The GRAIL lab conducts research within the general areas of computer graphics and geometric modeling. Research topics of particular interest include surface reconstruction, surface design, visibility analysis, anatomy of the retina, intersection, smooth computational geometry, and motion planning. Particular attention is paid to the development of algorithms that generalize from polyhedral meshes to smooth surfaces.
Knowledge discovery research at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) is being carried out by a multidisciplinary group with researchers from Computer and Information Sciences, Pathology and Medical Informatics. The current focus is on healthcare applications, more specifically on surveillance problems. A tool called Data Mining Surveillance (DMSS) has been developed which searches temporally organized medical data, builds associations and applies interestingness heuristics for the identification of trends of interest to medical domain experts. More recently several members of this group have been involved with bioinformatics applications.
The Software Composition and Modeling (SOFTCOM) Laboratory conducts research within the general areas of software engineering and programming languages. Our research is dedicated to the study of approaches that increase software productivity and quality by using novel software technology and programming language techniques. Our specific research areas range from component-based software development, aspect-oriented software development, formal methods in software engineering, program transformation, model-integrated computing, model driven architecture, and research into the customization of software development environments (e.g., speech enabled tools).
The High Performance Computing Laboratory concentrates on the design of high performance systems software for scientific and commodity computing environments. Emphasizing semi-analytical approaches to the understanding of complex systems such as networks and numerical libraries, the HPC Lab has projects that span the gamut from gigabit/s communication subsystems, to numerical algorithms for huge, sparse linear systems of equations, to object-oriented applications that utilize the infrastructure to solve real problems. Standards-based approaches to computer software are emphasized, in that good ideas are pushed into standards whenever possible, to help assure their acceptance, or to find better paths that can also be adopted by industry and government. Work is undertaken at the Department of Computer and Information Sciences where a well-equipped laboratory is housed.
The Collaborative Computing Laboratory (CCL) undertakes research in the areas of Grid Computing, Distributed Computing, and Web-based Computing. Current research focus is on application development and programming environments, integration systems, problem solving environments (computational portals), and collaborative environments to support multidisciplinary research. CCL has a 64-processor Opteron cluster with Grid middleware infrastructure and is in the process of being integrated with other computational resources on campus to create a distributed campus-wide computational infrastructure - UABGrid. Members of CCL have active collaboration with other CIS research groups as well as Academic Computing Department, Mechanical Engineering Department, and Molecular and Genetic Bioinformatics Facility at UAB.
Computer Forensics seeks to apply the principles of Computer Science to the real-world problems faced by CyberCrime Investigators. Current research areas include Spam Data Mining for Law Enforcement; Phishing; and Malware Analysis.
The Natural Language Processing Laboratory explores machine learning techniques to develop statistical models of human language. The goal is to employ these models in novel areas such as syntactic and semantic processing of mixed-language text and communication disorders.
