BYTES from Brooklyn by Spark451

A Newsletter from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering

BYTES FROM IN THIS ISSUE

FACULTY PROFILES Get to know more about two of our faculty working in security and big data

STUDENT PROFILES Four students share stories about their diverse backgrounds and research interests

ALUMNI PROFILES Find out what happens after our students leave the classroom and enter the field

PLUS... • Faculty bios • Department News • Take Our CS Quiz!

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MESSAGE FROM THE DEPARTMENT HEAD

elcome to the Department of Computer Science and Engineering Newsletter. I’m excited to be writing to you now, as Poly becomes NYU’s official school of engineering. Our completed merger is only one of the many reasons for the excitement brewing at our MetroTech campus though, and our department has been a particularly thrilling place to be lately. The single largest department in the entire school, Computer Science and Engineering is now home to several new faculty members, including Justin Cappos, whose profile you can read on page 2. He was recently named one of the 10 most promising, young researchers in the country by Popular Science, and he’s becoming a go-to source for major news outlets on the topic of computer security. We’re very proud to have him. Our other new faces include Juliana Freire and Claudio Silva, who are helping make Poly a juggernaut in the area of Big Data; you can read more about Juliana on page 2. Enrico Bertini is making quite a name for himself in the information visualization and visual analytics community, and if you’re a fan of video games, you’ll be happy to know that Andy Nealen, the designer of the popular and award-winning game Osmos, has joined us as well. While it’s exhilarating to work with our new additions, I’m also gratified by the accomplishments of our many veteran faculty members. You’ll be reading about them as well in the following pages. Now more than ever, the Department of Computer Science and Engineering is engaging in collaborative, crossdiscipline research with other departments and schools within NYU. Our students can currently minor in Game Engineering, and many of our faculty members are also pivotal figures at the new Media and Games Network (MAGNET), which is helping make Downtown Brooklyn an epicenter of gaming. We are involved in the Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP)—a research center focused on helping cities become more productive, livable, equitable, and resilient—and the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Security and Privacy (CRISSP), which I co-direct and which produces graduates who can create exceptionally secure information technologies based on a deep understanding of social, economic, behavioral and public policy implications. We’ve got a dozen new doctoral students at CRISSP who are going to help ensure that the personal information you use on-line remains personal. Our students, whether they’re doctoral candidates

Our students, whether they’re doctoral candidates or the youngest freshmen, continue to amaze us with the creativity and scope of their work. or the youngest freshmen, continue to amaze us with the creativity and scope of their work. They are developing apps and games that result in tens of thousands of downloads, publishing papers as they work closely with their professors on fascinating research projects, engaging in philanthropy, exploring product ideas and forming teams that win seed grants from NYU venture initiatives, and participating in enriching groups like our Cyber Security Club. You’ll be reading about some of them in this newsletter too, and I’ll wager that one day you’ll also be seeing their names as the co-founders of successful start-ups and in peer-reviewed journals, patent applications, and major newspapers. As you can see, like all department heads, I like talking about my great faculty, and I especially love boasting about our terrific students. But have I mentioned that we also happen to organize some of the most incredible events you’ll ever attend? Our Cyber Security Awareness Week (CSAW) has grown into the largest student-centered cyber security competition in the nation and a true worldwide phenomenon. The 2013 competition attracted some 13,500 students and professionals from 82 countries in the initial rounds. I hope you enjoy reading the newsletter and that you’ll continue to keep abreast of everything going on in the department. If the past is any indication, I can definitely promise you more excitement ahead. Spread the word, so that others can see for themselves the tremendous work we’re doing and the stellar group of people—students, faculty, and staff alike—who make up Computer Science and Engineering. Whether you’re affiliated with the department, thinking of becoming affiliated, or simply curious, you’re always welcome to drop by or call me. The tenth floor of 2 MetroTech is a second home to me, and I’d love for you to feel the same.

FEATURED FACULTY MEET OUR FACULTY Associate Professor Edward Wong: “I have recently become the director of the Master’s in Computer Science program within the department, overseeing enrollment, requirements, and course offerings. My research interests lie in the areas of computer vision and pattern recognition. I am currently working on algorithms for video surveillance applications and algorithms for medical image segmentation. My students and I recently developed a novel method for learning pose-invariant features for face recognition and a novel method to simultaneously perform tracking and segmentation in surveillance video.” Industry Associate Professor Fred Strauss: “My focus area is Software Systems Engineering and Senior Projects. Creativity and Innovation and Entrepreneurship. As the undergraduate and graduate coordinator for the software engineering curricula and related laboratory, I oversee the inclusion of modern systems engineering methodologies, techniques, and tools in the program. The software engineering laboratory is supported through software grants from IBM, Microsoft and Oracle. The engineering processes encompass problem identification, creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship. Students work with the incubator to evolve ideas into products and potentially create companies. Other students have entered the Poly and NYU innovation competitions or are working on related NYU projects. I am a member of the Long Forum for Technology (LIFT) Board of Directors, IEEE standards committees, and AITP. I am also an editor and author for several publications, and a mediator”

JULIANA FREIRE If you’ve hailed a taxi in New York City in the last few years, Professor Juliana Freire just might know a little something about your trip. Freire recently used data from more than 540 million New York City cab rides that had been taken over a three-year period to create a visual exploration system that allows for a previously impossible level of spatio-temporal analysis. Having the enormous data set in an accessible visual format could provide insight into many aspects of city life, from traffic patterns to human behavior. Next up: incorporating data from New York City’s popular CitiBike bike-share program. Freire’s work is expected to help city planners and

JUSTIN CAPPOS Justin Cappos traveled from Seattle, where he had completed a postdoc at the University of Washington, to accept his post as a tenure-track assistant professor of computer science and engineering at Poly. Asked if resettling in a city all the way on the other side of the country had been worth it, he answered without hesitation. “At Poly, I get to work with an amazing group of people who are doing practical things to make the world a better place,” he said. “I get to work with Nasir Memon, who spearheads CSAW, one of the biggest cybersecurity competitions in the U.S.; I get to work with Andy Nealen, who designs award-winning video games; I work with Juliana Freire and Claudio Silva, who built the VisTrails tool for big data visualization; with Ted Rappaport who is designing what may be the next 5G standard at NYU WIRELESS. I could go on and on. These aren’t professors working in a self-contained ivory tower. They’re trying to change the world!” That type of practical, hands-on work mirrors Cappos’s own ethos. “I look at a pragmatic problem, figure out how to solve it, deploy a solution that people in the real world will use and then learn from that to find other things to work on,” he explained. Cappos’s work recently earned him a spot on an elite list: the promising young researchers named by Popular Science magazine as the “Brilliant 10”. He was recognized primarily for his work on Seattle, a free, open-source cloud computing system that gives users access to resources that exist in any network, anywhere—it presents the Internet not as a specific ISP or government would have users experience it, but as it exists in any location in the world. For example, a student in China whose access is restricted may use Seattle to circumvent censorship and see the same Internet that a student in Brooklyn would see, in real time. “This isn’t a method of hacking into someone’s computer and controlling it,” explained Cappos, whose computer security background was essential in ensuring the safety of the system. “Instead, Seattle lets users experience the Internet as if they were sitting at someone else’s computer.” When Cappos joined the faculty of Poly, in 2011, he already possessed the kind of draw that could make his former students switch coasts along with him. That’s what happened

policymakers better assess and meet the needs of the millions of denizens of dynamic urban spaces. It’s not the volume of data, she explains, but “the human in the loop. The line from data to knowledge is not a straight line; it requires human interpretation.” In 2013 Freire (along with her colleague Professor Thanasis Korakis) was among 100 university engineers and scientists from around the globe to receive a Google Faculty Research Award, which she is using to support her cuttingedge research into the analysis of extremely complex data sets. In June of that same year she sat on a panel at the United Nations’ New York headquarters, discussing “The Many Faces of Big Data.” Now being profiled by such media outlets as LiveScience.com and the New York Observer, Freire herself is undeniably becoming one of the most well-known faces in the burgeoning Big Data field.

when Monzur Muhammad decided to join the graduate program at NYU-Poly after finishing his own studies at the University of Washington. Muhammad explained that Cappos always pushes his students to aim for top-tier conferences when submitting papers. “That makes us strive for the best,” he said. The chance to work with professors and students he admires is only part of the reason Cappos was drawn to New York City. “I love the diversity and the fact that you can walk down the block and hear 10 different languages within as many minutes,” he says. “And I love being able to jump on the subway instead of driving.” He laughingly added, “The Chinese food here also happens to be better than any I’ve ever had in my life outside of China.” Cappos might be hard-pressed to find time for visits to Chinatown, given the number of projects he’s currently working on. Next up for Cappos, who is also affiliated with NYC MediaLab, CRISSP, CATT, NYU WIRELESS, and the incubators: • Putting the finishing touches on the CATT supported NetCheck project, a diagnostic tool that can determine the causes of failure in networked applications like Skype • Continuing work on the NSF-sponsored Cages project, which protects parts of a computer program from each other so that even if there is a bug in one part of a program, a hacker can be often be prevented from to stealing sensitive information • With funding from CATT, developing PolyPassHash, a new approach to storing user passwords so that even if a company is hacked, hackers cannot uncover user passwords • Updating the NSF-supported project called TUF (The Update Framework), which helps secure notoriously vulnerable software updates for billions of users. Luckily, there’s always take-out or delivery!

MEET OUR FACULTY

DEPARTMENT Awards and Fellowships They aren’t actors and these aren’t the Academy Awards, but our department is still undeniably star-studded. Here are just a few of our red-carpet-worthy occasions. >> Haldun Hadimioglu added to his string of teaching awards in 2010-2011, when he was named Student Activities Faculty Member of the Year for his selfless devotion of time and energy and his mentorship. >> Katherine Isbister was recognized by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation with its prestigious Humboldt Research Fellowship (2011), which offered her the opportunity to conduct collaborative research at the Technische Universität in Berlin. She and her colleagues there drew upon studies of how physical movements and gestures affect human emotions to develop better human-computer interfaces. >> In 2012 Keith Ross was chosen as a fellow of the Association for Computer Machining (ACM) in recognition of his contributions to the design and modeling of computer networks and Internet applications. The ACM, the world’s largest professional society for computer science, elevates no more than one percent of its members to fellows, a rare honor. >> Claudio Silva was named a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the world’s largest technical professional association, in 2012 “for contributions to geometric computing and visualization.” Like the ACM, the IEEE honors only a small fraction of its members with the designation of fellow. >> Juliana Freire was the recipient of a 2013 Google Faculty Research Award, a prize established to support cutting-edge research in various disciplines of computer science and engineering. She drew the attention of the search-engine giant

news for her efforts to analyze extremely complex data sets in order to better understand the dynamics of cities, assess their service needs, and ensure that they are met. To that end, Freire is exploring data from a central element of urban life in New York City—taxi cab rides—as a model for a new framework for analyzing spatio-temporal data. >> We always knew he was brilliant, but now it’s been officially recognized. In 2013 Justin Cappos joined an elite group of young researchers named by Popular Science magazine as this year’s “Brilliant 10,” mainly for his work on the free, open-source cloud computing system known as Seattle. (This is the first time that a school the size of NYU-Poly has had two Brilliant 10 winners. Maurizio Porfiri, associate professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering and director of the NYU-Poly Dynamical Systems Lab, made the list in 2010 in recognition of his work with bio-inspired robots.) We could paper a whole room with our best-paper awards, but here are just a few ... >> Best Paper in Signal Processing 2012 (awarded by the IEEE Signal Processsing Society): Yagiz Sutcu, Qiming Li, and Nasir Memon, “Protecting Biometric Templates with Sketch: Theory and Practice” >> Best Paper in Multimedia Communications 2011 (awarded by the IEEE Communications Society): Z. Liu, Y. Shen, K. W. Ross, S. Panwar, and Y. Wang, “LayerP2P: Using Layered Video Chunks in P2P Live Streaming”

Assistant Professor Justin Cappos: “I’m focused on improving the security and efficiency of real-world systems. I created the Seattle testbed, which is now deployed on tens of thousands of machines. I’m very active in software update security, and my work has been adopted widely by industry, enhancing the security of millions of clients and servers around the world. The media often calls upon me as an expert in computer security. I keep busy here at Poly, working with the NYC MediaLab, CRISSP, CATT, NYU WIRELESS, and the incubators. I’m engaged in several projects that are still in stealth mode and am always looking for talented people to collaborate with.” Professor Nasir Memon: “I’m the director of the Information Systems and Internet Security (ISIS) laboratory at NYU-Poly as well as one of the founding members of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Security and Privacy (CRISSP). My research interests include digital forensics, data compression, and multimedia computing and security. I love to work with students to solve problems that are real and address a need. My goal is to design solutions that are effective and realistic and can be transitioned to practice.” Professor Claudio Silva: “I’m the Head of Disciplines of CUSP (Center for Urban Science and Progress), and I also hold faculty appointments at Courant and the Center for Data Science. I’ve coauthored more than 200 technical papers and 11 U.S. patents (primarily in visualization, geometry processing, computer graphics, scientific data management and HPC), and I’m currently focused on Big Data and Urban Systems.”

>> Best Paper at the Eurographics Workshop on Parallel Graphics and Visualization 2011: L. Ha, C. Silva, J. Krueger, J. Comba, and S. Joshi, “Optimal Multi-Image Processing Streaming Framework on Parallel Heterogeneous Systems” (Continued on page 8) 3

STUDENT STORIES MEET OUR FACULTY Assistant Professor Enrico Bertini: “I focus on the areas of information visualization and visual analytics. I study how to help people make sense of large and complex data sets through interactive data visualization and build novel techniques and tools to support their work. I was educated at Sapienza University of Rome and have held posts at the University of Konstanz in Germany and the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, where I worked on applied visualization projects in the area of network security and biochemistry. I am a co-founder of the BELIV Workshop series on Evaluation in Information Visualization. I am also the editor of a podcast on data visualization called Data Stories (http://datastori.es).” Professor Keith Ross: “I hold the Leonard J. Shustek Chair in Computer Science and am the Vice Dean of Business and Engineering at NYU Shanghai. My research interests are in social networks, Internet privacy, Internet piracy, peer-to-peer networks, Internet security, and video distribution in the Internet. I’m the co-author of the widely used textbook Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach Featuring the Internet and a fellow of both the ACM and IEEE.” Associate Professor Katherine Isbister: “My research focus is Games and Human Computer Interaction (HCI). My group builds research prototype games and other digital experiences that are meant to broaden the emotional and social palette of everyday interaction with technology, innovating design and research techniques. I’m Research Director of the Game Innovation Lab at NYU-Poly and have a joint appointment at the NYU Tisch Game Center. I’m also on the Faculty leadership ‘Presidium’ for the newly created NYU MAGNET Center.”

STUDENT STORIES

SARAH ALLEN It takes a special kind of person to tackle New York City and independent living at the age of 18, but that’s just what Sarah Allen did, working at a retail job to support herself. “I sold computers and as I began fixing them and learning more about them, I decided I wanted to pursue the field on a more serious level.” She had heard of NYU-Poly and one day made an appointment to meet with the admissions office. “The admissions officers there found several scholarship opportunities at Poly to help me finance my education,” she recalled gratefully. Once at Poly, Allen began immersing herself in a variety of projects and particularly enjoyed her time with the theory group. “Professors Iacono and Hellerstein were both really instrumental in encouraging me to begin doing research and in introducing me to what that entails,” she remembered. “That being said, there were many other professors who were also really supportive in helping me to find my interests and pointing me in the right direction.” That guidance led her in the direction of Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she is now a first-year doctoral student in the group devoted to Algorithms and Complexity Theory. Her work there is being supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. “Without question, I wouldn’t be here without the support of the faculty at Poly,” she asserted. “So many members of the faculty were truly invested in helping me to succeed.” She continued, “I was lucky to have a lot of individual guidance and support from my professors, especially

MING JIN More so than most of the movie-going public, computer scientists like Ming Jin know that blockbusters like Toy Story and Shrek don’t end up on the big screen without a lot of effort and sweat. “Even though there have been many advances in computer graphics over the last decade, it can still be a laborious and frustrating process for the makers of animated films and video games,” Jin, a doctoral student, said. “Part of my studies involve trying to understand those frustrations and helping to alleviate them.” Readying 3-D character models for animation—a process known as rigging—can take hours and hours of work if done by hand, Jin explained. The rigger must examine the 3D rendering and painstakingly attach a system of joints and handles—which functions somewhat like a skeleton—so that animators can manipulate them into various poses. Existing automatic rigging approaches don’t allow for incremental updates, a grave shortcoming in cases where the shape of a model needs revision after the rigging has been completed. Jin’s goal is to develop new software and algorithms to circumvent those problems. Although he is soft-spoken and humble about his accomplishments, the industry has taken notice, and Jin recently co-authored a paper that was published in the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Transactions on Graphics as well as in Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH.

NAPA SAE-BAE “I am one of eight siblings, so when I came to New York City to study, my parents weren’t too upset,” Napa Sae-Bae, who arrived here in 2008 to earn a master’s degree, laughed. “They still had seven children back in Thailand.” In recent years, however, that number dwindled. One brother subsequently came to the U.S. to attend culinary school and become a pastry chef, while another, Prasit, followed her all the way to NYU-Poly, where he is focused on cyber security. Sae-Bae herself, now working towards her doctoral degree, is engaged in finding new ways for users to authenticate on their touch devices. “I have the best of both worlds here at Poly,” she said enthusiastically. “I work closely with Professor Nasir Memon, who advises me on the technical side of things, and then I also work with Professor Katherine [Isbister], who helps me with the human elements in designing the studies. It’s a great combination, and they really complement each other.” Told that those professors must think very highly of her, Sae-Bae shrugs off the praise. “I’m just an average international student, like many others here at Poly. We are

during the whole process of choosing future programs and applying to graduate school.” Asked if she has any advice for current Poly students hoping to follow in her footsteps, she said, “You have a lot of great opportunities and excellent faculty willing to work with you, so take advantage of that. Take the initiative and seize every opportunity!”

(SIGGRAPH is a special-interest group within the ACM that consists of researchers, artists, developers, filmmakers, scientists, and business professionals who share an interest in computer graphics and interactive techniques.) The paper describes a system that unifies the modeling and rigging stages of 3D character animation, allowing users to create a rig for each sketched part in real time, updating the rig as parts are merged or cut. As a result, users can freely pose and animate their shapes and characters even while making modifications to the base shape. Jin is not concerned only with the problems of professionals. “Maybe there are 13-year-old aspiring animators out there with great ideas,” he said. “I want to develop accessible tools that will allow them to bring their creations to life through computer animation.” When he was that age, Jin still lived in his native China, and he earned his undergraduate and master’s degrees in Shanghai. (“It’s very exciting that NYU has a campus there now,” he noted.) He came to the U.S. to study at Rutgers University with Professor Andy Nealen, who is well-known for designing award-winning video games, and when Nealen moved to NYU-Poly, Jin made the move as well. “I was grateful to have the chance to continue studying with Professor Nealen,” he said. “And also for the chance to be at a place like Poly, which has such a first-rate computer science department.” Any 13-year-old who wants to follow in the footsteps of Walt Disney or John Lasseter may one day be very happy that Jin ended up here!

HENDRIK STROBELT Hendrik Strobelt might now be able to visualize massive data sets, but as an East German child born in 1979, he had difficulty visualizing ever leaving his country to work in the U.S. “At times it hits me how unlikely it was that I would end up here, in New York City of all places,” he said. “The reunification [of East and West Germany in 1990] was instrumental in allowing me to do so.” Born to parents who were both civil engineers, Strobelt earned his Abitur (A levels) at Käthe Kollwitz Gymnasium, in the town of Zwickau, before studying computer science at Technische Universität Dresden and the University of Konstanz, where he earned his doctoral degree. Drawn to the liveliness and centrality of New York, he began researching places at which to conduct post-doctoral research on Information Visualization and Visual Analytics. “It is easy to fall in love with this city as I did,” he said. “And when I learned that Poly was becoming a strong presence in the Visualization and Big Data community, the choice seemed natural.” Once here, Strobelt, who counted computers as a hobby long before they became his profession, began attending informal public meet-ups for people interested in big data. He soon met a group from the United Nations who was working on a project called MY World, a global survey asking people to choose their priorities for a better world. More than 1,000,000 people from 194 countries have cast their vote so far, providing a potential wealth of useful information. But such a rich data source, they knew, presented a daunting challenge to data analysts, who would need to build an accessible, interactive way to effectively explore the results. Together with U.N. Global Pulse, an initiative launched by the U.N. Secretary General, Strobelt tackled the problem. Juan Serrats and Michael Velez, who attended Professor Enrico Bertini’s Information Visualization class, joined the team. They

all just trying to work as hard as we can to advance ourselves and get opportunities we might not have at home. We know we should take advantage of every minute we are privileged to be here.” In 2011 Sae-Bae was featured in an issue of Forbes magazine, which reported on her prototype of a gestureauthentication system that captures enough unique user’s information (hand size, finger placement, and speed of movement, for example) to potentially be a safe and efficient replacement for typed-in passwords. The goal, she said, is to create a user experience that is so much fun that people actually look forward to it, as opposed to the dread many feel when forced to remember multiple lengthy passwords. The work also resulted in a paper presented at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Periodically Sae-Bae returns to visit her native Thailand, where she earned her undergraduate degree in telecommunications engineering at KMITL—“The full Thai name is very long and very difficult to relate to those who don’t speak the language,” she cautioned. She plans to one day return and pursue a career in academia. She said, however, “You can see how fond I am of New York City and of Poly. Once I earned my master’s degree, I didn’t think of leaving to get my doctoral degree anywhere else.”

created a preliminary data visualization of the answers received when the survey asked users to freely type in responses (in addition to choosing one of the multiple choice options). That aggregation, which has been called the first of its kind, allowed the U.N. to see an accurate representation of individual global voices. The data showed that the most common single word exhibited in people’s responses was “AIDS,” while the most frequent four-word chain was “honest and responsive government.” A second visualization, highlighting the relationship between typed-in entries and multiple-choice votes, was exhibited at the UNICEF Building in the U.N. Plaza and can been seen at: http://hendrik.strobelt.com/Prio17Combined/. When not working, Strobelt enjoys volleyball and squash, and he has also started jogging in New York City—an activity that gives him an entirely different sort of picture of the world.

MEET OUR FACULTY Professor Juliana Freire: “I work in the general area of data management. Recently, I have worked on three main problem areas: Big Data analysis and visualization applied to urban and social data; provenance management, in particular to support reproducibility of computational processes; and large-scale information integration.” Professor Torsten Suel: “My research is focused on building better, and particularly more efficient, search engines. Current large-scale engines such as Google or Microsoft Bing are based on huge data centers with hundreds of thousands of machines--this uses up a lot of resources and also results in a marketplace dominated by a handful of large players. My students and I are searching for ways to reduce the resource requirements for large-scale search, and we are also exploring new, more open, architectures that could lead to a more diverse playing field for search. Because being able to find stuff seems really important in the Information Age--you don’t want that to be dominated by a few companies.” Professor Boris Aronov: “I am a geometer. You may ask what a geometer is doing in a computer science department. I will try to explain: Like video games or movies made with help of computer animation? Used Google Maps, Mapquest, or OpenStreetMap? Heard of computer-aided design? In these and many other fields one has to process geometric information. Computational geometers study how to do this in the most efficient way. I am a computational geometer.”

ANNALS OF OUR ALUMS MEET OUR FACULTY Assistant Professor Andrew Nealen: “I design interfaces, algorithms, and systems for games, digital shape modeling tools and virtual cameras. My research is based on minimalist principles and leverages and extends the understanding of how humans perceive shape, motion, and color. I’m a codeveloper of the video game Osmos, which won the 2011 Apple Design Award.” Associate Professor John Iacono: “I’m focused on efficient methods for organizing and querying data in a variety of scenarios. This is the field of data structures, which has become increasingly important in the age of big data. Modern computers have increasingly sophisticated architectures, with multiple levels, speeds, and sizes of cache, and I am interested in modeling these and other features of modern computer architecture and then developing algorithms and data structures in these models. I’m particularly fond of binary search trees and heaps, and I work to find the best possible variants of these most fundamental structures. I also enjoy working on algorithms for geometric data.” Industry Professor John Sterling: “I have a broad range of interests, including operating systems, AI and most recently game programming. I am a firm believer that a software developer have a deep understanding of at least one ‘core’ language, should be productive with at least one high-level language and be at least reasonably familiar with programming in some assembly language. In addition to teaching courses, I also coach the programming team. For me, programming has always been a pleasure, and I very much enjoy helping others see the fun and focus on the mastery of these skills.”

JULIAN COHEN Even the most stalwart graduates of a school—those actively involved in the Alumni Association or those who proudly wear their school T-shirts long after they’ve earned their degrees— generally find themselves back on campus a few times a year at most and then only to attend reunions, sports matches, or other such special events. Julian Cohen, however, returns to Poly at least once a week. Cohen, who graduated in 2013 and now works for the asset management company BlackRock, said, ““The first thing I did when I got here as a freshman was to visit the Information Systems and Internet Security (ISIS) lab and introduce myself. I was very involved in all the lab’s programs during my student years at Poly, so I’m now serving as a technical advisor. The current students are doing a great job keeping everything I worked on running smoothly, but I like to help out where I can.” Cohen was referring, in part, to Poly’s Cyber Security Club. “It was pretty loosely structured when I first arrived,”

DAN GUIDO By his junior year of high school, Dan Guido had been banned from his school’s computer lab. His crime? He had uncovered vulnerabilities in the school district’s network and brought them to the attention of administrators who, rather than being grateful for the information, considered him a threat. At NYU-Poly, where he later earned a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, his talents were much more appreciated, and Guido, who joined Poly’s faculty in 2008, now serves as the school’s “Hacker-in-Residence,” a title that calls for him to create exercises that expose cyber security students to realworld hacking scenarios. Guido’s Application Security and Vulnerability Analysis courses are a major reason why the cyber security program at NYU-Poly is considered one of the best in the nation. His material has even been incorporated into courses at other universities and used by private security firms around the country. (So prized are Guido’s students that every boutique security firm in New York City counts at least one NYU-Poly

MEET OUR FACULTY

he recalled. “As president, I organized weekly meetings and recruited industry professionals to speak to us. Then, in 2010, we realized we needed more hands-on, practical activities, and that’s how Hack Night started.” He also became heavily involved in the long-standing Capture the Flag (CTF) Team. “We made it much more approachable and interactive,” he said. “Now it’s a very collaborative experience. Members do hands-on projects and we can help them get internships.” In the process, Cohen transformed Poly’s CTF from a small, niche event, into the largest such competition in the world and has attracted attention from such media outlets as USA Today, the Wall Street Journal and Fox News. Cohen retains the enthusiasm for Poly he initially felt in 2008, when he went to his first Cyber Security Awareness Week (CSAW) competition as a student at Brooklyn Technical High School. (He had cut a day of classes to attend.) “That day I met Dan Guido, Vikram Padman, and others who told me how the lab was a great offensive research environment. After that, there was no doubt in my mind that I would be attending Poly,” he recalled. “There are talented professors here who have created a great environment in the department. They helped the Cyber Security Club, the lab, and me all grow.”

graduate among its workforce.) In 2012 Guido founded THREADS, a security conference that takes place during NYU-Poly’s Cybersecurity Awareness Week (CSAW), and in 2013 he persuaded famed hacker Peiter “Mudge” Zatko (who once testified to the U.S. Senate that he could take down the Internet in 30 minutes) to be the keynote speaker. Busy researching and teaching such subjects as threat intelligence, intrusion detection, mobile platform security, and automated penetration testing, Guido still found time in 2012 to launch Trail of Bits, an independent information security company that, among other services, simulates attacks in order to teach companies how to strategically prepare for real ones. He likens starting his own company to becoming a parent to more than a dozen children at once—he now has little time for anything but work. Luckily that work sometimes takes him to Honolulu, Spain, Ottawa, and Austin, among other locales, and he recently gave the keynote address at a conference in Belgium, where, as he reports, the castles, chocolates, and beer were all first-rate. He’s always happy, however, to return to his white-hat hacking back in Brooklyn, which is becoming, thanks in part to him, an epicenter of practical, hands-on cyber security education.

NEW ACADEMIC Now more than ever, the Department of Computer Science and Engineering is engaging in collaborative, cross-discipline research with other departments and schools within NYU. >> city science We’ve already heard all the puns about being on the “CUSP” of something new; they may be corny but they’re very apt! The Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP), the world’s leading authority in the emerging field of “Urban Informatics,” uses New York City as a massive laboratory and classroom, and its researchers are set to help cities around the globe become more productive, more livable, more equitable, and more resilient. >> MAGNET-ic APPEAL It’s not all fun and games at the new Media and Games Network (MAGNET), just two floors below us at 2 MetroTech. MAGNET co-locates NYU’s teaching and research programs in game design and digital media design, games as a creative art form, computer science, and engineering. Interested in game engineering? MAGNET and the Department of Computer Science and Engineering are a winning combination.

notes >> We’re Number One! Not only was Poly one of the earliest schools to introduce a master’s degree in cyber security, the Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C), the country’s most prominent association of academic institutions championing online higher education, recently recognized our cyber security virtual master’s degree as the nation’s “Outstanding Online Program.” (We were awarded National Security Agency approval for the program nearly a decade ago and are designated both a Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education and a Center of Academic Excellence in Research.) >> We Play Nicely With Others Nasir Memon co-directs NYU-Poly’s Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Security and Privacy (CRISSP), which brings together educators from various fields to encourage the development of secure information technologies that take into consideration social, economic, behavioral and public policy implications. The center merges Poly’s security-technology strengths with NYU’s formidable expertise in cryptography (the Courant Institute), public policy and planning (the Institute for Civil Infrastructure Systems), the economics of information security (the Stern School), and legal issues and privacy (the Center on Law and Security). Another partner, the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, provides key expertise in the handling of cyber-crime.

Industry Professor Haldun Hadimioglu: “My teaching and research areas are computer architecture, parallel processing, reconfigurable systems, nanosystems and digital logic. I have organized workshops and conferences in these areas and was an associate editor of the IEEE Computer Architecture Letters. I am currently interested in reconfigurable computing and nano-structures. I am also interested in teaching hardware courses in novel ways, such as using high-level languages. I have received a number of teaching awards at NYU-Poly. I am a co-chair of the undergraduate Computer Engineering Steering Committee here and am involved in Computer Engineering activities.” Professor Phyllis Frankl: “My research focuses on software analysis and testing. I develop and evaluate techniques for trying to automatically find problems in software. The problems may be ordinary bugs or may be problems related to security or privacy. In recent years, I’ve been particularly interested in applications that interact with databases, including web-database applications and smart phone applications.” Lecturer Daniel KatzBraunschweig: “In all aspects of my life, I take on the role of teacher. Having worked in the computing industry and IT consulting since 1997, I have acquired numerous industry certifications, including those from companies such as Microsoft and Cisco. I am usually involved in teaching Operating Systems, Programming Languages, Java and numerous other courses. I have just begun applying for grants in security related research. In my spare time, I enjoy flying airplanes and teaching others to fly.”

DEPARTMENT

>> 1 0

Number of years event has been held

>> 1 3,500 Students who participated in the initial rounds of the Capture the Flag (CTF) competition

.3 3 million Number of “hits” received during the CTF preliminaries

>> 1 ,500

Number of teens trying to solve the mystery in the High School Forensics competition

>> 8 6

Number of countries participants hailed from

Bookshelf In the mood for a good book? Our faculty members have written some top-sellers. >> Keith Ross’s textbook, Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach, now in its sixth edition, continues to be the most popular textbook on computer networking in the world. It has been translated into more than a dozen languages— including French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Greek, Polish, Russian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Turkish—and has had well over 1400 citations.

>> Nasir Memon’s Digital Image Forensics: There Is More to a Picture than Meets the Eye, published in 2012, examines the ways in which digital images have become ever more ubiquitous as legal and medical evidence, just as they have become our primary source of news and have replaced paper-based financial documentation. The book takes a fascinating look at the profound problems of veracity and progeny that have arisen at the same time: It looks real, but is it? What camera captured it? Has it been doctored or subtly altered? Providing answers to those slippery issues in light of an environment where even novice users can alter digital media, Memon has earned praise from reviewers for his authoritative volume.

QUIZ

DEPARTMENT QUIZ 1. Which faculty member served on active duty in the U.S. Army for several years?

A. Ming Leung

2. Which faculty member is most likely to be able to discuss the fine points of Szechuan cuisine?

B. Lisa Hellerstein

3. Which faculty member began cooking at age 12 and is now the designated family chef?

C. Haldun Hadimioglu

4. Who advises the Badminton Club? 5. Whose hidden talent is the ability to sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” in an unusual way?

D. Justin Cappos

6. Who is a skilled table-tennis umpire?

E. John Iacono

7. Which faculty member is an avid historian as well as scientist? 8. Who owns a beloved mixed-breed dog that may include some corgi blood? 9. Which faculty member counts the airports he has been in, with the number now reaching more than 120? 10. Which outwardly well-adjusted, stable faculty member has a hidden dark side that enjoys violent mafia movies? 11. Which faculty member has been featured on NPR explaining how the X-Box Kinect tracks your moves?

F. Phyllis Frankl

G. Nasir Memon

H. Katherine Isbister

I. Enrico Bertini

12. Who “fell in love with data” so deeply that they blog about it? 13. Who has owned and played more than 270 games, which they have categorized alphabetically? 1) D 2) D 3) A 4) A 5) B 6) C 7) C 8) F 9) E 10) G 11) H 12) I 13) J

by the Numbers!

(continued from page 3)

J. Andrew Nealen

>> ANSWERS

CSAW

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