Research in computer science has shown a remarkable ability to change the world. Just consider some of the $1B industries that were spawned from basic research in computer science: Internet search, graphics and animation, relational databases, data mining, and speech recognition. In each of these cases, and fourteen others, the National Research Council traced each industry’s fundamental innovations back to university research projects1. Our computer science department has played a major role, including Simon Lam’s invention of secure sockets , which enabled e-commerce, and Allen Emerson’s breakthroughs in model checking, which enabled this verification method to be used routinely to create complex hardware and software systems. In this newsletter, and future ones, we showcase research projects in the Department that might well spawn the next world-changing innovation, starting with Chandra Bajaj’s research on automated drug discovery.
Bruce Porter, UTCS Chair
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1 National Research Council. Assessment of Department of Defense Basic Research. The National Academies Press, Washington D.C., 2005.