Carnegie Mellon University  
School of Computer Science  

Ph.D. Program in Computation, Organizations and Society

Institute for Software Research International  
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Research Projects

Research in the Ph.D. program in Computation, Organizations and Society (COS) appears at the confluence of computer science and a combination of management, social science, law, and policy. Projects in COS are heavily rooted in computer science, but are a multi-disciplinary pursuit. Recent research areas include privacy technology, social networks and e-business. A sample of student papers, and a list of affiliated labs and research groups conducting COS projects appear further below.

Recent Project Areas

  • Privacy rights management
  • Data privacy
  • Privacy technology (including surveillance, video, GPS)
  • Privacy-preserving data mining
  • Electronic market mechanisms
  • Automated negotiation
  • Multi-agent systems
  • Dynamic network modeling
  • Dynamic network analysis
  • Online dispute resolution

Student Papers

Below are samples of student papers on COS projects in which the noted student was either the sole author or a primary author.

  • Robert Behrman
    “Modeling the Structure and Effectiveness of Intelligence Organizations: Dynamic Information Flow Simulation” Proceedings of the 8th International Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium. Conference held at the National Defense War College, Washington DC. Evidence Based Research, Vienna, VA.

  • Li-Chiou Chen
    “The Impact of Social Networks in the Propagation of Computer Viruses and Countermeasures. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics.

  • Matthew J. Dombroski
    "NETEST: Estimating a Terrorist Network's Structure," Graduate Student Best Paper Award, CASOS 2002 Conference, Computational & Mathematical Organization Theory, 8.

    “Estimating the Shape of Covert Networks” Proceedings of the 8th International Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium. Conference held at the National Defense War College, Washington DC. Evidence Based Research, Vienna, VA.

  • Fabien Gandon
    “A Semantic eWallet to Reconcile Privacy and Context Awareness”, Web Semantics journal, Vol. 3, forthcoming

  • Ralph Gross
    “Silhouette-based Human Identification from Body Shape and Gait” 5th International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition, 2002

    “Individual Differences in Facial Expression: Stability over Time, Relation to Self-Reported Emotion, and Ability to Inform Person Identification” IEEE International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI), 2002

    “An Image Pre-Processing Algorithm for Illumination Invariant Face Recognition” 4th International Conference on Audio-and Video Based Biometric Person Authentication (AVBPA), 2003

  • Sun Jiong
    Coordinating Multi-Attribute Reverse Auctions Subject to Temporal and Capacity Constraints ”, IJCAI-03 Workshop on “Trading Agent Design and Analysis”, Mexico, August 2003.

  • Dag Kjenstad
    "Agent-based e-Supply Chain Decision Support", Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce, Vol. 13, No. 3, 2003

  • Zhiang Lin
    “Organizational Design and Adaptation in Response to Crises: Theory and Practice,” In Dennis H. Nagao (Ed.) AoM Best Papers Proceedings. Sixty-First Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management, Washington, D.C., USA, August 3-8, 2001, How Governments Matter, Academy of Management Proceedings 2001 , Academy of Management, Washington D.C. OMT: B1-B6.

  • Bradley Malin
    “Compromising Online Anonymity with Trail Re-identification.” Under review for publication.

    “Correlating web usage of health information with patient medical data”. Proc of the American Medial Informatics Annual Symposium. 2002.

    “Inferring Genotype from Phenotype through a Knowledge Based Algorithm.” Proceedings of the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing. 2002.

    “Re-identification of DNA Through an Automated Process.” Proc of the American Medial Informatics Annual Symposium. 2001. Honors: Paper named as a student finalist in the "Student Paper Competition"

  • Elaine Newton
    "Preserving Privacy by De-identifying Facial Images" Carnegie Mellon University Computer Science Technical Report. CMU-CS-03-119, March 2003. Under review for publication.

  • Craig Schreiber
    Task and Referential Databases: Information Technology and Knowledge Distribution in Organizations, CASOS 2002 Conference Proceedings, Pittsburgh, PA, June 21-23, 2002

    Information Technology and Knowledge Distribution in C3I Teams, 2002 Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium Proceedings, Monterey, CA, June 11-13, 2002

    Going Beyond the Data: Empirical Validation Leading to Grounded Theory, NAACSOS 2003 Conference Proceedings, 2003.

  • Jay Swaminathan
    "Modeling Supply Chain Dynamics: A Multiagent Approach", Decision Sciences, Vol. 29 (30), pp. 607-632, 1998.

    "Effect of Sharing Supplier Capacity Information". Tech. Rept. CMU-RI-TR-95-36, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890, 1997

  • Maksim Tsvetovat
    "Emergent Specializations in a Commodity Market: A Multi-Agent Model", Journal of Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory, 8: 221-234. Graduate Student Best Paper Award, CASOS 2001 Conference

    "A Multi-Agent Model of Emergence of Market Segmentation" in Modeling Autonomous Agents in a Multi-Agent World IV Lecture Notes on Artificial Intelligence 2004, Springer-Verlag Yves Demazeau, Francisco Garijo (Eds.)

  • Alex Yahja
    Current State of BioWar and Its Proposed Improvements, CASOS 2002 Conference Proceedings, Pittsburgh, PA, July 12-21, 2002.

Labs and Groups

Below is a sample of some affiliated labs and research groups conducting COS projects.


Ph.D. Program in Computation, Organizations and Society
School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
(412)268-1593
cos-phd@cs.cmu.edu