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Faculty Research Profiles

Larry A. Finkelstein Professor and Dean PhD, University of Birmingham, England

Founded in 1982, Northeastern University's College of Computer Science has grown to encompass 21 full-time faculty, 175 graduate students, and 425 undergraduates, with continued growth projected over the next five years.

The college offers both a Bachelor of Science and Bachelor of Arts degree in computer science and is introducing a Bachelor of Science program in information science. Students may also choose a dual-major program combining computer science with math, physics, or psychology. Our undergraduate programs reflect Northeastern's strength in practice-oriented education. Through the University's cooperative education (co-op) program, students are able to acquire almost two full years of industry experience as part of their degree program, preparing them to contribute professionally immediately upon graduation. Our undergraduates also have opportunities to integrate computer science theory and practice through involvement in faculty research projects. This education recently received international recognition when one of our undergraduates was honored as a Marshall Scholar.

Northeastern's location in the heart of Boston, and the area's enormous concentration of technology-based companies, affords the college many advantages. Undergraduates have a rich array of co-op employment opportunities with prestigious software companies, promising start-ups, and other prominent organizations. Many Boston-area computer professionals are attracted to our master's degree program, enriching the classroom through their wealth of practical experience. Our extensive ties to local industry provide graduate students additional opportunities to engage in practice-focused research projects, or to consider co-op employment.

At the master's level, the college's combination of a strong theoretical foundation and practical training is our distinction. We offer both MS and PhD degrees, as well as a certificate in information resources management presented jointly with Northeastern's College of Business Administration. Our active research programs involve PhD students in a wide variety of challenging and exciting projects.

Keeping pace with the rapidly evolving discipline of computer science, we have developed a number of areas of research excellence. This is demonstrated by our ability to attract external research funding, scholarly publications, and leadership roles within computer science. For example, Professor Mitchell Wand is recognized for his contributions to the area of programming languages and serves on the editorial boards of such publications as Information and Control, the Journal of Functional Programming, Higher-Order and Symbolic Computation, and Mathematical Structures in Computer Science. Professor Karl Lieberherr is a pioneer in the developing field of adaptive programming and serves as coeditor-in-chief of the Journal of Theory and Practice of Object Systems. Professor Betty Salzberg, whose research addresses online database reorganization and parallel database systems, is president of the IEEE-CS Computer Society's Technical Committee on Data Engineering, a member of the VLDB and SIGMOD program committees, and vice-chair of the IEEE ICDE committee.

Working in the area of computational group theory, Professor Gene Cooperman and I have produced several novel algorithmic methods. Professor Cooperman has also made important contributions to extending many of our ideas to the field of distributed computing. In addition, he is vice-chair of the ACM Special Interest Group in Symbolic and Algebraic Manipulation and received a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant supporting a laboratory for cluster-based distributed computing. This new space expands upon the college's laboratory resources available to faculty and graduate students in the University's state-of-the-art Egan Engineering/ Science Research Center.

The list of faculty accomplishments goes on: Professor Agnes Chan, who has worked closely with GTE Laboratories on computer security issues for many years, is known for her work in nonlinear feedback shift register sequences and their application to cryptography. She also is a former member of the IEEE Information Theory Society's board of governors. Professor Harriet Fell has done extensive work in cryptography as well, and has focused her more recent research on assistive technologies for persons with disabilities. She currently serves as secretary of the ACM Special Interest Group on Computers and the Physically Handicapped.

The college also has significant strength in the area of artificial intelligence. Professor Robert Futrelle, founder of the Biological Knowledge Laboratory, is a world leader in understanding diagrams. Professor Carole Hafner has contributed substantially in the areas of natural-language processing and computer-human interfaces. She is an editor of the Artificial Intelligence and Law Journal and the driving force behind the college's development of a new information science program. Professor Patrick Wang is prominent in the field of syntactic pattern recognition and a coeditor of the International Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence. Professor Raoul Smith has pioneered work on emotions in human-computer interactions. And Professor Ronald Williams is a leading expert in neural networks.

In still other areas, Professor Kenneth Baclawski is working on faster Internet search engines. And Professor Bryant York is pursuing important work in parallel algorithms and high-performance computing.

In the last few years, we also have been fortunate to attract several outstanding young faculty researchers. They include Professor William Clinger, in compilers; Professor Ibrahim Matta, in networks; Professor Rajmohan Rajaraman, in distributed systems; and Professor David Lorenz, in software systems.

Professor Clinger has accomplished significant work related to generational garbage collectors and optimizing compilers for Scheme. And Professor Matta, whose research involves dynamic quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees in private ATM networks and middleware support for network-aware applications, received an NSF Faculty Early Career Development award.

Our newest faculty members bring outstanding backgrounds to the college. Professor Rajaraman spent a year at the NSF Center for Discrete Mathematics and Computer Science before joining our faculty. His research interests are distributed and parallel algorithms for problems related to data management, load balancing, routing, and scheduling on distributed networks. Professor Lorenz conducts research in object-oriented programming, adaptive and aspect-oriented programming, and related software engineering disciplines.

To complement traditional computer science research, Professors Fell, Viera Proulx, and Richard Rasala are researching development of interactive software for computer science instruction. They have created innovative materials for teaching C++ to college freshmen and have received support from the NSF and Microsoft Corporation for this work.

Since its founding, our college has grown in both size and accomplishments, and we continue along that path. We are pursuing an aggressive program to increase the number of our faculty, and the depth and breadth of the research we conduct. In an ever-changing profession, we strive always to provide exceptional education in a world-class computing environment.

Table of Contents

Faculty Research Profiles