Recent News

	(01/26/10 - update) Prof. Sean Smith and his group will be playing a major role in an initiative to secure the power grid. Read more here and here .
	(12/21/09) Prof. Hany Farid helps in halting the spread of child pornography. Read more here.
	(11/09/09) Prof. Tom Cormen has been designated an ACM Distinguished Educator. Read more here.

Recent Technical Reports

• January 2010: On the Reliability of Wireless Fingerprinting using Clock Skews
• January 2010: AnonyTL Specification
• August 2009: Hardware-Assisted Secure Computation
• November 2009: User survey regarding the needs of network researchers in trace-anonymization tools
• September 2009: Katana: A Hot Patching Framework for ELF Executables

Featured Research

Family-Based Protein Design

Prof. Chris Bailey-Kellogg

Family reunions can be very interesting. Proteins have relatives (across organisms and even within the same organism) that are similar, but also different in significant ways. For example, shown in the figure are one serine protease (blue; function is to chop up other proteins) and one of its inhibitors (red; function is to block the chopping mechanism, as shown). Different proteases recognize different places to chop, while different inhibitors have different degrees of inhibition for different proteases. We are developing techniques to learn from nature's exploration of these families -- generalizing common features of observed family members and characterizing their differences, and relating these to experimental observations about their functions. This enables us to optimize our own new variants with desired functions (e.g., particularly strong and protease-specific inhibitors).

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