research

COMPUTER SCIENCE

Harvard's faculty in computer science investigate a wide range of topics, including ground-breaking work in provably secure cryptography, the implementation of sensor nets, developments at the interface of economics and computer science, and discoveries in VLSI.

Some of the key advances in CS happened at Harvard, including the development of the Mark computers, the invention of the COBOL programming language, the development of the APL programming language, the founding of computer graphics, the creation of the Information Dispersal Algorithm, the development of the PAC model for computational learning, the establishment of one of the first full-featured CS curriculums, and the creation the first Microsoft product, BASIC.

Computer science is inside of a dynamic hub that links to the rest of the University, from fields such as Electrical Engineering, Physics, Chemistry, and Biology to Harvard's professional schools in medicine and business.

The state-of-the-art building that houses activities in computer science and electrical engineering, Maxwell Dworkin, was underwritten by two of the Division's most famous attendees, Bill Gates COL '77 and his classmate Steven Ballmer '77.

Areas of Focus

Artificial Intelligence and Computational Linguistics

  • developing techniques for improving human–computer communication and collaboration in problem solving, in the design of intelligent systems that can deal effectively with uncertainty, and in the design of intelligent systems that can solve distributed problems with self-interested and game-theoretic agents
  • modeling the behavior of intelligent communication systems
  • developing algorithms and representation languages for probabilistic and game-theoretic reasoning
  • mechanism design and automated negotiation for bounded-rational agents

Researchers

Grosz, Barbara J.
Nagpal, Radhika
Parkes, David C.
Pfeffer, Avrom J.
Shieber, Stuart M.

Research Groups

Artificial Intelligence


Electronic Commerce

  • design of markets and mechanisms to promote good system-wide behavior from the combined actions of multiple self-interested and autonomous participants
  • applications to automated negotiation for procurement and logistics in business domains
  • applications to network resource allocation and negotiation in peer-to-peer systems in distributed systems

Researchers

Oettinger, Anthony G.
Parkes, David C.

Research Groups

Economics and Computer Science


Graphics

  • techniques to render new images from input image streams (image-based rendering)
  • techniques to render images efficiently
  • techniques to simulate light in order to render photo-realistic images as well as data structures and algorithms to represent 3-D geometric objects and environments

Researchers

Gortler, Steven J.
Pfister, Hanspeter
Zickler, Todd

Research Groups

Computer Graphics


Languages, Compilers, and Tools

  • creating new application-specific languages for solving targeted problems to new profiling and program-analysis techniques for improving our understanding of application behavior

  • the analysis and modification of binary code to help programmers improve the code's performance, improve the code's security, or run the code on a different machine from the original target
  • compiler-construction techniques that make compiler infrastructure reusable
  • adapting compilers and other low-level tools to support work on new ideas in run-time systems and machine architectures

Researchers

Morrisett, Greg
Smith, Michael D.


Networking and Systems

  • developing extremely high performance software and hardware systems, with a focus on the interactions between applications, operating systems, compilers, and architecture
  • extensible operating systems and storage systems
  • runtime virtual machines supporting dynamic optimizations
  • security for high-performance networks
  • wireless sensor networks
  • power-aware computer architectures and software

Researchers

Brooks, David M.
Kung, H.T.
Morrisett, Greg
Seltzer, Margo I.
Smith, Michael D.
Welsh, Matthew D.

Research Groups

Compilation/Architecture
Graphics
Internet
Systems Research at Harvard (SYRAH)


Theory of Computation

  • understanding the mathematical laws governing efficient computation, and applying this understanding to address problems arising in other parts of computer science and mathematics and in other fields such as neuroscience and physics
  • the design and analysis of algorithms
  • computational complexity
  • error-correcting codes
  • cryptography
  • learning theory and cognitive computation
  • logic in computer science
  • randomness in computation
  • quantum computation
  • computational algebra and number theory
  • parallel computation

Researchers

Lewis, Harry R.
Mitzenmacher, Michael D.
Rabin, Michael O.
Vadhan, Salil P.
Valiant, Leslie G.

Research Groups

Theory of Computation