SIS Research
Analytics (Mirsad Hadzikadic, Xi Niu, Bill Tolone, David Wilson and Albert Park)
Analytics is the systematic discovery of trends, value, explanations, and meaning, as well as the ability to make predictions from messy real world data including structured data, images, text, audio, and mobile sensor measurements. In the Department of Software and Information Systems, this research focus area also involves the development, modeling, and simulation of intelligent and complex systems in order to address the dynamics and non-linear characteristics of persistent real-world problems.
Current faculty and students belonging to the Complex Systems Institute, Defense Computing Center, Distributed Artificial Intelligence Lab and Human Computer Interaction Lab are making significant contributions in the areas of artificial intelligence, network science, complex systems, machine learning, metareasoning, multiagent systems and system-of-systems modeling and simulation.
Application areas include clinical informatics, collaborative and creative multimedia expression, critical infrastructure analysis, defense and intelligence analysis, spatial computing/geographic information systems, financial risk analysis, brain behavior and clinical neuroscience, mobile networks, online social networks, recommender systems, traffic analysis and weather tracking.
Design and HCI (Heather Lipford, Mary Lou Maher, Xi Niu, Manuel A. Pérez-Quiñones, Dale-Marie Wilson and Nick Davis)
Design is a high level cognitive activity that is becoming increasingly important in the technology domain, and requires both theoretical knowledge and practical skill. The design of artifacts for human use must reflect differential human cognitive and physical abilities, as well as the social, cultural, political and geographic contexts of use. Thus, design is an interdisciplinary field.
HCI is the study, design, and evaluation of the interaction between humans and computers. Research in design and HCI involves understanding the rich ecosystem of use, and innovating around how to enable humans to work in tandem with digital systems optimally, where the humans and the systems each do what they are best at. Design is about deciding which dimensions should be optimized and iterating through points within the space formed by those dimensions. HCI is about studying how people interact with systems, prototyping new interaction paradigms and learning how to evaluate the interaction between humans and systems. Design and HCI are critical areas of interest within the Department of Software and Information Systems, which is reflected both in our teaching and our research. We have three facilities to support this work, including the Human Computer Interaction Lab, the Interaction Design (InDe) Studio and a usability lab. Faculty and graduate students in HCI and Design are investigating diverse topics ranging from creativity to usable privacy to ubiquitous systems for accessibility.
Health Informatics (Yaorong Ge, Mirsad Hadzikadic, David Wilson and Albert Park)
Health Informatics is considered a part of the emerging field of Biomedical Informatics, which is the interdisciplinary, scientific field that studies and pursues the effective uses of biomedical data, information, and knowledge for scientific inquiry, problem solving and decision making, motivated by efforts to improve human health. Health informatics is generally concerned with informatics challenges in the clinical and public health domains as opposed to bioinformatics which focuses on data at molecular and cellular level. However, the boundaries between the subfields are superficial at best. Innovative research relies increasingly on effective integration of data, information, and knowledge at multiple scales.
Health Informatics is inherently an interdisciplinary research field. The health informatics program at UNCC is a joint effort between the College of Computing and Informatics (CCI) and College of Health and Human Services (CHHS). Each faculty member in the health informatics program also has many collaborators at various health care institutions including government healthcare agencies, integrated healthcare delivery systems, insurance providers, and pharmaceutical companies.
Current faculty research interests are reflective of the interdisciplinary nature of health informatics. Numerous CS and SIS faculty members conduct research in this area. The core HI faculty in CCI has active research projects in EHR data mining for drug repurposing, biomedical text mining, radiation therapy decision support, clinical data integration and data warehousing, cardiovascular imaging ontology and informatics platform development, and neural and behavioral modeling.
Security and Privacy (Bill Chu, Heather Lipford, Mohamed Shehab, Yongge Wang, Weichao Wang, Meera Sridhar and Tom Moyer)
The Cyber Defense & Network Assurability (CyberDNA) Center at the College of Computing and Information Systems of University of University of North Carolina Charlotte has been established to offer a leading role in research and education of information and system security and privacy. The CyberDNA research team includes strong and diverse expertise as well as state-of-the-art facilities to address critical information and system security, and privacy problems of high societal-impact. The objectives of CyberDNA research team is to make security and privacy assurable, usable and automated for smart open society by developing rigors cryptographic algorithms, security protocols, and analytics methodologies using formal methods, statistical analysis, mining and reasoning. CyberDNA offers a unique opportunity for student as well as industry collaborators to engage in research projects and activities including seminars and workshops. The CyberDNA team has active research collaboration with the industry particularly financial institutions, energy, service providers and many government agencies.
CyberDNA vision is (1) promoting security analytics and automation using system artifacts such as traces, logs, configuration ets for critical infrastructure, (2) offering leap-ahead research by integrating multidisciplinary research from security, networking, reliability, risk management, economical, and behavioral sciences, and (3) developing deployable tools to facilitate technology transfer and workforce education and preparation. The research of CyberDNA team includes security and privacy of data, applications, systems and networks considering human behavior, social sciences and economics. In particular, CyberDNA team includes many faculties from different colleges and external collaborators who cover wide range security expertise including security configuration analytics, identity management, usable security and privacy, intrusion detection, software security, cloud security, mobile application security, privacy-preservation computation, risk management, applied cryptology, wireless security, data mining, and virtualization.