine Learning
Gail Kaiser Software Systems
John Kender Video Processing
AngelosKeromytis Systems Security
AndrewKosoresow Artificial Intelligence
Christina Leslie ComputationalBiology
Kathy McKeown Natural LanguageProcessing
Vishal Misra Networking & PerformanceAnalysis
Shree Nayar Computer Vision
Jason Nieh Operating Systems
Steven NowickAsynchronous Systems
RaviRamamoorthi Computer Graphics & Vision
Ken Ross Database Systems
Dan Rubinstein Joint withElectrical Engineering
Rocco Servedio Theory & Learning
Edward Shortliffe Joint withMedicalInformatics
Elizabeth Sklar Software Agents
Clifford Stein Joint withI.E.O.R.
Sal Stolfo Security & Systems
Joseph Traub Information Based Complexity
Stephen Unger Computer Engineering
HenrykWozniakowski Complexity & QuantumComputing
Jonathan Gross Graph Theory
Tal Malkin Theory & Security
HenningSchulzrinne Networking
Yechiam Yemini Networking
4 CS@CU SPRING 2003
Student NewsTheodore Kim BSLawrence Kirschner BADixon Koesdjojo BSIsaac Krieger BSTakahiro Kuba BSKristen Kupchik BSWilliam Kwok BSFeng-Yin Lai BSBenjamin Langmead BAJulika Lartey BSDon Lee BALawrence Lee BSChang-Woo Lee BSJohnie Lee BSMicah Lemonik BSJeffrey Leung BSRobyn Levinson BAHo-Cheung Li BSDaniel Lichtenberg BASteven Ling BAAlan Lue BARobbie Majzner BAIgor Marfin BSEyal Mayer BAMaxim Mayer-Cesiano BAEdward Mezarina BAGregory Michalak BSShloke Mittal BSKaushik Mukherjee BSElizabeth Mutter BSJustin Namolik BSMichael Ockfen Metcalf BSCharles O'Donnell BSAdaku Ofoegbu BSRosauro Ola BSNicholas Orton BAPeter Ottomanelli BSJames Pak BSTamar Palgon BAEunSong Park BSSangdon Park BSJi-Soo Park BAChristopher Pendleton BSSina Peyrovian BSJeffrey Polanco BSDavid Pollack BAScott Price BSAmna Qaiser BSYong Man Ra BSMin Jeong Ra BAVivek Ramdev BSShiva Ramudit BSSukumar Rao BS
Daniel Reed BAJohn Rodriguez BAJohn Rolston BSSajid Sadi BSJordan Salvit BSAdam Schwartz BSAndrei Scudder BSMatthew Selsky BSGaurav Shah BADaniel Shamah BAMax Shevyakov BSAndrew Shin BSDarrell Silver BAAlvin So BSEva Soliz BATenzin Sonam BSMu Lan Tan BSMark Tarnapoll BADaniel Terry BSJonah Tower BSVikram Tuteja BSRegina Udler BANoel Vega BSBill Wang BSJing Wang BSCorey Wang BAMarta Wojcik BASau Man Wong BAJonathan Wu BARussell Yanofsky BSMichael Youn BAOlga Zaitseva BSEric Zhai BSJames Zheng BS
UndergraduateDegreesAyesha Abdul-Quader BAJoseph Aghion BSShantanu Agrawal BSOmar Ahmed BSKabir Ahuja BSKwamena Aidoo BAShuichi Aizawa BSAndrew Arnold BAKierstan Bell BSVadim Belobrovka BSMark Benvenuto BSWilliam Bert BARuby Bola BARostislav Briskin BSAndrew Brotzman BARobert Bruce BADaniel Burdeinick BSFelix Candelario BAMichael Castleman BSYe Chen BSMichael Ching BSFreddie Choi BSAlfred Chung BAKetecia Clarke BAEric DeFriez BA
Vijay Dewan BSLukas Dudkowski BSCharles Finkel BSGerardo Flores BSAner Fust BAMark Galagan BSJordan Genut BAMeena George BSKatrice Georges BSSamuel Gordon BAElizabeth Gorinsky BAJeffrey Green BSBrian Gruber BSZaheda Haidri BSAndrew Han BSDavid Hefter BSDavid Hessing BAHenry Ho BSMatthew Hoffman BSYossi Horowitz BSWilliam Hu BALin Jiang BSJeremiah Johnson BSCalvert Jones BAYuan Kao BSOlga Khaykina BAArseniy Khobotkov BSAlbert Kim BSKenneth Kim BS
Congratulations to our 2003 CS & CE Graduates!
Masters DegreesGenevive Alelis MSGeorge Atzemoglou MSJiangcheng Bao MSHrvoje Benko MSYuval Beres MSGabor Blasko MSAleksandr Bogomolov MSBlaine Boman MSVlad Branzoi MSLinh Bui MSGeorge Chang MSAnurat Chapanod MSClayton Chen MSYu-Hua Chen MSHelen Chen MSGyechul Cho MSPaolo De Dios MSHeba Elsayed MSGary Escola MSVanessa Frias-Martinez MSRavi Gadhia MSJoseph Gagliano MSYong Gao MSJohn Gassner MSXin Gong MSJean-Denis Greze MSRean Griffith MSAlexander Haubold MSMarshall Hayden MSIlana Hefter MSYu-Chi Hu ProfessionalYu-Ling Huang MSEdward Ishak MSStephen Jan MSAngel Janevski ProfessionalGanna Kozynenko MSNitya Krishnamoorthy MSBhaskar Krishnan MSShilpa Krishnappa MSLawrence Leftin ProfessionalBo Li MSWei-Jen Li MSDongping Liang MSAndrew Lih MSXiaohua Liu MSShahmil Merchant MSSilvia Metodieva MSAparna Mohla MSWilliam Morein MSSubroto Mukherjee MS
Min-Yen Kan Sponsors: Judith Klavans and Kathleen McKeown Automatic Text Summarization asApplied to Information Retrieval: UsingIndicative and Informative Summaries
Maria Papadopouli Sponsor: Henning Schulzrinne Resource Sharing in Mobile Wireless Networks
Carl Lewis Sable Sponsor: Kathleen McKeownRobust Statistical Techniques for the Categorization of Images Using Associated Text
DepartmentalAwardsComputer ScienceDepartment Award
Andrew Arnold (CC)For scholastic achievements and contributions to the Computer Science Department,Columbia College, and theUniversity as a whole
Computer ScienceScholarship Award
Meena George (SEAS)Joseph Aghion (SEAS)For excellence in Computer Science
Theodore R. BashkowAward
Charles O'Donnell (SEAS)For excellence in independent projects
The Russell C. MillsAward
John Rolston (SEAS)For excellence in the area of Computer Science
Paul Michelman Award
Phil GrossFor exemplary service to theComputer Science Department
Recognition ofExcellence in TAing
Ayesha Abdul-Quader (CC)Srikant Krishna For excellence in TAing and substantial contribution to thesense of departmental community
PhD TA/Teaching Award of Excellence
Peter DavisFor excellence in TAing and substantial contribution to thesense of departmental community
CS@CU SPRING 2003 5
Rocco Servedio and RyanO'Donnell have won the BestPaper Award at the IEEEConference on ComputationalComplexity for their paper"Extremal properties of polyno-mial threshold functions."(Ryan is Madhu Sudan's stu-dent at MIT.)
Luis Gravano's student,Eugene Agichtein, won theBest Student Paper award for their paper "Querying TextDatabases for EfficientInformation Extraction" pre-sented at the 2003 IEEE ICDE database conference.
Angelos Keromytis, Sal
Stolfo, Tal Malkin and Vishal Misra won a grant from the NSA for distributedintrusion detection.
The White House hasannounced the appointment of Judith Klavans to thePresident's InformationTechnology AdvisoryCommittee. Judith is Directorof the Center for Research on Information Access and aresearch scientist with theNatural Language ProcessingGroup.
Stephen Edwards received adonation of hardware and soft-ware from Xilinx for his embed-ded systems research group.
Vishal Misra has won the NSF Career Award under the title "Expecting theUnexpected: A Study ofNetwork Vulnerabilities." Healso won the IBM facultyaward, the DoE Career awardand the NSF Career award.
Richard Feynman conjecturedthat many problems in quan-tum mechanics could never besolved on a classical computer.(All existing computers areclassical.) He believed thatquantum computers would beneeded. Solving such problemsis important because quantummechanics governs the atomicand subatomic domains funda-mental to chemistry andphysics and is an essential keyto understanding our universe.
One of the formulations ofquantum mechanics is given bypath integrals. "Path Integrationon a Quantum Computer" by Joe Traub and Henryk
Wozniakowkski is the firstpaper to show that quantumcomputers provide a big win over classical computersfor this problem. The paper has been accepted by the journal "Quantum InformationProcessing."
Joe Traub presentedDistinguished Lectures to theSchool of Computer Science atCarnegie Mellon University,Peking University in Beijing andFudan University in Shanghai.
Al Aho won the 2003 IEEEJohn von Neumann Medal forcontributions to the founda-tions of computer science andto the fields of algorithms andsoftware tools. He was alsoelected to the AmericanAcademy of Arts and Sciences.
Steven Feiner is program co-chair for ISWC 2003, the 7thIEEE International Symposiumon Wearable Computers. Hegave the keynote talk at IEEEVirtual Reality 2003, and willbe giving invited talks at con-ferences in Japan and the UKover the next few months.
Jonathan Gross is editing ofThe Handbook of Graph Theorywith Jay Yellen as co-editor.This 50-chapter encyclopedicvolume will be published earlyin 2004. Columbia chapterauthors include Professors AlAho, Giuseppe Italiano, andCliff Stein.
Adam Cannon won the 2002SEAS Alumni AssociationDistinguished Faculty TeachingAward.
Julia Hirschberg gave a plena-ry talk at the ISCA & IEEEWorkshop on SpontaneousSpeech Recognition in Tokyo,entitled "Experiments inEmotional Speech." She alsogave a talk at the University ofPittsburgh’s CS DistinguishedLecture Series, entitled"Browsing and Searching AudioData: SCANMail."
Jason Nieh was 1 of 5 profes-sors across the nation to beawarded a 17" G4 PowerBookby Apple computers for use inoperating systems research in ahighly competitive competition.
Columbia’s ACM Student
Chapter won the OutstandingChapter Community ServiceAward for 2002-03.
Gail Kaiser was asked to deliv-er an invited talk and paper onautonomic computing at the5th Annual International ActiveMiddleware Workshop in June.She has also been hired as aconsultant by DARPA to "thor-oughly integrate cognitive sys-tems into the military's existingand future information infra-structures from tactical rawdata to strategic vision."
6 CS@CU SPRING 2003
Departmental News
(Message from the Chairscontinued from page 1)
The department has also elect-ed Al Aho as a new Vice Chairof Undergraduate Education.Under his purview, the depart-ment will be focusing on evolv-ing the curriculum at both theundergraduate and graduate lev-els to meet the new challengesour graduates will face as citizens of the information age.
Our undergraduate programsare extremely popular with stu-dents, both undergraduate andgraduate. We have 95 CS
majors per year, the largest inthe Engineering School. Weare also the only department inColumbia to offer both a BA and a BS and our majorscome from Columbia College,General Studies, BarnardCollege, in addition to SEAS.We also offer a ComputerEngineering degree, an inter-disciplinary program similar in spirit to our MS program; it draws 35 majors per year.
At the graduate level, we havea total of 156 MS students and102 PhD students. A key fea-
ture of our undergraduate pro-grams is the ability to becomeinvolved in research. This hap-pens though our ResearchLiaison program which holds aresearch fair mid-year to show-case student projects. For thegraduate students, researchstarts early in the program andquickly becomes the main edu-cational activity.
We should perhaps explainwhy the department has twochairs this year. HenningSchulzrinne was elected thechair of the Computer Science
Department, beginning inJanuary 2004. Kathy McKeownfinished her five-year term aschair in December 2002. SinceHenning is on sabbatical, AlAho (who was chair 1995-97)chaired the department inspring 2003, and KathyMcKeown will chair the depart-ment in fall 2003.
The department is clearly wellpositioned to meet the future.
Columbia ComputerScience at theRoboCupAmerican OpenProfessor Elizabeth Sklarbrought three teams to partici-pate in the RoboCup AmericanOpen, held earlier this monthat Carnegie Mellon University.
The "Metrobots" (shown on theright) entered the Four-LeggedLeague, which is dedicated toprogramming a group of SonyAIBO robots to play soccer.
Professor Sklar and her stu-dents are using the Sony AIBOrobots to experiment withembodied agents, multi-agentcoordination and various formsof machine learning, includingevolutionary computation. Oneof the biggest problemsencountered for most teams inthe Four-Legged League is cali-bration. The AIBO is equippedwith a digital video camera inits head piece, which capturesraw imaging data in YUV for-mat. Algorithms which performlocalization (knowing wherethe robot is on the soccer field)and object recognition (knowingwhich object is the ball) arehighly sensitive to the accuracy
of the imaging information,which in turn is greatly affectedby subtle changes in lightingconditions. Sklar and her students have been workingon various ways to perform cali-bration quickly and easily beforeand during a soccer game.
Throughout the summer, theMetrobots will continue towork on the calibration andlocalization problems, integrat-ing evolutionary learning to the manual methods they havedeveloped this Spring. In July,all three Columbia-affiliatedteams will participate in theSeventh International RoboCup,being held in Padova, Italy.
Metrobots is a joint effort withProfessor Simon Parsons ofthe City University of New York(CUNY) and Professor MichaelLittman of Rutgers University.The team includes CS PhD student Vannesa Frias-Martinezand CS alumnus MarekMarcinkiewicz ('02), currently a CUNY PhD student.
CS@CU SPRING 2003 7
Other News
VisitingCommitteeIn January 2003, anExternal VisitingCommittee consisting of twelve of the mostdistinguished scholars in Computer Sciencecame to evaluate theComputer ScienceDepartment at Columbia.The members of theexternal committee were:
Jacob AbrahamUniversity of Texas, AustinSteven Bellovin AT&T LaboratoriesRobert Constable Cornell University James Foley Georgia TechJitendra Malik UC BerkeleyChristos Papadimitriou UC BerkeleyFernando Pereira University of PennsylvaniaTomaso Poggio MITRaghu Ramakrishnan University of WisconsinAlfred Spector IBMJon Turner Washington UniversityJeannette Wing CMU
The Visiting Committee spent a day and a half examining theaccomplishments and direc-tions of the department. Themeeting began with a depart-mental overview given byKathy McKeown and Al Aho,followed by presentations fromDean Galil and PresidentBollinger. The Committee thenheard from the researchgroups, PhD students, MS students and undergraduates.
At the end of the review, theCommittee issued its report.They gave us excellent markson the progress we have madein advancing the department,
citing our strong research programs, excellence in hiring,and our focused strategic plan-ning. The committee madesuggestions on how we canimprove our educational pro-gram and we have alreadyinstituted one of these recom-mendations by electing Al Ahoto the position of Vice Chair ofUndergraduate Education. Weare actively working on imple-menting other suggestionssuch as curriculum reform.
A Behavior-basedApproach toSecuring EmailSystemsProfessor Sal Stolfo and his IDS(Intrusion Detection Systems)research group have developedthe Email Mining Toolkit (EMT),a system that implementsbehavior-based methods toimprove security of email sys-tems. Behavior models of emailflows and email account usagemay be used for a variety ofdetection tasks. Behavior-based
models are quite different from"content-based" models in com-mon use today, such as virusscanners. The goal of thesetechniques is the detection ofthe onset of viral propagations.The results achieved for thedetection of the onset of viralpropagations suggest emaildelivery should be egress ratelimited - stored for a while andthen forwarded - or a record ofrecently delivered emails shouldbe kept in order to develop suf-ficient statistics to verify a prop-agation is ongoing. EMT canform part of a larger securityplatform that deals with emailsecurity issues in general.
Department of Computer ScienceColumbia University1214 Amsterdam AvenueMailcode: 0401New York, NY 10027-7003
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CS@CU NEWSLETTER OF THE DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY WWW.CS.COLUMBIA.EDU
Other News (continued)Preserving cultural heritage and historicsites is an importantproblem. These sites are subject to erosion,vandalism, and as long-lived artifacts, they have gone throughmany phases of construction, damageand repair.It is important to keep anaccurate record of these sitesusing 3-D model building technology as they currentlyare, so preservationists cantrack changes, foresee struc-tural problems, and allow awider audience to "virtually"see and tour these sites. Dueto the complexity of thesesites, building 3-D models istime consuming and difficult,usually involving much manualeffort. A research team headedby Professor Peter Allen andfunded by the National
Science Foundation has begunto develop new tools to auto-mate the modeling process.One of the testbeds for theresearch is the Cathedral ofSaint-Pierre in Beauvais,France which is an endangeredstructure that is currently onthe World Monuments Fund'sMost Endangered List.Professor Allen's group hasused laser range sensors tomodel the Cathedral, amassingover 100 million points of data.These new modeling methodsutilize range image segmenta-tion and feature extractionalgorithms that can automati-cally register individual rangescans, placing the scans in thesame frame of reference. Themethods can be extended toautomate the texture mappingprocess as well, to create bothgeometric and photometricrealistic models. The image tothe left is a model generatedfrom 120 range scans of the Cathedral's interior shell as seen from the outside.
NON-PROFIT ORG.
U.S. POSTAGE
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NEW YORK, NY
PERMIT 4332
New Methods for DigitalModeling of Historic SitesUsing Range and Image Data
Professor Peter Allen's research team created this digital model of the Cathedral of Saint-Pierre
