Departmental Research

Department faculty and students research a number of topics, from robotics to the language analysis of program comments. This research helps faculty keep the undergraduate curricula up to date in a rapidly changing field, and it assists in students in pursuing  excellent advanced graduate programs.

Student Research

The department has a strong tradition of undergraduate involvement in research projects with an excellent record of participation in publications – students have traveled as far as Ireland to present joint faculty/student work, and they helped write the software that cracked the Human Genome.   Students primarily work on research as either a senior research project, or as a summer Hauber researcher. The summer Hauber research students are paid a stipend and may live on campus. In both cases, students work closely with one or two faculty advisors to pursue novel research areas.

Research Topics

Examples of  Current research topics:

• Text analysis of software projects (Drs. Binkley and Lawrie)
• Software process analysis (Drs. Binkley and Lawrie)
• Simulation validation (Drs. Olsen and Raunak)
• Modeling and simulation of complex systems (Dr. Olsen)
• Mobile device networks (Dr. Isaacman)

Publications

Many published faculty papers are cited on the faculty pages and faculty research pages linked from the department's faculty and staff listing. In addition to research published in journals and conference proceedings, faculty and students occasionally publish Technical Reports on Loyola's website.

Recent Grants

In 2016, Professors Megan Olsen, Dave Binkley, and Mr. George Hall, along with Dr. Albrecht in Chemistry and Dr. Schwartz in Economics, received a$280K NSF grant for a university-wide computing cluster. This cluster was installed by George Hall in January 2017, and supports computational research projects across the university, particularly in the STEM fields. The cluster supports both faculty and student research projects.

In 2015, Professor Lawrie was a co-PI on the $565K CPaMS grant obtained by Professor Shah in Mathematics and Statistics. This grant supports scholarships for high achieving students planning to study computer science, physics, mathematics, or statistics. Interested prospective students should apply by the spring semester deadline, the semester before beginning their study at Loyola.

In 2014, Dr. Binkley received an NSF grant and a Fulbright Fellowship to study varying aspects of the "Evolution of Software Product Families in Safety Critical Systems" with Dr. Loen Moonen of Simula Research Laboratory in Norway.

In 2009, Professors Dawn Lawrie and David Binkley received a $310k NSF grant on “Making Sense of Source Code: Improving Software through Information Retrieval.” This grant has allowed Drs. Lawrie and Binkley to work with students on the application of information retrieval techniques to the understanding and analysis of very large computer programs. Student research on this topic continues under the summer Hauber research program and senior research projects.