Magy Seif El-Nasr, an associate professor of game design and interactive media, discussed the importance of creating video games in a White House meeting last week. Photo courtesy of Susan Gold, Global Game Jam.

In a White House con­fer­ence last week, Magy Seif El-Nasr, an asso­ciate pro­fessor of game design and inter­ac­tive media at North­eastern Uni­ver­sity, dis­cussed the impor­tance of cre­ating edu­ca­tional video games through inter­dis­ci­pli­nary collaboration.

The meeting, which included industry leaders, pol­i­cy­makers and about 20 aca­d­e­mics from insti­tu­tions nation­wide, was part of the Aca­d­emic Con­sor­tium on Games for Impact and orga­nized by the White House Office of Sci­ence and Tech­nology Policy. The experts exam­ined ways to leverage their indi­vidual areas of exper­tise, share resources and build net­works aimed at sparking inter­dis­ci­pli­nary col­lab­o­ra­tion among acad­emia and industry in the area of “games for impact” — video games that yield sig­nif­i­cant soci­etal ben­e­fits in areas such as as edu­ca­tion and health.

“We’re trying to advance basic research in game design and advance the cur­rent appli­ca­tion of games in areas like edu­ca­tion, health and sus­tain­ability,” said Seif El-Nasr, whose research focuses on enhancing game designs by devel­oping tools and methods for eval­u­ating and adapting game experiences.

In recent years, mil­lions of people have devel­oped a strong reliance on mobile tech­nology. Many people — par­tic­u­larly youth — reg­u­larly plug away on their smart­phones or portable video game con­soles while eating, waiting for the bus or walking down the street, Seif El-Nasr explained; she added that it’s crit­ical to cap­ture the atten­tion of the tech-savvy public through the most pop­ular media.

The bulk of last week’s meeting focused on the impor­tance of pushing the video game field for­ward by fos­tering col­lab­o­ra­tions between aca­d­emic researchers and industry part­ners and by designing strate­gies aimed at improving the chances of receiving gov­ern­ment funding for these projects.

Since 2004, Seif El-Nasr has con­ducted research on using game design as a medium for edu­ca­tion, including the devel­op­ment of a series of engi­neering and tech­nology work­shops for middle– and high-school students.

Seif El-Nasr, who holds dual appoint­ments in the Col­lege of Arts, Media and Design and the Col­lege of Com­puter and Infor­ma­tion Sci­ence, is also working with a Vancouver-based com­pany called IgnitePlay on a project that uses games and social net­works to foster behav­ioral changes that pro­mote healthy lifestyle habits. The project uses real-time behavior tracking and selec­tive infor­ma­tion visu­al­iza­tion as moti­va­tional tac­tics to encourage behav­ioral changes and sus­tain long-term healthy living.

The com­pany, she said, is expected to launch the product within the next month.

Seif El-Nasr’s par­tic­i­pa­tion in the White House meeting built upon her inter­na­tional promi­nence as an authority on dig­ital game research. In May, she chaired the Foun­da­tion of Dig­ital Games 2012 con­fer­ence, which took place in North Car­olina. Then in June, she deliv­ered a keynote address in Greece at the 5th Inter­na­tional Con­fer­ence on Per­va­sive Tech­nolo­gies Related to Assis­tive Envi­ron­ments, which explored how social and coop­er­a­tive games can be lever­aged to enhance quality of life.

Incoming freshman Kaila Corrington honed her leadership skills as president of her high school’s chapter of Key Club International. Courtesy photo.

Building a web­site for her high school’s chapter of Key Club Inter­na­tional sold incoming freshman Kaila Cor­rington on studying com­puter sci­ence at North­eastern University.

“I didn’t have any expe­ri­ence writing code for a web­site,” Cor­rington recalls, noting her love of math, logic and the pur­suit of defin­i­tive answers, “but watching a string of char­ac­ters come to life con­vinced me.”

Cor­rington, who will enroll this fall in the Col­lege of Com­puter and Infor­ma­tion Sci­ence, has been accepted into the inau­gural class of the Uni­ver­sity Scholars Pro­gram. The full-tuition pro­gram sup­ports highly accom­plished future thought leaders, inno­va­tors and entre­pre­neurs who have excelled both in and out of the classroom.

Corrington’s laundry list of accom­plish­ments makes her an ideal fit for the pro­gram. She honed her lead­er­ship skills, for example, by serving as pres­i­dent of her high school’s chapter of Key Club and editor-in-chief of its year­book. As a freshman, sopho­more and junior, she demon­strated her love of learning by pro­ducing 10-minute doc­u­men­taries on Albert Ein­stein, the Cuban Mis­sile Crisis and the double-helical struc­ture of DNA, all of which reached statewide competition.

A National Merit Scholar who fin­ished at the top of her class in eight dif­ferent courses, Cor­rington pro­claims that the trick to bal­ancing course­work with extracur­ric­ular activ­i­ties is time man­age­ment. As she puts it, “If you let your­self fall behind on things, you won’t be able to bal­ance anything.” The Upland, Calif., native, looks for­ward to working with her fellow Uni­ver­sity Scholars, many of whom grew up out­side of the United States, in coun­tries such as India, Bolivia and Japan. Stu­dents in the accom­plished group have recorded albums, cre­ated iPhone appli­ca­tions and raised money for orphaned chil­dren in Africa.

“I’m going to be sur­rounded by a great group of stu­dents at North­eastern,” Cor­rington explains. “It’s going to be fun to work with new people in an exciting environment.”

Cor­rington expressed interest in trying out for Northeastern’s intra­mural soft­ball team, for which she would like to play third base or center field, and joining the University’s chapter of Circle K, Key Club’s col­le­giate version.

Her long-term career plans include cre­ating mobile appli­ca­tions for smart­phones and building web­sites for non­profit orga­ni­za­tions. Par­tic­i­pating in Northeastern’s flag­ship experiential-learning pro­gram, she says, would help her reach her goals.

“I’m inter­ested in doing a Dia­logue of Civ­i­liza­tions pro­gram and studying abroad in Europe,” Cor­rington says. “I might want to go to Italy, because of its his­tory, but I am sure I will be immersed in the cul­ture and have an amazing expe­ri­ence no matter where I go.”

Northeastern University faculty are available to provide expertise, analysis and commentary on a wide variety of news and research topics.

“We know that most Amer­i­cans are too seden­tary,” said North­eastern asso­ciate pro­fessor Stephen Intille, a founding fac­ulty member of the university’s new Per­sonal Health Infor­matics grad­uate pro­gram with dual appoint­ments in the Col­lege of Com­puter and Infor­ma­tion Sci­ence and Bouvé Col­lege of Health Sci­ences. “What we need is high quality infor­ma­tion about what drives deci­sions about phys­ical activity so we can design the next gen­er­a­tion of health interventions.”

Toward that end, Intille has teamed up with Genevieve Dunton, an assis­tant pro­fessor of pre­ven­tive med­i­cine at the Uni­ver­sity of Southern Cal­i­fornia, to gather infor­ma­tion about where, when, why and how teenagers get their phys­ical activity.

Tra­di­tional studies ask par­tic­i­pants to place an activity mon­itor on their hip, which uses an accelerom­eter to mea­sure motion. “What you get are data recording roughly how active a person is throughout the day, but you don’t get any infor­ma­tion other than this motion pat­tern,” Intille explained. But in order to develop informed inter­ven­tions, public health pro­fes­sionals also need to know things like where people are when they’re exer­cising or seden­tary, if they’re with other people and what they’re doing.

That’s why Intille and Dunton, with the sup­port of a two-year, $450,000 grant from the National Insti­tutes of Health, will develop and eval­uate a mobile phone app that sup­ple­ments the activity-monitor data. Using the loca­tion and motion tech­nolo­gies already embedded in mobile devices, Intille’s app will deter­mine appro­priate times throughout the day to ask study par­tic­i­pants about the con­texts that are influ­encing their activity.

“The fun­da­mental idea is there is a rela­tion­ship between the motion of your phone and the activity that you do and the use of the activity mon­itor.” The phone will rec­og­nize periods of increased or reduced phys­ical activity (for example, if you take it off while playing a high-impact sport or take a nap) and present ques­tions about what a par­tic­i­pant is doing during the “inter­esting” periods.

“It’s about cre­ating and eval­u­ating a tool that would help us aug­ment the type of infor­ma­tion that we get from stan­dard research tools so that researchers get that addi­tional con­tex­tual info about where and why teens are doing the activity,” said Intille. Dunton explained that the higher quality data will allow researchers to better under­stand the rela­tion­ship between phys­ical activity, seden­tary behav­iors, and the risk of meta­bolic, car­dio­vas­cular and other chronic diseases.

Intille’s lab at North­eastern focuses on sensor-driven mobile health tech­nology. Other studies to come out of it have used a sim­ilar approach, but this is the first time the app will be pro­grammed to rec­og­nize major activity changes.

“Pre­vious studies would ask ques­tions ran­domly throughout the day, but that’s not a very effi­cient way to do it,” Intille said. This is the first time the app will be pro­gramed to aug­ment an existing research tool by rec­og­nizing major activity changes and using a game-like inter­face that makes it easy for teens to fill in gaps by answering carefully-timed questions.

He hopes that the app will pro­vide a valu­able, low-cost tool for future studies that also inves­ti­gate phys­ical activity patterns.

“In the long term, we could poten­tially use this same type of tech­nology as an inter­ven­tion,” said Intille, who explained, for example, that users would receive pos­i­tive feed­back mes­sages through the phone when the app detects that they are being phys­i­cally active.

Themis Papageorge, Associate Clinical Professor in the College of Computer and Information Science, examines the cybersecurity threat posed by al-Qaida and Anonymous, a global group of hackers. Photo by Mary Knox Merrill.

Last week, Anony­mous, a global group of hackers, suc­cess­fully infil­trated the Depart­ment of Justice’s system and released stolen data. At the same time, al-Qaida, the inter­na­tional ter­rorist orga­ni­za­tion, released a video calling for an “elec­tronic jihad” on the United States. We asked Themis Papa­george, an asso­ciate clin­ical pro­fessor in the Col­lege of Com­puter and Infor­ma­tion Sci­ence, and the director of the college’s infor­ma­tion assur­ance pro­gram, to ana­lyze the threat posed by rogue hacker groups and what the U.S. gov­ern­ment can do to pro­tect itself against future attacks.

This isn’t the first time the Department of Justice was hacked. What do groups such as Anonymous accomplish by hacking into these networks and releasing data? What is the motivation behind their attacks?

Groups like Anony­mous are becoming a crit­ical threat to society and national secu­rity: They attack gov­ern­ment, public and pri­vate com­pa­nies, and indi­vid­uals’ net­works and com­puter sys­tems mul­tiple times every day. When they breach a com­puter system they steal data and many times install mali­cious soft­ware pro­grams that, unbe­knownst to the sys­tems’ owners, allow for future access by the hackers and con­tin­uous leaking of con­fi­den­tial data.

Stolen data can vary from pro­pri­etary product infor­ma­tion and other intel­lec­tual prop­erty to national-security data. Anony­mous and sim­ilar groups can embar­rass a gov­ern­ment or a com­pany by breaching its net­works and com­puter sys­tems and can also gain finan­cially by selling the stolen data.

The moti­va­tion of hacker groups such as Anony­mous is a key com­po­nent of the threat analysis that we teach in infor­ma­tion assur­ance courses at North­eastern. Threat agents, such as Anony­mous group mem­bers, are moti­vated by many fac­tors, ranging from per­sonal gain to revenge, peer recog­ni­tion, curiosity, and crime; to polit­ical, reli­gious and sec­ular influ­ence; and poten­tially to ter­rorism and national mil­i­tary objec­tives. We train our stu­dents to assess the cyber­se­cu­rity risk posed by each group by ranking these moti­va­tion factors.

What can government do to thwart future breaches? What challenges do federal entities face in protecting themselves from hackers?

We need to defend more effec­tively against such groups, both from a tech­nical capa­bil­i­ties per­spec­tive as well from a con­tex­tual per­spec­tive. Gov­ern­ment and public orga­ni­za­tions need to con­sis­tently imple­ment risk-based tech­nical coun­ter­mea­sures and con­trols for net­works and com­puter sys­tems, along with poli­cies and user awareness.

Many times a cyber­se­cu­rity con­trol, such as a soft­ware patch, may be avail­able for months before it is imple­mented. People can be our most capable fire­wall by training employees to defend against social engi­neering. It is impor­tant to know not to click on a mali­cious attach­ment in an email and not to pro­vide con­fi­den­tial infor­ma­tion to an uniden­ti­fied tele­phone caller. User training and aware­ness are some of the valu­able com­po­nents in secu­rity risk management.

The greatest chal­lenges facing fed­eral enti­ties come from a lim­ited knowl­edge of the threat agents’ modus operandi.

Since the attackers have the advan­tage of choosing the method and time of attack, fed­eral agen­cies could make risk-based deci­sions by defending against the most dam­aging attacks only by having access to a com­pre­hen­sive and cur­rent data set of attacks and methods. This can be accom­plished by sharing attack and method data and sce­narios across fed­eral agen­cies and public com­pa­nies. This strategy would help build effec­tive net­work and com­puter system secu­rity con­trols, coun­ter­mea­sures, poli­cies and inci­dent response strategies.

Al-Qaida has called for an “electronic jihad,” promoting attacks on a range of online targets. Is there evidence that a network of al-Qaida operatives could plan coordinated attacks?

Al-Qaida has a well-documented record as a ter­rorist group with mul­tiple phys­ical attacks. In terms of orga­ni­za­tional struc­ture, hacker groups have been a col­lec­tion of indi­vidual threat agents with net­working abil­i­ties (ini­tially using the Internet and also later tech­nolo­gies such as Peer-to-Peer and Bit­Tor­rent) to talk about their exploits and share mali­cious tools. Al-Qaida is reported to have a hier­archy but seems to operate as a net­work of semi­au­tonomous cells of threat agents whose actions are thus even more dif­fi­cult to pre­dict and stop.

There­fore, if al-Qaida were to acquire the tech­nical capa­bil­i­ties of a hacker group such as Anony­mous, they would be a very cred­ible and high-risk cyber­se­cu­rity threat. Plan­ning and exe­cuting coor­di­nated attacks in the cyber­se­cu­rity domain is very dif­ferent from exe­cuting attacks in the phys­ical secu­rity domain, because the space and time con­straints of phys­ical attacks are con­sid­er­ably reduced in the cyber domain. It may take weeks or months to plan a cyber­se­cu­rity attack, but it could only take a few min­utes to launch a denial-of-service attack, using a botnet of com­puters belonging to unsus­pecting com­pa­nies and indi­vid­uals, and poten­tially bring down a com­po­nent of crit­ical infrastructure.

Through a new partnership with the NSA, Northeastern’s cybersecurity curriculum will prepare select students for highly specialized jobs in federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies that investigate cybercrimes. istockphoto.

North­eastern Uni­ver­sity has been des­ig­nated as a National Center of Aca­d­emic Excel­lence in Cyber Oper­a­tions by the National Secu­rity Agency. The pro­gram, in which stu­dents can pursue a new spe­cialty in cyber oper­a­tions, aims to pro­vide them with the advanced tech­nical training and skills to tackle emerging cyber threats in their pro­fes­sional careers.

After a rig­orous appli­ca­tion and screening process, North­eastern is only one of four uni­ver­si­ties nation­wide to earn this esteemed dis­tinc­tion in the newly launched pro­gram, which is part of Pres­i­dent Barack Obama’s National Ini­tia­tive for Cyber­se­cu­rity Education.

In selecting North­eastern, Agnes Chan, asso­ciate dean and director of grad­uate edu­ca­tion in Northeastern’s Col­lege of Com­puter and Infor­ma­tion Sci­ence, said the NSA was par­tic­u­larly impressed with the university’s experiential-education model and overall strength in cyber­se­cu­rity research and education.

“In cyber oper­a­tions, you can’t just be a the­o­reti­cian,” Chan said. “The inte­gra­tion of co-op and class­room learning, com­bined with oppor­tu­ni­ties to par­tic­i­pate in research, pro­vide our stu­dents with a very practice-oriented experience.”

Through this part­ner­ship, under­grad­uate com­puter sci­ence stu­dents at North­eastern can work toward a newly cre­ated con­cen­tra­tion in cyber oper­a­tions by taking existing high-level courses in areas like soft­ware vul­ner­a­bility and net­work security.

In addi­tion, stu­dents as well as fac­ulty will par­tic­i­pate in sem­i­nars run by the NSA, in which they will be faced with solving real cyber­se­cu­rity chal­lenges. As par­tic­i­pants, stu­dents and fac­ulty will be hired as tem­po­rary NSA employees and will undergo back­ground checks and obtain secu­rity clearances.

For par­tic­i­pating fac­ulty, the sem­i­nars will present the oppor­tu­nity to strengthen their exper­tise in cyber­se­cu­rity and trans­late that knowl­edge in the classroom.

Chan said that while this pro­gram is ini­tially only open to under­grad­uate computer-science stu­dents, she hopes it will expand into a master’s pro­gram, as well as to the Depart­ment of Elec­trical and Com­puter Engi­neering in Northeastern’s Col­lege of Engineering.

Along with strength­ening its aca­d­emic part­ner­ships, the NSA said the pri­mary goal is to expose stu­dents to the sci­en­tific and intel­lec­tual foun­da­tions of cyber oper­a­tions, pro­viding a glimpse into how that knowl­edge can be applied to cyber-related careers in the government.

The NSA pro­gram also requires the uni­ver­si­ties to include an aca­d­emic com­po­nent about the legal and eth­ical issues sur­rounding cyber­se­cu­rity. North­eastern meets this require­ment with its Fun­da­men­tals of Infor­ma­tion Assur­ance course offered in the Master of Sci­ence in Infor­ma­tion Assur­ance pro­gram, Chan said.

The NSA, along with the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­rity, had des­ig­nated North­eastern a National Center of Aca­d­emic Excel­lence in Infor­ma­tion Assur­ance Research in 2008.

The des­ig­na­tion builds on Northeastern’s ongoing com­mit­ment to secu­rity research. The uni­ver­sity opened its George J. Kostas Research Insti­tute for Home­land Secu­rity in Sep­tember 2011. In March,a team of North­eastern experts led a con­gres­sional briefing in Wash­ington on evolving cyber­se­cu­rity threats, and in April, Kostas Insti­tute co-director Stephen Flynn tes­ti­fied at a con­gres­sional hearing on the chal­lenges posed by cyber­se­cu­rity threats.

Elise Murray (right), CIS’12, received her award at the Cooperative Education Award ceremony last month from co-op coordinator Melissa Peikin (right). Photo by Craig Bailey.

Working both as an Android and iOS devel­oper on co-op gave Elise Murray, CIS’12, more than just the tech­nical know-how to say, “There’s an app for that.” Now she can say, “I have a job doing that.”

Murray, who grad­u­ated in May as a com­bined major in com­puter sci­ence and busi­ness with a con­cen­tra­tion in entre­pre­neur­ship, spent two summer co-ops working for Boston-based mobile com­merce com­pany Where, Inc., per­forming upgrades to the company’s smart­phone apps and fixing bugs.

The expe­ri­ence helped her land a full-time job with PayPal — a busi­ness unit of Ebay, the ecom­merce giant that acquired Where, Inc., last year. Murray will become an offi­cial member of PayPal’s Android devel­oper team this week.

“It was incred­ible to work in such a growing industry before I’d even grad­u­ated,” said Murray, who worked part time this spring to help develop PayPay Here, which allows mer­chants to use smart­phones to take pay­ments from customers.

All her life, Murray has been fas­ci­nated with elec­tronics and eager to get her hands on the latest gad­gets. “I remember hearing about the first iPod being released, and knowing I had to have it,” she admitted.

At North­eastern, this pas­sion fueled Murray’s desire to pursue her co-op expe­ri­ences, which she credits with pro­viding her the flex­i­bility to embrace new chal­lenges and tackle the ever-evolving pro­gram­ming world early in her career.

She even released two smart­phone apps as a stu­dent — Airhorn­Plus, which allows users to unleash the blis­tering sound of an air horn at a moment’s notice, and His­tori­cise, which acts as a dig­ital memory book for users to record their most sig­nif­i­cant life­time moments.

This spring, Murray was hon­ored at the Coop­er­a­tive Edu­ca­tion Awards cer­e­mony and was named one of Northeastern’s Most Influ­en­tial Seniors.

Melissa Peikin, Murray’s co-op coor­di­nator, said that while Murray didn’t have a com­puter sci­ence back­ground when she came to North­eastern, her enthu­siasm to fear­lessly dive into co-op and absorb as much knowl­edge as pos­sible pro­pelled her to success.

“I think Elise defines what the co-op pro­gram can actu­ally do for a stu­dent,” Peikin said. “Every­thing was new for her freshman year. She wasn’t quite sure where she saw her­self in this field, but co-op changed that for her. That’s where she got a chance to shine.”

Associate professor Engin Kirda (center) was installed as the Sternberg Interdisciplinary Associate Professor of Information Assurance. President Joseph E. Aoun (right) and Provost Stephen Director (left) awarded Kirda with a medal. Photo by Mary Knox Merrill.

Our rising depen­dence on net­worked sys­tems makes it increas­ingly ben­e­fi­cial for hackers to exploit it, Engin Kirda said on Monday after­noon in a lec­ture enti­tled “Taming the Mali­cious Internet.”

The event marked Kirda’s instal­la­tion as the inau­gural Sy and Laurie Stern­berg Inter­dis­ci­pli­nary Asso­ciate Pro­fessor for Infor­ma­tion Assur­ance. Kirda is the director of Northeastern’s Insti­tute for Infor­ma­tion Assur­ance, and has joint appoint­ments in the Col­lege of Com­puter and Infor­ma­tion Sci­ence and the Col­lege of Engi­neering’s Depart­ment of Elec­trical and Com­puter Engi­neering.

His work crosses a spec­trum of dis­ci­plines and has a major impact on research vital to society, Larry Finkel­stein, dean of the Col­lege of Com­puter and Infor­ma­tion Sci­ence, said in his intro­duc­tion of Kirda.

Stephen W. Director, provost and senior vice pres­i­dent for aca­d­emic affairs, pre­sented Kirda with a medal­lion rec­og­nizing his accom­plish­ments in inter­dis­ci­pli­nary research addressing an area of con­cern to society.

Fif­teen years ago, Kirda said, “the cyber­se­cu­rity sit­u­a­tion was not bad. We could keep every­thing in check.” Today, how­ever, our tech­nolo­gies are not evolving as quickly as the mali­cious soft­ware they are trying to pro­tect against. A problem that began with simple viruses attacking indi­vidual com­puters has mor­phed into a threat that could lead to an inter­na­tional cyberwar, a reality that, Kirda said, has not quite been real­ized but would cer­tainly be foreseeable.

Kirda believes that in order to tame the Internet — that is, “to keep it in check” —vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties need to be addressed through a variety of prac­tical solutions.

“There’s no silver bullet,” he said.

But in order to design the right solu­tions, we need to iden­tify the bad guys. These days the common “bank robber” doesn’t look the way he used to, Kirda said. Today he sits behind a com­puter often sev­eral thou­sand miles from the entity he is attacking. He is prob­ably young and smart — and under­standing the world through his eyes is crit­ical to defending against him.

Kirda has devel­oped a variety of secu­rity tools, including two that help unravel the attacker’s mindset. The first, Anubis, allows users to iden­tify mal­ware and send infor­ma­tion to a so-called “prison,” where it is dis­abled and ana­lyzed, gen­er­ating mal­ware reports. The second, FIRE, or FInding Rogue nEt­works, ana­lyzes the body of mal­ware reports coming from Anubis to expose orga­ni­za­tions and ISPs that exhibit mali­cious behavior, Kirda explained.

The soft­ware is useful for detecting mali­cious behavior and, more impor­tantly, for locating the com­mand and con­trol servers orches­trating that behavior. Destroying the com­mand center shuts down activity across a net­work of infected machines instead of trying to address indi­vidual attacks, Kirda said.

But these, he stressed, are just the tech­nical solu­tions. And they are only one part of the equa­tion. We also need to under­stand the human factor. Why, for example, do people get infected? Why do we click on links that could jeop­ar­dize our security?

Kirda believes the psy­chology behind user behavior can help cyber secu­rity devel­opers create more appro­priate mal­ware detec­tion and enable more tar­geted edu­ca­tional campaigns.

Cyber­se­cu­rity as a research field isn’t going any­where. The chal­lenge, Kirda explained, will be devel­oping cre­ative, inter­dis­ci­pli­nary solu­tions to a net­work of increas­ingly com­plex attacks.

Marty Vona, an assistant professor in the College of Computer and Information Science, is developing robots that can detect uncertainty in their environment, a particular concern for driverless cars on a road full of unpredictable people. Photo by Mary Knox Merrill.

Nevada recently issued Google the first-ever offi­cial license to operate its self-driven car. Cur­rent laws in other states tech­ni­cally pre­vent cars from dri­ving themselves. We asked Marty Vona, an assis­tant pro­fessor in Northeastern’s Col­lege of Com­puter and Infor­ma­tion Sci­ence, to explain the tech­nical chal­lenges of dri­ver­less cars and how these vehi­cles may change the traffic landscape.

From a robotics perspective, how does the self-driving car work?

To my knowl­edge, Google has released few tech­nical details of its imple­men­ta­tion — its project was a com­pany secret until fall of 2010. Google’s approach is said to com­bine sensor inputs from cam­eras, radar, wheel rota­tion and lasers that have been added to the car, along with pre­vi­ously stored maps and images from the Google Street View data­base. Pre­sum­ably Google also uses GPS to get a rough idea of the car’s loca­tion. Exactly how it is using that infor­ma­tion has not been dis­closed, but it is likely both a com­bi­na­tion of high-level plan­ning and lower-level control.

For plan­ning, the car is prob­ably given a des­ti­na­tion and then plans a route based on its cur­rent loca­tion and map data. The plan could also be revised along the way, should road clo­sures or heavy traffic pro­vide impediments.

For con­trol, which is likely the more chal­lenging task, it would be nec­es­sary to rapidly process data from the onboard sen­sors both to mea­sure nom­inal aspects of the envi­ron­ment, such as road mark­ings, and off-nominal events, such as unex­pected pedestrians. The soft­ware would then need to quickly decide how to modify the car’s dri­ving inputs (steering, throttle, brakes) to react safely.

The legal and eth­ical ques­tions of dri­ver­less cars are very sig­nif­i­cant: Who will be respon­sible —and liable — if a dri­ver­less car is involved in an accident?

Though Google’s car has been making head­lines since it was revealed, self-driving cars have been studied world­wide since the 1980s; some projects had already com­pleted thou­sands of self-driven miles as early as 1995. The pace of advance­ment picked up over the last decade, in part because the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency spon­sored sev­eral high-profile competitions.

What technical challenges does Google face in designing its driverless car?

The main chal­lenges are sen­sors that can sub­sti­tute for human eyes and ears and soft­ware that can reli­ably process that data to drive safely.

The soft­ware would nom­i­nally need to under­stand the cur­rent loca­tion of the car and fun­da­mental aspects of the dri­ving envi­ron­ment, including road bound­aries as well as the posi­tions and speeds of nearby cars and pedestrians. It would also need to under­stand how the car would react to changes in the dri­ving inputs. How far, for example, would the car travel before coming to a stop when a cer­tain level of braking is applied?

A fun­da­mental and deep chal­lenge would be to pre­dict the behavior of sur­rounding vehi­cles, espe­cially when humans may be dri­ving, but there are also a number of more subtle off-nominal sit­u­a­tions that are likely huge chal­lenges to handle auto­mat­i­cally. These chal­lenges include road damage, weather con­di­tions, nearby acci­dents, unusual sig­nage and sudden engine, wheel and break malfunctions

What are the benefits and drawbacks to introducing a self-driving car into the current traffic pattern?

One of the ben­e­fits that has been sug­gested is the pos­si­bility that self-driving cars could reduce acci­dents, many of which are attrib­uted to human error or inattentiveness. Another ben­efit could be reduced traffic delays, since self-driving cars could poten­tially coor­di­nate road use by acquiring and using larger-scale infor­ma­tion about other cars on the road via wire­less com­mu­ni­ca­tion. This would likely require that at least a sig­nif­i­cant frac­tion of all cars be self-driven and par­tic­i­pate in such coordination.

The main draw­backs are safety, lia­bility and cost. Can the cur­rent soft­ware respond as well — and as rapidly — to off-nominal sit­u­a­tions as an expe­ri­enced human? When a self-driven car is involved in an acci­dent, could the maker of the dri­ving system be liable, just as a human driver could be? How much can the cost for the req­ui­site advanced sen­sors and com­puters, which is cur­rently in the tens of thou­sands of dollars,be reduced?

Computer sciences professor Viera Proulx traveled to the Slovak Republic for a Fulbright funded sabbatical, reconnecting with old friends along the way.

Last fall Viera Proulx returned to her home country, the Slovak Republic, to begin a Fulbright-funded sab­bat­ical at Come­nius Uni­ver­sity in Bratislava.

Proulx’s journey forged impor­tant aca­d­emic col­lab­o­ra­tions, but it also had the unex­pected effect of recon­necting her with friends she had not seen since since the Warsaw Pact coun­tries invaded Czecho­slo­vakia in 1968.

Proulx, a pro­fessor in Northeastern’s Col­lege of Com­puter and Infor­ma­tion Sci­ence, said the work taking place at Come­nius dove­tailed with her research, which focuses on devel­oping methods for teaching com­puter pro­gram­ming to begin­ners in a sys­tem­atic way.

“I was intrigued by what they do with chil­dren in the Slovak Republic,” she said. “Every kinder­garten class­room has a com­puter in it.”

But, she explained, the edu­ca­tional system is strug­gling and math­e­matics has been elim­i­nated from the high-school grad­u­a­tion exam. “The depart­ment has had a hard time attracting stu­dents,” Proulx said. “But they are retraining teachers and offering nice projects to improve per­for­mance among stu­dents in fifth grade through high school.” Proulx helped design ques­tions for a nation­wide infor­matics com­pe­ti­tion for middle– and high-school stu­dents. In exchange, she received ideas for improving her own teaching cur­ricula at Northeastern. She also deliv­ered sem­inar talks at uni­ver­si­ties in Bratislava, Kosice and Prague and was a keynote speaker at the Inter­na­tional Con­fer­ence on Infor­matics in Sec­ondary Schools: Evo­lu­tion and Per­spec­tives, which was held in Bratislava in October.

The last time Proulx lived in the country, she was 21 years old. She spent a summer working in Eng­land and had no plans to leave Czecho­slo­vakia. “I was in London with two suit­cases when the Rus­sians came in and my aunt said, ‘you can come to the United States now.’”

The Czecho­slo­va­kian gov­ern­ment allowed Proulx to study in the U.S. for two years, but that didn’t give her enough time to earn a degree. “I didn’t think if I went back I could finish the school there or they would give me any decent job to work on because I’d been in the U.S. for too long,” she said. “And so,” she added, “I didn’t go back.”

For 10 years, until she became a U.S. cit­izen, Proulx evaded a 15-month jail sen­tence for aban­doning her country. The Czecho­slo­va­kian gov­ern­ment kept close watch on incoming let­ters from over­seas, Proulx said, so she cut ties with all her friends.

“You are a polit­i­cally sus­pi­cious person if you have a friend in a cap­i­talist country,” she explained. “It can cost you jobs, cost you pro­mo­tion, cause harassment.”

After so many years, Proulx believed she would never see her friends again. But a high-school class­mate who had learned of Proulx’s sab­bat­ical tracked her down and invited her on a day hike in the Carpathian Mountains.

“It was just spec­tac­ular all day,” Proulx said. “But recon­necting with someone I hadn’t talked to in 43 years was amazing.”

President Joseph E. Aoun greeted seniors last week at a reception for those selected as “most influential” from the Class of 2012. Photo by Mike Mazzanti.

Most years, Northeastern honors 100 students deemed most influential on campus at a reception in the spring. However, the Class of 2012 supplied such a bumper crop of influential students that the university deemed 100 simply wasn’t enough.

At this year’s reception, held last week, a total of 118 were honored for their achievements in everything from academics and experiential-learning opportunities to athletics and student organizations.

President Joseph E. Aoun said some students joked about the reasons they were invited — saying they knew the right people or had left favorable impressions on top administrators. Those reasons, he said, were far from true.

“Some of you said, ‘I have been doing the right thing.’ And that’s why you are all here,” Aoun said. “But the right thing is not the same for each one of you. Some of you have been involved in leading various clubs, some of you have been involved in various aspects of university life and community service. Whatever it is, you’re right: You did the right thing.”

The students honored included athletes, club leaders and key figures in campus life and community service — and many had multiple distinctions and leadership roles to their names.

“As the person responsible for the academic programs here at Northeastern, I’m really pleased to see all of you doing so well,” said Provost Stephen Director. “You should feel good about the education you received and know that we’re really proud of everything you’ve done.”

For many students, the reception provided an opportunity to reflect upon their Northeastern experiences and the lessons they learned.

“I learned you have to try a lot of things to figure out what you want to do, and it’s OK to do that,” said Katherine Hayden, a sociology major who used a study-abroad semester in Scotland to further her knowledge in political science.

Computer science major Daniel Bostwick, a leader in the university’s chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery, said his initiative helped him succeed in class, clubs and entrepreneurial endeavors.

“I learned of the importance of starting something and being able to follow through, whether it’s for schoolwork or a start-up,” Bostwick said.

Aoun said the group of influential students would leave Northeastern as models for future students looking to succeed in their endeavors, whatever they may be.

“It’s obviously the case that you are the role models for us, for the students and for the future,” he said.