Congratulations to John Byers and George Kollios!
John Byers and George Kollios have been promoted to Professor. Congratulations John...
By conroynm
Congratulations to John Byers and George Kollios!
John Byers and George Kollios have been promoted to Professor. Congratulations John and George!
John Byers and George Kollios win this year’s IEEE ICDE Influential Paper Award
John Byers and George Kollios, along with their former PhD students Jeffrey Considine and Feifei Li, won this year’s IEEE ICDE Influential Paper Award for their 2004 IDCE paper. They are invited to present a reflection at ICDE 2014 in April.
Jeffrey Considine, Feifei Li, George Kollios, John W. Byers
Approximate aggregation techniques for sensor databases, ICDE 2004
ICDE Committee Citation: The paper describes novel methods to handle duplicate-sensitive aggregates over distributed datasets. It carefully extends the duplicate-insensitive Flajolet-Martin method, adapting it to require little computation and communication efforts, and make it robust to link losses. This work has been highly impactful in the area of sensor networks, and has been shown to be applicable to any setting with multiple data sources that may suffer network failures, such as distributed data centers of today.
Sharon Goldberg wins NSF Early Career award
Sharon Goldberg has won an NSF Faculty Early Career Development Award to
support her research and teaching efforts in internet security, in
particular her project “Centralized Authorities in Internet Security: Risk Assessment, Mitigation, and New Architectures.”
Congratulations to Sharon on this prestigious grant award, which is very
well deserved indeed!
“Centralized Authorities in Internet Security”:
Intellectual Merit: The proposed work solves fundamental problems in network security, and will move the community away from the same tired and broken solutions to more robust architectures that can withstand new threats without harming the systems they were designed to protect. The work will also contribute new techniques and directions to the computer science theory community.
Broader Impact: The proposed work has implications on the security of some of the Internet’s most crucial systems, as well as on the balance between Internet security and Internet freedom. The work will also influence design and policy decisions made by practitioners engaged in the standardization and adoption of Internet systems. The PI also plans to reach out to (a) young women through involvement in women’s STEM organizations, mentorship, and education, and to (b) high school students by providing professional development for high-school teachers offering a new course that touches on network security and technology policy (“CS Principles”). The proposal also include the development of a new “thread” in the undergraduate curriculum at BU on network security and technology policy, and supports the training of a number of graduate, undergraduate, and women students.
Sharon Goldberg Wins 2014 Sloan Fellowship
Sharon Goldberg is one of the 2014 Alfred P. Sloan scholars. The Sloan Fellowship scholars represent the most promising scientific researchers working today. Their achievements and potential place them among the next generation of scientific leaders in the U.S. and Canada. Since 1955, Sloan Research Fellows have gone on to win Nobel Prizes, Fields Medals, National Medals of Science, John Bates Clark Medals, and numerous other distinguished awards.
Sharon Goldberg is a network security researcher. Her research seeks to go beyond traditional questions of security and performance in order to overcome the hurdles that stand in the way of the adoption of security solutions. Much of her work is inspired by engagement with industry, regulatory and standards bodies, and uses tools from both computer science theory (cryptography, game-theory, algorithms) and networking (measurement, simulation, domain knowledge) to design security solutions that are practically compelling, and can be deployed in the Internet.
Airbnb research (John Byers and Davide Proserpio) featured in The Atlantic and NYTimes
Professor John Byers, CS PhD student Davide Proserpio, and SMG Professor Georgios Zervas research the impact of Airbnb on the hotel industry. Their research has been featured in multiple publications, including the New York Times, The Atlantic, and in the Huffington Post, Spanish version.
“A new study by researchers at Boston University demonstrates for the first time that as the so-called sharing economy rises, the traditional lodging industry gets squeezed. For every 1 percent increase in the size of the Airbnb market, the researchers found, hotel revenue slips 0.05 percent.”
-David Streitfeld of the New York Times
BU Security Group Research Wins TWO IETF/IRTF Prizes
Research done by the BU/CS security group has won two IETF/IRTF Applied Networking Research Prizes.
These are given by the IETF and its research arm the IRTF. They are awarded for “results in applied networking research that are relevant for transitioning into shipping Internet products and related standardization efforts.” The recipient is invited to present the work at an upcoming IETF meeting. (More here.)
The prizes are for “On the Risk of Misbehaving RPKI Authorities,” by Danny Cooper, Ethan Heilman, Kyle Brogle, Leonid Reyzin, Sharon Goldberg (appearing at HotNets-XII) and for “BGP Security in Partial Deployment: Is the Juice Worth the Squeeze?,” by Robert Lychev, Sharon Goldberg, Michael Schapira (appearing at SIGCOMM’13).
Congratulations to all the authors!
Prof. Matta awarded NSF grant for RINA project
Prof. Abraham Matta has been awarded a grant in support of his RINA project by NSF, through the GENI Program Office. The grant is entitled “Experimenting with Programmable Management Policies over GENI” and will provide more than $110K for his research. The proposed work is described below.
Our Recursive InterNetwork Architecture (RINA) enables private (e.g., virtual or content delivery) networks to be dynamically instantiated, by customizing network management policies (e.g., authentication, routing, addressing, resource allocation) into a single layer, without the shortcomings of the TCP/IP architecture. For example, since our RINA layer identifies applications (services) by location-independent names, they can move, migrate, or be multi-homed; since we support explicit (authenticated) enrollment into the layer, communication through the layer is secure; and since layer services are recursively built, they can be better coordinated and managed.
This project builds on our initial experience running RINA experiments over GENI (the Global Environment for Network Innovations testbed) by testing a wider range of management and control policies. Our RINA prototype will be made available to the GENI community so that users can experiment with their own policies. These wide range of experiments should stress the GENI capabilities and provide an invaluable feedback to improve the experimental support environment of GENI, in addition to the research results from innovative policies that will be produced by the networking and distributed
systems communities.
BUILDS Qualifies for Capture-the-Flag competition
BUILDS has qualified for the finals of NYU-Poly’s CSAW (Cyber-Security Awareness Week) Capture-the-Flag competition, an event in which teams from across the world compete to solve computer security challenges. We will be sending a team of four to the finals, which are at NYU-Poly, in Brooklyn, from Thursday, 14 November to Saturday, 16 November. Our team for finals will be:
| Name | Year of Graduation | Major |
| Allan Wirth | 2015 | Computer Science |
| Danny Cooper | 2014 | Computer Science |
| Andrew Mohn | 2014 | Math |
| George Silvis, III | 2014 | Math/Ancient Greek |
In addition, the following people participated in the qualifying round
this past weekend:
| Name | Year of Graduation | Major |
| A.J. Trainor | 2017 | Computer Science |
| John Moore | 2015 | Computer Engineering |
| Lily Houghton | 2016 | Linguistics/Computer Science |
| Arjun Lamba | 2015 | Computer Science |
| Tony Faraco-Hadlock | 2014 | Computer Science |
| Huy Le | 2016 | Computer Science |
Out of 1387 teams that participated in the preliminary round, we placed 26th, and out of the undergraduate teams eligible to qualify, we took 6th. BUILDS is pleased to represent Boston University in this internationally recognized competition.
You can find more information about the CSAW CTF competition at NYU-Poly’s website.
2013 Distinguished Alum Talk and Award Presentation
Boston University
Department of Computer Science
2013 Distinguished Alum Talk and Award Presentation
Prof. Eric Nyberg (BA 1983)
Date: Friday, September 27, at 11am
Location: Hariri Institute
Automatic Optimization of Intelligent Information Systems
Software frameworks which support integration and scaling of text
analysis algorithms make it possible to build complex, high performance
information systems for information extraction, information retrieval,
and question answering; IBM¹s Watson is a prominent example. As the
complexity and scaling of information systems become ever greater, it is
much more challenging to effectively and efficiently determine which
toolkits, algorithms, knowledge bases or other resources should be
integrated into an information system in order to achieve a desired or
optimal level of performance on a given task. This talk presents a
formal representation of the space of possible system configurations,
given a set of information processing components and their parameters,
and discusses algorithmic approaches to determine an optimal
configuration. We introduce the Configuration Space Exploration
framework, an extension to the UIMA framework which provides a general
distributed solution for building and exploring configuration spaces for
information systems. Using the CSE framework, we explored over one
trillion combinations of components and parameter values for a
biomedical information system evaluated on TREC Genomics datasets, and
achieved results which are significantly better than prior published work.
Biography:
Dr. Eric Nyberg is a Professor in the Language Technologies Institute in
the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He is
Director for the M.S. program in Very Large Information Systems, and
co-Director for the M.S. Program in Biotechnology, Innovation, and
Computation. He has made significant research contributions to the
fields of automatic text translation, information retrieval, and
automatic question answering. Dr. Nyberg received his Ph.D. from
Carnegie Mellon University (1992), and his BA from Boston University
(1983). He has pioneered the Open Advancement of Question Answering, an
architecture and methodology for accelerating collaborative research in
automatic question answering. In 2012, Dr. Nyberg received the Allen
Newell Award for Research Excellence for his scientific contributions to
the field of question answering and his work on the Watson project.
More about the BU Computer Science Distinguished Alumna/Alumnus Award:
http://www.bu.edu/cs/people/alumni/bu-computing-alumni-network/alumni-award