researchers. The group's weekly speaker series has featured
people like Miquel de Icaza, vice president of engineering at
Novell, and Stan Lippman, a C++ architect from Microsoft,
who talk to students about the field's latest developments
and their own current research and projects.
chapter activities, and school service. The group provides students
with great resources (like its new library, which has approximately
600 technical books for loan); numerous forums for students to
swap ideas and mingle in casual settings (think board game nights,
barbecues, and student-faculty receptions); and structured pro-
grams that add depth and value to their college experience.
to students by students. "ACM members learn about different
technologies--like Linux, Perl, or game design--that they wouldn't
necessarily be taught about in their classes," explains senior
Chris Lambert, '
known as Crew, taught several of these classes. He also wrote a
A Developer's Notebook, that was printed by O'Reilly Media.
after graduation.
network and laid the groundwork for integrating Linux into the
college system. "You really get involved with the industry and with
the computer science field very intimately working on these sorts
of projects," says John Patota, '09, the current leader of Crew.
Four former Crew members are working full time at Google--
five by this spring--and another worked as an intern there this
summer. Other Crew graduates have joined organizations like
MIT, Turbine, and the Defense Information Systems Agency,
which is affiliated with the U.S. Department of Defense.
"They enrich the social life of the college and provide students
with an opportunity to learn about new technologies in the
computing field that are not generally available in formal
classes. We are proud of their accomplishments and look
forward to their continued success."
distributed computing lab are
working on projects that range
Noubir are using a major grant from the
Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency (DARPA) to work on a wireless
anti-jamming project called Second-
generation wireless Protocol Resiliency
Enabled by Adaptive Diversification,
or SPREAD.
limited over wireless networks, so it is
easy for a malicious attacker to launch
attacks aimed at jamming communica-
tions or exhausting resources available
to legitimate users," explains Chan. Such
attacks could result in major casualties
in a battlefield situation.
keys to maintain security," says Chan. That's
why Chan, with the help of graduate
student Jonathan Wong, has designed
an algorithm to update keys immediately, so
that vulnerabilities resulting from lack of
perfect synchronization can be reduced.
management schemes whereby the
binary tree used to maintain the keys
remains balanced at all times.
designing and building a game-theory model
to analyze and improve communication
security. "In game-theory, the question is:
How do we strategize so we can always
win?" says Sundaram. "You need to
know the strategies your opponents are
going to use and the probability of when
they are going to use them." Their aim is
the optimal strategies and associated
probabilities for the communicating nodes.
projects: Chan is using an NSA grant to
develop educational programs to train
information assurance professionals;
Sundaram and Rajaraman are using an
NSF Theory grant, which they received
this September, to analyze Internet
capacity and vulnerability; and Noubir
is designing cross-layer protocols for
robust and scalable heterogeneous
wireless networks, for which he received
an NSF CAREER Award. Noubir has
constructed a model for his Heterogeneous
Smart Home, a system that allows users
to securely and efficiently interact with
their homes via their cell phones and
multi-hop sensor networks.
and algorithms, have joined the Network
Security group this fall. They come
to Northeastern from top universities
around the world, including UCLA,
IIT Guwahati (India), Bilkent University
(Turkey), Sharif University (Iran), and
several institutions in China.
Hong Kong
Verizon Technological Organization