Dan Feinberg explains how the new medical-billing system will impact health care delivery. Photo by Christopher Huang.

Beginning on Oct. 1, 2013, a new federally mandated medical billing system would require doctors to use a bank of more than 140,000 alphanumeric codes to describe injuries and medical services in bills sent to insurers. We asked Dan Feinberg, the director of the health informatics program — a joint program in the Bouvé College of Health Sciences and the College of Computer and Information Science at Northeastern University — to explain how the new coding system will affect health- care delivery.

How will the new medical-billing system change the way physicians, health insurers and information specialists deal with patients and patient data?


The new system — which is formally called the International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision (ICD-10) — changes how data is represented, but it doesn’t really change the data that is collected. ICD-10 will be able to represent that data in a way that computers can understand. There is research on finding a way for computers to understand free text that doctors put into their notes, but a formalized coding system is far better for computer interpretation.

Under the new system, your provider and your insurance company will know that you were bitten by a rat and not by a dog. If we discover that there is an outbreak of a disease being spread by rats, you might get a letter or a phone call. That will be new. It also works the other way. By having this detailed data in a structured format, we’ll be able to find patterns of problems that occur after rat bites and discover that, for example, outbreaks of a flu-like illness occurred in people who were bitten by rats.

What are health-care information specialists doing to prepare for the billing code changes?


Systems are being upgraded at a time when we are already making a push toward electronic records. Not everyone will make it in time, but people are still trying to maintain a sense of urgency. Europe has been running on a slightly different version of the U.S. version of ICD-10 for quite a while, so this feels more like finally catching up than blazing a new trail.

Under the new system, suffering an injury in a chicken coop, walking into a lamppost and being struck by a turtle will all be describable by code. How can this type of information help health-care providers deliver higher-quality care to patients? What else may this information be used for?

We will be much better at detecting outbreaks, and we will be much better at identifying how to keep people healthy. A broken arm, an animal bite and severe flu may not seem to go together until we find out that they are all chicken-related, so the computer can flag you for a phone call from a nurse with special training in chicken-handling education. In reality, chicken-related injuries are not overwhelming the health-care system, and we don’t train nurses specifically to address this problem. Having said that, the finer data in ICD-10 will allow us to identify patients with problems and pair them with nurses who can address them.

People may laugh at codes for poor personal hygiene, but these are very significant red flags for mental health issues that will benefit from early intervention. Whatever the information is, having it in a structured format vastly improves our ability to look for patterns in the data.

Ken McGrady stands between Aileen Yates and Melissa Perkin after receiving the William Jefferson Alcott, Jr. Award

The 40th annual Cooperative Education Awards were held on March 31st. The College of Computer and Information Science was proud that two of our senior students were recognized by such a competitive and prestigious honor.

Kenneth McGrady, a combined major in computer science and mathematics, received the William Jefferson Alcott, Jr. Award, which is presented to one senior within the university who utilizes his or her academic training in a creative way to make a positive contribution to society, and who has demonstrated exceptional achievement in cooperative education. It also recognizes the student’s accomplished goals beyond the requirements of the University curriculum. Between Ken’s co-op experiences at MITRE, Intuit and Pixar Animation Studios, his role as a research assistant in providing faster parsing technologies in compilers, and key player in the creation of Northeastern’s iPhone App “Discover Northeastern,” Ken is an individual who has made a significant impact to the college, university, and to all of the companies he has worked with on co-op. In addition, Ken’s involvement with ACM, CISters, NUEats, along with his role as Orientation Leader, RA and tutor, clearly demonstrate how he has gone above and beyond to make a lasting mark on the College of Computer and Information Science.

Alex Brick received the Outstanding Co-op Award for the college

Alex Brick, a combined Bachelor of Science and Master of Science candidate in Computer Science, with a minor in mathematics, received the Outstanding Co-op Award for the college. With Alex’s two co-ops at Amazon, one of CCIS’s most sought after co-op positions, his demanding course of study, his research within the college and his study abroad in Japan, Alex has taken full advantage of everything Northeastern University has to offer. Additionally, Alex is a tour guide for the Admission Office and participates in the CCIS Fellow program where he mentors freshmen students and assists in the Overview 2 class. Alex embodies the ethic, spirit and can-do personality of a student who seizes all opportunity to make the most of his education.

It has been a privilege to have had the opportunity to work with both Ken and Alex over the last five years, and they truly will be missed. We look forward to hearing of their successes in the years to come, as they both head to Seattle, Ken to work at Hulu and Alex to work at Amazon.

Whelan (left), Williams (center) and Bottiglieri (right) created a robot that can find disaster victims through their mobile phones Photo by Mary Knox Merrill

Northeastern University student-researchers have created a roving robot named WiLU that may be able to locate and rescue victims of natural disasters or participate in military missions that are too dangerous for soldiers.

The innovative technology was developed for a senior capstone project under the direction of electrical and computer engineering professor Charles DiMarzio and associate professor in the College of Computer and Information Science, Guevara Noubir. The team members includedelectrical and computer engineering students Tom Bottiglieri, Spiros Mantzavinos, Travis Taylor, Ryan Whelan and Eric Williams.

WiLU—which looks like a Tonka truck—could help save the lives of victims of catastrophic disasters, such as the massive 9.0 earthquake that rocked Japan in March, said Whelan.

As he put it, “You could send this robot into a search and rescue scenario where you don’t want humans to go.”

Noubir sponsored the students and funded the project with a portion of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Major Research Instrumentation grant awarded to him and an interdisciplinary team of professors from Northeastern to develop wireless sensor networks that support key applications such as search and rescue by swarms of robots.

He praised the student’s innovative robot. “It’s a great example of an effective research platform that integrates multi-disciplinary expertise spanning mechanical engineering, RF communications, embedded software development, and algorithms designs.”

Students created a complex algorithm that would enable the robot to locate people—or even bombs that are detonated through mobile phones.

Here’s how it works: a smart antenna mounted atop WiLU measures the signal strength of a mobile phone that is connected to a wireless network. Then, the robot autonomously determines the location of the object by adaptively forming beams to pinpoint the direction and location of the wireless signal source.

Students, who say humans could also control the robot from remote locations, hope to create a subscription service whereby mobile phone users could automatically join the WiFi network.

“Incorporating so many different creative and technical skills on a single project is the goal of our Capstone Design course,” DiMarzio said.

Junior computer science major Greg Kerr (left) worked with Prof. Gene Cooperman (right) to develop a system to save progress on supercomputer computations. Photo by Mary Knox Merrill

A Northeastern University undergraduate is leading the development of a new process that will make it possible for certain supercomputers to save their data midway through a computation, preventing the loss of progress due to a computer crash or bug that would otherwise require the machine to be restarted from the beginning.

“Computers are like a car engine — the more complicated they are, the more likely they are to break,” said Greg Kerr, a sophomore computer science major.  Kerr said that his protocol applies to high-performance machines known as InfiniBand supercomputers.

Next month, he will present his research at REcon, a computer science conference held annually in Montreal, Canada. He has been selected to give an hour-long talk on the first day of the conference, an honor, for an undergraduate, said Gene Cooperman, a professor in the College of Computer and Information Science, where Kerr is a research assistant.

“If you give your talk on the first day, it means everyone who is there for the conference knows who you are and can talk about your work in the later days,” said Kerr. “It shows that the organizers believe this work is very important and will generate a lot of interest among the attendees.”

InfiniBand is a relatively new computer system that has made high-performance computing more open and accessible since it was developed and released in the early 2000s.  Because the system is scalable, it can be used on systems ranging from small computer clusters to some of the world’s largest and most advanced supercomputers.

“This is the networking technology behind some of the worlds largest computers, and yet the number of people who understand the internals of the InfiniBand technology is very small, largely because it is relatively new,” said Cooperman, who urged Kerr to reach out to some of the top InfiniBand experts in the world as he began developing his new process.

No one has been able restart an InfiniBand process midstream. This new work would allow scientists to more efficiently complete massive calculations on expensive computers in high demand.

This summer, Cooperman and several of his doctoral students are working at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where some of the nation’s most advanced supercomputers are located, and Kerr believes his work will soon be ready to be applied to those computations.

“I think we’re close,” Kerr said. “We’ve got the main points proven and now we need the summer to iron everything out and work out the bugs.”

Professor Albert-László Barabási received the 2011 Lagrange-CRT Foundation Prize.

Albert-László Barabási, a world-renowned network scientist at Northeastern University, has received the 2011 Lagrange-CRT Foundation Prize for his body of research on complex networks in natural, technological and social systems.

The prize, which includes a $71,800 cash award, is given by the Institute for Scientific Interchange Foundation, in Turin, Italy.

“Winning the award was pleasantly surprising,” said Barabási, a Distinguished Professor of Physics with joint appointments in biology and the College of Computer and Information Science, and the founding director of Northeastern’s Center for Complex Network Research (CCNR).

CCNR is considered the leading university-based center for network science research in the world. The center focuses on how networks emerge, what they look like, how they evolve and how networks affect our understanding of complex systems.

In 1999, Barabási’s groundbreaking research led to the discovery of scale-free networks, which can be found in human cells and online communities, such as Facebook. Taking a network-based approach to identifying and battling disease, he said, could help reveal the biological significance of mutations associated with life-threatening illnesses.

As he put it, “Network theory provides a set of tools to understand and solve problems in our society that revolve around complex systems.”

Earlier this year, Barabási and Yang-Yu Liu, a postdoctoral research associate in Barabási’s lab, coauthored a study on the ways in which greater control of complex systems, such as cellular networks or social media, can be achieved by merging the tools of network science and control theory. The research findings were featured as the cover story in the May 12 issue of the journal Nature.

The research could have a variety of applications, said Barabási, from developing cures to metabolic diseases, to offering new insights into the design of better organizations.

He may use his prize-winnings to take his family on a vacation around the world. “I have a long-term dream of visiting Africa,” he said, “but with a 2-and 3-year-old, it could be many years away.”

View selected publications of Albert-László Barabási in IRis, Northeastern’s digital archive.

Professor Engin Kirda assesses the impact of an attack he said represents the “largest loss of private information to date.” Photo by Mike Mazzanti

In late April, a hacker crippled Sony’s PlayStation Network by stealing the names, home addresses and perhaps even the credit card numbers of some 70 million subscribers, who play and download games through the online service.

Engin Kirda, an associate professor with joint appointments in Northeastern’s College of Computer and Information Science and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, assesses the impact of the attack he said represents the “largest loss of private information to date.”

How easy is it to hack into a network, like Sony’s, and steal personal information? How difficult is it to combat?

Although we have recently seen very sophisticated attacks against security companies such as RSA, Comodo, and HBGary, most of the successful attacks are still quite simple in nature. In many cases, a simple programming mistake on a company’s website can lead to complete compromise over time.

Attackers typically proceed step by step. For example, they might first compromise the web server and then move on to attack other critical components, such as databases and mail servers. Many attacks today also use so-called “social engineering” techniques. Like phishing attacks, a user might be tricked into downloading and installing malicious software, which can then help the attackers gain access to sensitive data.

To my knowledge, it is not very clear what vulnerability or technique the attackers used to break into Sony’s systems. In any case, we have witnessed the largest loss of private information to date.? At Northeastern, my security group is working on techniques to automatically detect vulnerabilities in software systems in order to prevent attacks. We are also looking at how social engineering attacks work effectively in practice, and why users often fall for such attacks.

The PlayStation Network has been down for almost three weeks after Sony promised that it would be back online within a day or two. Why is it taking so much longer than expected?

It is not easy to say why things are taking time to fix without having knowledge of the internal discussions at Sony. My guess would be that Sony is trying to make sure that its systems are secure so that something like this does not happen again. Suffering a similar attack after the network goes back online would be very embarrassing for them.

It could also be that their systems are so complex that a quick fix is impossible. Often, bad design decisions are the hardest to fix. Some of my colleagues at Northeastern are working on the problem of designing systems in a secure way from the start.

Should users who play or download games on the PlayStation Network be hesitant to log back on? What type of impact can hackers have on the bottom line of a company like Sony?

Once the systems go back online, I would not be hesitant to log back on. Having said that, I would advise all users to change their passwords and also make sure that they have not used the same password that they used on Sony on other sites, such as Gmail or Yahoo. It has been reported that many passwords have been stolen and attackers often use stolen passwords to log on to other websites to send spam.

I would also advise Sony users to be wary of phishing attacks. The attackers are probably going to use the information they have stolen to craft authentic looking phishing e-mails. I would not be surprised if such phishing e-mail will be designed to look as if Sony has sent it. There are also reports that credit card information has been stolen. If you had your credit card information stored on the Sony site, then it would be wise to regularly check your credit card statements.

Associate professor Engin Kirda’s research involves studying Web security and creating better virus-protection techniques. Photo by Michael Mazzanti.

When Engin Kirda started focusing on cyber-security research 10 years ago, those primarily responsible for launching Internet attacks were teenagers out for kicks, he said. But the scope of threats existing through the Web has dramatically changed since then.

Now security breaches are often financially motivated and highly organized — which presents intriguing challenges for the new associate professor with joint appointments in Northeastern’s College of Computer and Information Science andDepartment of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

“We’ve seen a shift from attacks for fun to attacks for profit,” said Kirda, who joined the faculty in January. “That’s why it’s fascinating for me to see how these bad guys are operating, and to try to come up with solutions to combat them.”

Kirda studies Internet security issues and how to discover vulnerabilities in websites and Internet applications to create more secure applications. He is also working on creating better virus-detection techniques. He previously taught at research institutions in Vienna and Sophia Antipolis, France, and he is the cofounder and codirector of the International Secure Systems Lab — a collaborative effort of European and U.S. researchers focused on analyzing and designing tools for computer security.

Kirda plans to take a closer look at why some users’ computers get infected with malware, a software designed to harm or secretly access a computer system, and how well those people are able to identify cyber attacks. As part of this project, users would be given online tests to determine the scope of their understanding of cyber threats.

“One thing I have learned over the years is that security problems are not only technical problems. There is a very social aspect to all these issues,” he says. “For example, someone can come up with technical solutions, but they might still fail because we don’t exactly understand how well users are actually able to accept these technical solutions.”

Kirda was drawn to Northeastern in part because of the new Information Assurance doctoral program, and he hopes to explore interdisciplinary collaborations here to develop more robust systems and better solutions.

He says one small virus released in a network or system, for a bank or nuclear reactor, can cause major damage. Given the number of people and companies depending on Internet reliability and security on a daily basis, he is excited to work in an ever-evolving field of significant societal importance.

“The problems are very real,” Kirda says, “so there is an opportunity to make quite a large impact.”?

A class learns computer skills at the Action for Boston Community Development. Jake Rozin photo for boston.com

Who knows what eventually pushed Deborah Morgan Thawes of Roxbury to sign up for computer classes last month?

It might have had something to do with her 83-year-old mother buying and learning to use a new computer. Or it might have had something to do with her son, a senior in high school, telling her, quite plainly, “Mom, you need to learn computers.”

One thing is for sure: She is learning now.

“If [my mother] can do it, I can do it,” said a determined Thawes.

She is among dozens of city residents enrolled in computer classes held at the Action for Boston Community Development Parker Hill/Fenway location in Roxbury. ABCD is a neighborhood service center that focuses on families below 125 percent of the poverty level. The center holds programs for adults, youths, and the elderly, including career development, health services, food pantries, and the computer classes.

The classes are funded by a grant from the Mission Hill Fenway Trust Fund. ABCD Parker Hill/Fenway applied for the grant because its computer lab was not being used and it lacked funding to pay for an instructor.

Milagros Arbaje-Thomas, the director of ABCD Parker Hill/Fenway, said the funding “has allowed us to take an educational perspective to how we fight poverty.”

“It is grants such as this one that allow us to keep teaching these classes,” said Arbaje-Thomas. “We take for granted how easy it is for us to use our phones to send pictures or emails.” But for low-income residents, she added, “it is a huge barrier to overcome.”

Diego Rodriguez of Dorchester has a 14-year-old daughter who has learned to use computers at school. He is taking the class not only for himself, but for her.

“As a parent, it is a good idea to know what my daughter is doing and if she is safe,” he said.

Others in the class want to connect with family overseas.

Michele Lagene said she hoped to learn how to send pictures from her camera to her family and friends at home in Haiti. “In Haiti, I worked for 10 years on a computer,” she said. “Now, I am here for more experience.”

The classes cover the basics: a brief history of computers and their parts; navigating the operating system; and some software, including Microsoft Office. Because of interest from the students, the rest of the curriculum is spent on navigating the Internet.

Students learn how to be safe online as they search and book airline flights, pay bills, apply for jobs, and send and receive e-mails.

Rafael Feliciano Cumbas, a junior at Northeastern University, teaches the classes. He grew up in Mission Hill, only blocks from the community center.

“I’ve been doing ABCD since I was four or five years old,” said Cumbas, who attended the summer youth program and later taught at the Phillip Brooks summer camp, funded by ABCD.

“I have benefited greatly from ABCD,” he said. “It’s nice to be able to give back.”

The classes meet three times a week, for three hours each. This is the fourth cycle of classes, which run for five weeks and are offered in Spanish and English.

The skill base of the students varies widely.

“Some students are very advanced,” said Cumbas. “Others are at zero. They help each other, though. It’s nice to see that.”

Prospective students are screened based on several guidelines. They must be Boston residents and meet the income limits, and are asked about motivation and barriers to attendance.

“There is a lot of excitement about this program,” Arbaje-Thomas said. “The wait list is very long. Each day, more people come in asking for spots.”

Each student goes through a pre- and post- course assessment to gauge improvement. They have tests, assignments and evaluations, culminating in a graduation ceremony.

“We take this seriously,” said Arbaje-Thomas. “It is like a college class.”

Thawes also takes the classes seriously – although she jokes about the possibilities that come with being Internet-savvy.

Learning to navigate the Web will make it easier “to spend my husband’s money” shopping online, she said with a smile.

This article was reported and written by Northeastern University journalism student Jake Rozin, under the supervision of journalism instructor Lisa Chedekel (l.chedekel@neu.edu), as part of collaboration between The Boston Globe and Northeastern.

By Jake Rozin, Globe Correspondent

Associate professor Guevara Noubir weighs in on mobile phone security, and how much attention users pay to the risks they may face.

According to a recent survey conducted by AVG Technologies, a global consumer security software provider, and the Ponemon Institute, an independent research group, many smart phone users are complacent about the security risks that exist from using these mobile devices. Computer science professor Guevara Noubir, an expert in wireless security, analyzes this finding and assesses the potential risks that stem from using smart phones.


Do you agree that Americans are lax in their mobile phone security?


My feeling is that a portion of the population is lax, not everyone. People might download hundreds of applications to iPhones or Android phones, and I think some people aren’t careful enough about it. But the risks will keep increasing as phones become more ubiquitous and more sophisticated applications emerge, and because phones are with us all the time and we tend to trust them.

What are the greatest risks for cell phone users when it comes to security threats?


One potential threat relates to the fact that people carry mobile phones with them all the time, so their location can be tracked. Some applications people use, such as apps that enable them to access their bank accounts, could be damaging if that information is compromised.

These threats are related to many other aspects, including the fact that some of the protocols behind Wi-Fi and connectivity still have security issues. Others are related to the specific user. Many apps will ask you to accept its terms, which could include sharing the user’s location. Many people don’t read these terms and just click, “Yes.”

A couple of weeks ago, several applications were taken off the Android market because they included malware — meaning someone repackaged them to include harmful software that reports user information.


Has mobile phone security software kept pace with the cell phone technology, and how do you see this trend continuing in the future?


I think smart phone security is still just emerging, because cell phone technology has evolved so quickly over the last few years. Manufacturers put security mechanisms in their systems that are quite good, but beyond that, many threats haven’t been realized yet. We haven’t heard about a really large number of people being compromised, so if and when that happens, we’ll see more work done to solve these problems. I think most people now are ignoring it because there is no imminent threat. It’s hard to predict future threats, but overall, I feel if people are careful about what applications they install, their threat level is reasonable.

“In 1995, my research team and I decided to create TeachScheme!, an educational outreach project, with the hope that our work on programming languages could effect a dramatic change in K-12 computer science. Specifically, we envisioned a virtuous cycle of two mutually reinforcing ideas. On the one hand, we would create a design-oriented curriculum path from middle school through college. On the other hand, our approach would help kids with learning school mathematics. Hence a course on programming would benefit every student, not just those who end up choosing computer science as a college major. At this point, we have a new design-oriented curriculum; a pedagogic program development environment to make it fun; and a series of matching programming languages. After focusing at the overlap between high schools and colleges at first, we now use after-school programs to move upstream, and we are working on two major downstream courses for the second semester in college: one on object-oriented design and another on logic in program design.”

Bio: Matthias Felleisen obtained his PhD (’87) from Daniel P. Friedman who also pointed him in the direction of a professorial career. He then spent the next 15 years at Rice University in Houston, including long and short sabbaticals at Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh) and Ecole Normale Superieure (Paris). In 2001, he took on a position at Northeastern University in Boston and moved his entire team there. Felleisen and his distributed PLT team conduct research on all aspects of programming languages: design, implementations, and applications. On the side, they also run TeachScheme!, an educational outreach project. Over his 25-year career, Felleisen co-authored six books. As a PhD student, he revised his adviser’s “Little LISPer” (MIT Press), which is still in print in its 35th year of existence. The two of them also wrote “A Little Java, A Few Patterns”. With some of his own PhD students, Felleisen produced “How to Design Programs” (MITP, 2001) and “Semantics Engineering” (MITP, 2009).