Frank Klassner is a Professor in Villanova's Computing Sciences Department and has served as the second Director of Villanova's Center of Excellence in Enterprise Technology since 2006. His research has studied topics in high-level adaptive signal processing, educational robotics, simulation, and now virtual reality and 3D visualization. He has served as a member of the North America Lego Education Advisory Panel and as a consultant for the Vatican Internet Office and the Vatican Museums. He is founding Treasurer of THECAAV, an organization for promoting best practices for VR on campuses. Dr. Klassner holds MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and BS degrees in Computer Science and Electronics Engineering from the University of Scranton, Pennsylvania.
Researcher Bios
Robert Beck is a Professor of Computing Sciences at Villanova. He was the founding chair of the Department of Computing Sciences and served as chair for 21 years. He has also served as chair of the Department of Mathematics. He conducts research in the area of Human Computer Interaction and is currently working with persuasive HCI for promoting sustainability. He also leads the Program for Website Creation and Evaluation for the Center of Excellence in Enterprise Technology. His work in the area of Computer Science Education has recently focused on computing in context and the use of inquiry-based learning, problem based learning and authentic research to promote collaboration between disciplines. In the area of Software Engineering, Dr. Beck has focused on formal models of systems and systems.
Henry "Hank" Carter is an Assistant Professor in the Computing Sciences department at Villanova. His research interests are in cybersecurity and applied cryptography. Specifically, his work focuses on developing practical cryptographic protocols for maintaining data privacy on untrusted computing platforms. These protocols can then be applied to mobile applications or cloud-based computing services to ensure that a user’s data is never misused or exposed in the event of a security breach. Beyond privacy-preserving cryptography, Henry has conducted research in telephone network fraud, ransomware detection, and web authentication security. He received his PhD and MS in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology and his BS from Belmont University.
Mirela Damian is a Professor in Villanova's Computing Sciences Department. Her research is broadly in the areas of computational geometry and graph theory, inspired by problems in wireless networks, graphics, robotics and computational biology. Her most recent work focuses on the design of wireless networks with directional antennas, where the goal is to maximize communication robustness and security while minimizing power consumption and interference. Other projects of interest include reconfigurations of modular robots into structures suited for a certain enviroments or tasks, polyhedra unfolding motivated by industrial design, and DNA computing.
Vijay Gehlot is currently an Associate Professor and Graduate Programs Director in the department of Computing Sciences at Villanova University. He received his PhD in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania. His current research focus is applications of Colored Petri Nets (CPNs) in modeling and analysis of systems, including system of systems and system dynamics. Specific focus of his research work include healthcare applications pertaining to workflow and patient safety issues; enterprise service oriented architectures and scalability issues; emergent behaviors of cyber-physical systems; broadband networks architecture, modeling, measurement, and analysis; systems biology and signaling pathways modeling.
Edward Kim is an Assistant Professor in the Computing Sciences department at Villanova University. His general interests are on the areas of computer graphics and computer vision. He currently conducts research in visual computing, both in generating digital imagery and in interpreting multimedia. He applies his research towards applications of image analysis and retrieval on large scale web collections and medical image databases. He also collects, analyzes, and visualizes data through game environments and interactive multimedia. Dr. Kim holds a PhD in computer science from Lehigh University, an MSE in computer graphics and game technology, and a BSE in computer science with minors in fine arts and psychology from the University of Pennsylvania.
Thomas Way is an Associate Professor of Computing Sciences at Villanova. He led a team of 9 faculty, 12 graduate students, 5 undergraduate students and 2 full-time research associates, collaborating with industry engineers from Gestalt LLC (now part of Accenture) and managers from the USAF’s Electronic Systems Center on the Applied Research in Computing Enterprise Services (ARCES) program, CEET’s flagship research project funded by the Department of Defense. His current research is exploring parsing in a variety of forms, such as big data opinion mining, social network extraction, compiler analysis, positional characterization, textual analysis and data translation. He incorporates machine learning, natural language processing and sentiment analysis techniques into his parsing research.