Fall 2009 ♦ Issue Forty-four
CompSci @ Carolina
Dear Friends,
The weather is turning crisp and it’s a beautiful time of year in Chapel Hill. It is also a very busy time of
year, with a new semester underway, a new department chair, the welcoming back of students, continu¬
ing and new research, and the preparation of numerous grant proposals.
I am very honored to have been selected by my peers to be the new7 chair of computer science. It’s an
exciting time in the department, with many new research collaborations and the newest areas of re¬
search, robotics and computer security, really taking off. I would like to thank Jan Prins for his excellent
leadership over the past five years.
This summer, we were proud to learn that Assistant Professor Lana Lazebnik was the recipient of a Microsoft Research
New Faculty Fellowship, i .ana is the second in our department to receive this prestigious award, with Associate Professor
Wei Wang having received the fellowship in its inaugural year. Congratulations, Lana!
Congratulations also to our three alumni fellowship award winners - Gennette Gill, Xiaoxiao Du and Jason Sewall. You
can read about their dissertation research on page 3. Thanks to those of you who support this fellowship, and for those
of you who haven’t yet donated, please consider doing so. The alumni fellowships are of great benefit to the students who
receive them.
I welcome any thoughts you’d like to share about the future of computer science at UNC. Feel free to send me a note, or
stop by and see us sometime!
In this issue
HIGH DEMAND FOR COMPUTER SECURITY
As long as bad guys want to steal data or
interrupt computer networks, good guys
trained in computer security will be in de¬
mand. The challenge of computer security
is ever evolving and never ending: Where
will the next breach be?
changing adversary. “We’re interested in the
technical means that hackers use to accom¬
plish an attack. What makes it fascinating is
that we’re dealing with human adversaries
that can change and adapt,” he says. “They
read our papers.”
1 High Demand for
Computer Security
2 Interdisciplinary
Human Movement
Research Laboratory
3 Lazebnik receives
Microsoft Fellowship
Security is a slice of computer science re¬
search that’s hard to categorize because it
uses many different approaches to solving
its problems. “I work in security,” says Dr.
Michael Reiter (B.S.M.Sci. 1989), “but I’m
a student of machine learning, distributed
algorithms, systems, formal methods, sta¬
tistics, and applied mathematics.” Reiter
points out that the security field attracts
people with very diverse interests and skills
to work on network security, software se¬
curity, and applied cryptography for math-
based encryption — all focused on an ever-
Reiter came to the department in 2007 to
launch a security research group, and he
was joined in 2008 by Dr. Fabian Monrose.
They had previously worked together at Bell
Labs in the Secure Systems Research De¬
partment, which Reiter headed. They went
back into security research in academia —
Reiter at Carnegie Mellon University and
Monrose at Johns Hopkins University —
but were successfully lured to UNC. Their
research group includes a dozen grad stu¬
dents (some shared with other specialties).
3 Alumni Fellowship
Recipients
4 An Epic Story
5 Networking
Researchers Work
Together Seamlessly
6 Alumni News
8 Department News
10 Family Matters
11 Recent Publications
continued on page 2
