Peter Desnoyers of the College of Computer and Information Sciences received a CAREER award to pursue his work with solid-state storage devices. Photo by Kristie Gillooly.

In the early days, standard computers could be as large as a single story house. Over the last several decades, many development efforts have focused on shrinking them for use in the home and eventually anywhere in the world — on the train, in a cave, you name it.

That is, if you want to use standard computer-based tools, like the Internet or iTunes. Today’s tiny devices are capable of crunching lots of data pretty quickly, but what if “lots of data” means tens or hundreds of terabytes or more, amounts that would take a typical PC days or weeks to process? For that we need supercomputers, which are still big and expensive.

Peter Desnoyers, assistant professor in the College of Computer and Information Science, recently received a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation to explore solid-state drives, which are data-storage devices that use flash memory, as new computational tools. If successful, these devices could revolutionize the industry by making large-scale computation possible for the masses.

Flash was originally designed to replace hard drives as a faster data-storage method. “It is somewhat faster for large files than hard drives,” Desnoyers said. But more important, it is “far more nimble, able to switch from one small file to another at electronic speeds while a hard drive must wait for mechanical parts to move.”

The only problem is flash came too late. Over the last several decades, computer scientists have optimized software to run on hard drives. Anything that would run better on flash has not yet been designed. “We’ve stopped trying to do anything that involves complex data structures outside of the computer’s memory,” Desnoyers said. “We’ve stopped trying to do the things that flash is best at.”

Before computer scientists can start designing new uses for flash they must first understand how it behaves. In particular, Desnoyers’ team is looking at fragmentation, in which creating and deleting files over time causes a storage system to become randomly arranged.

Hard drives, Desnoyers explained, slow down but continue to work as they become fragmented. But flash must constantly defragment in order to work at all. It must constantly rearrange blocks of data like a sliding tiles puzzle, shuffling it between unoccupied areas in order to clear more space. This process causes the drive to run slower and eventually reduces its lifetime.

“We’re trying to understand it so we can design better algorithms to deal with it,” Desnoyers said.

In addition to making personal computers more powerful, solid-state storage devices could also extend the power of supercomputers beyond their current capacity. Desnoyers’ team is working with Oak Ridge National Laboratories to explore ways of making that possible.

Still, Desnoyers isn’t convinced that flash is the future of computing. “Disk is getting bigger and cheaper faster than flash is,” he said. “For flash to become really widespread, we need to develop new approaches to make it worth the price — it has to enable us to do things with computers that we couldn’t do before.”

Associate professor Magy Seif El-Nasr, who holds joint positions in the College of Computer and Information Science and College of Arts, Media and Design, teaches game design and interactive media — one of Northeastern’s fastest-growing interdisciplinary programs. But to design games, you need to be able to play them. And when El-Nasr does, she opts for ones with the most highly visual 3-D worlds and challenging quests. Her favorite? “Assassin’s Creed,” she said, “and that’s the one I’m best at.”

Assassin’s Creed Series
In this historical-fiction action-adventure game, modern-day Desmond Miles, who is descended from a line of assassins, uses a machine to relive memories of his ancestors — one assassin who lived during the Crusades; the other, in Renaissance Italy in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. Combat, mayhem and love ensue.

Civilization Series
You are the leader of a civilization competing with other civilizations, starting from 4000 BC all the way to the near future. You strategically build and manage cities, work the land for food, trade, choose which technologies will benefit your empire, keep citizens happy and occasionally deal with marauding barbarians.

Prince of Persia Series
The games, which spawned a 2010 Disney movie, follow the adventures of an acrobatic prince as he travels through time combating evil forces, saving Persia and rescuing the princess, all the while completing difficult quests and solving puzzles to gain more power.

Children of Eden
The object of this musically and visually stunning game is to save the first child born in deep space from being destroyed by a virus. The young girl is asleep, and when a parasite is destroyed in each of the five levels, her memories are awakened one by one.

Skyrim
Enter the Nordic world of Skyrim, a massive landscape filled with forests, countrysides, mountains and creatures. The king has been assassinated and civil war threatens. In the fifth chapter of the Elder Scrolls, the evil dragon-god and his minions have returned, and the kingdom awaits the savior (that would be the player) who will fight for mankind.

William Robertson (left), assistant professor in the College of Engineering and the College of Computer and Information Science, is seen here at a congressional briefing on cybersecurity last month in Washington that was led by a Northeastern University team of experts. Photo by Paul Morigi.

Last Friday, a major Atlanta-based payment card processor, Global Payments, announced a server security breach that could affect more than 1 million accounts. We asked William Robertson, a cybersecurity expert and professor in both the College of Computer and Information Science and the College of Engineering, to explain how hackers penetrated the company and the impact this will have on credit-card holders.

How did the Global Payments security breach occur?

The breach was only made public on Friday, and the story is still developing. Nevertheless, it seems clear that cybercriminals have had illicit access to the internal networks of Global Payments since January 2012, and possibly as far back as January 2011. The company has stated that at most 1.5 million accounts have been breached, although this number may increase as the investigation proceeds and more details become public.

From what we do know, it appears that hackers successfully penetrated a subset of the servers that comprise Global Payments’ card processing system. From this vantage point inside the company’s internal networks, the hackers were able to exfiltrate sensitive credit-card data, including sufficient information to clone new, illegitimate credit cards. The intrusions themselves could have been a result of poor password selection, exploitable network services or even targeted attacks against highly privileged employees. At this point, however, there is no way to be sure what the exact vector was.

Can hacks like this be prevented? If so, what measures is the cybersecurity industry or even government putting in place?

While we do not yet know the specifics of this case, it is clear that our current computer systems and networks are fundamentally insecure in the sense that we have little assurance that they are free of security vulnerabilities. And, even if they were perfectly secure, cybercriminals could still attack the human elements of the system, for instance through social engineering. The Systems Security Group at Northeastern is actively researching ways to detect and prevent attacks against existing systems, as well as designing new systems that are invulnerable or resilient to classes of attacks. But there is still much work to be done.

For their part, industry and government are not idle. In particular, the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard establishes a set of requirements that must be followed by companies that handle cardholder information. This standard includes measures for attack prevention and detection, as well as guidelines for security incident response. It is important to recognize, however, that adopting these measures is in no way a guarantee that your credit-card information will not be stolen by cybercriminals. Rather, their purpose is to reduce liability when breaches do occur. Incidentally, Visa has removed Global Payments from the list of the Security Standard-compliant service providers as a response to the reported breach.

What does this incident mean for the average credit-card holder? Do you have any tips for how cardholders can protect themselves from fraud?

Most cardholders will probably not be affected in any way. For those whose card information was accessed as part of the breach, you will receive a notification from the bank that issued your card with instructions that you should follow immediately. Of course, you should not be held liable for the security failures at Global Payments.

The unfortunate reality is that no level of vigilance on your part can fully protect your card information from attacks such as the one that occurred at Global Payments. Regardless, it is very important to: a) regularly monitor your bank and credit-card statements and report irregularities; b) scan your computers and watch for signs of malware; and c) be careful how and to whom you divulge sensitive information. Best practices such as these will help to reduce the risk and keep your sensitive information safe.

Tim Bickmore of the College of Computer and Information Science and Roger Edwards of the Bouvé College of Health Sciences are using computer technology to improve breastfeeding education for expecting mothers. Courtesy image.

When two Northeastern University professors, one in health sciences and the other in computer and information science, came together to try to develop a system to help women breast-feed more successfully, their project joined their common interest and their two worlds. They created a lactation avatar: Tanya.

Tanya is knowledgeable. She can demonstrate techniques. She doesn’t mind repeating herself, and if she gets impatient with a mother who’s slow to master the football hold, she’ll never, ever show it. Plus, notes Tim Bickmore, who helped create the “computerized lactation-education consultant,” she’s available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and she doesn’t charge by the hour. “We wanted to create a tool that would be there when mothers needed it,” he said.

You can’t download a Tanya yet — this is a project in the very early development stages. But in a small pilot study, the two men found that their strategy, when made available to women during their hospital stay, “significantly increased both breast-feeding knowledge and the intent to breast-feed.”

Increasing knowledge and intent is a long way from a rousing success, but this is a technology with promise — and without, Professor Bickmore assured me, any intention to substitute for human lactation support. “Tanya isn’t a replacement,” he said. “She’s an additional resource.”

In the future, Professor Bickmore and his colleague, Prof. Roger Edwards, hope to offer an avatar that coaches women who are holding baby dolls containing embedded sensors on their technique, and a 3-D version of Tanya, and, of course, smartphone apps.

Could you have used an online lactation consultant at 4 a.m. in your first nights home with your infant? I’d have to see her in action to be convinced — but if she was available, I’d certainly have been willing to try.

By KJ DELL’ANTONIA, NYTimes writer. The original copy can be found here.

Fourth-year information sciences major Shay McDonough continues to work part time for Novartis after completing two co-ops with its IT group. Photo by Casey Bayer.

In high school, Shay McDonough developed an interest in both biology and computer science. At Northeastern, McDonough — now a fourth-year information sciences major — combined her love for both fields on two co-ops for the information technology (IT) group at the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research in Cambridge, Mass.

“It was a beautiful integration of biology and computer science,” she said.

On her first co-op, McDonough updated a management system to comply with the research organization’s design and IT standards. Her work made it easier for researchers on the cardiovascular and metabolic diseases team to share information with data analysts.

McDonough’s familiarity with team projects helped her land a second co-op as a program manager, a role that enabled her to work on the design of a bigger program that connects users within each of the company’s research areas.

McDonough’s manager, Arturo Morales, global lead at the Novartis Data Federation Initiative, praised her contribution. “As much as this was a learning experience for her, she has made a significant impact in the team and helped us move forward,” he said.

Soon after beginning the project, however, McDonough realized that it would take at least a year to complete. “Co-ops in general are really interested in getting things done and having something you can say you really accomplished in your six months there,” she explained.

But that turned out to be impossible for the hardworking student. Instead of saying goodbye to the project at the end of her co-op, McDonough chose to continue working at Novartis as a part-time employee to see her work through to a later stage of development.

McDonough said the Novartis experience served as a launching pad for a future career, and in her third co-op, she hopes to continue challenging herself even more in the area of user interface.

Prof. Timothy Bickmore, in collaboration with co-PI Michael Paasche-Orlow, MD, at Boston Medical Center (BMC), was just awarded a 5-year, $4 million grant from the National Cancer Institute to develop animated conversational agents to help patients navigate oncology clinical trials.

The “Research Ethics and Safety Promoted by Embodied Conversational Technology” (RESPECT) project was funded through NIH’s Ethical Issues In Human Subjects Research program to help ensure ethical treatment of participants in oncology trials, by ensuring that all patients understand informed consent documents and study protocols, irrespective of their health, reading or computer literacy abilities.

Prof. Bickmore has spent the last decade developing conversational agents that counsel patients about health-related topics and Dr. Paasche-Orlow is a national expert on health literacy, especially related to patient understanding of research informed consent documents. The current effort builds on a five-year collaboration between them to develop agent-enhanced explanation of informed consent and other healthcare documents for patients with limited health literacy.

The project will involve the development of conversational agents that: 1) help candidates find clinical trials they are eligible for and interested in among the 1,000 active trials at BMC; 2) explain research informed consent documents to participants and assess their comprehension; and 3) monitor participants during oncology trials to promote adherence to study protocols and automatically report adverse events to the research staff, the Data Safety and Monitoring Board and the Institutional Review Board (IRB), as appropriate. The advisory committee for the effort involves members of the BMC IRB and national experts on clinical trials and ethics.

Backed by an NSF CAREER Award, Marsette Vona plans to design a robot that can adapt to an uncertain environment. Photo by Mary Knox Merrill.

Today’s robots can vacuum floors, build cars and even perform surgery. While not quite on the intelligence level of the Jetsons’ robot maid, Rosie, they are rather smart. Nonetheless, modern robots struggle to handle the common problem of uncertainty in the environment: Move a wrench from a Ford robot’s tool tray, for example, and you risk ruining the whole car. Get a new rug with tassels and your Roomba may as well go back in the closet with the broom.

Marsette Vona, an assistant professor in the College of Computer and Information Science at Northeastern, wants to change all that. Backed by a five-year National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award, Vona plans to merge the two areas of research he has pursued throughout his academic career: 3-D perception and compliant contact.

The goal, he said, is to develop software through which a robot can acquire 3-D information about its surroundings, process the data and then approach the environment with a certain amount of “intelligence.”

As a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab, Vona designed a climbing robot that could grab onto uneven surfaces and adjust its grip based on the dynamics of its initial contact. “It’s helpful for a robot to be ‘soft’— to adjust appropriately based on response,” Vona explained. “Humans do it intrinsically.”

But Vona’s climbing robot and more recent compliant machines are “blind.” In another project, Vona uses cameras to give robots “sight.”

Earlier iterations of this technique use 2-D cameras to extract information about the surroundings. Using the Microsoft Kinnect 3-D camera, however, Vona’s team can analyze the geometry of an environment with the hope of one day coupling that information with compliant contact. By recognizing uneven terrain, for example, robots may soon be able to make a decision about how to approach and touch that surface.

Vona envisions robots that could help amputees traverse rocky trails, perform hazardous tasks in a compromised nuclear reactor surrounded by debris, or move along the sea floor — or even the surface of another planet — with ease.

“We need robots today that can work in hazardous locations with very rough terrain,” Vona said. “In the future we may want robots that can walk with us over stairs, curbs and rocks.

“Understanding how to combine 3-D perception with compliant contact,” he added, “will be a major step towards these goals.”

The research component of Vona’s CAREER award will intersect with his teaching program. He currently teaches Robotic Science and Systems, in which both undergraduate and graduate students team up to write software for and build practical robots that can lift objects off the floor. In the future, Vona hopes to introduce students to the problem of uncertainty in this class.

Post-doctorate researcher Filippo Simini is part of a team that has developed a new model for mapping human mobility patterns to help answer questions ranging from the spread of infectious disease and to the spread of ideas. Photo by Mary Knox Merrill.

“It’s human nature to want the greatest outcome for the least amount of work,” says Filippo Simini a post-doctorate researcher in Northeastern’s Center for Complex Network Research, directed by Albert-László Barabási.

Simini is quoting the American linguist George Kingsley Zipf who, in the early 1940s, introduced a model based on this “principle of least effort” to predict individuals’ inter-city movements.

Later variations of Zipf’s original model are based on an analogy with Newton’s law of gravitation: larger and closer cities attract people more than smaller and more distant cities. The so-called “Gravity Law” of mobility, which accounts for the size and distance between a commuter’s origin and destination, help contemporary network scientists build larger mobility maps, which can help them predict the spread of disease.

But the Gravity Law has several limitations: It depends on parameters that are not universal to all regions of the globe, its predictions are sometimes flat out wrong and, perhaps most importantly, it cannot be used in regions without sufficient traffic data, which often correlate to areas most affected by infectious diseases.

“The Gravity Law works,” says Simini, “But maybe it’s not the best we can do.” In research published online Sunday in the journal Nature, Simini and Barábasi, along with collaborators Marta González from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Amos Maritan from University of Padua in Italy, present a more accurate approach, which they call the “Radiation Model.”

Instead of looking only at origin and destination populations, it also takes into account the population density throughout the entire region in which a commuter may find work. Since it depends only on population density data, which is widely available across the globe, it is more versatile than the Gravity Law.

To illustrate the difference between the two models, the team analyzed census data from two pairs of counties with similar populations in Utah and Alabama, respectively. Because the Gravity Law looks only at origin and destination populations, it predicts identical commuting patterns in the two regions. But census data reports 10 times more trips between the two counties in Utah than in Alabama.

“If you live in a city that lies in a densely populated region” says Simini, “then you will probably find good employment close to home. If your city is surrounded by a desert, you’ll have to travel farther to find comparable job opportunities.” Predictions from the Radiation Model come much closer to the actual data.

The team applied their equation to other data sets, such as hourly trips detected by mobile phone use, migration data from the IRS and freight shipment data. The equation accurately predicts the number of trips made between two places using any of these sets.

Network scientists have already put the equation to use in current studies modeling the spread of disease and report that it can give more accurate results than their current methods.

“We enter an era in which predicting the large-scale mobility of individuals is essential for epidemic prediction and transportation planning,” says Barabási, the principal investigator on the work. “The results obtained in the paper offer a rational tool to quantify these movements.”

Associate professor Timothy Bickmore highlights the unique focus and approach to health care that encompasses the new health informatics PhD program — set to launch in fall 2012.

The United States spends $2 trillion in health care annually. New technologies and approaches to health care have led to a growing field in health informatics, which has a focus on both the clinical and personal aspects of the industry. We asked Timothy Bickmore, an associate professor in the College of Computer and Information Science, to discuss the impact this field can have on the health care industry as a whole, as well as Northeastern’s new PhD program in health informatics.

As one of the first in the nation to have this program, what are some different approaches we can expect from Northeastern’s new health informatics PhD program this fall?

The program was designed primarily by four faculty members in the College of Computer and Information Science and Bouvé College of Health Sciences — myself, Stephen Intille, Rupal Patel and Matthew Goodwin — all researchers doing interdisciplinary research in “patient-facing” health informatics.

The focus on patient- and consumer-facing health informatics is unique. There are several graduate programs in medical and health informatics in the United States, but they all focus on clinical informatics — that is, information systems used by doctors and nurses.

The key issues that our program will address are designing systems that can be used by laypeople with varying degrees of computer and health literacy, with various educational and cultural backgrounds; and creating systems that are intended to change health behavior as much as to inform, and are designed to be integrated into peoples’ everyday lives over long periods of time.

What is the impact of health informatics on health care, and how will it shape people’s relationship with health-care providers and the industry?

Poor health behavior — including everything from physical inactivity and poor diet, smoking, not getting recommended vaccinations and screening tests — is a direct cause of a significant portion of the $2 trillion the United States spends on health care annually.

One focus of personal health informatics is designing new technologies that can have a significant positive impact on these behaviors; another is designing assistive technologies to increase the quality of life for individuals with a variety of disabilities. Some of the significant design challenges we face are creating systems that can facilitate provider-patient communication, and designing systems to communicate health data that is measured and reported outside of the clinical environment in a way that providers trust and will use.

What are some instances of health informatics adoption by health-care professionals that people can already interact with and utilize as the field continues to grow?

There is an exploding market for consumer-health technologies, ranging from pedometers to digital bathroom scales to sleep monitors. These technologies are becoming increasingly intelligent and networked to reporting and feedback functions aimed at improving health behavior.

There is also a growing market in telemedicine devices that monitor and communicate with patients at home, then report status and alerts to health-care providers. The health informatics program is designed not only to teach students how to design these devices, but how to use them in theory-driven interventions and evaluate them in rigorously controlled clinical trials, which are required to gain credibility with health care providers.