David Lazer’s interdisciplinary team includes social scientists, graphic designers and data miners. Together they’re using computational modeling to gain insights on society. Photo by Brooks Canaday.

For the last sev­eral weeks, North­eastern Uni­ver­sity researchers have been using com­pu­ta­tional models to dis­till mas­sive amounts of pres­i­den­tial cam­paign data into nuggets of infor­ma­tion that the human brain can comprehend.

From a “Debate Tweet Meter” to an analysis of super PAC funding, the team has tried to “illu­mi­nate processes by which money is raised and lan­guage is pro­duced,” explained David Lazer, a pro­fessor of polit­ical sci­ence and com­puter and infor­ma­tion sci­ence whose lab is leading the effort. “The machinery around both deeply affects our democracy.”

While Twitter is an obvious go-to source for lots of data on voter sen­ti­ment, other sources — such as the RSS feeds of main­stream media sources, the polit­ical “blo­gos­phere” and cam­paign ads — leave traces of the lin­guistic strate­gies intended to sway that sentiment.

To untangle the sources of those strate­gies, Lazer’s inter­dis­ci­pli­nary team of social sci­en­tists, data miners and graphic designers is devel­oping visu­al­iza­tion tools that tell the story behind the lan­guage. Assis­tant research pro­fessor Yu-Ru Lin, who leads the Debate Tweet Meter project, sifts through and ana­lyzes large data sets including Tweets or finan­cial con­tri­bu­tions. Assis­tant research pro­fessor Mauro Mar­tino turns those data into dynamic visual rep­re­sen­ta­tions, while post­doc­toral researchers Drew Mar­golin and Sasha Goodman use the infor­ma­tion to make infer­ences about social processes.

“The beauty of my lab is that we have these dif­ferent types of people with dif­ferent skills and per­spec­tives,” Lazer said. “And then we shake them up and cool stuff comes out.”

The group is also probing the finan­cial struc­tures behind lan­guage. “A lot of the money sup­ports expen­di­tures on lan­guage,” Lazer said, refer­ring to the spending of polit­ical cam­paigns and polit­ical action committees.

He noted that focus groups and sur­veys, for example, could be used to help cam­paigns tailor their mes­sage to elicit a desired response. From there, the mes­sage per­co­lates through society, leading to “lin­guistic homogeneity.”

Using con­tent from tele­vi­sion com­mer­cials, var­ious types of web­sites and lan­guage used by the can­di­dates them­selves, the researchers are devel­oping what they call the Invis­ible Net­works Project. “We’re looking at the shared chunks of words that are artic­u­lated by politi­cians and the media,” Lazer said. “They are readily iden­ti­fi­able if you look at the data, because it’s exactly the same quotation.”

By iden­ti­fying these texts, the team is con­structing a visual model of the net­work of lan­guage that per­vades our world and influ­ences our everyday experience.

“A crit­ical ele­ment of a democ­racy is for people to be exposed to dif­ferent points of view,” Lazer said. “Ulti­mately we’re all sub­ject to the same laws and the same poli­cies.” Lazer’s team is working to reveal those views by laying bare the machinery of money and memes in politics.

In leading the College of Computer and Information Science for the last 18 years, Larry Finkelstein advanced Northeastern’s teaching and research mission in critical areas and expanded experiential education opportunities for students.

Larry Finkel­stein, who has served as dean of North­eastern University’s Col­lege of Com­puter and Infor­ma­tion Sci­ence for the last 18 years, will step down from his posi­tion before the start of the next aca­d­emic year.

“Serving as dean of our col­lege has been the high­light of my aca­d­emic career,” Finkel­stein said. “By every objec­tive mea­sure, the col­lege is in the strongest posi­tion it has ever been and is primed to take the next giant step for­ward. These accom­plish­ments are due to the efforts of our tal­ented fac­ulty, staff and stu­dents who are ded­i­cated to the con­tin­uing suc­cess of the col­lege. During this final year, I will work hard to see that our ambi­tious new ini­tia­tives are firmly established.”

Stephen W. Director, provost and senior vice pres­i­dent for aca­d­emic affairs, announced the news to the North­eastern com­mu­nity on Wednesday.

“Larry’s work over the years has made a tremen­dous impact on CCIS and advanced the university’s teaching and research mis­sion in crit­ical areas, such as improving the quality of health care through inno­v­a­tive infor­ma­tion tech­nology and securing the nation’s cyber­in­fra­struc­ture,” Director said.

Finkel­stein joined the North­eastern fac­ulty in 1983, just one year after the Col­lege of Com­puter and Infor­ma­tion Sci­ence was founded. During his tenure, CCIS was awarded two National Cen­ters of Aca­d­emic Excellence—one from the National Secu­rity Agency for a center in Cyber Oper­a­tions and the other from both the NSA and the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­rity for a center in Infor­ma­tion Assur­ance Research & Edu­ca­tion. During the last three years, research funding has increased by 180 percent.

In addi­tion to pio­neering com­bined majors at North­eastern, CCIS has also launched sev­eral ground­breaking and inter­dis­ci­pli­nary pro­grams at the under­grad­uate, grad­uate and doc­torate levels. These pro­grams include bachelor’s degrees in com­puter sci­ence with a con­cen­tra­tion in cyber­op­er­a­tions and master’s and doc­torate degrees in health infor­matics and infor­ma­tion assurance.

Under Finkelstein’s lead­er­ship, the quality of stu­dents enrolled in CCIS has increased sig­nif­i­cantly and the col­lege has expanded expe­ri­en­tial edu­ca­tion oppor­tu­ni­ties for under­grad­u­ates and grad­uate stu­dents, including adding numerous posi­tions at For­tune 500 companies.

Finkel­stein also helped lead the devel­op­ment of online options for pro­fes­sional master’s stu­dents, including making all of these pro­grams avail­able at Northeastern’s grad­uate cam­puses in Char­lotte, N.C., and Seattle, Wash.

As dean, Finkel­stein strength­ened the college’s teaching and research enter­prise in the core dis­ci­plines of com­puting and pur­sued new fields such as net­work sci­ence, com­pu­ta­tional social sci­ence and “big data.” He has hired out­standing fac­ulty throughout his tenure who have advanced this expanded view of com­puting and sig­nif­i­cantly ele­vated the external rep­u­ta­tion of the college.

After taking a one-year sab­bat­ical, Finkel­stein plans on returning to the fac­ulty to teach and oversee a research program.

In the coming months, the uni­ver­sity will con­duct a national search for a new dean.

An international group of researchers has built a prototype system for detecting botnets on a large scale and that can sniff out previously undiscovered botnet command-and-control (C&C) servers.

Botnet hunters traditionally focus on inspecting individual botnets or botnet activity within organizations, for example, the researchers say. The new prototype, called Disclosure, expands the view of botnet activity to a wider scale and detects botnet C&C traffic in real-time, inspecting billions of flows of datasets each day, they say. It uses the NetFlow network protocol created by Cisco that gathers IP traffic data, plus some custom features they added that allow the tool to differentiate between C&C traffic and legitimate traffic based on flow size and behavior patterns of the clients, as well as time frames of the traffic. They also integrated it with some external reputation scoring services.

“I think the main contribution is that it’s operating at such a large scale that you could have much broader [botnet] protection of the Internet at large,” says William Robertson, assistant professor at the College of Computer and Information Science at Northeastern University, who, along with Engin Kirda of Northeastern, Leyla Bilge of Symantec Research Labs, Davide Balzarotti of Eurecom, and Christopher Kruegel of UC Santa Barbara, built and tested Disclosure.

“It’s very efficient: It can process a day’s worth of data in less than a day,” Robertson says.

The prototype also was able to detect several botnet C&C servers that had been previously unknown, he says. “We manually verified those: We had some students probe those sites to discover if they were likely C&C servers or not.”

Today’s tools for botnet hunters provide them the ability to detect C&C channels between the botnet operator and the infected bots, or to detect botnets based on behavior among a group of machines that indicates they are bots, the researchers say.

“Once bots or, ideally, C&C servers have been identified, a number of actions can be performed, ranging from removal of infected endpoints from the network, to filtering C&C channels at edge routers, to orchestrated take-downs of the C&C servers themselves,” the researchers wrote in their paper, which they will present in December at the Annual Computer Security Applications Conference in Orlando, Fla.

“Unfortunately, while previous botnet detection approaches are effective under certain circumstances, none of these approaches scales beyond a single administrative domain while retaining useful detection accuracy. This limitation restricts the application of automated botnet detection systems to those entities that are informed or motivated enough to deploy them,” they wrote. “Thus, we have the current state of botnet mitigation, where small pockets of the Internet are fairly well protected against infection while the majority of endpoints remain vulnerable.”

The prototype is not the first large-scale botnet protection approach, however: Damballa, for instance, offers DNS-based reputation filtering for protecting large customers such as ISPs.

Meanwhile, in tests of the tool in a university network and a Tier 1 ISP network, the researchers found that Disclosure spotted some 65 percent of known botnet C&C servers, with a 1 percent false-positive rate. It also caught new botnet C&C servers that weren’t previously known.

NetFlow data is valuable in botnet detection, but NetFlow analysis alone has its limitations in an enterprise environment, where network address translation and IPSes can wreak havoc on detection there, security experts say. “But even in the ISP environment, flow-based systems have problems keeping up with the traffic. Therefore, as the authors of the paper discuss, they will have to do sampling of the overall NetFlow traffic. It is clear that by sampling the traffic, a large portion of the botnet traffic will not be observed due to the sampling,” says Manos Antonakakis, principal scientist and director of academic sciences at Damballa. “Therefore, the particular flow-based botnet detection system will most likely detect quite noisy botnets” such as spam, DDoS, and peer-to-peer botnets, he says.

The researchers say their prototype is not meant to detect targeted attacks of mini-botnet C&C systems. “This approach is not for more targeted attacks. We are trying to look at characteristics of large-scale attacks,” says Kirda, who is associate professor for information assurance at the College of Computer and Information Science and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University. The researchers also previously had built a tool called Exposure that detects DNS anomalies.

Damballa’s Antonakakis says Disclosure is yet another tool for botnet defenders. “New detection tools are useful in botnet research. I think research should focus more on how we can defend against emerging threats. To that extent, I consider this paper a step toward the right direction, however quite incremental, to already existing techniques,” says Antonakakis, who while at Georgia Tech co-developed Notos (PDF), a dynamic reputation system for DNS traffic that helps spot botnet activity and that is used today by Damballa.

The Disclosure research paper is available here (PDF) for download.

Article by Kelly Jackson Higgins from Dark Reading. The original article can be found here

David Smith (left), assistant professor of computational social science in the College of Computer and Information Science, and Ryan Cordell, assistant professor of English and digital humanities in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities. Photo by Brooks Canaday.

In the past, a scholar would have to spend years of intense researching in order to assemble a broad humanities-based assess­ment of a topic like the role of race in 19th-century literature.

“That would require reading for years,” said Ryan Cordell, a new assis­tant pro­fessor of Eng­lish in theCol­lege of Social Sci­ences and Human­i­ties at North­eastern. “And after all that time, he or she would have read 0.0001 per­cent of what was written in that era. There are limits of what you can phys­i­cally read.”

Enter the emerging field of dig­ital human­i­ties, which applies com­puter and network-science tech­niques to dig­i­tized texts, like the mas­sive vol­umes of lit­er­a­ture that have been scanned and stored over the past two decades.

“The Internet Archive has scanned more than 2 mil­lion public-domain books span­ning 500 years, so we can see how lan­guage, words and syntax change over time — or look at any broad trend that exists,” said David Smith, a new assis­tant pro­fessor in the Col­lege of Com­puter and Infor­ma­tion Sci­ence. He was pre­vi­ously a research assis­tant pro­fessor at the Uni­ver­sity of Massachusetts-Amherst and in 2010 received a Ph.D. from Johns Hop­kins University.

Smith and Cordell are among the fac­ulty mem­bers founding Northeastern’s new Cen­ters for Dig­ital Human­i­ties and Com­pu­ta­tional Social Sci­ence, an inter­dis­ci­pli­nary base for researchers from schools including the Col­lege of Com­puter and Infor­ma­tion Sci­ence, the Col­lege of Social Sci­ences and Human­i­ties and the Col­lege of Sci­ence.

“By turning these archives into data, we can make quan­ti­ta­tive and replica­tive analysis,” said Smith, such as looking at how infor­ma­tion spreads through a society over time or looking at lit­er­a­ture to examine issues like social mobility during a par­tic­ular era.

Cordell, who received his Ph.D. from the Uni­ver­sity of Vir­ginia in 2010, enters the field from a human­i­ties per­spec­tive: While working on his dis­ser­ta­tion, he began to track the (usu­ally uncred­ited) spread of a piece by Nathaniel Hawthorne through news­pa­pers and pub­li­ca­tions across the United States. Hawthorne him­self used the term “pirating” before its per­va­sive use to describe his work’s spread, and Cordell was curious if that same phe­nom­enon existed with other publications.

“If you don’t know what is going to be reprinted, you’re left com­paring every­thing to every­thing else,” said Smith, who explained how digital-humanities methods allow researchers to turn text into search­able data, which can be orga­nized and assessed with network-science tech­niques. “What you ulti­mately get are net­work maps that let us the­o­rize how these pub­li­ca­tions were talking to one another and explain how this infor­ma­tion spread.”

Both Cordell and Smith will be teaching courses for under­grad­u­ates and grad­u­ates this fall: Smith a course on infor­ma­tion retrieval, and Cordell one on tech­nolo­gies of text, which he jokes covers “a his­tory of reading from the scroll to the scroll.”

Raymond Fu designs algorithms capable of rapidly analyzing photos and videos on Facebook. Photo by Brooks Canaday.

Ray­mond Fu, a newly appointed assis­tant pro­fessor of elec­trical and com­puter engi­neering, wants to build a better social-media ecosystem, one in which Face­book makes expert friend rec­om­men­da­tions and consumer-product suggestions.

“My goal is to bring the cur­rent social-networking system to the next level,” said Fu, a machine-learning expert who will hold joint appoint­ments in both the Col­lege of Engi­neering and the Col­lege of Com­puter and Infor­ma­tion Sci­ence. “Users,” he added, “will def­i­nitely have access to a higher-quality ser­vice in the near future.”

At the begin­ning of the year, Fu received funding from both a sci­en­tific research orga­ni­za­tion and a coali­tion of gov­ern­ment agen­cies to design algo­rithms capable of rapidly ana­lyzing con­tent on social-networking and video-sharing web­sites. In Jan­uary, for instance, he received a two-year, $360,000 post­doc­toral research fel­low­ship award from the U.S. Intel­li­gence Com­mu­nity, and in Feb­ruary he received a three-year, $483,500 grant from the Air Force Office of Sci­en­tific Research.

One algo­rithm in progress, Fu explained, will be capable of pre­dicting the demo­graphics, behav­ioral ten­den­cies and rela­tion­ships between people who appear in photos and videos on Face­book or YouTube. The other algo­rithm will be capable of pin­pointing their geo­graphic location.

“Social-media users are sharing a lot of infor­ma­tion every single day,” Fu explained. “Our goal is to develop an auto­matic method that could process this data very fast.”

Face­book adver­tisers will have the ability to pur­chase the data for the pur­poses of tar­geting ads to par­tic­ular users. But, Fu explained, “Users would have to allow this con­tent to be deliv­ered to them.” Issues of pri­vacy, he added, “would have to be resolved.”

Both social-media projects dove­tail with the university’s focus on con­ducting use-inspired research that solves global chal­lenges in cyber­se­cu­rity. As Fu put it, “This research con­siders secu­rity issues such as data com­mu­ni­ca­tion, sharing and pri­vacy in cyber­phys­ical networks.”

Prior to joining the North­eastern fac­ulty, Fu served as an assis­tant pro­fessor of com­puter sci­ence and engi­neering at State Uni­ver­sity of New York at Buf­falo and was the founding director of its Syn­er­getic Media Learning Lab.

Fu hopes to set an ambi­tious research agenda in his first year at North­eastern. He looks for­ward to col­lab­o­rating on inter­dis­ci­pli­nary research projects with sev­eral fac­ulty mem­bers, including Deniz Erdogmus, an elec­trical and com­puter engi­neering pro­fessor, and Marty Vona, an assis­tant pro­fessor of com­puter and infor­ma­tion science.

“North­eastern has a very strong engi­neering pro­gram,” Fu said, adding that five grad­uate stu­dents and three post­doc­toral researchers under his watch at SUNY Buf­falo have trans­ferred to the uni­ver­sity. “There are many col­leagues who share sim­ilar research inter­ests who I look for­ward to col­lab­o­rating with.”

Gillian Smith joins the College of Arts, Media and Design and the College of Computer and Information Science as an assistant professor this fall. Photo by Brooks Canaday.

Com­puters were designed to do com­plex math­e­mat­ical cal­cu­la­tions, like map­ping the tra­jec­tory of a bullet. But according to new fac­ulty member Gillian Smith, it’s not so easy for a com­puter to under­stand con­cepts like fun, friend­ship and love.

“We don’t find games that are about those topics because we don’t know how to model them,” she explains.

Smith, an assis­tant pro­fessor with joint appoint­ments in the Col­lege of Arts, Media and Design and the Col­lege of Com­puter and Infor­ma­tion Sci­ence, hopes to change that. “I am inter­ested in fig­uring out how com­puters can help people be a little bit more cre­ative and how com­puters could be cre­ative them­selves,” she says.

Smith is exploring ways to bring crafting and com­puters together with both dig­ital tools and games. A startup com­pany called Play Crafts, which Smith co-founded with two friends she met at the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­fornia, Santa Cruz, gives tech-based design tools to quil­ters, sewers and other crafters.

One tool, for example, auto­mat­i­cally gen­er­ates a color palette from a user-uploaded photo. “Dif­ferent people love doing dif­ferent parts of craft,” Smith says. “We want to make it so a com­puter can help with the parts you’re less expe­ri­enced with or find less enjoy­able, so we can make it more fun.”

In her aca­d­emic work, Smith is also pur­suing plat­forms where com­puters and crafts inter­sect. She is inter­ested in designing games, or “playable expe­ri­ences,” which present users with tasks and design lim­i­ta­tions to guide their actual quilting, embroi­dering or sewing.

The idea calls to mind an impor­tant ques­tion regarding the nature of gaming and cre­ativity: What, exactly, is a game? And more specif­i­cally, if a user is required to sew a button where he wouldn’t have oth­er­wise planned to, would that inhibit his own nat­ural cre­ative process?

“I find that where I feel the most cre­ative comes from a con­straint I’ve been given that I may not nec­es­sarily know about ahead of time,” Smith says.

Per­haps unsur­pris­ingly, Smith uses con­straints to teach game design, which, she says, “forces you to think in a direc­tion you might not have thought before.”

If all of this sounds rel­a­tively out of the box, that’s because it is. The com­puter sci­ence field is still dom­i­nated by men, whereas the crafting pop­u­la­tion is mainly made up of women. It’s no wonder, then, that the two areas haven’t tra­di­tion­ally over­lapped much, but, as Smith explained, “I’m inter­ested in finding ways to use com­puters to diver­sify com­puter science.”

Working at a research center in Ghana this summer gave senior David Glidden a chance to delve into a global health issue at the community level. Photo by Mary Knox Merrill.

David Glidden began many days this summer bal­anced pre­car­i­ously as the second rider on a one-person motor­cycle, buzzing through Navrongo in northern Ghana. His des­ti­na­tion: the homes of new mothers, where he helped admin­ister sur­veys for an ongoing health study focused on malaria risk in infants.

Glidden, a senior biology and com­puter sci­ence com­bined major at North­eastern, spent two months working at the Navrongo Health Research Centre. In his role, he and a field worker reg­u­larly made home visits to new mothers who had malaria during preg­nancy, asking the women sev­eral ques­tions about a range of health issues. The survey was part of an ongoing research project to eval­uate the risks of malaria in infants born to mothers who received inter­mit­tent pre­ven­tive treat­ments as com­pared to those born to mothers who received inter­mit­tent screening and treatment.

“We asked the mothers about a range of health issues, like their breast-feeding habits, whether their babies reg­u­larly slept under insecticide-treated bed nets and about their babies’ health his­tory and most recent hos­pital visits,” Glidden said. The visits, he added, also included taking infants’ blood samples.

For Glidden, the experiential-learning oppor­tu­nity proved to be a fas­ci­nating glimpse into a global health issue at the com­mu­nity level. At North­eastern, he’s sought ways to com­bine his inter­ests in health, sci­ence and soft­ware devel­op­ment. On co-op with the Beth Israel Dea­coness Med­ical Center’s Divi­sion of Clin­ical Infor­matics in Brook­line, Mass., for example, he helped develop a web-based med­ical records system for a Kuwaiti health institute.

The project, he explained, opened his eyes to the pos­si­bility of combing his inter­ests in a ful­filling way. “That expe­ri­ence made me realize I could be a pro­grammer but still get into med­i­cine,” said Glidden, who noted the increasing need for tech-savvy physicians.

This month, Glidden began his final co-op working as a devel­oper with Meraki, a San Francisco-based wire­less net­working firm. Glidden’s pro­fi­ciency in Scala, a pro­gram­ming lan­guage, helped him nab the posi­tion, he said. He honed his pro­gram­ming skills working on co-op with Firefly Bioworks Inc., a Cam­bridge, Mass.-based devel­oper of next-generation mul­ti­plexed assays for bio­marker detection.

Glidden has also worked in chem­istry and chem­ical biology pro­fessor John Engen’s lab, con­tributing to a col­lab­o­ra­tive project studying a pro­tein called Nef, which is expressed in HIV.

“At North­eastern, I’ve tried to take advan­tage of every oppor­tu­nity, learn as much as pos­sible and try many new things,” he said. “I think that’s the point of college.”

From left, David R. Kaeli, associate dean of undergraduate programs in the College of Engineering, Agnes Chan, associate dean and director of graduate programs at the College of Computer and Information Science, and assistant professor Will Robertson, a systems security researcher in the College of Computer and Information Science and the College of Engineering. Photo by Brooks Canaday.

Thou­sands of open cyber­se­cu­rity posi­tions in the fed­eral gov­ern­ment under­score the fact that our nation suf­fers from a sig­nif­i­cant lack of pro­fes­sional exper­tise in this field.

“Training for human resources is a major issue right now,” said Agnes Chan, asso­ciate dean of grad­uate studies in the Col­lege of Com­puter and Infor­ma­tion Sci­ences.

Chan is prin­cipal inves­ti­gator on a recent $4.5 mil­lion grant from the National Sci­ence Foun­da­tion that will extend the university’s schol­ar­ship pro­gram in infor­ma­tion assur­ance. William Robertson, assis­tant pro­fessor with joint appoint­ments in the Col­lege of Com­puter and Infor­ma­tion Sci­ence and the Col­lege of Engi­neering and David Kaeli, asso­ciate dean of under­grad­uate pro­grams in the Col­lege of Engi­neering, will serve as the grant’s co-principal investigators.

The Cyber­Corps: Schol­ar­ship for Ser­vice pro­gram pro­vides both under­grad­uate and grad­uate stu­dents full tuition, fees and a stipend for the final two or three years of their studies. In return, stu­dents agree to serve for two or three years in infor­ma­tion assur­ance posi­tions in the fed­eral, state or local gov­ern­ment or at a fed­er­ally funded research and devel­op­ment center.

The fed­eral gov­ern­ment, Robertson noted, is having a hard time keeping pace with the cur­rent scale of attacks against national assets. As a result, he explained, “Recruiting and devel­oping this talent is a top pri­ority at the gov­ern­ment agen­cies respon­sible for civilian and mil­i­tary cybersecurity.”

The stu­dents in the pro­gram, Roberts explained, will also have the oppor­tu­nity to work on con­crete topics related to broad areas like mobile secu­rity and secure system design. He noted that Northeastern’s secu­rity researchers have active projects in a number of these areas.

Through their intern­ships and co-op posi­tions, stu­dents also have access to broad research oppor­tu­ni­ties. Ryan Whelan, for example, a com­puter engi­neering doc­toral can­di­date in the pro­gram, interned with a cyber­se­cu­rity group at MIT Lin­coln Lab­o­ra­tory. The lab is now spon­soring his research in dynamic-software analysis and the expe­ri­ence, he said, con­firmed his interest in the field.

“The SFS pro­gram helped focus my studies and inter­ests on cyber­se­cu­rity,” Whelan said.

But, Chan said, skills in the tech­nical and com­puter sci­ences alone will not pre­pare a stu­dent for a suc­cessful career as a cyber defender. “Our pro­gram is diverse in every respect — we’re able to train stu­dents whose back­ground is not tech­nical to under­stand what cyber­se­cu­rity is all about and to use the tools,” she explained.

“Human­i­ties stu­dents are ideal can­di­dates for infor­ma­tion assur­ance posi­tions,” added Samuel Jenkins, who enrolled in the master’s pro­gram with an under­grad­uate degree in polit­ical science.

Jenkins recently accepted a posi­tion with the Exec­u­tive Office of the Pres­i­dent, and will pro­vide infor­ma­tion tech­nology and other infra­struc­ture ser­vices to the White House. While the job will require the soft com­mu­ni­ca­tions skills he honed in his under­grad­uate training, Jenkins said he was hired for the tech­nical skills he acquired in the SFS program.

The award fol­lows on the heels of Northeastern’s recent des­ig­na­tion as one of four National Center of Aca­d­emic Excel­lence in Cyber Oper­a­tions. The project, Kaeli said, is “per­fectly aligned with the university’s mis­sion to become an inter­na­tional leader in the field of cybersecurity.”

Marsette Vona, an assistant professor in the College of Computer and Information Science, explains the challenges of controlling a Martian rover. Photo by Mary Knox Merrill.

Prior to joining the North­eastern fac­ulty as an assis­tant pro­fessor in the Col­lege of Com­puter and Infor­ma­tion Sci­ence, Marsette Vona worked for NASA’s Jet Propul­sion Lab­o­ra­tory as part of the teams that put both the Spirit and Oppor­tu­nity rovers on the sur­face of Mars. We asked Vona, who is devel­oping robots that can detect uncer­tainty in their envi­ron­ment, to explain how Curiosity, the newest and most advanced rover on the red planet, and its crew on Earth handle the logis­tical chal­lenges of space exploration.

The vast distance between Earth and Mars makes it impossible for NASA scientists to communicate or control Curiosity without a time delay. To compensate for this time delay, what did engineers and programmers need to consider when designing the rover and planning the mission?

The Earth to Mars radio delay, which ranges from about three to 20 min­utes, adds sig­nif­i­cant com­plexity to robotic mis­sions on Mars. Another chal­lenge is the logis­tics of sched­uling the Deep Space Net­work radio dishes, which are shared with other dis­tant space mis­sions and which are our only means to com­mu­ni­cate at inter­plan­e­tary dis­tances. Yet another issue is that each Mars day is about 40 min­utes longer than an Earth day, making it dif­fi­cult to syn­chro­nize human oper­a­tors living on Earth time with rover activity in day­light on Mars.

So in order to get much done, the robots we send to Mars must be fairly intel­li­gent: They must be able to operate autonomously for some amount of time. We cannot “remote con­trol” them as we can do, for example, with sub-sea explo­ration robots on Earth. Instead, we typ­i­cally send them com­mands before dawn on each Mar­tian day. They exe­cute those com­mands autonomously, pos­sibly making some deci­sions on their own, and radio back results and status infor­ma­tion during the fol­lowing Mar­tian night.

Your expertise lies in understanding how robots handle uncertainty, such as uneven terrain or unexpected surroundings. How does Curiosity handle similar challenges and how can those technical advances be used on Earth?

Curiosity uses a com­bi­na­tion of tech­niques to reli­ably move around in the sand and rock envi­ron­ment of the Mar­tian sur­face. First, its mobility system, com­posed of six wheels and a sus­pen­sion called a rocker-bogey, enable it to roll right over rocks up to 50 cen­time­ters (about 20 inches) tall. Second, it will auto­mat­i­cally attempt to drive around larger obsta­cles, which it looks for using com­puter vision algo­rithms in live video feeds from front– and rear-facing cam­eras called “haz­cams.” Third, it can use other com­puter vision algo­rithms to ana­lyze longer-distance images from mast-mounted “nav­cams” for sev­eral pur­poses, including “visual odom­etry” to esti­mate how far it has actu­ally trav­eled (which may differ from wheel rota­tion data because of slip­page in the sand), and target tracking to mon­itor progress toward a vis­ible goal such as an inter­esting rock.

A mobility system like that on Curiosity could be used on Earth for robots that must travel over rubble after, say, an earth­quake or other dis­aster. Its com­puter vision algo­rithms for autonomous nav­i­ga­tion and obstacle avoid­ance are also extremely useful; related sys­tems are used on Earth for autonomous cars. Some of my own cur­rent research focuses on adapting algo­rithms like this for walking robots, which could help humans travel over very uneven ground, or which could even­tu­ally replace us in under­taking haz­ardous tasks.

How is Curiosity’s ability to explore Mars different from the Spirit and Opportunity rovers?

Over the last 15 years we have suc­cess­fully landed four rovers on Mars. New tech­nolo­gies suc­cess­fully tested in each mis­sion are incor­po­rated into later ones. Also, each mis­sion has approx­i­mately dou­bled the rover size, which is impor­tant because larger rovers can carry more sci­en­tific instru­ments and can travel far­ther and faster.

Spirit and Oppor­tu­nity tested pre­cur­sors to the auto­matic nav­i­ga­tion, obstacle avoid­ance and visual odom­etry algo­rithms on Curiosity. Curiosity, how­ever, is twice their size (about 3 meters long) and has addi­tional autonomous nav­i­ga­tion capa­bil­i­ties that should enable it to travel far­ther on its own. Curiosity also used a new “sky crane” landing system instead of airbags, and it is pow­ered by a radioiso­tope thermal gen­er­ator, unlike Sojourner, Spirit, and Oppor­tu­nity, which were solar pow­ered. This should enable it to operate over a full Mar­tian year, whereas the pre­vious mis­sions were typ­i­cally only active in the plen­tiful sun­light of the Mar­tian summer. Finally, and pos­sibly most sig­nif­i­cantly, Curiosity car­ries sev­eral new instru­ments that will be used to ana­lyze sam­ples of the Mar­tian rock to detect water, carbon com­pounds and other bio­log­i­cally impor­tant mate­rials. This will both help us under­stand whether life ever existed on Mars and also the extent to which we will be able to use mate­rials on Mars to help sup­port future human explorers.

Assistant professor and cybersecurity expert Wil Robertson explains the growing threat of hackers targeting American military and infrastructure. Photo by Dreamstime.

Last week, The Wash­ington Post reported the Pen­tagon has pro­posed that mil­i­tary cyber­spe­cial­ists be per­mitted to take action out­side of its net­works to defend crit­ical U.S. com­puter sys­tems that con­trol such resources as power sta­tions and water-treatment plants. The report indi­cated the pro­posal was under review as part of a revi­sion of the military’s standing rules of engage­ment. We asked Wil Robertson, an assis­tant pro­fessor with dual appoint­ments in the Col­lege of Com­puter and Infor­ma­tion Sci­ence and the Col­lege of Engi­neering, to explain the new and evolving chal­lenges in cyberde­fense and what this pro­posal, if adopted, could mean for national cybersecurity.

What would the adoption of this Pentagon proposal mean for national security, and is there any precedent for this?

The Depart­ment of Defense cre­ated the U.S. Cyber Com­mand (CYBERCOM) in 2009 to orga­nize the defense of the nation’s mil­i­tary com­puter net­works, and addi­tion­ally to con­duct so-called “full-spectrum mil­i­tary cyber­space oper­a­tions” — in other words, to attack adver­saries on the Internet and else­where in order to achieve spe­cific mil­i­tary goals. So, CYBERCOM has had from its begin­ning a man­date to develop offen­sive capa­bil­i­ties. But these capa­bil­i­ties have hereto­fore been restricted to lim­ited instances where their use has been autho­rized in sup­port of spe­cific mis­sion objectives.

What is novel about this latest devel­op­ment is the Pentagon’s push to modify the standing rules of engage­ment — which serve as guide­lines for how CYBERCOM can inde­pen­dently react to sce­narios such as attacks by for­eign powers or inde­pen­dent actors on mil­i­tary assets — to allow for an offen­sive response to neu­tralize a per­ceived threat. While it is accepted that the major powers already unof­fi­cially engage in cyber­op­er­a­tions against each other to one degree or another, this pro­posal would set a sig­nif­i­cant new prece­dent in making offen­sive counter-operations a part of offi­cial standing U.S. policy.

How much of a threat do cyberattacks pose against the United States? What areas are targeted the most and which are the most vulnerable to attack?

Cyber­at­tacks against mil­i­tary assets have been an unfor­tu­nate reality for some time. The DoD doesn’t pub­licly dis­close sta­tis­tics on the number or severity of breaches, but it is known that for­eign actors have con­ducted long-running, tar­geted cam­paigns to pen­e­trate both U.S. mil­i­tary net­works and net­works belonging to U.S. mil­i­tary con­trac­tors in order to gain access to clas­si­fied information.

But there has also been rising con­cern in the past few years sur­rounding the vul­ner­a­bility of indus­trial con­trol sys­tems for national crit­ical infra­struc­ture, including tar­gets such as the power-generation and –dis­tri­b­u­tion grid, water supply, transit sys­tems and more. An increasing body of aca­d­emic research has demon­strated the poten­tial for cat­a­strophic attacks against sys­tems that were never meant to be exposed to the Internet and, as such, do not include basic, nec­es­sary safe­guards that pro­tect other net­worked sys­tems from attack.

And actual attacks — such as the pen­e­tra­tion of a Spring­field, Ill., water plant last fall that lead to a crit­ical equip­ment failure — hint at the dev­as­ta­tion that could ensue from a well-executed, large-scale oper­a­tion against our nation’s infra­struc­ture. At the CCIS Sys­tems Secu­rity Lab at North­eastern, part of our focus involves researching prac­tical methods for securing our crit­ical systems.

How have the duties of CYBERCOM expanded in the past, and in what way could this division of the military continue to grow?

CYBERCOM is a rel­a­tively new orga­ni­za­tion, and its role in the national defense is still evolving. While it is cur­rently tasked with oper­ating solely in the mil­i­tary domain, there is con­cern that it could even­tu­ally eclipse orga­ni­za­tions such as the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­rity and FBI, which are cur­rently respon­sible for the civilian sphere.

It is very likely that the organization’s size and man­date will expand. The devel­op­ment and recruit­ment of a new gen­er­a­tion of cyber­se­cu­rity experts is a top pri­ority at both DoD and DHS. And com­ments by senior Pen­tagon offi­cials indi­cate that the pro­posed amend­ments to CYBERCOM’s rules of engage­ment are but part of a larger, long-term ini­tia­tive to increase CYBERCOM’s ability to better respond to evolving, future threats.