A Newsletter from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering
BYTES FROM 2015-2016
LETTER FROM THE CHAIRMAN
IN THIS ISSUE
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DEPARTMENT NEWS
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FACULTY PROFILES
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ALUMNI REPORT
How smart is too smart when it comes to appliances, innovative techniques in animation, and more of what we’re investigating
Meet the newest members of the department, experts in everything from cyber security to medical image analysis to big data
See where they’re at and how they got there
PLUS... • Stereotype-busting students • Female-empowering initiatives • And More
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Welcome to the Department of Computer Science and Engineering
s you may have already read in the newspaper—or guessed from the new logo in the top-left corner of this page— the School of Engineering has a new name, given in acknowledgement of an incredibly generous gift of $100 million from philanthropists Chandrika and Ranjan Tandon. The funds are sure to heighten our entire school’s already significant role in the city’s tech landscape, so stay tuned for future developments. Meanwhile, our department already has much to report to you. Right now, we have six new faculty members in our ranks: Professors Rumi Chunara, Brendan Dolan-Gavitt, Guido Gerig, Damon McCoy, Paul Morarescu, and Itay Tal. Their expertise bolsters each of our research strengths. You will find more information about each of them in this newsletter. All of our faculty members—new and old alike–have been busy, with most at the forefront of exciting research projects and work in conjunction
with our students. Read more here about Professor Andy Nealen’s Animesh, a program that greatly simplifies typical digital 3D modeling and animating; Professor Enrico Bertini’s RevEx, a tool that assists in visualizing Yelp data; and many more. They’ve been busy—but not too busy to accept multiple awards and fellowships, and I’m proud to announce some of those in these pages as well. We’re especially proud of our programs and events geared toward women, including Career Discovery in Cyber Security: A Women’s Symposium, an annual event that draws everyone from high school students choosing a college to professionals contemplating a mid-career change, and GenCyber, a free, two-week summer program that introduces young women to the fundamentals of computer science and cyber security. I hope this gives you some small idea of the great work we do. Please do come by for a visit or check us out on the Web to learn even more.
What Are Your Prize-Winning Memories?
Alumni—when you think back on your time in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, does a favorite class or professor come to mind? How about an incident that proved to be either funny or meaningful? Write a few lines (no more than around 100 words) and tell us about it. Include your name, address, phone number, and email, because we’ll be choosing one submission to win a trip to New York, including transportation and hotel accommodations, plus dinner with a CSE faculty member of your choosing. Use the QR code at the right to send your entry electronically or mail it to: NYU Tandon School of Engineering Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering Attn: Newsletter Contest 2 MetroTech Ctr. Tenth Floor Brooklyn, NY 11201
DEPARTMENT Animate Objects
A STUDENT APPROVED
ndy Nealen, an assistant professor of game engineering, computer graphics, and perceptual science, has created a system, dubbed Animesh, which makes it possible for even beginners to create sophisticated and complex 3D shapes and animations. “I like to describe AniMesh as a form of Legos for animators, because it allows for building elaborate structures with only the most rudimentary skills needed,” Nealen—who was aided
news by graduate students Ming Jin and Dan Gopstein and Assistant Professor Yotam Gingold of George Mason University—says. “Another analogy that could be made is that this could one day do for animation what Photoshop has done for the art of photography, democratizing the process.” A short demonstration of AniMesh can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=xHCPc0ibdjM
When a grateful former student wanted to honor his graduate advisor, Professor Phyllis Frankl, he hit upon the idea of endowing a scholarship in her name. Now a successful professional who prefers to remain anonymous, he said, “From the very first day I got here, she was an enormous help. For example, it was important that I find scholarship money right away—if not, there would have been no way for me to undertake doctoral work—and she was instrumental in guiding me in that area.” His generous gesture will now ensure that other students benefit from the wisdom and insight that Frankl and her fellow School of Engineering faculty members can provide. Just months after learning of the scholarship, Frankl received another piece of news: she had been named the recipient of the 2015 Jacobs Excellence in Education Award, which has among its criteria a commitment to students and active learning as indicated by supporting statements and documents from individual students and student groups.
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DEPARTMENT
news
The Entrepreneur Will See You Now
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li Heron, the Director of Technology Program Management at HBO, and hackerturned-venture capitalist Lucas Nelson, a Principal at the firm Gotham Ventures, each has another title they happily wear: Entrepreneur in Residence. The pair, who began working at the School of Engineering in 2014, maintains an open-door policy: although the Entrepreneurs in
Residence program is an initiative of CSE, they welcome students of any major to run ideas by them, get advice, and attend their events. This semester, they’re planning talks by the Chief Technology Officers of major companies, and they expect to work with Major League Hacking (MLH), a group that plans weekend-long competitions at which student hackers get together to build websites, applications, hardware hacks, and more. They want to nurture a powerhouse hybrid: an engineer who can also think like a businessperson and understands storyboarding, customer needs, lean and agile methodologies, and other such topics. If they have their way, the School of Engineering might soon need more incubator space. Reach them at NYUPoly-EIRs@googlegroups.com
Is Your Coffee Pot Spying on You?
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hen Consumer Reports wanted to find out what privacy concerns were posed by “smart” products—like coffee pots that allow java fans to program when to start brewing with an iPhone or laptop—they turned to our Offensive Security, Incident Report, and Internet Security Lab to find out. Student hackers equipped the coffee pot and other products with a program called Fishbowl, which captures any information sent to a router or WiFi network, and the devices’ communication history was then examined. The coffee pot, somewhat scarily, turned out to be its own wireless access point, essentially allowing itself to connect to the Internet. Another device brought into the Lab, a child’s tablet computer, required sending potentially
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Six months after receiving the 2014 Visualization Technical Achievement Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Professor Claudio Silva was elected to a two-year term as chair of the organization’s Visualization and Computer Graphics Technical Committee (IEEE VGTC). Professor John Iacono has been awarded a Fulbright Research Fellowship for the 2015-2016 year. The prestigious fellowship will allow him to spend the year at the Algorithms Research Group at the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Brussels, Belgium, where he will focus on the topic of binary search trees. SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, elected Department Chair Nasir Memon a fellow, citing his achievements in multimedia security and lossless image compression.
Visualizing Better Healthcare
For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow rofessor Juliana Freire was recently named a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society. Freire was recognized for her “contributions to provenance management research and technology, and computational reproducibility,”
sensitive information, including names and birthdates, through an unsecured online connection during the set-up process. As objects become smarter, everyone agreed, there must be better assurances of protection for the general public. As a representative of Consumer Reports said at the Lab, “A person shouldn’t have to be a software engineer to know the safety standards of these products.”
NEWS IN BRIEF
which have made possible significant advances in the management, integration, analysis, and visualization of big data. Only the top one percent of all ACM members are ever awarded fellowships. Also this year, Freire was awarded $3.6 million by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop methods to locate and explore hard-to-find information both on the web surface and on the deep web, the parts of the web not indexed by standard commercial search engines.
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onsumers looking for a new healthcare provider often turn to Yelp, a site that allows users to post reviews of local businesses. The sheer volume of data now available on the site can be daunting, however. To alleviate that problem, Assistant Professor Enrico Bertini (an expert in big-data visualization) and his graduate student Cristian Felix helped develop RevEx, which allows a prospective patient to apply multiple filters to his or her query in order to single out reviews
with the desired combination of parameters and keywords—say, reviews with 4 stars containing the word “orthodontist”—and to see the results displayed in clear, easy-to-read format. It was the chance to work on just such important, real-world projects that drew Felix, who earned his undergraduate degree in São Paulo, Brazil, to NYU. “After I applied, Professor Bertini reached out to me personally,” Felix recalls. “And because anyone interested in big-data visualization knows his name, the choice of where to attend graduate school became very plain.” (As plain, we’d say, as choosing a doctor with the help of RevEx!) 3
FACULTY
FACULTY
profiles
Our Newest Additions The opportunity to engage in cutting-edge collaborative research, the lure of being in one of the nation’s fastest growing tech hubs, the chance to work with world-class colleagues . . . there’s a long list of reasons our new faculty members are excited to be joining us. And we’re every bit as excited to have them here. Keep reading to find out a little about each. higher. With ever increasing-amounts of data at our fingertips, Chunara—who was named one of the top young innovators of 2014 by MIT Technology Review—explores the ways in which that information can be used to better the health of individuals and entire communities.
Assistant Professor Rumi Chunara works at the intersection of Big Data and Public Health, using information gleaned from social media sites to predict epidemics, track obesity rates on a local level, and much more. In one study, for example, she discovered that a spate of Twitter posts about cholera had corresponded with an outbreak of the disease in Haiti. In the time it took for the country’s health ministry to examine their data, workers could have been mobilized to distribute needed medical supplies and water purification tablets to lessen the impact of the outbreak. In another study that generated much media buzz, she aggregated data found on Facebook and discovered that in neighborhoods with a higher percentage of people interested in television viewing or other sedentary pursuits, obesity rates were
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Assistant Professor Brendan DolanGavitt’s research has led to new ways of understanding the behavior of large, real-world systems and producing novel defenses against attacks. He explains that while software has expanded into nearly every aspect of modern life, from cars to coffee makers, that expansion has not been accompanied by safer programming practices, and the safety and reliability of those devices is highly suspect. He recently won funding
from the Office of Naval Research for “Embedasploit: a Pen-test in a Box for Industrial Control Systems,” which will create a system to fingerprint an industrial control network, catalog its known flaws, emulate the whole system for simulation, and outline a model that prevents hackers from listening to system activity, injecting malicious traffic, or obtaining binary code.
Glance at Professor Guido Gerig’s computer screen, and you might think you’re looking at a piece of art from the Guggenheim or MoMA. Those bursts of color are not mere abstract designs, however, but attempts to visualize the mysteries of the human brain. Gerig is among the world’s foremost authorities in the field of medical image analysis, and, as such, he has worked with
radiologists, psychologists, childdevelopment experts, and others to devise ways to extract the most possible information from scans of the human brain. His seminal work has led to a deeper understanding of how autism can be predicted, how traumatic brain injuries can best be treated, how the normal brain develops, and more. As a child in his native Switzerland, Gerig spent hours taking apart radios, watches, and small appliances to discover their inner workings, and he applies that same insatiable curiosity to his research today. While those with whom he’s worked make liberal use of terms like “genius” and “miracle worker,” Gerig himself modestly stresses the collaborative nature of his work and the team efforts involved.
Assistant Professor Damon McCoy researches wireless privacy, anonymous communication systems, cyber-physical security (which relates to systems like power grids and smart automotives), and the economics of e-crime. He thus spends much of his time studying shady on-line realms most of us don’t even like to think about. But if you’ve ever been annoyed by intrusive
pop-up ads, been spammed by an untrustworthy-sounding pharmaceutical company, or taken in by a scam posting on Craigslist, you’ll appreciate the importance of his work. Among his most recent projects has been studying ad injection, in which users find that they are seeing intrusive, annoying ads either in addition to, or different from, the ads the Websites they’re visiting intentionally sent. (He and his colleagues discovered that ad injection was impacting more than 1 in 20 unique daily IP addresses accessing Google— tens of millions of users around the globe—and alerted the reputable advertisers affected, to alert them to the deceptive practices being deployed by the injectors.) When his students graduate, he says, they’re going to be a strong line of defense against cybercrime and network intrusions.
With Big Data rapidly pervading every aspect of our lives—from the way we do our banking to how politicians try to win our votes—Industry Associate Professor Paul Morarescu is preparing the next generation of savvy interdisciplinary-minded data scientists needed to tackle all the issues involved.
profiles
The days when they could merely sit in front of their computers is long over, he cautions them, because as the need for concise data analytics spreads to every field, they must now interact with a wide variety of businesspeople, politicians, and others. They must also be statisticians (with the ability to mine data and look for patterns) and computer scientists (because programming is a must), and they might even need to study social psychology, behavioral economics, and other such topics In order to excel.
Industry Assistant Professor Itay Tal dwells in a high-tech world, but among his favorite teaching tools is the decidedly low-tech blackboard, because it allows for greater flexibility to emphasize, re-explain, demonstrate, and illustrate based on the reaction of the students, their body language, and their questions. That type of sensitivity is especially important since he’ll be teaching Design and Analysis of Algorithms I, Foundations of Computer Science, and Introduction to Programming and Problem Solving— seminal courses important to any aspiring computer scientist.
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ALUMNI
report
Samah Saeed on the Tenure Track
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ook down the long list of recipients of the E. J. McCluskey Doctoral Thesis Award, a prestigious annual prize given by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Test Technology Technical Council (TTTC); until recently you would have found that the list included only male doctoral candidates, an unsurprising fact considering the dearth of women in the field of hardware security. Thanks to Samah Saeed, who garnered the award in 2014, the list of McCluskey winners is now displaying some much-needed gender diversity. Saeed, who was recognized by the TTTC for the thesis “DfT [Design for Testability] Approaches and Security Challenges in the Scan Design,” is accustomed to such trailblazing. Notably, she is the first doctoral student of engineering to emerge from New York University’s Abu Dhabi portal (NYUAD). (As an NYU Global Ph.D. Fellow, Saeed earned her degree from the NYU School of Engineering and took courses in Brooklyn, but her research was conducted primarily in Abu Dhabi, under the supervision of advisor Ozgur Sinanoglu, who directs the school’s Design-for-Excellence Lab.) Born in Kuwait, Saeed hails from a science-minded family: her father is an electrical engineer, and her siblings
include a dentist and an aspiring computer engineer. With their encouragement, she entered Kuwait University, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science in 2008 and a master’s degree in the same discipline in 2010, both with high distinction. She arrived in Abu Dhabi the following year. Upon embarking on her doctoral studies, Saeed quickly immersed herself in NYU life, entering Cyber Security Awareness (CSAW) competitions and winning the 2013 Pearl Brownstein Doctoral Research Award. Saeed explains that while much cyber security research focuses on software, electronic chips themselves are prone to vulnerability. “It goes all the way back to the design of the chip,” she says. “They must be designed in such a way that they can be tested periodically, so testing needs easy access to the chip. But making things easy for testing can also mean making them easier for an attacker who knows enough to exploit the test infrastructure. It’s important to find a middle ground.” There is no middle ground, however, when discussing Saeed’s commitment to scholarship and excellence. Awarded her Ph.D. in January 2015, she is now an assistant professor at University of Washington, Tacoma.
ALUMNI IN SHORT
profiles
>> Jorge Poco Now working as: a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Washington Thanks in part to: great internships at Google, Kitware, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Xerox Research
>> Sai Teja Peddinti Now working as: a research scientist in the Infrastructure Privacy group at Google, in Mountain View, California Thanks in part to: the encouragement and support of his advisors, Keith Ross and Justin Cappos
>> Nicholas Anderson Now working as: a member of the Cyber Security R&D team at Sandia National Labs Thanks in part to: his experiences as head of the NYU-Poly Capture the Flag team and curator of Hack Night
>> Tony Tao Now working as: a member of the spamfiltering group at Yahoo! Thanks in part to: classes like “Object Oriented Programming” and “Design and Analysis of Algorithms”
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STUDENT
>> The Polymath Growing up in Silicon Valley with parents who were both engineers, Wells Santo seems almost destined to pursue a career in technology. But if you’re picturing a socially awkward loner hunched over his computer screen, think again. Listen to Santo talk about his minor (Science and Society, with a focus on the philosophy of science), hear about his time as both a bassist for an alternative rock band and a student of classical music theory, and read some of his essays on topics as disparate as Schrodinger’s Cat and neuroscience, and you will definitely re-evaluate any stereotypical notions you might harbor about what a typical Computer Science and Engineering major is like. (Santo is in a dual program and will graduate in 2016 with a bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering and a master’s degree in Computer Science.) The NYU School of Engineering is a perfect fit, he asserts, for someone with wide-ranging interests. “I’m getting a good, solid engineering education, which, incidentally, makes my parents very happy,” he says. “And at the same time I can pursue my interest in the humanities in Washington Square.”
>> The Gamer It’s not every graduate student who enters school already a successful game designer and angel fund investor, but Aaron Isaksen isn’t just any graduate student. The co-founder of AppAbove Games, whose products are distributed in more than 50 countries, and a founding partner of the Indie Fund, which aims to help other game developers, Isaksen arrived at the School of Engineering in 2014 and quickly made his mark—gaining recognition as the incoming Ph.D. candidate
with the best qualifying exam and coauthoring three well-received scholarly papers (one of which took home a best-paper award in the category of Artificial Intelligence and Game Technology from the 2015 Foundations of Digital Games conference.) Isaksen is one of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering members working at the NYU Game Innovation Lab to help game creators better understand the relationship between design and player experience. The system they’re developing reduces the need for iterative and timeconsuming human testing, making it easy
of new algorithms and bridging the divide between the core algorithms community and researchers in other Computer Science disciplines. So, was it all hard work? “We actually played a game,” Cheu said, before going on to explain that the game was based on Van der Waerden’s theorem, which holds that for all positive integers k and c, there is another integer n where any partitioning of {1,2,3,...n} into c subsets results in a k-length arithmetic progression in one of the subsets. Many undergrads would have packed up and headed for the beach, but Cheu felt inspired and fascinated by the work. “I’m definitely considering grad school right now,” he says.
>> The Advocate
for even beginning designers to fine-tune parameters for optimal effect. That’s a winning proposition for everyone.
>> The Theorist
Albert Cheu could have picked any number of ways to spend his summer vacation, but for him the choice was simple; when you’re one of only a handful of top students from around the country to be invited to take part in Combinatorial Algorithms Applied Research (CAAR), you accept. CAAR, a 10-week program hosted by the University of Maryland, is an ultra-competitive National Science Foundation-funded initiative aimed at exposing promising undergraduates to real-world problems requiring the design
Recipient of the 2015 President’s Service Award, Vice-President for Academic Success in the Student Council, and Dean’s List member, Chandrika Khanduri is proving that women in STEM can have it all. Khanduri, from India, is a junior whose focus is cyber security. She is also an advocate for women in science, technology, engineering and math, and enjoys the support of her sisters in Alpha Omega Epsilon, NYU’s first engineering sorority. On campus, you can frequently hear Khanduri talk about the need for more female engineers in industry. “We must make [them] feel welcome and provide support,” she says, pointing to the School of Engineering’s WoMentorship program, which is aimed at fostering peer mentoring relationships between female students. “You can be pretty, and you can be smart at the same time, all it requires is hard work and dedication” declares Khanduri, who herself holds a 3.7 GPA and works as a teaching assistant for an undergraduate programming class. “You just have to keep pushing for the change you want to see.” 7
Female Professors Nurturing Female Scholars Master’s students Ishwarya Rajendrababu and Sowmya Sridhar recently co-wrote a white paper accepted to the University of Seattle’s Data Science Workshop, a National Science Foundation-sponsored event held in August 2015. The paper, “Weather Data Characterization Tool,” was created under the guidance of Adjunct Professor Suzanne McIntosh.
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Hacking the Glass Ceiling
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hose of us who teach entrylevel engineering courses quickly realize that the few women in the room often start out at a disadvantage—they may not know as much about coding or jargon, and that makes them reluctant to join the classroom discussion. But they quickly overcome that small entry hurdle to become stars,” Department Chair Nasir Memon once asserted. Memon and his faculty members are strongly committed to nurturing more of those stars, a worthy goal considering the dearth of women in computer science. (The National Center for Women & Information Technology estimate that women earn only 18% of all undergraduate computer and information sciences degrees and represent a vastly untapped talent pool.) The programs and events they’ve initiated have something for everyone—from the nervous student unsure if she’ll ever be able to learn coding to the mid-career professional considering a change of field. Among their flagship events is the annual Career Discovery in Cyber Security: A Women’s Symposium, a full-day educational and networking conference designed to boost the pipeline of women entering careers in that fast-growing field. This year’s event, which took place on July 30, drew dozens of elite cyber security professionals from such companies as Etsy, Tumblr, Live Nation, and IBM, as well as more than 100 students and mid-career hackerhopefuls who enjoyed hands-on workshops,
keynote addresses, “day-in-the-life” talks, and networking. This summer also saw dozens of eager young students flock to the MetroTech Center to take part in the GenCyber Computer Science for Cyber Security (CS4CS) Summer Program for High School Women, for an introduction to the fundamentals of cyber security and computer science that included hands-on training, trips to Google’s New York City offices, and an immersive introduction to the interdisciplinary field. The list goes on. Fall brought the Women in Computer Science Meet & Greet; meetings of the student group WISE (Women in Search of Excellence); the Girls Talk Tech event honoring pioneering computer scientist Anita Borg; the Microsoft-sponsored intercollegiate Scientista Symposium, whose theme was Let’s Get Digital: The Importance of Technology across STEM Fields; and much more. Popular professor Phyllis Frankl (see page 2) summed up her best advice to female students looking to make the most of the opportunities offered in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering—or any department. “Ask lots of questions. Believe it or not, most professors like it when students come to office hours, especially if they don’t wait until the day before the exam to do so,” she asserted. “I also urge women students to have confidence in their own abilities. Don’t be afraid to take on new challenges and don’t be intimidated by other students who appear to know everything—some may have more experience in some area than you have, but that doesn’t mean they’re better at it.”