On April 12, 2011, John Savage served as a witness and gave testimony before a Senate Judiciary Committee on “Cyber Security: Responding to the Threat of Cyber Crime and Terrorism.”

According to John, “The problem of making our computers, networks and applications safe from attack is unsolved and probably will remain so for several reasons. First, human innovation is relentless, and especially if there is money to be made or an enemy to defeat. Second, security has been notoriously difficult to define. This is illustrated by the fact that a single‐bit error can result in a system intrusion ...

Computer Science Ph.D. students Michael Hughes and Layla Oesper recently received fellowships from the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program, a prestigious and highly competitive program. In addition, two other Ph.D. students, Andrew Ferguson and Brian Thomas, received honorable mentions.

Michael Hughes investigates machine learning algorithms for processing multimedia such as text documents and video clips. His research develops hierarchical Bayesian models for supervised tasks as well as inference procedures for these models via Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods. His current project attempts to automatically classify human activities such as running, eating, or answering the phone ...