Research

Computer Science research at Johns Hopkins University is charting new territory and transforming society through innovation and discovery.  Our faculty are researchers who excel in their respective areas of interest.  Here are brief overviews of centers and laboratories within the department, and links to their respective webpages.

Center for Language and Speech Processing

The Johns Hopkins Center for Language and Speech Processing (CLSP) was established in 1992 with support from the US Government (NSF, DARPA, DoD). Its aim is to promote research and education in the science and technology of language and speech. Research is conducted by faculty, research scientists, and graduate students affiliated with six associated academic departments: biomedical engineering, cognitive science, computer science, electrical and computer engineering, mathematical sciences, and psychology. The research involves work in all aspects of the science and technology of language and speech, with fundamental studies under way in areas such as language modeling, natural language processing, neural auditory processing, acoustic processing, optimality theory, and language acquisition.

Engineering Research Center/Computer Integrated Surgery

The CISST ERC is a collaborative Engineering Research Center for Computer Integrated Surgical Systems and Technology. The Johns Hopkins University with Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, Massachusetts Institute of Technology with Brigham and Women's Hospital, and Carnegie Mellon University with Shadyside Hospital are teamed to develop novel computing methods, interfacial technologies and computer-integrated surgical systems to significantly improve surgical procedures in the 21st Century. The Center's industrial affiliations augment the collaboration by providing systems development infrastructure for rapid prototyping and validation of surgical systems concepts. Together, CISST ERC partnerships address a vital national need to greatly reduce surgical costs, improve clinical outcomes, and improve the efficiency of health care delivery.

Information Security Institute

The Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute (ISI) provides a comprehensive approach to the many issues encompassed by information security. Through a partnership across the divisions of Johns Hopkins, ISI is a well-integrated effort on information security, which addresses all of information security's major concerns. ISI involves a blend of educational, research, business relationship components, and a mixture of academic, business, and government involvement.

Wireless Communication Lab

The Wireless Communication Lab investigates efficient ways to form a secure extended mobile ad-hoc network of laptops, handhelds, and other wireless capable devices, and bridge it to the Internet. Our research encompasses scalable routing, security, and energy efficiency in pure peer-to-peer mobile ad-hoc networks, mobile multi-hop infrastructure access networks, and sensor networks.

Theoretical Computer Science

The theoretical computer science community at Johns Hopkins deals with algorithmic and mathematical problems ranging from graph theory and combinatorics to data structures and algorithms in the areas of routing and scheduling, geometry, languages, and cryptography.

The Security and Privacy Applied Research lab

The SPAR Lab is a research group in the Johns Hopkins University Computer Science Department. We are affiliated with the Information Security Institute, an inter-departmental program to foster research, teaching and training into all aspects of information security. The ISI brings together the School of Engineering, School of Arts and Sciences, School of Advanced International Studies, School of Public Health, School of Medicine, Peabody Conservatory, Applied Physics Laboratory, and the School of Professional Studies in Business and Education.

The Hopkins interNetworking Research Lab (HiNRG)

The Hopkins InterNetworking Research Group (HiNRG) lead by Dr. Terzis performs research in the area of computer networks. The main research themes of HiNRG are building networks that are resilient to a wide range of failures and extreme networking, networks consisting of very large numbers of small wireless devices.

Systems Research Lab

The Systems Research Laboratory (SRL) explores a range of topics in systems tools and software. It is a part of the Hopkins Information Security Lab. While the lab pursues a wide range of systems research, the current research mission of the lab can be summed up in one question: How do you build a system that is secure, robust, efficient and usable? Research projects include the Extremely Reliable Operating System (EROS), PCMS, a distributed configuration management system that builds on ideas from cryptographic capability systems and RODYNE, Foundations for Robust Communication in Dynamic Networks.

Storage Systems Lab

The Hopkins Storage Systems Lab (HSSL -- preferably pronounced hizzle) is dedicated to building distributed and high-performance storage systems and the technologies that make these systems possible. In particular, the lab explores the relationship between storage systems and distributed computing. Research at HSSL designs storage software architectures that are congruent with the networks and hardware systems on which they are deployed in order to improve manageability, reliability, and performance.

Programming Languages Lab

The Programming Languages Laboratory focuses on fundamental problems in programming languages. We are interested in addressing challenging problems which can also have practical impact within a ten year time frame. A common thread of much of our research is the extraction of static (compile-time) properties of programs. This can include type information, flow information, security information, and other program properties. Efforts involve both solving of fundamental problems, and implementation to justify the usefulness of the solution.

Natural Language Processing

Effective natural language interfaces will be an enabling technology for the mass exploitation of the benefits of computing. In conjunction with the Center for Speech and Language Processing, the members of the NLP Lab are committed to finding novel and efficient computational methods that rival human performance in natural language competency tasks. Recent areas of research include: machine translation, transformation based learning techniques, language modeling, syntax acquisition, morphology/phonology and information retrieval.

Computer Graphics

The Computer Graphics group is involved in research in all aspects of computer graphics. Our focus, though, lies at the core of computer graphics and we seek and solve the fundamental problems that prohibit interactive display of real world models. In other words, interactive generation of believable images of real world models sums up the driving motivation of our research. As a result our research path has taken us through massive-model walkthrough, dynamic surface tessellation, view-dependent mesh simplification, visibility computation, collision detection, efficient geometry representation, large-scale volume rendering, parallel rendering, image-based rendering and many other areas. In our lab we try to facilitate independence of research tracks for students, while at the same time moving them all towards the common goal of advancing the speed and quality of rendering. This naturally fosters collaborations and exchange of ideas. In addition, we have regular lab get-togethers, individual research meetings and seminars.

Computational Interaction and Robotics Lab

The Johns Hopkins Interaction Group is a part of Johns Hopkins Computer Science and the NSF Engineering Research Center for Computer-Integrated Surgical Systems and Technology (CISST). We are interested in understanding problems that involve dynamic, spatial interaction at the intersection of vision, robotics, and human-computer interaction.

Distributed Systems and Networks Lab

The Distributed Systems and Networks lab focuses on the interplay between theory and practice in distributed systems and networks. Our vision is to create a paradigm shift in the way distributed systems are designed and built. In contrast to the ad-hoc methods underlying most current systems, the lab is building a small set of general tools that are provably correct and provide high performance. These tools encapsulate the challenging aspects of asynchronous networks and enable people to build scalable distributed applications. The impact of our lab encompasses the whole range of theoretical ideas, prototype academic systems, and commercial-grade tools that are used by industry.

ACCURATE: A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable, and Transparent Elections

ACCURATE is a multi-institution voting research center directed by Prof. Avi Rubin and funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The goals of the center are: to research ways in which technology can be used to improve voting systems and the voting process; to develop the science that will help inform the election community and the public about the tradeoffs among various voting technologies and procedures; to serve as a resource to the elections community, politicians, vendors and the public about issues related to public policy, technology, and law with respect to voting; and, to publish and disseminate our research so that future systems can benefit from the center's work.

 

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