Computer Science

Professor Georges Grinstein Ph.D., Director

Dr. Grinstein has been developing visualization and design, modeling, analysis and visualization of complex information systems geared toward solving high dimensional problems in bioinformatics and cheminformatics data sets. Dr. Grinstein and Dr. Marx from the Chemistry Department first began the collaborations evolving into the present day Bio/cheminformatics option. In addition he has developed, managed and disseminated a number of software packages, suites and tools in use worldwide, some of which have gone into commercial development. Dr. Grinstein's educational interests include distributed education, bridging high school and university scholars, building conduits between industry and universities and furthering interdisciplinary undergraduate and graduate bioinformatics studies.

Cindy Chen Ph.D., Assistant Professor 

Dr. Cindy Chen's research interests are database systems, XML information systems and data mining. She received her PhD from UCLA in 2001. After graduation, she joined IBM T.J. Watson Research Center and AT&T Labs-Research as a post doctoral fellow and visiting scientist, respectively. Since January 2003, she has been an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at UMass Lowell.

Karen Daniels Ph.D., Associate Professor

Dr. Daniels’ research interests are computational geometry, combinatorial optimization, geometric modeling, and packing/layout/covering problems. Her research support has come from NSF, DARPA and Harvard University. Her previous applied algorithms research was in VLSI design (custom layout algorithms for a silicon compiler), geometric modeling (partitioning cubic B-spline curves), manufacturing (inventory level optimization for factory production and layout algorithms for apparel manufacturing), and telecommunications (channel assignment algorithms for wireless networking). Some of her work has been licensed to Gerber Technologies and is part of a commercial product. She is interested in the application of her algorithmic expertise to molecular modeling, clustering and geometric covering. Her research group has begun work on computational geometry techniques for clustering algorithms. One of her current research interests is hemoglobin assembly simulation that would model molecular environments and facilitate a number of molecular dynamic simulations, each involving a different hypothesized hemoglobin formation process.

Haim Levkowitz Ph.D., Associate Professor

Dr. Levkowitz’s research centers round Visual Computing (Color, Perception, Graphics), Auditory Computing (Sound and Sonification), Information Retrieval and Advanced Web Technologies. He has been studying the use of color, texture and sound to fuse/integrate image data from multiple modalities and sources for improved diagnosis, utilizing better clustering and segregation in high dimensional features spaces. He is also studying Web approaches to visual and aural delivery of text information. 

Gary Livingston Ph.D., Assistant Professor 

Dr. Gary Livingston's current research is focused on high performance data mining and discovery systems that can be enhanced using heuristics, especially in automating the acquisition and use of domain knowledge provided by domain expert. Dr. Livingston is currently collaborating with Dr. John Rosenberg form the University of Pittsburgh biology department, using his systems to discover patterns in protein crystal-growing experiments. He is beginning investigations into methods for discovering gene-expression pathways.