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FEATURE
STORY Columbia Engineering has long prided itself on its ability to
offer undergraduates the experience of a small school within a
large research university. Nowhere is this more apparent than
in the Computer Science Department, whose research program for
undergraduates involves almost a third of the student body. This
semester, more than 40 undergraduates have elected to participate
in research as part of their academic programming. Department Chair Kathleen McKeown said, “Because our faculty
is engaged in so many research areas, we are able to offer our
students numerous opportunities to become an integral part of
research projects while they are still undergraduates, and they
take advantage of that.” While research opportunities for undergraduates have always existed
at the Engineering School, the ability to involve large numbers
of students developed two years ago, when Eleazar Eskin and Eugene
Agichtein, Ph.D. students of Prof. Salvatore Stolfo, began a website
to help undergrads find CS
research opportunities. Stolfo’s research group is working on intrusion detection
systems and has more than 20 undergraduates involved, some of
whom have published research papers, an exceptional coup for both
the students and the School. Last year, then senior Matthew Schultz, now a Ph.D. student at
Cornell, was first author on two papers, one presented at the
IEEE Security and Privacy symposium and the other at the USENIX
technical conference, where it was awarded the best student paper
for the FREENIX track. Co-author on that paper was Manasi Bhattacharyya,
who also was a senior and is now a CS masters student. “It has been wonderful fun to see so many students have
this chance to do good research and succeed,” said Stolfo.
“Our project provides a lab environment where students at
all levels can participate and contribute to a research team.
It is instructional for undergrads in particular to learn about
advanced research, but it is also instructional for graduate students
to learn about research team management.” Manasi Bhattacharyya’s interest in research projects began
in the latter part of her junior year. “I realized that I
wanted to actually see the applications of the things I was learning
in the classroom,” she said. “I started off slowly and
worked on the project with Matt Schultz and co-authored the paper.
I am now working on another paper that is based on that work and
have two undergrads working with me on the project.” The
research is on malicious email filtering by tracking the path
of the virus and the damage caused. “The model on how research is done in a university is changing,”
said Eskin. “The only way to manage a very large project
is to have a large group of students helping. Even those who don’t
have the background can still participate by working on the implementation
of demonstrations. It’s a great system because, with more
experience, you can have your own research.” Two current seniors, Frank Apap and Andrew Honig, are finalizing
a paper for submission to the IEEE journal, a product of the research
they have been doing since Spring, 2000. They are working on a
host-based intrusion detection algorithm for Microsoft Windows.
The algorithm detects attacks on a host machine by looking for
anomalous accesses to the Windows Registry. |
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