Sometimes, you only get a few minutes to make a point. This was certainly the case last week in the Klaus Building auditorium as 25 College of Computing faculty members presented brief summaries of their research to more than 200 graduate students as part of Three-Minute Madness.

During the event held on Aug. 17, professors had just three minutes and a few slides to preview current classes and research projects, and encourage students to join them. Faculty from the schools of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE), Computer Science (CS), and Interactive Computing (IC) participated in the rapid-fire session, highlighting a wide range of ongoing research.

CS faculty members discussed cybersecurity, computer architecture, systems, and software engineering projects.

“We’re looking for smart students,” CS Professor Milos Prvulovic said. “It’s more about being able to learn rapidly than being an expert.”

In addition to Prvulovic, participants included Professor Constantine Dovrolis, Professor Wenke Lee, Professor Vivek Sarkar, Associate Professor Hyesoon Kim, Professor Umakishore Ramachandran, and Professor Alessandro Orso.

Highlights from the event include:

• Prvulovic focuses on computer architecture and security. He’s currently looking for six graduate students to help with a project.
   
• Professor Alessandro Orso studies software engineering with a focus on software testing and analysis. His goal is to improve the quality of software from fundamental theory to application. “We like to build tools because it keeps you honest and allows for experimentation that can validate techniques and discover new ideas,” he said. He is also looking for graduate students.
   
• Professor Umakishore Ramachandran is currently studying distributed architecture for multimodal sensing, target tracking in camera networks, and fog computing that extends cloud utility. All of this research could lead to infinite storage on mobile devices.

Members of the School of IC also presented on topics such as human-computer interaction, ubiquitous computing, machine learning, health, social computing, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, robotics, wearable technology, information visualization, and computing education research.

Present at the event were Professors Gregory Abowd, Amy Bruckman, Ashok Goel, Thad Starner, Mark Guzdial, Jarek Rossignac, Tucker Balch, and Bruce Walker; Associate Professors Thomas Ploetz, Karen Liu, and James Hays; Assistant Professors Sonia Chernova and Alex Endert; and Senior Research Scientist Rosa Arriaga.

From the School of CSE, Assistant Professor Polo Chau presented about machine learning and human-computer interaction for cybersecurity.

Representing both the College of Computing and the Scheller College of Business, Professor Peter Swire presented on cybersecurity and privacy.