Matthew Burke

Phone: 202-994-0718
E-mail: mmburke@gwu.edu
Campus Location(s): Academic Center, Phillips Hall 709
Office Hours: Monday 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM, Wednesday 4:45 - 6:00 PM

About Prof.Burke in his words:

Although I often list ubiquitous computing as one of my interests, I am primarily interested in ubiquitous access to information and how that impacts education and research. I am currently developing tools to assist software developers make use of information while programming. On days when I am feeling more mathematically inclined, I am interested in combinatorial game theory (not to be confused with game theory a la Nash or Von Neumann). Combinatorial games are two-player games of perfect information: think go, chess, amazons, etc. Recently I have begun work exploring a class of impartial games which I refer to as multi-dimensional. I have also worked in the past using mathematical and computational techniques to study ecological problems such as weed spread and feeding behavior of whales. I intend to begin new investigations in this area soon.

Interests

ubiquitous computing, computational thinking, combinatorial game theory, mathematical ecology

Education

Ph.D., 1996, Mathematics, Washington State University

M.S., 1992, Computer Science, Washington State University

B.A., 1989, Mathematics and Computer Science, Earlham College

Selected Publications

1. Burke, Matthew, Lua and Web Programming. Lua Programming Gems. , R. IERUSALIMSCHY, W. CELES and L. HENRIQUE DE FIGUEIREDO, Eds., In preparation.
2. Burke, Matthew, Lua Data Structures. Lua Programming Gems. , R. IERUSALIMSCHY, W. CELES and L. HENRIQUE DE FIGUEIREDO, Eds., In preparation.
3. Burke, Matthew, Prototype-based Languages (Workshop Abstract) , The Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges, Volume 21, Number 2, pp. 215-216, December 2005.
4. Burke, Matthew, The .LRN Course Management Framework (Workshop Abstract). , The Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges., Volume 20, Number 3, pp 2-3, February 2005.
5. Burke, Matthew, Instant Messaging and Course Diaries , The Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges, Vol. 19, No. 5, pp. 270�274, May 2004.
6. Burke, Matthew, Monitoring Aerosols, Ozone and Trace Gases , Lecture Notes from the 1992 NOAA Colloquium on Operational Environmental Prediction., pp. 68�77, January 1995.
7. Burke, Matthew, Great Lakes Hydrology , Lecture Notes from the 1992 NOAA Colloquium on Operational Environmental Prediction, pp. 413�427, January 1995.
8. Burke, Matthew, Wave Forecasting , Lecture Notes from the 1992 NOAA Colloquium on Operational Environmental Prediction, pp. 498�504, January 1995.
9. Burke, Matthew, A Review of the Cellular System for Cellular Automaton-Based Models. , Natural Resource Modeling, Volume 7, Number 3, pp.295�298, Summer 1993.
10. Burke, Matthew, Random Variables in Forth. , SIGFORTH Newsletter, Volume 3, Number 3, pp. 21�24., January 1992.

Poorvi Vora

E-mail: poorvi@gwu.edu

Campus Location(s): Phillips 706

Office Hours: Tuesdays: 1-2 pm, 6-8:30 pm, Thursdays: 1:30-4 pm

Prof.Poorvi Vora is the best professors in her field of teaching and research. Professor Poorvi Vora receive the 2009 ACM Teacher of the Year Award at the Annual Department of Computer Science Honoring Our CS Graduates BBQ.

Major Research Interests:
Privacy, cryptology, electronic voting, watermarking and counterfeit deterrence, game theory,
image processing, information theory and coding

Education

Ph.D., Electrical Engineering. North Carolina State University (1993)
Dissertation Title: Optimization Criteria and Numerical Analysis in the Design of Colour
Scanning Filters
Dissertation Adviser: H. Joel Trussell
M.S., Mathematics. Cornell University (1990)
M.S., Electrical Engineering. North Carolina State University (1988)
Thesis Topic: Bounds on the Improvement of Restoration Using Spatial a priori Information
Thesis Adviser: H. Joel Trussell
B. Tech., Electrical Engineering. Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (1986)

Classes Taught

 At GW
1. CSCI 283, Computer Security Systems I
2. CSCI 284, Cryptography
3. CSCI 381, Advanced Cryptography
4. CSCI 224, Advanced Discrete Structures. Co-located with CSCI 124.
5. CSCI 162, Cryptography. Co-located with CSCI 284.
6. CSCI 172, Computer Security. Co-located with CSCI 283.
7. CSCI 124, Discrete Structures II. Co-located with CSCI 224.

Selected Publications

1. Ben Hosp, Poorvi L. Vora, An Information-Theoretic Model of Voting Systems , Mathematical and Computer Modelling. Special issue on: Mathematical Modeling of Voting Systems and Elections: Theory and Applications, Vol. 48, nos.9-10, pp. 1628-1645, Nov 2008.
2. Poorvi L. Vora, An Information-Theoretic Approach to Inference Attacks on Random Data Perturbation and a Related Privacy Measure , IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Vol. 53, No. 8, pp 2971-2977, August 2007.
3. Sumit Joshi, Yu-An Sun, Poorvi Vora, The Privacy Cost of the Second Chance Offer , WPES, 2005.
4. Poorvi L. Vora, H. Joel Trussell, Measure of goodness of a set of color scanning filters. , Journal of the Optical Society of America-A, vol. 10, no. 7, pp. 1499-1508, July 1993.

Nan Zhang

         Phone: (202) 994-5919
E-mail: nzhang10@gwu.edu
Campus Location(s): 715 Academic Center
Office Hours: Tuesday 12:00 - 2:00 PM

 Nan Zhang is an assistant professor of Computer Science at the George Washington University. Before he joined GWU in 2008, he was an assistant professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington. He received his Ph.D. from Texas A&M University in 2006, and his B.S. from Peking University, China, in 2001, both in Computer Science. His current research interests include privacy and security issues in databases, data mining, and computer networks, including security and anonymity in data collection, publishing, and sharing, privacy-preserving data mining, and wireless network security and privacy. He received the NSF CAREER Award in 2008.

Education

Ph.D., 2006, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX
B.S., 2001, Peking University, China

Interests

Privacy and security issues in databases, data mining, and computer networks, including security and anonymity in data collection, publishing, and sharing, privacy-preserving data mining, and wireless network security and privacy.

Selected Publications

1. N. Zhang, S. Wang, and W. Zhao, A New Scheme on Privacy-Preserving Data Classification , Proceedings of the 11th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), 2005.
2. N. Zhang and W. Zhao, Distributed Privacy-Preserving Information Sharing , Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB), 2005.
3. N. Zhang and W. Zhao, Privacy-Preserving Data-Mining Systems , IEEE Computer, 40(4), 2007.
4. N. Zhang and W. Zhao, Privacy Protection Against Malicious Adversaries in Distributed Information Sharing Systems , IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), 20(8), 2008.
5. W. Yu, N. Zhang, X. Fu, R. Bettati, and W. Zhao, On Localization Attacks to Internet Threat Monitors: An Information-Theoretic Framework , Proceedings of the 38th IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), 2008.