Department of Computer Science

Samantha Kleinberg, an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science, has been appointed as the Farber Chair Associate Professor for a three-year term, effective September 1, 2023. This appointment has been made in recognition of Kleinberg’s excellence in scholarly activities and quality of teaching, as well as her significant contributions to Stevens and her field of expertise.

Since joining Stevens in 2012, Kleinberg has developed an international reputation as a leader in interdisciplinary work on causality, health and decision-making, as evidenced by 60 invited talks (21 international in nine countries), $8 million in funding as PI, two international collaborations, a best paper award, two books and an interdisciplinary edited volume. Her active research awards include three National Institute of Health grants and three National Science Foundation grants.

Her research uses computational methods to address problems in health, and it aims to advance human health by helping doctors and patients make better choices with data. In addition to the core impact on society, this has led to impact in other fields such as philosophy, psychology and biomedical sciences.

Team NAM (Never Alone with Me) of the Department of Computer Science have placed second in the fifth annual Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge, sponsored by Amazon.

Advised by Assistant Professor Jia Xu and assisted by postdoctoral fellow Abdul Rafae Khan, the team was awarded a $50,000 prize, in addition to the $250,000 research grant they’d earned to compete in the competition. Final team members included first-year master’s students João Luís Lins Rodrigues Cruz, Sai Nikhil Reddy Maligireddy, Abhijeet Gusain and Yeshwanth Reddy Peddamallu.

The Stevens team was selected in August 2023 as one of only five teams to compete in the final round of the university challenge competition, which focuses on creating a socialbot that easily and clearly chats with users on trending topics and news for 20 minutes.

The student’s interactive socialbot, which is an artificial intelligence-based system capable of interacting with a user conversationally through text and images, was released to the public via Amazon Alexa devices and apps, allowing them to gather feedback directly from customers in order to refine their approach. Capable of learning through interaction, the NAM socialbot was designed to ask clarifying or follow-up questions in order to clear up conversational confusion or uncertainty. The final evaluation was performed by judges interacting on a screen-equipped device in a closed session.

Michael Greenberg, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science, has been awarded a $556,063 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for his project, “Scaling Unix/Linux Shell Programs.” The project seeks to modernize the shell programming environment so it can scale for current technology and handle the ever-increasing volumes of Big Data required to meet the needs of society today. The four-year project is funded in collaboration with Brown University and University of Pennsylvania.

Shell programming is an essential component of modern computing infrastructure but is difficult to scale for modern computing environments and workloads. Greenberg and team will develop novel program analysis and transformation techniques to accelerate, optimize and scale out new and existing shell programs in a way that requires minimal, if any, user effort and no modifications to the shell, its programs or its components. Their methods will be evaluated on real-world shell programs across a variety of domains, including bioinformatics, data science, machine learning, software development automation and the cloud.

The team's research will allow the federal government, industry and open-source projects to cost-effectively leverage state-of-the-art computing infrastructure, while increasing safety, security and ease of maintainability.

Assistant Professor and Charles Berendsen Junior Professor in the Department of Computer Science Eric Koskinen recently received a $593,022 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to develop formal, yet user-friendly, proofs for verifying the accuracy of concurrent software. The grant is in collaboration with the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche.

Modern software takes advantage of computers with multiple processors by using concurrent programming, in which more than one process is executed at the same time.

Researchers have developed mathematical reasoning techniques to prove that their concurrent programming is correct, but these techniques require complex mathematical calculations and rules that are often difficult to understand. In contrast, algorithm designers in the distributed computing community (in which multiple computers work together to complete a task) prove the accuracy of their work in an easier to understand manner by describing a few key example scenarios of how different simultaneous tasks occur correctly.

Koskinen’s project will bridge this gap by developing a formal yet approachable method for proving concurrent programming using scenario-based reasoning that will allow everyday programmers without a background in formal methods to verify their concurrent software’s correctness.