Faculty in the area of bioinformatics and computational biology apply computational methodologies such as databases, machine learning, discrete, probabilistic, and numerical algorithms, and methods of statistical inference to problems in molecular biology, systems biology, structural biology, and molecular biophysics.
Computational science and engineering, or scientific computing, provided the impetus for many of the early Computer Science departments in the 1960s. Purdue is one of the few programs nationwide that have consistently maintained a leadership position in this important discipline.
This group conducts fundamental and cutting- edge research in database systems, database privacy and security, data mining, web search, information retrieval, and natural language processing.
The distributed systems group focuses on designing distributed systems that are scalable, dependable, and secure, behaving according to their specification in spite of errors, misconfigurations, or being subjected to attacks.
The graphics group performs research in graphics, visualization, computational geometry, and related applications.
Faculty involved with information security and assurance are often affiliated with the university-wide Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS). CERIAS is generally considered to be the top- ranked such group in the world, with faculty from 18 departments at Purdue. Their research covers all aspects of computer and network security, privacy, and cyber crime investigation.
With massive data available from various engineering, scientific, and social disciplines, machine learning and information retrieval have played an imperative role in discovering hidden patterns or relationships between intertwined components, understanding properties of various systems, and making meaningful predictions for a variety of applications.
Faculty in the area of networking and operating systems are tackling fundamental problems at different layers of the network protocol stack, from the medium access control layer all the way up to the application layer. The group uses theoretical models, simulation, emulation, and extensive testbed experimentation to develop and evaluate their proposed solutions.
The programming languages and compilers group at Purdue engages in research spanning all aspects of software systems design, analysis, and implementation.
to fault isolation, various kinds of bug detection including those related to race conditions in concurrent programs, and specification inference for large-scale software systems.
Research interests of the members of the theory of computing and algorithms group range over many areas of algorithms. Also, much of the research reflects interaction with other areas of the field, such as information security, databases, and geographic information systems.