UT Dallas > Computer Science > Research > Research Areas

Research Areas

The CS Department at UT Dallas puts a strong emphasis on research. Its 51-strong research faculty are engaged in cutting-edge research in areas of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Cyber Security, Data Science, Networks, Systems, Theory, and Software Engineering. The 2022 U.S. News & World Report Best Colleges rankings place UT Dallas CS at No. 71 and Software Engineering at No. 16. CS Faculty members’ research have been funded by external grants totaling $45 Million over the last 5 years. The CS Department ranked 37th in the nation for its research expenditures in 2016, based on data from ASEE. Seventeen of the UT Dallas CS faculty have won NSF CAREER awards, and three of the faculty have been Air Force Young Investigators. CS faculty members direct four research institutes, eight research centers, and one education center/institute and have won numerous awards and accolades. Recent ones include:

  • Professor Murat Kantarcioglu and Latifur Khan were named IEEE Fellows.
  • Professor B. Prabhakaran was named Editor in Chief of the IEEE Multimedia Journal.
  • Professor Bhavani Thuraisingham was honored with the Special Recognition Award at IEEE Cyber Security Cloud Conference for her work on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Cyber Security, Cloud, and Data Science.
  • Center for Applied AI and Machine Learning (CAIML) Assists InfoVision to Develop a Drone-Supported Inventory System.
  • Members of UT Dallas’s Machine Learning Center, directed by Professor Sriraam Natarajan, and the Cyber Security Research and Education Institute, directed by Professor Kevin Hamlen, published seven papers at AAAI 2021.
  • Professor Shiyi Wei received Distinguished Paper Award at USENIX 2022.
  • UT Dallas CS Researchers Apply Power of AI To Forecast Energy Supply, Demand.
  • Four Most Influential Paper awards and a distinguished paper award to Dr. Andi Marcus and his students in the area of software engineering.
  • Four ACM SIGSOFT DistinguishedPaper awards to Dr. Tien Nguyen and his students in the area of software engineering.
  • Technical Achievement Award in Intelligence & Security Informatics (ISI) to Dr. Murat Kantarcioglu from the IEEE.
  • Ten-year Test-of-Time Award from the Association for Logic Programming to Dr. Gopal Gupta and his students for their research on coinductive logic programming.
  • UT Dallas Founders Professor Dr. Ivan Hal Sudborough received the Test-of-Time Award at the International Workshop on Graph-Theoretic Concepts in Computer Science for the  highly influential 1980 research paper titled “Bounding the Bandwidth of NP-Complete Problems.”
  • IEEE Computer Society Services Computing Technical Committee’s 2017 Research Innovation Award and the 2017 CODASPY Research Award to Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham. Dr. Thuraisingham was also named a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the National Academy of Inventors (NAI) in 2018.
  • NSF chose Dr. B. Prabhakaran’s project on 3D Immersive Tele-Rehabilitation as one of eight impactful research projects to showcase to the US Congressional Representatives & Senators at Capitol Hill.
  • Google Scholar named Dr. Zygmunt Haas’ research paper as one of the ten most cited papers in the area of computer networks.
  • Dr. Latifur Khan was the recipient of the IBM Faculty Award (Research) in 2016 for his outstanding research regarding Effective Big Stream Analytics in Presence of Limited Labeled Data. In 2019,  Dr. Latifur Khan received the IEEE Big Data Security Senior Research Award in recognition for his outstanding and sustained research contributions in the field of Big Data Security and Privacy for over ten years.
  • Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham Taylor L. Booth Education Award for her leadership in cybersecurity education, data science education, and mentorship of members of systemically marginalized groups.
  • Dr. Wei Yang was granted a National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Award to support research to improve automated software analysis in 2022.
  • Dr. Shuang Hao received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award to support research to detect online deception in 2022.

Research in the UT Dallas Computer Science Department is organized into six main areas:

Cyber Security

CYBER SECURITY

Cyber Security Research in the UT Dallas CS department is conducted within the umbrella of the Cyber Security Research and Education Institute. Its origins go back to October 2004 when UTD’s Cyber Security Research Center (CSRC) was established soon after which it received the NSA/DHS Center of Academic Excellence designation in Information Assurance Education (CAEIAE) in June 2004. After receiving the NHA/DHS CAE in Research in 2008 and a $1.8 million Scholarship for Service (SFS) award from the NSF in 2010, our efforts and in cyber security research education were combined to establish Cyber Security Research and Education Center in January 2012. Subsequently, due to significant growth in faculty hiring, research and education in cyber security, the Cyber Security Research and Education Institute was established in April 2013.

For more info, view the CS news article on the CSI..

Computing Theory

COMPUTING THEORY

The computing theory researchers in the Computer Science Department are focused on issues related to algorithms, combinatorics, graph theory, and cryptography. Key research areas include algorithms, combinatorics and optimization, computational biology, computational complexity, computational geometry, cryptography, and secure multiparty computations. There are a number of faculty members involved in this area. Research in the computing theory group is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Computer Systems

COMPUTER SYSTEMS

The System researchers at UT Dallas perform world-class research on diverse topics such as parallel embedded systems, embedded software, parallel computers and networking, data mining, database systems, forensic analysis, multimedia, computer graphics, visualization, and programming language security. The research has been funded by external sources, including NSF, NASA, NGA, AFOSR, ARMY, Raytheon, NOKIA, Texas Instruments, CISCO, AT&T, Texas Advanced Research Program, Microsoft, USA, and Tektronix. A number of young faculty members received the prestigious NSF Career award and AFOSR Early Investigator Award.

Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE / MACHINE LEARNING

Work in Intelligent Systems (IS) involves several aspects of Artificial Intelligence, with a special focus on Natural Language Processing, Speech, and Machine Learning.  Many faculty and students in the IS track are involved in the Human Language Technology Research Institute, which has been in existence since 2002. The goal of the Human Language Technology Research Institute (HLTRI) is to incorporate activities in a broad spectrum of disciplines, such as natural language processing, speech recognition, and synthesis, knowledge acquired from texts, and text mining from a variety of genres. These activities enable computers to interact with humans using natural language capabilities and to serve as useful assistants to humans by providing services such as automatic text understanding and retrieval, question answering, automatic translation, and speech recognition. HLTRI is one of the very few Institutes in the world dedicated to the study and research of language and its automatic processing. Work in the HLTRI is cross-disciplinary, attracting researchers from several schools and departments in the University. This is justified by the cross-disciplinary aspects of language processing and artificial intelligence. Our faculty have expertise in several areas of IS, allowing them and their students to generate original and valuable research with many applications, e.g., processing electronic medical records, capturing the semantics of texts on the Web and in social media as well as providing summaries of discussions and spoken dialogs.

Software Engineering

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

The software engineering researchers in the Computer Science Department are focused on issues related to effectively developing large-scale, complex systems. In particular, new categories of applications are emerging such as Big Data, Cyber-physical, and autonomous adaptable systems, which continue to drive leading-edge research in software engineering on diverse topics. Key research areas include requirements engineering, architecture, design, component-based engineering, testing and verification, static analysis, software maintenance, and multi-agent systems. A number of faculty members are involved in software engineering research.

Networks

NETWORKS

The networking researchers in the Computer Science Department are focused on issues related to the design and evaluation of next-generation computer and telecommunication networks. Key research areas include wireless and mobile networking, analysis and modeling of large networks, quality of service scheduling, network reliability and survivability, optical networking, network monitoring and Internet measurements, network security, group communication, and IP multicast, algorithmic issues in wireless sensor networks, mobile ad hoc networks, cognitive radio networks, distributed algorithms, resource allocation, high-performance network architectures, and network switches and routers.

View news stories about research being done within the UT Dallas Computer Science Department.

Learn about the faculty and their research projects.