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Two Researchers Join CCIS Faculty

CIS welcomed two new faculty
members this fall, enhancing its
strengths in the areas of secu-

rity and human-computer interaction.

Riccardo Pucella comes to

Northeastern from Cornell University,
where he had been a postdoctoral fellow
since earning his PhD in computer
science in 2004. His current research
focuses on the theoretical and logical
foundations of security.

One goal of his work is to understand

what people mean by security, and to
develop methods to verify whether a
system is achieving the desired func-
tionality. He is working on methods
that can be used both for discovery--
to determine what security features
a system should have--and for
verification--to determine whether a
system meets security specifications.

Pucella's research at CCIS will relate

to both the programming languages
group and the networking group. At
Cornell and at McGill University, where
he received his master's and bachelor's
degrees, Pucella studied the work of
Trustee Professor Matthias Felleisen
and Professor Mitchell Wand.

"I'm very happy to be at Northeastern

and to be working with both of them,"
he says. "And I'm happy to be in Boston,
with its great density of intellectuals."

The second new member of the

faculty, Timothy Bickmore, was an
assistant professor of medicine at
Boston University School of Medicine
and a research assistant in the MIT Media
Lab before coming to Northeastern
this year.

With a PhD in media arts and

sciences from MIT, Bickmore focuses
on using animated agents to maintain
social and emotional relationships with

users and influence behavior. At the
MIT Media Lab, he studied the role of
nonverbal behavior in conversation, and
the role of social dialogue in building
trust between a user and a conversational
agent. This work led to the development
of a life-sized, animated real-estate agent
who builds rapport with users using
speech, gestures, gaze, intonation, and
other nonverbal modalities.

Later, he used animated agents to

motivate students to stick with exercise
programs. This successful work led to
the BU School of Medicine appointment,
where he did similar work involving
geriatric patients. Also at BU, he had
the opportunity to study doctor-patient

relationship building more closely and
learned about ways to align his work
with other medical interventions.

At Northeastern, Bickmore has

joined the human-computer interaction
group, where he is continuing his work
on animated agents, with an emphasis
on long-term interactions and increas-
ingly complex social interaction and
natural language dialog (see related
story, page 3).

I'm very pleased that we were able

to recruit such talented researchers,"
says CCIS Dean Larry Finkelstein. "It is
a tribute to the ever-increasing prestige
of the college and the excellent work that
is done here."

Assistant Professor Riccardo Pucella

The two newest recruits to the CCIS faculty are a tribute

to the ever-increasing prestige of the college.

Assistant Professor Timothy Bickmore