Corporate & Graduate Information Sheet
Updated - November 1999
Computer Science Faculty
Sergio A. Alvarez, Visiting Assistant Professor; Ph.D., Maryland, 1996. Metrics for Knowledge Combination and Data Analysis, Models of Uncertainty, Neural Networks.
Lee A. Becker, Associate Professor; Ph.D., Illinois, 1978. Artificial Intelligence, Visual Communication, Object-oriented systems.
David C. Brown, Professor; Ph.D., Ohio State, 1984. Knowledge-Based Design Systems, Artificial Intelligence.
Michael Ciaraldi, Professor of Practice, M.S., University of Rochester. Software Engineering, Networks.
Mark L. Claypool, Assistant Professor; Ph.D., Minnesota, 1997. Distributed systems, collaborative systems, networking, multimedia
Isabel F. Cruz, Assistant Professor; Ph.D., Toronto, 1994. Database systems, multimedia information systems, digital libraries, user interfaces, information visualization, visual languages, graph drawing, constraints.
David Finkel, Professor; Ph.D., Chicago, 1971. Computer System Performance Evaluation, Distributed Computing Systems.
Michael A. Gennert, Associate Professor; Sc.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1987. Computer vision, spatio-temporal databases, theoretical computer science.
Nabil I. Hachem, Associate Professor; Ph.D., Syracuse, 1988. Very Large Data and Knowledge Bases, Computer Architecture and Database Machines.
Glynis Hamel, Teaching Assistants Coordinator; M.S., Worcester Polytechnic Institute, 1986.
George T. Heineman, Assistant Professor; Ph.D., Columbia, 1996. Software Engineering, object-oriented technologies, database systems, transaction management.
Micha Hofri, Professor and Head of the Computer Science Department; D.Sc. Technion (Haifa, Israel), 1972. Analysis of algorithms, Performance evaluation, Applied probability, Operating Systems.
Robert E. Kinicki, Associate Professor; Ph.D., Duke, 1978. Network management, Distributed Systems, Computer System Performance Evaluation, Computer Networks.
Karen A. Lemone, Associate Professor; Ph.D., Northeastern, 1979. Electronic documents, Language Translation.
Soraya Rana, Assistant Professor; Ph.D., Colorado State University, 1999. Evolutionary Computation, Heuristic Search, Artificial Intelligence, Scheduling.
Carolina Ruiz, Assistant Professor; Ph.D., Maryland, 1996. Logic Programming, Deductive Databases, Data Mining.
Elke A. Rundensteiner, Associate Professor; Ph.D., Irvine, 1992. Object-Oriented and Multi-Media Databases, Digital Libraries.
Gabor Sarkozy, Assistant Professor; Ph.D., Rutgers, 1994. Graph Theory, Combinatorics, Algorithms.
Stanley M. Selkow, Professor; Ph.D., Pennsylvania, 1970. Combinatorial Algorithms, Graph Theory, Analysis of algorithms.
Mark R. Stevens, Assistant Professor; Ph.D., Colorado State University, 1999. Computer Vision, Computer Graphics, Pattern Recognition, Artificial Intelligence.
Matthew O. Ward, Associate Professor; Ph.D., Connecticut, 1981. Data and information visualization, computer graphics, and spatial data analysis and management.
Craig E. Wills, Associate Professor; Ph.D., Purdue, 1988. Distributed Systems, Networking, User Interfaces.
General Introduction
The computer science department is involved in innovative work in many research areas. This enables the cross fertilization of ideas with colleagues in biology, electrical engineering, materials science, civil engineering and mechanical engineering; as well as with many electronics and computer industries located in New England's diverse high-technology region.
Computer science plays a major role in maintaining WPI's 125-year-old tradition of academic excellence. Today, more than ever before, the department's recognition of the importance of active scholarship is leading to new levels of research.
After celebrating our 20th anniversary in 1989, the department moved into the newly constructed Fuller Laboratories in January 1990. Facilities include attractive office spaces for faculty, graduate students and staff, eight instructional laboratories, six research labs, and modern meeting rooms. The significant improvement in research space has expanded our horizons for research activity, and has supported growth in our Ph.D. program, which was established in 1983. The educational labs provide space to house workstations for student use, producing a high quality computer laboratory experience for all CS courses.
The CS Department has about 450 undergraduates, and about 170 full- and part- time graduate students, with about 20 of those working towards a Ph.D. One third to one half of the full-time graduate students receive financial aid from WPI or from faculty research grants.
A leader in undergraduate education, WPI is gaining recognition for its publications, graduate programs and research. The number of CS research grants and supported Ph.D. candidates remains very encouraging. Our graduate program has been completely updated, with a challenging set of core areas, and a graduate specialization in Computer and Communications Networks (CCN) has been established in conjunction with the ECE Department.
Research Groups
CS research is nurtured by its research groups. Each group holds regular meetings to discuss current research topics and results. Most research groups operate their own laboratories with gifts, grants or contracts from outside agencies.
ADVances in Information Systems (ADVIS) Prof. Cruz. ADVIS meets to discuss research in computer information management systems with particular emphasis on: databases, information visualization, retrieval and presentation of information, multimedia systems, digital libraries, electronic publishing, and knowledge discovery.
Artificial Intelligence in Design Group (AIDG) Prof. Brown. AIDG concentrates on intelligent computer-aided design systems and multi-agent systems. Current projects include functional reasoning, learning in multi-agent systems, and design rationale.
Artificial Intelligence Research Group (AIRG) Profs. Becker, Brown, Gennert & Ruiz. Members share interests in the theory and applications of knowledge-based systems. Current research includes design, case-based reasoning and visual interfaces.
Data/Knowledge Base Research Group (DKBRG) Profs. Cruz, Gennert, Hachem, Rundensteiner & Ward. DKBRG is interested in deductive databases, recursive queries, the transitive closure of database relations, object-oriented spatio-temporal database systems, visual browsing and query interface design.
Database Systems Research Group (DSRG) Prof. Rundensteiner. DSRG is a subgroup of DKBRG. It is composed of Prof. Rundensteiner and all students that work with her on database and software systems research projects.
Graph Theory Research Group (GTRG) Profs. Sarkozy & Selkow. GTRG members study combinatorics and graph theory.
Image Science Research Group (ISRG) Profs. Gennert & Ward. The group conducts interdisciplinary research into image processing and image understanding. Projects include automatic pavement analysis, knowledge-based image segmentation, stereo vision, visualization and fractal-based image processing.
Performance Evaluation of Distributed Systems (PEDS) Profs. Claypool, Finkel, Kinicki & Wills. PEDS is interested in the design and analysis of distributed systems, with a special focus on the performance of distributed operating systems.
REsearch in FiltEring and Recommendation systems (REFER) Profs. Alvarez, Becker, Brown & Claypool. REFER is a research group whose interests include a variety of issues in information filtering and recommendation systems.
Software Engineering Research Group (SERG) Profs. Heineman, Becker & Rundensteiner. SERG meets to discuss issues related to the discipline of Software Engineering. SERG provides a forum for discussion of the research of group members, attracts students to Software Engineering, and generates new areas of software engineering research.
Facilities
The Computer Science Department's computing equipment includes Sun and Alpha machines/servers, a dual-processor Sparc server, Linux servers, and numerous personal computers for general use. The department has a Beowulf cluster and a variety of special graphics devices, high resolution color monitors, scanners, and printers. In addition, faculty and students have access to PCs and color X terminals. Several Research Laboratories have recently been upgraded with new workstations, including SGIs and Alphas. The department's building has just been fully rewired and is connected to the campus-wide high-speed communication network. This network provides access to other campus computing resources, including a large parallel computer, and the College Computer Center.
ADVIS Lab -- supports research in information systems, including visual query languages for databases, and web discovery.
Artificial Intelligence Lab -- supports the research of the AIRG & AIDG. Current research concentrates on data mining and knowledge-based design systems.
Database Systems Research Lab -- supports research in very large database and information systems. Current research includes data warehousing, and object-oriented database tools.
Distributed Systems Lab -- supports research in distributed processing and distributed systems.
Visualization & Image Science Lab -- supports research in the development of graphical tools and techniques for art, science and technology, with emphasis on visualization.
Some Selected Recent Publications
Grecu, D. L., and L. A. BECKER. Coactive Learning for Distributed Data Mining. Fourth International Conference on Knowledge Discovery in Databases, KDD-98. New York, NY: AAAI Press, pp. 209-213, 1998.
BROWN, D. C., and M. E. Balazs. A preliminary investigation of design simplification by analogy. Proc. Conf. Artificial Intelligence in Design '98, Lisbon, Portugal, July 1998.
CLAYPOOL, M. L., and Riedl, J.T. End End-to-End Quality in Multimedia Applications, Chapter 40 in Handbook on Multimedia Computing, CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL, Fall 1998.
CRUZ, I. F., and W. T. Lucas, Virtual Document Generation from Multimedia Repositories. Theory and Practice of Object Systems, Vol. 4(4), pp. 245-260, 1998.
FINKEL, D., C. E. WILLS, B. Brennan, and C. Brennan. Distriblets: Java-based distributed computing on the web. Internet Research: Electronic Networking Applications and Policy, 9(1), 1998.
Lisin, D. A., and M. A. GENNERT, Optimal function approximation using fuzzy rules. Proc. Int. Conf. North American Fuzzy Information Processing Society, June 1999.
Taylor, S. E., N. I. HACHEM, and S. M. SELKOW. The average height of a node in the BANG directory tree. Inf. Proc. Lett. 61:55-61, 1997.
HEINEMAN, G. T. A Model for Designing Adaptable Software Components. 22nd Annual international Computer Science and Application Conference, COMPSAC-98. pp. 121-127, August 1998.
HOFRI, M. Analysis of Algorithms: Computational Methods and mathematical Tools. Oxford University Press, New York, 1995.
Raghavendra, A., and R. E. KINICKI. A Simulation Performance Study of TCP Vegas and Random Early Detection. Proc. 18th International Performance, Computing, and Communications Conference, Phoenix, AZ, Feb. 99, pp.169-176.
LEMONE, K. A. ReCourse: A system for retargetable course generation. ITS '96, Montreal, 1996.
RUIZ, C. and J. Minker. Logic Knowledge Bases with Two Default Rules. Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, vol. 22, no. 3,4, pp. 333-361, 1998.
Kuno, H. A., and E. A. RUNDENSTEINER. Incremental Maintenance of Materialized Object-Oriented Views in MultiView: Strategies and Performance Evaluation. IEEE Transaction on Data and Knowledge Engineering, Vol. 10, No. 5, Sept/Oct. 1998, pp. 768-792.
Atkins, A.C., G.N. SARKOZY, and S.M. SELKOW. Counting Irregular Multigraphs. Discrete Mathematics, vol. 195, pp. 235-237, 1999.
Resnick, R., M. O. WARD, and E. A. RUNDENSTEINER. FED - a Framework for Iterative Data Selection in Exploratory Visualization. Proc. of Tenth International Conference on Scientific and Statistical Database Management, (SSDBM 98), July 1998.
C. E. WILLS, D. C. BROWN, B. Dunskus, and J. Kemble. Evaluating network serviceability. Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, 30(24):2283-2291, December 1998.
For Further Information
A brochure containing research summaries, faculty biographies and other descriptions is available from the department.
Please address inquiries to General Information, the Graduate Coordinator, the Undergraduate Coordinator, or the Research Coordinator, at:
Computer Science Dept., WPI,
Worcester, MA 01609-2280, USA.
Office: (508) 831-5357
FAX: (508) 831-5776
Email: research@cs.wpi.edu
Web: http://www.cs.wpi.edu/
Last modified: August 02, 2006 10:52:48