Yongdae Kim

Secure group communication is an increasingly popular research area, having received much attention in recent years. Since most group communication takes place over the wide-open expanse of the Internet, security is a major concern. The fundamental security challenge revolves around secure and efficient group key management. Centralized key management methods (key distribution) are appropriate for 2-party (e.g., client-server or peer-to-peer) communication as well as for large multicast groups. However, many collaborative group settings require distributed key management techniques. Kim's main research focuses on secure and efficient distributed group key management techniques for secure group communication systems. He is currently extending his previous research into other network applications such as storage area networks.

Donglin Liang

Ever-increasing demands and complexity of software systems have constantly called for improvement in software quality and programming productivity. Software quality and programming productivity greatly depend on the capabilities of programmers in reasoning about and understanding software artifacts. The major goal of Liang's research is to develop program analysis techniques that automatically extract information from program artifacts to enhance such capabilities. One focus of his current research is to develop practical program analysis techniques that can efficiently extract information from programs up to millions of lines of code. Another focus of his current research is to develop effective visualization techniques that leverage the collected information to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of various software development and maintenance activities. The third focus of his current research is to develop new testing and analysis techniques for next generation software---software that lives in the ubiquitous computing environment.

Stergios I. Roumeliotis

In Stergios Roumeliotis's view, most of the events that synthesize our world are non-deterministic in nature and therefore, are only amenable to stochastic methods in order to comprehend them and control their outcome. His research has concentrated mainly on sensing techniques - analysis, modeling and fusion - for autonomous robot navigation. Specific examples of these platforms are wheeled rovers, tracked vehicles, unmanned helicopters and spacecrafts, and their domain of application spans from indoors to outdoors and from autonomous landing to planetary exploration. The same theoretical framework is also appropriate to deal with equivalent issues pertinent to arrays of networked sensors, intelligent embedded systems and problems that require processing of large and diverse amounts of sensory information. It is within the focus of his research to develop efficient probabilistic algorithms based on strong theoretical foundations for real-time state estimation from noisy and uncertain sensor information. These estimation algorithms are necessary to support intelligent behavior such as perception and representation of the environment, planning under uncertainty, autonomous navigation and control.

Loren Terveen

Loren Terveen's research interests are human-computer interaction and computer-mediated communication. More specifically, he is interested in extending recommender systems to help people form relationships and build community. Such systems can identify people's shared interests, creating a context to bring them together and organize their interaction. He also is interested in the design of mobile devices for providing peripheral awareness of information. Currently, he is working on experiments to investigate how similarity between people (of their knowledge and personal characteristics) affects online interaction, both objective outcomes and the building of relationships. In the longer term, he is planning projects to (1) create theory and develop guidelines for increasing people's contribution to online communities, (2) develop mobile, location-aware applications that can support people's information needs and enhance their social experience of large meetings and events, and (3) investigate how socially meaningful places constrain people's information needs and then incorporate the concept of places into location-based community information systems.