Alessandro Vespignani, the Stern­berg Family Dis­tin­guished Uni­ver­sity Pro­fessor of physics, computer science and health sciences, was elected president of the Complex Systems Society. Photo by Mary Knox Merrill.

The sci­ence of com­plex sys­tems was born in the mid-20th cen­tury, but it has only recently begun to mature into a research field with real-world rel­e­vance. The devel­op­ment of new tech­nolo­gies that stamp data points on nearly all of our activ­i­ties is allowing us to quan­tifi­ably study society — the ulti­mate com­plex system.

“Com­plex sys­tems is really now get­ting into a dif­ferent stage of its life in which it can start to have an impact through prac­tical appli­ca­tions,” said Alessandro Vespig­nani, the Stern­berg Family Dis­tin­guished Uni­ver­sity Pro­fessor of physics, com­puter sci­ence and health sci­ences.

It is for this reason that the Euro­pean Union sought in 2006 to sup­port the first-ever aca­d­emic society devoted to com­plex sys­tems sci­ence, which com­prises 600 mem­bers world­wide. This year, in the first renewal of the society’s lead­er­ship, Vespig­nani was elected as its president.

“This is a young field and it needs young researchers to pro­mote it, advo­cate for it and pro­vide momentum,” said Vespig­nani, whose research uses human mobility pat­terns to track the spread of dis­eases across the globe.

The society came to fruition in 2004 during the first Euro­pean Con­fer­ence for Com­plex Sys­tems, which has since grown into an annual series. Vespig­nani hopes to expand the series’ reach during his three-year term by holding meet­ings in the EU and turning both the conference’s and the society’s activ­i­ties into a global endeavor.

“The idea is to be more and more inclu­sive and more world­wide with events not just in Europe, where the society was born,” Vespig­nani said. He hopes that expanding and col­lab­o­rating with smaller insti­tu­tions devoted to the field would enable the society to more effec­tively coor­di­nate and sup­port the efforts of com­plex sys­tems sci­en­tists around the world.

Vespig­nani also noted that his appoint­ment would allow him to advo­cate for more funding for the field of com­plex sys­tems sci­ence. The advent of so-called “big data,” he said, which touches the lives of almost everyone, has forced the field to con­front a series of  unique eth­ical chal­lenges that must be addressed with careful policy measures.

“Com­plex sys­tems sci­ence is not any­more just a fancy sci­ence to look at very exotic phe­nomena,” said Vespig­nani. “It actu­ally is some­thing that might help to solve impor­tant real-world prob­lems. It has the matu­rity now to get into applied science.”

This semester, professors Matthew Goodwin, Rupal Patel, Stephen Intille, and Timothy Bickmore launched the nation’s first program devoted to Personal Health Informatics.

Per­sonal health tech­nolo­gies amount to more than just your smart­phone apps. A group of North­eastern researchers, who are leading a new doc­toral pro­gram at the uni­ver­sity, hope these tech­nolo­gies will save the health-care system.

The inno­v­a­tive Per­sonal Health Infor­matics program—the first of its kind in the nation—will pre­pare stu­dents from both the health and com­puter sci­ences fields to lead research and devel­op­ment of new tech­nolo­gies to trans­form health-care delivery around the globe.

“Sci­en­tific inno­va­tion in health care is a national imper­a­tive and one of Northeastern’s research pri­or­i­ties,” said Stephen W. Director, provost and senior vice pres­i­dent for aca­d­emic affairs. “A crit­ical piece of our efforts is devel­oping Ph.D. pro­grams that are anchored in mul­tiple dis­ci­plines and aligned with the needs of both industry and society.”

With a growing elderly pop­u­la­tion, surging obe­sity rates and younger diag­noses of con­di­tions like cancer, autism and HIV, people at all stages of life are flooding an already over­whelmed U.S. health-care system, according to Matthew Goodwin, pro­fessor of health sci­ences and com­puter and infor­ma­tion sci­ences. Unfor­tu­nately, he explained, that system is based on a sick-patient model with no way to reim­burse for wellness.

Along with Goodwin, the doc­toral pro­gram is being led by: Stephen Intille and Rupal Patel, both asso­ciate pro­fes­sors in the Bouvé Col­lege of Health Sci­ences and Col­lege of Com­puter and Infor­ma­tion Sci­ences; and Tim­othy Bick­more, asso­ciate pro­fessor in the Col­lege of Com­puter and Infor­ma­tion Sciences.

The team says health-care tech­nolo­gies, which have tra­di­tion­ally tar­geted clin­i­cians, have a great poten­tial to pre­vent ill­ness and pro­mote well­ness when placed in the hands of patients. And they believe these so-called “per­sonal health infor­matics,” could be the key to solving the health-care crisis.

On Monday, the North­eastern com­mu­nity can get an up-close look at some of the tech­nolo­gies from uni­ver­sity labs at Northeastern’s Open Lab Expe­ri­ence and Recep­tion. The event, spon­sored by the Office of the Provost, will run from 4–6 p.m. in the Raytheon Amphithe­ater in the Egan Research Center, and will fea­ture inter­ac­tive demos of tech­nolo­gies from North­eastern laboratories.

Cur­rent North­eastern stu­dent Stephen Fla­herty spent a half-decade in the imaging depart­ment at Boston’s Beth Israel Med­ical Dea­coness Center and had been searching for a doc­toral pro­gram for a number of years. “Nothing fit my inter­ests the way the PHI pro­gram does,” he said.

“Nearly all existing doc­toral pro­grams in health or med­ical infor­matics focus on the devel­op­ment and use of tech­nolo­gies used by physi­cians and other med­ical staff,” Intille said. “Most of the tech­nolo­gies are only used once people get sick.”

The tech­nolo­gies of PHI — which range from assis­tive tech­nolo­gies for chil­dren with autism to wellness-focused mobile apps — are “focused on helping patients take care of them­selves,” Bick­more said.

The pro­gram includes fac­ulty from six of the university’s nine col­leges and schools, whose exper­tise includes human-computer inter­ac­tions, data pro­cessing and mea­suring emo­tion, to name a few. These strengths, cou­pled with a com­mit­ment to training skilled health-care pro­fes­sionals, will enable the new program’s suc­cess, Patel said.

Northeastern’s com­mit­ment to trans­dis­ci­pli­nary teaching and research,” Intille said, “make it an ideal envi­ron­ment in which to con­duct research on the design and rig­orous field eval­u­a­tion of inno­v­a­tive per­sonal health tech­nolo­gies that may lead to dra­matic, pos­i­tive changes in how people receive and manage their care.”

We are pleased to announce the 2012 Fall CCIS Newsletter. Read the CCIS Network for the latest in Cyber Operations, Programming Languages, Game Design, and Personal Health Informatics. Highlights include faculty hires and awards, alumni news, and co-op expansion.

Read Here

CCIS Professor Guevara Noubir organized a recent NSF workshop in Boston dedicated to bringing together researchers with broad interests in computation and communication in the bio-nano world. A mix of scientists from often polarized fields such as Computer Science, Bioengineering, Mathematics, and Physics attended to foster interdisciplinary discussions and collaborations. Specific topics of interest included:

• Engineering synthetic biological circuits with communication interfaces
• Microbial communication networks
• Wireless energy transfer at the nano-scale
• Quantum coherence in biological systems

Read more at the conference website.

Ear­lier this month, the FBI began rolling out a $1 bil­lion update to the national fin­ger­printing data­base. Facial-​​recognition sys­tems, DNA analysis, voice iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and iris scan­ning will all con­tribute to the government’s arsenal of Next Gen­er­a­tion Iden­ti­fi­ca­tion (NGI) data. We asked Ray­mond Fu, a new assis­tant pro­fessor with joint appoint­ments in the Col­lege of Engi­neering and the Col­lege of Com­puter and Infor­ma­tion Sci­ence, to explain the sci­ence behind one of these new tech­nolo­gies: facial-​​recognition software.

How does facial recognition work, and where is the state of the art now?

Web­sites like Face­book, LinkedIn and other social-​​media net­works con­tain mas­sive amounts of valu­able public infor­ma­tion. Auto­mated web tools called web crawlers sift through these sites, pulling out infor­ma­tion on mil­lions of people in order to tailor search results and create tar­geted ads or other mar­ketable content.

But what hap­pens when “the bad guys” employ web crawlers? For Engin Kirda, Sy and Laurie Stern­berg Inter­dis­ci­pli­nary Asso­ciate Pro­fessor for Infor­ma­tion Assur­ance in the Col­lege of Com­puter and Infor­ma­tion Sci­ence and the Depart­ment of Elec­trical and Com­puter Engi­neering, they then become tools for spam­ming, phishing or tar­geted Internet attacks.

“You want to pro­tect the infor­ma­tion,” Kirda said. “You want people to be able to use it, but you don’t want people to be able to auto­mat­i­cally down­load con­tent and abuse it.”

Kirda and his col­leagues at the Uni­ver­sity of California–Santa Bar­bara have devel­oped a new soft­ware call Pub­Crawl to solve this problem. Pub­Crawl both detects and con­tains mali­cious web crawlers without lim­iting normal browsing capac­i­ties. The team joined forces with one of the major social-​​networking sites to test Pub­Crawl, which is now being used in the field to pro­tect users’ information.

Kirda and his col­lab­o­ra­tors pre­sented a paper on their novel approach at the 21st USENIX Secu­rity Sym­po­sium in early August. The article will be pub­lished in the pro­ceed­ings of the con­fer­ence this fall.

In the cyber­se­cu­rity arms race, Kirda explained, mali­cious web crawlers have become increas­ingly sophis­ti­cated in response to stronger pro­tec­tion strate­gies. In par­tic­ular, they have become more coor­di­nated: Instead of uti­lizing a single com­puter or IP address to crawl the web for valu­able infor­ma­tion, efforts are dis­trib­uted across thou­sands of machines.

“That becomes a tougher problem to solve because it looks sim­ilar to benign user traffic,” Kirda said. “It’s not as straightforward.”

Tra­di­tional pro­tec­tion mech­a­nisms, like a CAPTCHA, which oper­ates on an indi­vidual basis, are still useful, but their deploy­ment comes at a cost: Users may be annoyed if too many CAPTCHAs are shown. As an alter­na­tive, non­in­tru­sive approach, Pub­Crawl was specif­i­cally designed with dis­trib­uted crawling in mind. By iden­ti­fying IP addresses with sim­ilar behavior pat­terns, such as con­necting at sim­ilar inter­vals and fre­quen­cies, Pub­Crawl detects what it expects to be dis­trib­uted web-​​crawling activity.

Once a crawler is detected, the ques­tion is whether it is mali­cious or benign. “You don’t want to block it com­pletely until you know for sure it is mali­cious,” Kirda explained. “Instead, Pub­Crawl essen­tially keeps an eye on it.”

Poten­tially mali­cious con­nec­tions can be rate-​​limited and a human oper­ator can take a closer look. If the oper­a­tors decide that the activity is mali­cious, IPs can also be blocked.

In order to eval­uate the approach, Kirda and his col­leagues used it to scan logs from a large-​​scale social net­work, which then pro­vided feed­back on its suc­cess. Then, the social net­work deployed it in real time, for a more robust eval­u­a­tion. Cur­rently, the social net­work is using the tool as a part of its pro­duc­tion system. Going for­ward, the team expects to iden­tify areas where the soft­ware could be evaded and make it even stronger.

CCIS Professor Guevara Noubir organized a recent NSF workshop in Arlington, Virginia to address the question of biologically-enabled wireless networks. While wireless networks have achieved great successes in the past decade, challenges such as energy efficiency remain. At the same time, bio-organisms such as the brain carry out complex tasks with only a few tens of watts. The clear superiority of biological systems’ efficiency begs the question:  could we one day build biologically -enabled networks?

This conference brought together experts from research, biophysics and biomedical communities to articulate a vision for biologically-enabled wireless networks, define a clear set of challenges to be solved, and make recommendations for future inter-disciplinary collaborations. Presentation topics included:

• Enabling mechanisms for bio-networks, such as electromagnetic energy harvesting and transduction into biological signals, and magnetic control of biological systems
• Molecular computation and communication networks considering both the fundamental information and computation theoretic issues and system design
• Synthetic biology as a way to engineer biologically enabled wireless devices and how biologically enabled devices can be made less sensitive to their environment

Read more at the conference website.