Areas of Research

On this page:

• Assistive Technologies and Learning with Disabilities
• Bioinformatics
• Biomed Imaging and Visualization
• Cloud Computing
• Cyber Security
• Cyber-Physical Systems
• Databases and Data Mining
• Data Science and Security
• Kno.e.sis
• Multimedia Systems and Apps
• Semantic, Social and Sensor Web
• Soft Computing and Machine Learning
• Wireless Networking and Security

---

Assistive Technologies and Learning with Disabilities

"Disabilities can be very traumatic, leading to frustration and depression," according to the American Foundation for the Blind. The rate of unemployment among legally blind individuals of working age residing in the United States greatly exceeds the unemployment rate for individuals with no functional limitations. Clever devices and information technology engineering strategies can be developed to help people overcome barriers to pursue educational and professional opportunities that will allow them to become productive members of the society.

---

Bioinformatics

Bioinformatics advances fundamental concepts in molecular biology, biochemistry, and computer science to help further understanding of basic DNA, genes, and protein structures it relates to mechanisms for drug development and treatment of diseases.

---

Biomed Imaging and Visualization

Biomedical imaging and visualization research has become a very active research field during the last two decades, offering unique solutions for a great variety of biological and biomedical problems. Analysis and visualization of medical images facilitates diagnosis and treatment planning. Visualization systems used as surgical navigation systems enable precise and minimally invasive surgery.

---

Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is a major step toward organizing all aspects of computation as a public utility service. It embraces concepts such as software as a service and platform as a service, including services for workflow facilities, application design and development, deployment and hosting services, data integration, and management of software. The cloud platform increases in importance as our industry makes the phase change from in-house data management to cloud-hosted data management to improve efficiency and focus on core businesses. However, like any new technology, there are formidable problems, from performance issues to security and privacy, from metadata management to massively parallel execution.

This is a major part of the Kno.e.sis Research Center.

---

Cyber Security

The Department of Computer Science and Engineering of Wright State University recently received a grant, titled "REU Site: Cyber Security Research at Wright State University", from the National Science Foundation. This NSF REU site offers a ten-week summer program that aims at providing a diverse group of motivated undergraduates with competitive research experiences in cyber-security research. A variety of projects will be offered in Network Security, Intrusion Detection, Wireless Sensor Network Security, Internet Malware Detection, Analysis, and Mitigation, Software Reverse Engineering and Vulnerability Discovery, and Privacy-Preserving Data Mining. More information of this REU Site can be found at http://reu.cs.wright.edu.  

---

Cyber-Physical Systems

Cyber-Physical Systems are jointly physical and computational and are characterized by complex loops of cause and effect between the computational and physical components. We focus on the creation of methods by which such systems can self-adapt to repair damage and exploit opportunities and methods by which we can explain and understand how they operate even after having diverged from their original forms. Our current application area the creation of control systems for insect-like flapping-wing air vehicles that repair themselves, in flight, after suffering wing damage.

Click here for more information about Cyber Physical Systems at Wright State University

Researchers

• John Gallagher
• Amit Sheth

---

Databases and Data Mining

Data mining is the process of extracting useful knowledge from a database. Data mining facilitates the characterization, classification, clustering, and searching of different databases, including text data, image and video data, and bioinformatics data for various applications. Text, multimedia, and bioinformatics databases are very large and so parallel/distributed data mining is essential for scalable performance.

---

Data Science and Security

The Data ScThe Data Science and Security Cluster (DSSC) is a collaboration of several research groups at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. It encompasses seven faculty members and a total of approximately 50 people across five research labs. Focus areas include data integration and analytics, data visualization, data security and privacy, network security, bioinformatics, semantic web, social network analysis, and web and complex systems.

---

Kno.e.sis

The Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-enabled Computing (Kno.e.sis) at the Wright State University performs world-class research on moving from information to meaning, towards the vision of Computing for Human Experience. The well-funded center consists of 13 labs and approximately 100 multidisciplinary researchers, including 15 faculty and more than 50 Ph.D. students from Computer Science (incl. ML/NLP/IR/KR/DB/data mining/bioinformatics/visualization), Biomedical Sciences and Health Informatics, and the Cognitive Sciences.

The current focus is on Web 3.0 topics including Semantic/Social/Sensor Webs, Web of Things, and Ubiquitous-Mobile-Cloud Computing, with varied applications such as disaster management and diplomacy (social media based emergency coordination, water diplomacy), e-Sciences with focus on health care and life sciences (metabolomics, human parasite research, extra-medical use of pain killers, reducing hospital readmissions, cardiology data mining, and literature based knowledge discovery) and defense/intelligence (war fighter situational awareness, socio-cultural-behavioral analysis, human effectiveness). In addition to competitive federal funds (NIH/NSF/AFOSR/AFRL, etc), its faculty members have recent innovation, challenge, or faculty awards from MSR, IBM Research, Google, and HP Labs, and maintain strong industry collaborations. Kno.e.sis’ outcomes have made the university among the top in WWW, and its graduates highly sought after and successful.

---

Multimedia Systems and Apps

Multimedia systems offer synergistic and integrated solutions to a great variety of applications related to multi-modality data, such as automatic target recognition, surveillance, tracking human behavior, etc.

---

Semantic, Social and Sensor Webs

The World Wide Web contains rapidly growing amount of enterprise, social, device/sensor/IoT/WoT data in unstructured, semistructured and structured forms. The Semantic Web initiative by the World Wide Web consortium (W3C) of which Wright State University is a member (represented by Kno.e.sis) has developed standards and technologies to associate meaning to data, to make data more machine and human understandable, and to apply reasoning techniques for intelligent processing leading to actionable information, insights, and discovery. Kno.e.sis has one of the largest academic groups in the US in Semantic Web, and its applications for better use and analysis of social and sensor data.

This is a major part of the Kno.e.sis Research Center.

---

Soft Computing and Machine Learning

Artificial intelligence is an area of computer science focused on the development of computer systems that exhibit intelligent behavior in decision making, object recognition, planning, learning, and other applications that require intelligent assessment of complex information. Many AI systems incorporate learning systems such as simulated neural networks or evolutionary algorithms to improve performance with experience.

One of the difficulties encountered in many of the domains considered in artificial intelligence is the need for decision making in the presence of uncertain and/or incomplete information. Soft computing refers to a number of formal systems that have been developed to represent and reason with uncertain information. These systems include fuzzy logic, rough set theory, Bayesian networks, and hidden Markov models.

---

Wireless Networking and Security

Wireless communication and networking have revolutionized the way people communicate. Currently, there are more than two billion cellular telephone subscribers worldwide. Wireless local area networks have become a necessity in many parts of the globe. With new wireless enabled applications being proposed every day, such as wireless sensor networks, telemedicine, music telepresence, and intelligent web, the potential of this discipline is just being unleashed.