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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Web­sites like Face­book, LinkedIn and other social-​​media net­works con­tain mas­sive amounts of valu­able public infor­ma­tion. Auto­mated web tools called web crawlers sift through these sites, pulling out infor­ma­tion on mil­lions of people in order to tailor search results and create tar­geted ads or other mar­ketable content.

But what hap­pens when “the bad guys” employ web crawlers? For Engin Kirda, Sy and Laurie Stern­berg Inter­dis­ci­pli­nary Asso­ciate Pro­fessor for Infor­ma­tion Assur­ance in the Col­lege of Com­puter and Infor­ma­tion Sci­ence and the Depart­ment of Elec­trical and Com­puter Engi­neering, they then become tools for spam­ming, phishing or tar­geted Internet attacks.

“You want to pro­tect the infor­ma­tion,” Kirda said. “You want people to be able to use it, but you don’t want people to be able to auto­mat­i­cally down­load con­tent and abuse it.”

Kirda and his col­leagues at the Uni­ver­sity of California–Santa Bar­bara have devel­oped a new soft­ware call Pub­Crawl to solve this problem. Pub­Crawl both detects and con­tains mali­cious web crawlers without lim­iting normal browsing capac­i­ties. The team joined forces with one of the major social-​​networking sites to test Pub­Crawl, which is now being used in the field to pro­tect users’ information.

Kirda and his col­lab­o­ra­tors pre­sented a paper on their novel approach at the 21st USENIX Secu­rity Sym­po­sium in early August. The article will be pub­lished in the pro­ceed­ings of the con­fer­ence this fall.

In the cyber­se­cu­rity arms race, Kirda explained, mali­cious web crawlers have become increas­ingly sophis­ti­cated in response to stronger pro­tec­tion strate­gies. In par­tic­ular, they have become more coor­di­nated: Instead of uti­lizing a single com­puter or IP address to crawl the web for valu­able infor­ma­tion, efforts are dis­trib­uted across thou­sands of machines.

“That becomes a tougher problem to solve because it looks sim­ilar to benign user traffic,” Kirda said. “It’s not as straightforward.”

Tra­di­tional pro­tec­tion mech­a­nisms, like a CAPTCHA, which oper­ates on an indi­vidual basis, are still useful, but their deploy­ment comes at a cost: Users may be annoyed if too many CAPTCHAs are shown. As an alter­na­tive, non­in­tru­sive approach, Pub­Crawl was specif­i­cally designed with dis­trib­uted crawling in mind. By iden­ti­fying IP addresses with sim­ilar behavior pat­terns, such as con­necting at sim­ilar inter­vals and fre­quen­cies, Pub­Crawl detects what it expects to be dis­trib­uted web-​​crawling activity.

Once a crawler is detected, the ques­tion is whether it is mali­cious or benign. “You don’t want to block it com­pletely until you know for sure it is mali­cious,” Kirda explained. “Instead, Pub­Crawl essen­tially keeps an eye on it.”

Poten­tially mali­cious con­nec­tions can be rate-​​limited and a human oper­ator can take a closer look. If the oper­a­tors decide that the activity is mali­cious, IPs can also be blocked.

In order to eval­uate the approach, Kirda and his col­leagues used it to scan logs from a large-​​scale social net­work, which then pro­vided feed­back on its suc­cess. Then, the social net­work deployed it in real time, for a more robust eval­u­a­tion. Cur­rently, the social net­work is using the tool as a part of its pro­duc­tion system. Going for­ward, the team expects to iden­tify areas where the soft­ware could be evaded and make it even stronger.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.”

CCIS Professor Guevara Noubir organized a recent NSF workshop in Arlington, Virginia to address the question of biologically-enabled wireless networks. While wireless networks have achieved great successes in the past decade, challenges such as energy efficiency remain. At the same time, bio-organisms such as the brain carry out complex tasks with only a few tens of watts. The clear superiority of biological systems’ efficiency begs the question:  could we one day build biologically -enabled networks?

This conference brought together experts from research, biophysics and biomedical communities to articulate a vision for biologically-enabled wireless networks, define a clear set of challenges to be solved, and make recommendations for future inter-disciplinary collaborations. Presentation topics included:

• Enabling mechanisms for bio-networks, such as electromagnetic energy harvesting and transduction into biological signals, and magnetic control of biological systems
• Molecular computation and communication networks considering both the fundamental information and computation theoretic issues and system design
• Synthetic biology as a way to engineer biologically enabled wireless devices and how biologically enabled devices can be made less sensitive to their environment

Read more at the conference website.