July 18, 2000

Computer Scientists at NC State Lead the Way in E-Commerce

As "dot-com" companies capitalize on the surging popularity of e-commerce -- buying, selling and exchanging products and services via the Internet -- headlines tout the business and investment opportunities in the online world. But the public doesn't get much exposure to the emerging technologies that make buying paperbacks, getting physician referrals, researching gas grills and auctioning off a Confederate cannonball possible. The people who spend hours working algorithms or creating appealing graphical representations are the unsung heroes of e-commerce, and several of the leading experts teach in the Department of Computer Science in the NC State University College of Engineering.

"There's a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes," observes Dr. Munindar Singh, associate professor of computer science, who recently led a project to create a shopping engine technology that is currently licensed to a local company. "There are several new ideas in that technology, for which NC State University has filed a provisional patent. It not only can present information from several merchants but also offers a unified shopping cart and an integrated checkout."

Singh is one of five professors in the computer science department whose research and teaching specialties are in the area of e-commerce. Singh, who serves as editor-in-chief of the prestigious IEEE Internet Computing, has won research awards from the National Science Foundation and from IBM. He epitomizes a new breed of academic who carries out scholarly research while also keeping close ties with industry.

Singh and his students are pursuing several research directions in e-commerce ranging from design and analysis of protocols such as for digital payments to flexible contracts among trading partners. One of his major research interests involves trust, which he distinguishes from security.

"Roughly, security deals with controlling access to your information whereas trust depends on whether other parties use that information appropriately," Singh says. Security without trust is meaningless, he explains, because keeping your information safe won't help if when you do reveal it to someone that turns out to be someone you shouldn't have trusted.

Singh and his students are researching cooperative means of increasing trust in the Internet. You can trust some of the people you know directly; you can also trust those whom they refer you to, and so on. Users can systematically share knowledge about the people and companies that they deal with and help each other answer questions like which dentist causes the least discomfort, which day care has the best music program for toddlers, and which accountant won't get you into trouble with the IRS. People share knowledge, but ultimately they decide for themselves.

The decentralized nature of referrals contrasts with current Internet approaches for finding information. Such approaches are based on directories or recommender services, both centralized, says Singh. "For instance, amazon.com recommends books based on prior purchases from their site," he says. "But while the merchant knows something about you based on your selection, you are at a disadvantage because you don't know the criteria they used to recommend you the book, and you don't know the people from whom they obtained their information." Singh is working on personal computer assistants that will help people use electronic referral networks to find the most precise, reliable information with as few messages and referrals as possible.

Another professor's work focuses on online auctions, which most experts predict will become ever more pervasive and encompass many different kinds of goods and services. Dr. Peter Wurman, whose graduate work at the University of Michigan received an award from IBM for the best e-commerce dissertation proposal in 1998, focuses on auction theory and automated negotiation, areas that combine the disciplines of artificial intelligence and economics.

"Auction exchanges will be central to e-commerce," says Wurman. "People usually think of auctions as, say, art for sale at Sotheby's, but there are hundreds of other types of auctions. The stock market is an auction. In fact, by using different combinations of rules, we have come up with 25 million versions of distinct auctions."

Technology transfer opportunities for software that can make online auctions faster, easier and more accessible are enormous, notes Wurman. "Most of us negotiate for only very large purchases, like houses and cars, because negotiation costs too much (to do the research and make the deal). Most of the goods and services now being auctioned online, like airline tickets and computers, are surplus. But we will see auctions for more things, in both the business-to-business and business-to-consumer space."

That's because competition from Priceline.com, Mercata.com and their progeny will compel many traditional merchants to offer at least some of their products via the auction format. And by working on such consumer-friendly auction technologies as personal trading agents, Wurman and his team are leading the way for a consumer-driven e-commerce climate. Soon software will be widely available for purchase or download that will search multiple sites for the best deals and negotiate and pay on the user's behalf. To some degree, sites such as eBay provide that now, but their software is limited to bidding only on individual items, and only on eBay's site.

Students, faculty and industry professionals across the country are working on developing sophisticated trading agent software in a contest Wurman is helping to sponsor this summer. While the only prize is, as Wurman puts it, "fame," he thinks developers may use the contest entries to glean insights into how to build a commercially viable piece of software.

Wurman is also co-director of NC State's e-commerce partnership, an interdisciplinary initiative with the College of Management whose membership includes 12 high-tech companies who benefit from access to joint research projects, educational materials, and access to some of the country's top business and computer science students.

"One of our advantages at NC State is that we can put together a project between management and computer science," says Wurman. "That's not common at other universities."

In addition to the exposure such an initiative gives the university as a whole, it's also a boon to the fast-growing computer science department, observes Dr. Alan Tharp, head of the department.

"What's interesting about NC State is that we have the largest e-commerce concentration on our faculty of any other university I know of in the country," he notes. "We saw the e-commerce trend coming several years ago and focused our faculty hiring on such emerging areas. We offer three courses directly related to e-commerce now, and as we hire more faculty and resources, we'll add more courses."

At pre-registration for Fall 2000, dozens of students were turned away from those classes. One popular course hasn't even debuted yet, but students clamored to get in just based on the title and description. It will be taught by Dr. Laurie Williams, a newly minted Ph.D. from the University of Utah, who is undeniably qualified to teach "Launching the E-Commerce Enterprise." Williams brings a multidisciplinary background to the class and the department: She has nine years of computer-industry experience (IBM), an undergraduate degree in industrial engineering and an MBA from Duke.

"Look for the creators of tomorrow's Amazons, eBays, and Yahoo!s to emerge from the department," predicts Tharp. "The benefit to North Carolina is the companies that will spin off from here -- that's how Silicon Valley developed, from the graduates of local universities."

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Technical contact: Dr. Alan Tharp, alan_tharp@ncsu.edu

Computer Science at NC State University One of the Fastest Growing Programs in the US

E-commerce is a hot field right now, and at the forefront of e-commerce activities is the Department of Computer Science at NC State University. But this department is gaining national prominence in many more ways as well, including collecting top awards and attracting the best faculty and students from around the world, observes Dr. Alan Tharp, head of the department.

"Fourteen tenure-track faculty have joined the Department of Computer Science in the past six years, and six of those faculty members have won prestigious CAREER awards from the National Science Foundation (NSF)," says Tharp. He notes, "To my knowledge, such growth is unique among American universities." The department, which began offering graduate degrees in 1990, is gaining wide acclaim as one of the fastest growing computer science departments in the US.

Computer science faculty who have been recognized for their teaching and advising as well as for their research are part of the reason student enrollments in the department are climbing. And the new students coming in are bringing outstanding academic credentials with them. Twenty-nine of the freshmen who entered the department in fall 1999 scored 1540 or higher on the SAT.

Tharp notes that two former undergraduate students in particular, Jennifer Nolan and Luke Zettlemoyer, received national recognition through the Outstanding Undergraduate Award in Computer Science from the Computing Research Association in 1996 and 2000, respectively. Also, Zettlemoyer was selected for the USA Today All-USA Academic Team, an especially high honor.

The number of fellowships offered to graduate students has increased, offering even more incentive, and the department is now attracting more American students than ever before - proof that young people see the value in studying at this top computer science program despite stiff competition from industry with its lure of jobs.

"Many of our students choose to come to NC State over other colleges like MIT, Brown, Stanford and Berkeley," Tharp said. "Clearly, undergraduates from NC State are among the very best in the country."

As the word of the department's recent successes spreads, the department continues to attract the very best students and faculty, and this leads to even greater opportunities for success in the future, Tharp notes. "Our goal is to be one of the top computer science departments in the country."

And from the looks of things, this department is indeed on a fast track to the top.

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