The College of Computer and Information Science is dedicated to creating and disseminating knowledge through:
- Individual faculty and research groups
- Collaborations with researchers in other disciplines
- Affiliations with interdisciplinary research centers
The college is gaining international prominence for interdisciplinary research tackling some of society’s most pressing concerns. This research focuses on four interrelated themes:
Cyber Security
Focused on systems security and wireless security, our researchers are concerned with improving the detection and analysis of malware and providing secure, safe, and reliable services to users. Their work has contributed to Northeastern’s designation by the National Security Agency and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security as a National Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Research and Education.
Health Informatics
Cross-disciplinary research integrating knowledge from computer science, behavioral science, and health care is establishing Northeastern as a leader in designing and evaluating technology that uses the Internet, mobile devices, advanced sensors, and sophisticated computing techniques to improve health delivery and promote wellness.
Network Science
Network science focuses on network robustness in the face of failures and attack; the laws governing network evolution; and the spread of ideas, viruses, and diseases in social, information, or computer networks. Our researchers are making fundamental contributions to network science, including:
- The foundations of scale-free networks
- Its application to predicting the spread of pandemics
- The role of networks in political and social systems
Software Reliability
Our increasingly digital and interconnected society requires a cyber infrastructure that works reliably. Individuals, government, and commerce also depend on software to perform critical tasks correctly. Our faculty researchers have achieved an international reputation in software reliability based on their contributions to the fields of programming languages, formal methods, and software engineering. These researchers work in several important areas:
- Developing new programming languages that build in reliability to eliminate the possibility of the simple errors that cause most software failures
- Identifying security mechanisms that detect unforeseen error conditions and allow programs to react to them
- Using formal methods to specify the desired behavior of both software and safety-critical cyber-physical systems.
