CS&E Media Mentions

Ph.D. student Denis Foo Kune's work exposes cell phone security risks

Computer science researchers Denis Foo Kune, associate professors Nick Hopper and Yongdae Kim, and undergraduate student John Koelndorfer have discovered that cell phone hackers can track your physical location without your knowledge. Using a cheap phone, readily available equipment, and no direct help from a service provider, hackers can listen to unencrypted broadcast messages from cell phone towers.

The group described their work in a recently released paper “Location Leaks on the GSM Air Interface” which was presented at the 19th Annual Network & Distributed System Security Symposium in San Diego, California.

Professor Nikolaos Papanikolopoulos and Scout robot featured in the Pioneer Press

Professor Nikolaos Papanikolopoulos is featured in a new story in the Pioneer Press and on twincities.com. The article discusses the burgeoning robotics industry in the Twin Cities area and Robotics Alley, the first regional conference on robots hosted by Edina-based ReconRobotics and the Minnesota High Tech Association happening Thursday, November 17th at the Carlson School of Management.

Papanikolopoulos discusses the Scout, the robot created at the University of Minnestoa in 2006. "It's just a camera on wheels," Papanikolopoulos said. "Why is it so popular? Because it does a very dangerous job and it saves lives."

Professor Papanikolopoulos's research using Xbox Kinect recently featured on several news sites

The research of Professor Nikos Papanikolopoulos was recently featured on several local news sites including WCCO, Kare11, Star Tribune, The Pioneer Press, and The Minnesota Daily.

Papanikolopoulos's group includes researchres in the Institute of Child Development, the University of Minnesota Medical School and the College of Science and Engineering. The researchers are exploring the use of technology to diagnose children of mental disorders via a video monitoring system comprised of several Xbox Kinect cameras stationed around a room to record footage of a child playing with toys.

You can read the full article, "Researchers ‘Kinect’ data to make faster diagnoses."

Shekhar and Oliver's work featured on ReadWriteWeb

An article by Professor Shashi Shekhar and CS&E graduate student Dev Oliver recently gained attention on several social media sites. Top web technology blog ReadWriteWeb, featured Shekhar and Oliver's work Computational Modeling of Spatio-temporal Social Networks: A Time-Aggregated Graph Approach in an article on January 17th. The post generated hundreds of tweets and Facebook postings.

Shekhar and Oliver's work was also featured on GIS and Science, a premier Geographic Information Science blog.  Shekhar and Oliver's paper was first presented in the December 2010 NSF/ARO Spatio-Temporal Constraints on Social Networks Workshop, organized by Michael Goodchild, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and Kathleen M.

Department Head Vipin Kumar's research featured in The Economist

The research of Department Head Vipin Kumar was featured December 18, 2010 issue of The Economist. The article specifically highlights the University of Minnesota's data mining work as a key enabler for low-cost monitoring of global forest cover.

This article discusses the launch of the first prototype of the forest skin that was developed jointly between the University of Minnesota, Planetary Skin Institute and NASA.

The Planetary Skin Institute and its partners unveiled the beta version of its Tropical Forest ALERTS 1.0 platform for monitoring global land change at the 16th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Assistant Professor Myers published in Molecular Systems Biology journal

CSE Ph.D. student Benjamin VanderSluis, post-doctoral scientist Jeremy Bellay and their advisor Chad Myers recently had their work published in the Molecular Systems Biology journal. Their paper, “Genetic interactions reveal the evolutionary trajectories of duplicate genes,” presents new insights about how genes evolve based on network analysis of genetic interactions in yeast. The ancestor of modern day yeast underwent a whole-genome duplication event approximately 120 million years ago, from which ~10% of the genes have been retained in duplicate with very similar sequences. 

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