Purdue Today

Purdue computer scientists playing role in virtual history

Editor's note: This story originally appeared in the spring issue of the College of Science's Insights magazine. More from the magazine is available at www.science.purdue.edu/ insights/Spring2011.
  

Faster than you can say smartphone or iPad, the next great computer device will have come and gone. Working behind the screens, Purdue computer scientists are helping set the pace for change and experiencing the evolution of the field.
  
No one knows this better than Purdue faculty, among them Susanne Hambrusch, a computer science professor who served as head of the Department of Computer Science from 2002 to 2007 and is now helping shape the future of the discipline in a leadership position in the National Science Foundation.

The field has changed hugely since Hambrusch began studying it some 35 years ago. The discipline was just in its infancy when she enrolled at the Technical University of Vienna in her native Austria in 1974. The university, in fact, had established a computer science (.Informatik.) major only a year or two before.

"It seemed like a magical field," Hambrusch recalls. "No one knew its potential, and I went into the field by pure instinct. It was a very much evolving field and everything was very new and I liked that it was not established."

Now on leave from Purdue as director of the NSF's Division of Computing and Communication Foundations (CCF) in the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, Hambrusch oversees an annual $180 million research budget and helps define national initiatives for the discipline.

In her daily work, Hambrusch and her NSF team might determine ways in which CCF's research areas could support, for example, President Barack Obama's interest in clean energy and sustainability. Or she might initiate and oversee a workshop on the understanding of the challenges and promises of algorithmic foundations in emerging applications and fields.

Professor Eugene Spafford is an internationally recognized specialist in cybersecurity and a national advisor on homeland security. As director of Purdue's Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS), he oversees one of the world's leading centers for research and education in areas of information security that are crucial to the protection of critical computing and communication infrastructure. An active and eloquent blogger and social media user, Spafford is a great source of future vision for his discipline. In recounting the formative years of CERIAS, which opened in 1998, he writes in his blog:

"Back in 1997, a year before the formation of CERIAS, I presented testimony before a U.S. House of Representatives hearing on 'Secure Communications.' For that presentation, I surveyed peers around the country to determine something about the capacity of U.S. higher education in the field of information security and privacy (this was before the term "cyber" was popularized). I discovered that, at the time, there were only four defined programs in the country. The best numbers I could come up with from surveying all those people was that, as of 1997, U.S. higher education was graduating only about three new PhD students a year in information security."

By 2010, CERIAS had produced 135 Ph.D.s in its 12-year life, or well over 25 percent of all U.S. doctorates in the field. Those men and women went on to teach, consult, guide agencies and grow the discipline.

Elisa Bertino, who works with Spafford as research director for CERIAS, came to Purdue in 2004, lured from the faculty at the University of Milan by Purdue's worldwide reputation in computer security. She directs collaboration with industry partners on problems of computer architecture, assurance and digital provenance, privacy techniques and digital identity management. To her, it is the opportunities for such collaboration -- with disciplines ranging from social science to medicine -- that makes computer science a fascinating field.

"Suppose you want to apply computer science to medicine and health care," Bertino says. "You need to understand medicine. It exposes you to things that are outside the discipline as you consider how to use a computer to deliver better care to patients."

Bertino shares her fascination with the social implications and broad applications of computer science with Jennifer Neville, assistant professor of computer science and a statistician, who joined the department in 2006. Neville focuses on data mining and machine learning techniques for relational data. This is the study of information within and across networks, an area that includes social networking, which is a field exploding both within the discipline and throughout daily life.

Hambrusch says, "Social networking is changing how society operates, how communities are formed, how they communicate and organize. Not only computer scientists but also social scientists will be studying it for years to come."

Neville designs and implements data mining techniques for data sets that can be represented as a graph. The real-world applications range from social network issues such as marketing to fraud detection. It can be applied also to networks of systems, such as understanding what is happening in distributed systems and large-scale systems like the electrical power network or air traffic flow.

"A lot of computer science has focused on what goes on inside the box (i.e., inside the computer). For example, how do we make the computer store the data and process the instructions?" Neville says. "Many areas that are flourishing now are using computer science outside the box. They interface with the data and other kinds of projects that need computing in the real world."

In 1998, when Neville began her undergraduate work at the University of Massachusetts, only one person in that computer science department was studying data mining for Web and network analysis. It is now among the dominant subfields in data mining. Whereas data mining once was used to help companies make projections and maximize profit, it now has much more personal applications.

"Now that we all interact on email, Facebook, and the Web, we are starting to learn about people's preferences and behaviors," Neville says. "This data could be used to adaptively personalize the systems for people, which goes way beyond a company learning how to market to maximize their profit."

Neville is also working in the area of computational social science, an area now in its infancy and one in which Purdue, with its strength in social sciences, hopes to lead.

The goal of computational social science is to take the computational methods used to analyze data and to do for social science what 10 years ago computer scientists did for computational biology, Neville explains. That is to bring their strength in computational fields and data mining to the social science table. This would give social scientists a new way to investigate human behavior.

Rebooting computing

In 2009, a group of passionate computer scientists from around the world, who were concerned that their discipline was in a slump and had lost its luster, hosted a conference titled "Reboot Computing." Its purpose was to brainstorm ways to promote the many dynamic applications of computer science and draw future generations into the field.

At Purdue, Hambrusch and colleagues in the Department of Computer Science and the College of Education had a similar goal. They joined a few years ago to start the Computer Science for Education (CS4EDU) program, designed to educate high school computer science teachers and help create a high school computer science curriculum. With better prepared teachers and an updated curriculum, middle school and high school students might just get hooked on the magic of the discipline that drew Hambrusch so many years ago.

"When I started, the field was magical, because it was new and evolving," Hambrusch recalls. "The field will continue to change and this will impact the topics we teach as technologies, applications and infrastructures evolve. Many tools we use today will not be what we will use in 10 years. It is important for students to learn the foundations of the field and the fundamental principles, as they will not change. There are some really neat and challenging problems out there waiting to be solved."