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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read Here

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

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

Read more at the conference website.

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.”

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

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