Please see the CIS blog for news on what’s going on in the Department!

Chair’s Blog

  • “Topping off” Ceremony for Amy Gutmann Hall
    In August of 2024, the new home of Data Science at Penn (which will encompass many faculty, staff, and students in CIS) is expected to open. A flurry of construction has happened over this past Read more…
  • CIS Welcomes New Faculty!
    After a banner year of hiring — with 10 new Assistant Professor hires starting over the next year — the CIS Department is delighted to welcome 3 new colleagues for the Fall: Osbert Bastani develops Read more…
  • New Data Science Building: Amy Gutmann Hall
    On Friday members of the Penn community, led by President Gutmann and Dean Kumar, gathered to celebrate the official groundbreaking of the new SEAS data science building, announced by naming donor Harlan Stone as Amy Read more…
  • Welcome (Back) to Campus
    We want to extend to everyone a very warm welcome (back) to the campus — after being remote for more than a year!  The events of the past year have instilled an even deeper community Read more…

Highlighted Research Projects

Developing Real-Time Virtualization

Recent years have witnessed two major trends in the development of complex real-time systems. First, they are moving from physically isolated hosts towards common computing platforms shared by multiple systems. Using common platforms can bring Read more…

Network Provenance

Operators of distributed systems often find themselves needing to answer a diagnostic or forensic question. Some part of the system is found to be in an unexpected state; for example, a suspicious routing table entry Read more…

Theory and Practice of Differential Privacy

Large, diverse datasets hold tremendous promise, if only we can derive statistical insights from them. But often, these datasets are siloed and withheld, because of privacy concerns. Differential privacy can mitigate these concerns — it Read more…

Fairness in Machine Learning

Important decisions such as police deployment, loan approvals, hiring, and parole from incarceration are beginning to be made by machine learning algorithms. This has lent urgency to the question of whether these algorithms are fair. Read more…

Foundations of Adaptive Data Analysis

Classical tools for rigorously analyzing data make the assumption that the analysis is static: the models to be fit, and the hypotheses to be tested are fixed independently of the data, and preliminary analysis of Read more…

Improving GPU Performance and Programmability

In recent years, graphics processing units (GPUs) have thoroughly permeated consumer processor designs. It is now essentially impossible to find a smartphone, tablet or laptop without a substantial integrated GPU on the processor die. Utilizing Read more…

Measuring the World’s Well-Being

The World Well-Being Project (WWBP) is pioneering scientific techniques for measuring psychological well-being and physical health based on the analysis of language in social media. As a collaboration between computer scientists, psychologists, and medical researchers, Read more…

The Science of Deep Specification

In our interconnected world, software bugs and security vulnerabilities pose enormous costs and risks. The Deep Specification project addresses this problem by showing how to build software that does what it is supposed to do, Read more…