Faculty & Staff

Joseph Beck, assistant professor of Computer Science, has been at WPI since 2007. His research focuses on educational data mining, a new discipline that develops techniques for analyzing large educational data sets to make discoveries that will improve teaching and learning. His work centers on estimating how computer tutors impact learning. He established the first workshop in the field and in 2008 was program co-chair of the first International Conference on Educational Data Mining. ... View Profile

Mark Claypool has been a professor of Computer Science and Interactive Media Game Development at WPI since 1997. Mark has a B.A. in Mathematics from Colorado College and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed conference and journal papers and written two books on computer games. He has chaired several ACM conferences on networks, games and multimedia and served on the technical program committee for over 40 of them. ... View Profile

My research interests focus on networking and security, including deep packet inspection and packet processing. My contributions include analysis of malware communications, parallelization strategies for network traffic analysis, and hardware accelerators for packet inspection and forwarding. I have also worked on optimized signature matching and instruction scheduling for novel processor architectures. View Profile

Professor Eltabakh’s research is in the broad area of Database Management Systems and Information Management. In particular, his work is in the areas of query processing and optimization, indexing techniques, scientific data management, and large-scale data analytics. Prof. Eltabakh is currently exploring possible extensions to both database management systems and Hadoop framework to support scientific applications and health-care systems. He is a member of the Database Systems Research Group (DSRG) and a faculty member of the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (BCB) program. ... View Profile

My research interests are in the application of robotics and computer science to enhance medicine, and particularly surgery. What gets me out of bed in the morning is the prospect of helping doctors save lives and improve the quality of life of their patients. My students and I work side-to-side with clinical collaborators to create technology that presents a tangible clinical value – for instance, making an existing surgical procedure more accurate or enabling new procedures that are not feasible with current instrumentation. ... View Profile

I am an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute. I completed my Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts Amherst advised by Prof. Prashant Shenoy in 2016. I am a system builder. My research is about modeling system behaviors, especially these of large scale systems, and to build prototypes that help to empirically evaluate system's behaviors. Broadly, I am interested in designing systems to handle new trade-offs in cost, performance and efficiency. ... View Profile

Information visualization is a powerful means for understanding data and informing human minds. As people begin to rely on visualizations to make high-impact and even life-critical decisions, there is a growing need to ensure that information can be perceived accurately and precisely. My research addresses these challenges by leveraging cognitive and perceptual principles to quantify and model user performance with visualizations. ... View Profile

Computer programming makes it possible to solve problems that otherwise could never be attempted. You can create worlds that could never be possible and help make this world a better place. Most of my professional and personal accomplishments were possible directly because of my understanding and practice of computer programming. For me, programming led me to appreciate fundamental concepts in computer science and directed me to major in CS. I've always been passionate about the possibilities of computer programming; this forms the basis for all of my teaching. ... View Profile

My research is interdisciplinary and spans the fields of bioinformatics of complex disease, computational genomics, systems biology, and biomedical data analytics. We bring expertise in machine learning, data mining and massive data analytics to study molecular mechanisms underlying genetic disorders, such as cancer, diabetes, and autism, and deadly infections, such as pandemic flu. Our approaches benefit from integrating Next Generation Sequencing, high-throughput interactomics, and structural biology data. ... View Profile

My broad research interests are in analyzing, understanding, and making sense of big data generated from various complex networks in many contexts, including urban network analysis, large-scale network data sampling, measurement, online social behavior modeling. My recent research focuses on exploring the challenges in managing and analyzing big data from urban networks, with an ultimate goal of improving human life quality and designing smarter cities. ... View Profile

The focus of my research is designing innovative tools for swarm robotics. I am developing Buzz, a programming language specifically designed for real-world robot swarms. During my Ph.D., I have designed ARGoS, which is currently the fastest general-purpose robot simulator in the literature. I am also working on swarm robotics solutions for disaster response scenarios, such as search-and-rescue and firefighting. View Profile

Carolina Ruiz's research interests are in data mining, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Together with her graduate and undergraduate students, colleagues in computer science and biology, and medical doctors, Ruiz investigates and develops data mining algorithms for genomics and for clinical medicine. In addition to being a faculty member in computer science, she is a founder and active member of the bioinformatics and computational biology program at WPI. She enjoys teaching courses, and advising undergraduate and graduate research projects in data mining and machine learning. View Profile

My research interests are in graph theory, discrete mathematics, and theoretical computer science. I am especially interested in studying the structure of very large graphs,; an area that is getting more and more important these days. I enjoy teaching at WPI; in particular, I enjoy the project experience. I am the founder and director of the Budapest Project Center, the first and only WPI Project Center in Eastern Europe. I love sports, especially tennis and soccer. View Profile

Dr. Smith's research interests are in computational creativity, game design, computer science education, and the intersection of traditional crafts and computation. Her interdisciplinary work merges technical research in AI and HCI with creative practice in textiles and games, with a view towards addressing social issues and broadening participation and perspectives on computing. ... View Profile

My research is in human-computer interaction. One focus of my research is on next-generation interaction techniques, such as brain-computer interfaces, physiological computing, and reality-based interaction. I design, build and evaluate interactive computing systems that use machine learning approaches to adapt and support the user’s changing cognitive state and context. I also investigate novel paradigms for designing with accessibility in mind, particularly for the Deaf community. Much of my work also explores effective human interaction with complex and autonomous systems and vehicles. ... View Profile

I am a practical and highly analytical problem solver, having worked in corporate R&D for 35 years at Bell Labs/Bellcore/Telcordia/Ericsson, Netapp, Motorola and Cisco Systems, and in academia as an Assistant Professor and as Adjunct Faculty. ... View Profile

Prior to entering academia, I worked as Chief Technologist, Director of Information Systems, and Director of Technical Operations at various corporations in the information systems and software field. For the past 16 years teaching in university courses, I have aimed to impart this industry experience in my software engineering and databases courses by incorporating real life projects, examples, and whenever possible, collaborations with business organizations such as Brigham & Women's Hospital, the US Treasury, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and Massachusetts General Hospital. ... View Profile