Research and Collaboration

Collaboration and research activities are continually ongoing throughout the Department. Collaboration with students is now a special emphasis at Bradley, and the Department is seeking more ways to work more closely with students on focused research activities. Individual research by professors is listed under their respective faculty pages.

The University holds a Student Scholarship initiative with awards for top students that the Department has participated in. Additionally, special emphasis grants for collaborative faculty-student projects is available through the University to cover lab costs and some minor travel expenses.

Faculty-student collaboration also takes place within the Department's BEAR student organization. Another avenue is for students to choose a topic and a faculty member to work on a select piece of research. An example of this current research is below.

Dr. Vladimir Uskov is working with female graduate students on a National Science Foundation ITWF grant. They designed and developed computer games for school-age girls using state-of-the-art computer gaming tools. Project team participates in the Annual National Girls-For-Girls (G4G) Competition at the Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Dr. Christos Nikolopoulos is Dr. Nikolopoulos and students working with four undergraduate students and three graduate students on an externally funded research grant by Caterpillar Inc. The project is a multi-generational product plan to extend PROCEED™ technology into the Medical Risk Stratification (MRS) domain. Novel machine learning algorithms were implemented and MRS models were created to predict a patients risk for potential diseases such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes. This research has been incorporated into Caterpillar's Healthy Balance(R) health promotion program, which identifies modifiable health risks and provides lifestyle recommendations that decrease risk. The American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine named Caterpillar as its 2007 recipient of the National Corporate Health Achievement Award and both the Healthy Balance(R) health promotion program and the research results of this project were acknowledged as important components of this award.

Dr. Vladimir Uskov is working with Adam Byerly, Bradley CS undergraduate student, and Dr. Alexander Uskov, IT Specialist, on a state-of-the-art YouTeach project based on active utilization of streaming multimedia technology. This technology enables users from various countries (who use different natural languages such as English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese, Finnish, Swedish, Russian, Arabic) to create and immediately post on the Web rich multimedia presentations that comprise of video, audio, data, text, graphics, animation, augmented narration, and other types of media. The developed by project team All-in-One Educational Content Creator software system won the “2008 Best Non-Commercial Software System for Web-Based Education” Award at the 7th Annual international competition of software systems and products, March 17-19, 2008, Innsbruck, Austria.

Dr. Steven Dolins recently visited the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) in Santa Barbara, CA. for a Principal Investigators (PI) Workshop presented by the Smithsonian Institute Tropical Research Institute (STRI). The purpose of the meeting was to demonstrate STRI’s database and reports to STRI’s PI's (about twenty-five scientists from rainforest plots around the world). STRI’s database and reports were built by computer science students taking the Capstone Project course. Twenty users were running reports concurrently from California on a new server (purchased with funds from a Bradley University grant encouraging faculty-student collaboration). The reports allowed PIs to see their own data in ways they have never viewed it before and many of the PI’s said they will adopt this technology. At the meeting special recognition was given to Brooke Barnabe, Bradley CS student, for her work developing the reports. Special thanks goes out to Dr. Alexander Uskov (also a graduate of Bradley and now IT professional staff for the Department of Computer Science) for setting-up the new server used for the demonstrations.

Dr. Jiang-Bo Liu and Adrew Flick, Bradley CS student, are working on Intergrating .Net Technology in Enterprise Computing project. This research project explores .Net in an attempt to show its validity in the enterprise computing; validity meaning enhancements to what we can implement it and how it compares with other enterprise computing technologies such as Java J2EE. Furthermore, validity is already given to the process by introducing technologies to Bradley students that can be directly accepted in industry today. Midwest companies, Caterpillar, State Farm, Accenture, and more have already embraced this technology. One of the purposes of this research is to make sure that Bradley students become involved with this technology that will increase their probability of success in industry. The goal of this research project is tri-fold, but stresses professor/student cooperation. The first goal explores .Net server technologies and integrates them into the enterprise computing. The second investigates the technological advancements in .Net programming and their applications in the new web-based programming paradigm. The third explores student/faculty collaboration enhancements provided by the .Net tools. Furthermore, it must be noted that research in security issues will be held as top priority across the three goals.