Current Computer Science Research Projects (by faculty)
The funded projects listed below are active projects and the funded running total for the active projects is on the left navigational menu.
Triangle Computer Science Distinguished Lecturer Series
Franc Brglez
$55,300 by Army Research Office
01/ 3/2011 - 01/ 2/2013
Since 1995, the Triangle Computer Science Distinguished Lecturer Series (TCSDLS) has been hosting influential university researchers and industry leaders from computer-related fields as speakers at the three universities within the Research Triangle Area. The lecturer series, sponsored by the Army Research Office (ARO), is organized and administered by the Computer Science departments at Duke University, NC State University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This proposal argues for continuation, for an additional 3 years, of this highly successful lecturer series
NeTS: Large: Collaborative Research: Network Innovation Through Choice
Rudra Dutta ; George Rouskas
$643,917 by National Science Foundation
09/15/2011 - 08/31/2014
This project builds on the SILO project that started in 2006 to design a new architecture for the Internet. In this new project, we will collaborate with teams of researchers from the University of Kentucky, the University of Massachusetts, and RENCI, to design critical parts of a new architecture for the Internet that will support the flexible use of widely applicable information transport and transformation modules to create good solutions for specific communication applications. The key idea is to allow a network to offer information transformation services at the edge or in the core transparently to the application, and creating a framework in which application can issue a request not only for communication but for specific reusable services. We also propose research tasks that will enable network virtualization and isolation seamlessly at many levels, currently a difficult but highly relevant problem in practical networking.
GENI IMF: Integrated Measurement Framework and Tools for Cross Layer Experimentation
Rudra Dutta ; George Rouskas
$479,259 by Global Environment for Network Innovations (National Science Foundation)
10/ 1/2009 - 09/30/2012
The goal of this project is to develop and deploy a GENI instrumentation framework, integrate it into one of thecfive control framework prototypes, and develop a set of experimenter capabilities to enable cross-layer experimentation in the optical substrate.
Production and Assessment of Student-authored Wiki Textbooks
Edward Gehringer
$110,518 by National Science Foundation
02/15/2010 - 10/15/2012
Recent research shows that students are capable of writing a peer-reviewed textbook for their own course. The pedagogical advantages are numerous. Instead of being merely the consumers of knowledge, students become co-producers. This forces them to learn the material in greater depth, and to reflect upon it more frequently. The natural medium for creating such a textbook is a wiki, because it standardizes the format and makes it easy to edit parts of a larger work. This project is building a software system to manage creation and peer review of a wiki textbook, automating features such as rubric creation by students, double-blind feedback between author and reviewer, quality-control strategies for student peer reviews, and support for flow management to allow different chapters of the text to be written and reviewed at different times during the course. It promises to bring wiki textbook-writing to a much wider audience. The project addresses several high?profile needs in American education. Students hone composition skills writing for authentic purposes and audiences. Peer-reviewing fosters critical analysis and teaches them how to provide meaningful feedback. The project is socially relevant, as Wiki textbooks are freely available to a global audience, helping to combat the problem of rising textbook costs. The project has the potential to benefit at-risk students, since students receive feedback while they still have a chance to improve their work. This helps nontraditional students stay on task, and typically offers the most benefit to students who underperform as measured by exams and standardized tests
CAREER: Enable Robust Virtualized Hosting Infrastructures via Coordinated Learning, Recovery, and Diagnosis
Xiaohui (Helen) Gu
$450,000 by National Science Foundation
01/ 1/2012 - 12/31/2016
Large-scale virtualized hosting infrastructures have become the fundamental platform for many real world systems such as cloud computing, enterprise data centers, and educational computing lab. However, due to their inherent complexity and sharing nature, hosting infrastructures are prone to various runtime problems such as performance anomalies and software/hardware failures. The overarching objective of this proposal is to systematically explore innovative runtime reliability management techniques for large-scale virtualized hosting infrastructures. Our research focuses on handling performance anomalies in distributed systems that are often very difficult to reproduce offline. Our approach combines the power of online learning, knowledge-driven first-response recovery, and in-situ diagnosis to handle unexpected system anomalies more efficiently and effectively. We aim at transforming the runtime system anomaly management from a trial-and-error guessing game into an efficient knowledge-driven self-healing process.
Predictive Anomaly Management For Resilient Virtualized Computing Infrastructures
Xiaohui (Helen) Gu
$300,000 by Army Research Office
07/ 1/2010 - 06/30/2013
Large-scale virtualized computing infrastructures have become important platforms for many real-world systems such as cloud computing, virtual computing lab, and massive information processing. However, due to its inherent complexity and sharing nature, virtualized computing infrastructures are inevitably prone to various system anomaly problems such as software/hardware failures, performance anomalies, and malicious attacks. The goal of this project is to develop a new predictive anomaly management system to enhance the resilience of virtualized computing infrastructure. The major contributions will be an integrated framework consisting of four synergistic techniques: 1) scalable runtime virtual machine monitoring; 2) self-evolving online anomaly prediction; 3) speculative anomaly diagnosis; and 4) online anomaly correction.
CSR: Small: Online System Anomaly Prediction and Diagnosis for Large-Scale Hosting Infrastructures
Xiaohui (Helen) Gu
$405,000 by National Science Foundation
09/ 1/2009 - 08/31/2012
Large-scale hosting infrastructures have become important platforms for many real-world systems such as cloud computing, virtual computing lab, enterprise data centers, and web hosting services. However, system administrators are often overwhelmed by the tasks of correcting various system anomalies such as performance bottlenecks, resource hotspots, and service level objective (SLO) violations. The goal of this project is to develop novel online anomaly prediction and diagnosis techniques to achieve robust continuous system operation. The major contributions will be an integrated framework consisting of three synergistic techniques: i) self-compressing information tracking to achieve low-cost continuous system monitoring; ii) online anomaly prediction that can raise advance alerts to impending anomalies; and iii) just-in-time anomaly diagnosis that can perform online anomaly diagnosis while the system approaches the anomaly state.
Ensemble and Comparative Visualization of Scientific Datasets
Christopher Healey
$51,299 by UNC Chapel Hill/Sandia National Laboratories
02/22/2012 - 08/31/2012
This proposal will study methods to visualize simulation ensembles, large sets of simulation results generated by repeatedly executing a simulation across a range of input parameter values. Ensembles will be provided by collaborators in astrophysics, meteorology, high energy physics, and statistics. The goal of our research is to identify effective techniques to visualize ensembles containing 100s or 1000s of simulation runs. We propose to combine techniques from perceptual and multidimensional visualization to build images that present some or all of the results to an end-user, in a manner that allows him to explore, validate, discover, and analyze individual values within the ensemble
IC-CRIME: Interdisciplinary Cyber-Enabled Crime Reconstruction Through Innovative Methodology and Engagement
David Hinks (Lead-Textiles ; R. Michael Young ; Timothy Buie
$1,400,000 by National Science Foundation
09/ 1/2009 - 08/31/2012
Through innovative application of computational thinking, this project will build the necessary cyber infrastructure to provide the next generation platform for multi-disciplinary and multi-agency collaboration in crime scene investigation (CSI). Since Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, CSI is both a highly visual and quantitative analysis characterized by a time-sensitive need to gather, organize, analyze, model, and visualize large, multi-scale, heterogeneous and context-rich data. CSI is also characterized by a fundamental need for rapid coordination and data translation across disciplines, agencies and levels of expertise as crime scenes are processed, reconstructed, solved and ultimately prosecuted over time, often critically in front of lay-people comprising a jury. Current methods of CSI are hindered by a lack of cyber infrastructure and protocols for virtual access to expertise and inadequate repositories of key data. From a computational e-Science perspective, forensic science is ripe for revolution through the development of a cyber infrastructure that will provide both new core data resources and collaboration capabilities in CSI for analysis and communication. Through remote access to data, tools and experts, as well as holistic integration of diverse data streams to virtually reconstruct and preserve actual crime scenes, the application of computational thinking to CSI will enable meta-analysis of evidentiary data and transform research and education for CSI professionals, legal professionals, forensic scientists, and K-20 students. The transformative research goal of this project is to develop a pioneering platform for interdisciplinary, cyber-enabled crime reconstruction through innovative methodology and engagement (IC-CRIME). The IC-CRIME platform will enable collaborative engagement in a 3D virtual reconstructed crime scene that incorporates multi-layer, scale-variant data and objects, including new critical data resources. The proposed cyber infrastructure will allow novice users to embed, interact with and analyze multi-layered data and objects within reconstructed crime scene in such a way that provides lucid spatial insight for users while simultaneously preserving quantitative geospatial relationships among evidentiary components as meaning is gleaned from data. The transformative educational goal of this project is to develop a team-based inter-disciplinary educational tool for professionals and K-20 that provides experiential, problem-based learning opportunities in a data-intensive virtual environment.
An Integrated Architecture For Automatic Indication, Avoidance and Profiling of Kernel Rootkit Attacks
Xuxian Jiang
$200,000 by Purdue University/US Air Force-Office of Scientific Research
04/ 1/2010 - 03/31/2014
Kernel rootkit attacks are one of the most stealthy yet foundational threats to cyberspace. Unfortunately, current research and practice in kernel rootkit defense is mainly reactive and in a fundamentally disadvantageous position relative to the kernel attackers. In this work, we advocate the development of strategic kernel rootkit defense that is proactive with early kernel rootkit threat indication, automatic when performing rootkit attack avoidance and forensics, and integrated with all these capabilities enabled under the same architecture for production systems. Specifically, we envision a virtualization-based rootkit-prevention architecture that is capable of (1) indicating a kernel rootkit threat before it strikes, (2) avoiding the attack by ?steering? the targeted production system away from the threat, and (3) profiling the (possibly zero-day) kernel rootkit for future kernel protection. The architecture is deployable in a wide range of virtualization-based cyber infrastructures, such as data centers, enterprises, and cloud computing environments (e.g., VCL).
CAREER: Towards Exterminating Stealthy Rootkits -- A Systematic Immunization Approach
Xuxian Jiang
$424,166 by the National Science Foundation
02/15/2010 - 01/31/2015
Stealthy rootkit attacks are one of the most foundational threats to cyberspace. With the capability of subverting the software root of trust of a computer system, i.e., the operating system (OS) or the hypervisor, a rootkit can instantly take over the control of the system and stealthily inhabit the victim. To effectively mitigate and defeat them, researchers have explored various solutions. Unfortunately, the state-of-the-art defense is mainly reactive and in a fundamentally disadvantageous position in the arms-race against these stealthy attacks. The proposed research aims to fundamentally change the arms-race by proposing a systematic immunization approach to proactively prevent and exterminate rootkit attacks. Inspired by our human immune system and fundamental biological design principles, the proposed approach transforms system software (i.e., the OS and the hypervisor) so that the new one will tip the balance of favor toward the rootkit defense. To accomplish that, we will investigate a suite of innovative techniques to preserve kernel/hypervisor control flow integrity and evaluate their effectiveness with real-world malware and infrastructures. The proposed education components include the creation and dissemination of unique hands-on course materials with live demos, lab sessions, and tutorials.
Collaborative Research: II-NEW: OpenVMI: A Software Infrastructure for Virtual Machine Introspection
Xuxian Jiang
$225,000 by National Science Foundation
09/ 1/2009 - 08/31/2012
Research in virtualization technologies has gained significant momentum in recent years. One of the basic yet powerful enabling function in many virtualization research efforts is virtual machine introspection or VMI: Observing a VM's states and events from outside the VM. The goal of this project is to develop OpenVMI: a software-based research infrastructure for VMI, which is expected to enable new research and education opportunities, including, but not limited to, safe malware experiments, intelligent virtual infrastructure management etc.
Secure Open Systems Initiative
Dennis Kekas ; Peng Ning ; Mladen Vouk ; Rudra Dutta
$3,336,000 by Army Research Office
04/ 3/2008 - 11/30/2012
This program will establish a national Secure Open Systems Institute (SOSI), located on North Carolina State’s premier Centennial Campus that will be a global center for Open Source security research and development. The goals are twofold. First, SOSI will significantly contribute to strengthening mission critical information technology infrastructures vital to the Department of Defense, state and nation. Second, SOSI will accelerate the creation and growth of high tech industries in North Carolina and beyond by providing a centralized repository of research results, testing tools and qualification services.
Type I: ENGAGE: Immersive Game-Based Learning for Middle Grade Computational Fluency
James Lester ; Kristy Boyer ; Bradford Mott ; Eric Wiebe
$999,996 by National Science Foundation
01/ 1/2012 - 12/31/2014
The goal of the ENGAGE project is to develop a game-based learning environment that will support middle grade computer fluency education. It will be conducted by an interdisciplinary research team drawn from computer science, computer science education, and education. In collaboration with North Carolina middle schools, the research team will design, develop, deploy, and evaluate a game-based learning environment that enables middle school students to acquire computer fluency knowledge and skills. The ENGAGE project will be evaluated in middle grade classrooms with respect to both learning effectiveness and engagement.
Investigating An Intelligent Cyberlearning System for Interactive Museum-based Sustainability Modeling
James Lester ; James Minogue ; Bradford Mott ; Patrick Fitzgerald
$713,384 by National Science Foundation
09/15/2011 - 08/31/2013
By leveraging intelligent cyberlearning technologies, rich media, and advanced digital storytelling, the Future Worlds demonstration project will enable children at a museum to take virtual journeys through time to explore the impact of social and economic decisions on the environment. Guided by a virtual environmentalist who will narrate their journeys and offer problem-solving advice, visitors will travel to the past, present, and future to explore the relationship between conservation decisions, energy use, and population growth on Earth?s ecosystem.
Promoting Literacy Education in Rural Schools with Intelligent Game-Based Learning Environments
James Lester ; Brad Mott
$498,783 by EDUCAUSE
06/30/2011 - 09/30/2012
Recent years have seen a growing recognition of the transformative potential of game-based learning technologies. With support from the National Science Foundation, for the past five years we have been creating intelligent game-based learning environments that utilize commercial game engines and leverage artificial intelligence to create customized learning experiences. Crystal Island is an intelligent game- based learning environment we have developed for middle grade students. Students interact with Crystal Island to solve a science mystery as they learn about microbiology. To date, more than 1,000 students have used Crystal Island, and rigorous studies have demonstrated that it helps students achieve significant learning gains. In the proposed work, Crystal Island will be extended to provide literacy education for middle grade students. The project will focus on the deployment of Crystal Island in classrooms of low SES rural middle schools in eastern North Carolina.
The Leonardo Project: An Intelligent Cyberlearning System for Interactive Scientific Modeling in Elementary Science Education
James Lester ; Bradford Mott ; Michael Carter ; Eric Weibe
$3,499,409 by National Science Foundation
08/15/2010 - 07/31/2014
The goal of the Leonardo project is to develop an intelligent cyberlearning system for interactive scientific modeling. Students will use Leonardo's intelligent virtual science notebooks to create and experiment with interactive models of physical phenomena. Students will sketch graphic models that will come to life as interactive multimedia animations with accompanying sound and narration. As students design and test their models, Leonardo's intelligent virtual tutors will engage them in problem-solving exchanges in which they will interactively annotate their models as they devise explanations and make predictions. Leonardo's virtual tutors will scaffold students' modeling experiences with customized advice and explanations. With diverse student populations in 60 classrooms drawn from both urban and rural settings, studies will determine precisely which technologies and conditions contribute most effectively to learning processes and outcomes. During the project, the Leonardo virtual science notebook system will be rolled out to 60 classrooms in North Carolina, Texas, and California.
R&D: Developing Science Problem Solving Skills and Engagement Through Intelligent Game-Based Learning Environments
James Lester ; Hiller Spires ; John Nietfeld ; James Minogue
$2,523,295 by the National Science Foundation
08/ 1/2008 - 07/31/2012
Despite the great promise offered by game-based learning environments for elementary science education, realizing its potential poses significant technological challenges. In this project we will develop a full suite of intelligent game-based learning environment technologies for elementary science education. To promote effective science learning, we will create intelligent game-based learning environment technologies that leverage the rich interactive 3D game environments provided by commercial game engines and the inferential capabilities of intelligent tutoring systems. We will also provide a comprehensive empirical account of the cognitive processes and results of elementary students interacting with intelligent game-based learning environments for science education.
Emerging Research-Empirical Research--An Integrated Model of Cognitive and Affective Scaffolding for Intelligent Tutoring Systems
James Lester ; Eric Wiebe
$1,542,275 by National Science Foundation
09/15/2010 - 08/31/2013
Intelligent tutoring systems leverage artificial intelligence technologies to create effective learning experiences for students. The project targets the design, implementation, and empirical validation of an integrated model of cognitive and affective scaffolding for intelligent tutoring systems. Computational models of tutorial strategies will be automatically acquired through machine learning techniques from human-human tutorial dialogue traces. The resulting models of cognitive and affective scaffolding, which are based on hierarchical hidden Markov models, will be incorporated into an intelligent tutoring system, JavaTutor. JavaTutor will be evaluated with first year university computer science students to assess its impact on student learning gains and motivation.
Joint Faculty Appointment
Xiaosong Ma
$549,457 by UT-Battelle, LLC
09/21/2003 - 08/15/2012
Xioasong Ma's joint work with NCSU and Oak Ridge National Laboratories (ORNL) will bridge the gap between the two organizations in a practical manner to cooperatively research parallel I/O in conjunction with the Genomes to Life (GTL) and Scientific Data management projects within the Computer Science and Mathematics Division at ORNL.
CSR:Small:Collaborative Research: Hybrid Opportunistic Computing For Green Clouds
Xiaosong Ma ; Xiaohui (Helen) Gu (co-PI)
$320,000 by National Science Foundation
09/ 1/2009 - 08/31/2012
We propose to explore the new computing model of offering computation- and/or data-intensive cloud services on active nodes serving on-demand utility computing users. More specifically, we plan to (1) assess the efficacy of resource sharing between foreground interactive utility computing workloads and background high-throughput cloud computing workloads on multi-core servers, in terms of energy saving and performance interference; (2) develop a scheduling and load management middleware that performs dynamic background workload distribution considering the energy-performance tradeoff; and (3) exploits the use of GPGPUs for cloud services on active nodes running foreground workloads mainly on the CPUs.
Collaborative Research: Dynamic Staging Architecture For Accelerating I/O Pipelines
Xiaosong Ma ; Scott Klacky
$133,933 by National Science Foundation
04/ 1/2010 - 03/31/2013
In the proposed work, we will investigate innovative techniques to enable efficient I/O staging at a variety of locations in the HEC storage stack. The proposed work will improve the application-visible I/O performance in Peta-scale applications and explore the scalable incorporation of solid state drives (SSDs) into the HEC I/O hierarchy.
Collaborative Research: Automatic Extraction of Parallel I/O Benchmarks From HEC Applications
Xiaosong Ma ; Frank Mueller (co-PI)
$499,999 by National Science Foundation
09/15/2009 - 08/31/2012
Parallel I/O benchmarks are crucial for application developers, I/O software/hardware designers, and center administrators. However, currently there lack portable and comprehensive I/O benchmarks for high-end storage systems. We address this gap by proposing automatic generation of parallel I/O benchmarks. More specifically, we target the automated creation of application I/O benchmarks.
SHF: Small: RESYST: Resilience via Synergistic Redundancy and Fault Tolerance for High-End Computing
Frank Mueller
$376,219 by National Science Foundation
10/ 1/2010 - 09/30/2013
In High-End Computing (HEC), faults have become the norm rather than the exception for parallel computation on clusters with 10s/100s of thousands of cores. As the core count increases, so does the overhead for fault-tolerant techniques that rely on checkpoint/restart (C/R) mechanisms. At 50% overheads, redundancy is a viable alternative to fault recovery and actually scales, which makes the approach attractive for HEC. The objective of this work to the develop a synergistic approach by combining C/R-based fault tolerance with redundancy in computer to achieve high levels of resilience. This work alleviates scalability limitations of current fault tolerant practices. It contributes to fault modeling as well as fault detection and recovery in significantly advancing existing techniques by controlling levels of redundancy and checkpointing intervals in the presence of faults. It is transformative in providing a model where users select a target failure probability at the price of using additional resources.
CSR: Medium: Collaborative Research: Providing Predictable Timing for Task Migration in Embedded Multi-Core Environments (TiME-ME)
Frank Mueller
$390,000 by National Science Foundation
09/ 1/2009 - 08/31/2013
Assuring deadlines of embedded tasks for contemporary multicore architectures is becoming increasingly difficult. Real-time scheduling relies on task migration to exploit multicores, yet migration actually reduces timing predictability due to cache warm-up overheads and increased interconnect traffic. We propose a fundamentally new approach to increase the timing predictability of multicore architectures aimed at task migration in embedded environments making three major contributions. 1. We develop novel strategies to guide migration based on cost/benefit tradeoffs exploiting both static and dynamic analyses. 2. We devise mechanisms to increase timing predictability under task migration providing explicit support for proactive and reactive real-time data movement across cores and their caches. 3. We propose rate- and bandwidth-adaptive mechanisms as well as monitoring capabilities to increase predictability under task migration. Our work aims at initiating a novel research direction investigating the benefits of interactions between hardware and software for embedded multicores with respect to timing predictability.
Operating and Runtime System Resilience on the Path to Exascale
Frank Mueller
$55,448 by Sandia National Laboratory via US Dept of Energy
01/12/2012 - 01/12/2013
For large-scale high-performance computing (HPC) systems with 10s/100s of thousands of cores, faults have become the norm rather than the exception. To address this problem, we propose to develop and evaluate advanced mechanisms to protect the operating and runtime systems and thereby increase resilience to failures.
Operating System Mechanisms For Many-Core Systems (PICASO)
Frank Mueller
$33,333 by Securboration, Inc
04/ 3/2012 - 10/ 2/2012
The objective of this work is to design and evaluate novel system and program abstractions for combined performance and scalability paving the path into a future of operating system supporting a massive number of cores on a single chip.
II: NEW: ARC: A Root Cluster for Systems Research into Scalable Computing
Frank Mueller ; Vincent Freeh ; Xiaohui (Helen) Gu ; Xuxian Jiang ; Xiaosong Ma
$549,999 by National Science Foundation
03/ 1/2010 - 02/28/2013
Scalability is one of the key challenges to computing with hundreds if not thousands of processor. Yet, testing software at scale with hundreds of processing cores is impossible if system software with privileged access rights needs to be modified. The inability to change system software at will in large-scale computing installations thus impedes progress in system software. This project creates a mid-size computational infrastructure, called ARC (A Root Cluster), that directly supports research into scalability for system-level software solutions. ARC empowers users temporarily with administrator (root) rights and allows them to replace arbitrary components of the software stack. Such replacements range from entire operating systems over drivers, kernel modules to runtime libraries, middleware and system tools. ARC ultimately enables a multitude of systems research directions to be assessed under scalability that could otherwise not be conducted. Through ARC, methodologies for scalability of experimental system software in various institutional projects and beyond can be explored and systematically improved. ARC is positioned to benefit the software systems community and indirectly science in general by this assessment of system software requirements at scale.
Workshop: HCC: VL/HCC 2012 Doctoral Consortium
Emerson Murphy-Hill
$27,061 by National Science Foundation
09/ 1/2012 - 02/28/2013
Recent advances in computing have led to continually deeper integration between computers and human society. Yet as socio-technical systems have grown in complexity, their underlying computation has become increasingly difficult for people to express, manipulate, and understand. This proposal aims to advance knowledge and understanding of solutions to these problems by supporting a Doctoral Consortium (DC) at the IEEE Conference on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC).
CISCO-NCSU Internship Program
Peng Ning
$32,000 by Cisco Systems, Inc.
07/12/2011 - 07/11/2016
This is a pilot internship program between NCSU and Cisco for 4 undergraduate students to learn through working part-time on real life problems for Cisco with the hope that this pilot program can grow and develop into a long term working relationship. Specifically, NCSU students will participate in Cisco Software Application Support plus Upgrades (SASU) projects and/or conduct research for SASU. This will be done with an understanding that the interns are students, and as such are learning and being trained with the training coming from both the Cisco (for SASU-specific skills), and NCSU (through the undergraduate program they are enrolled in) in general relevant skills.
TC: Small: Defending against Insider Jammers in DSSS- and FH-Based Wireless Communication Systems
Peng Ning ; Huaiyu Dai, ECE
$499,064 by National Science Foundation
09/ 1/2010 - 08/31/2013
Jamming resistance is crucial for applications where reliable wireless communication is required, such as rescue missions and military applications. Spread spectrum techniques such as Frequency Hopping (FH) and Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS) have been used as countermeasures against jamming attacks. However, these anti-jamming techniques require that senders and receivers share a secret key to communicate with each other, and thus are vulnerable to insider attacks where the adversary has access to the secret key. The objective of this project is to develop a suite of techniques to defend against insider jammers in DSSS and FH based wireless communication systems. We will develop novel and efficient insider-jamming-resistant techniques for both DSSS- and FH-based wireless communication systems. Our proposed research consists of two thrusts. The first thrust is to develop novel spreading/despreading techniques, called DSD-DSSS (which stands for DSSS based on Delayed Seed Disclosure), to enhance DSSS-based wireless communication to defend against insider jamming threats, while the second thrust is to develop a new approach, called USD-FH (which stands for FH based on Uncoordinated Seed Disclosure), to enable sender and receivers using FH to communicate without pre-establishing any common secret hopping pattern. A key property of our new approaches is that they do not depend on any secret shared by the sender and receivers. Our solution has the potential to significantly enhance the anti-jamming capability of today?s wireless communication systems.
TC: Large: Collaborative Research: Trustworthy Virtual Cloud Computing
Peng Ning ; Xuxian Jiang ; Mladen Vouk
$1,523,685 by National Science Foundation
09/15/2001 - 08/31/2013
This project consists of three technical thrusts: (1) Thrust 1 -- new security architecture and services that better isolate different customers' workloads and enhance their trustworthiness; (2) Thrust 2 -- protection of management infrastructure against malicious workloads; and (3) Thrust 3 -- protection of hosted workloads from potentially malicious management infrastructure. The first thrust explores new opportunities to enhance the trustworthiness of virtual cloud computing against mutual threats between workloads as well as external security threats, while the last two address the service providers' security concerns for customers' workloads and customers' security concerns for the service providers, respectively.
Computer-aided Human Centric Cyber Situation Awareness
Peng Ning ; Michael Young
$979,463 by Pennsylvania State University
09/17/2009 - 09/16/2012
The NCSU participants will focus on the development of multi-level information fusion in the cyber world, VM-based automated vulnerability diagnosis of unknown cyber vulnerabilities, and application of video game technology to bridge the gap between the cyber and the human worlds.
III:Small: MOSAIC - Semantic Querying Techniques for Supporting Problem Solving Tasks on the Structured Web
Kemafor Ogan
$477,713 by National Science Foundation
09/ 1/2009 - 08/31/2012
The Web is evolving from a resource for finding/verifying facts, to one used to support complex problem solving and exploratory tasks in a variety of domains. Thus, the traditional search paradigm targeted primarily at fact-finding, and is predicated on users knowing what they want and how to search for it, is unsuitable for such situations. This project focuses on developing support for advanced query models that capture the iterative process typical of problem solving and exploratory tasks where at each step users may only be able to formulate vague queries. It proposes to develop semantic techniques for integrating information created across the multiple steps of such tasks as and also predict and recommend other potentially relevant and informative data that the user may have missed.
PSM Minigrant
Harry Perros
$4,300 by NCSU Professional Science Master
07/ 1/2011 - 11/30/2012
The grant money will be used to turn the Master of Science in Computer Networks to a Professional Science Master (PSM).
NeTS: Small: Investigation of Human Mobility: Measurement, Modeling,Analysis, Applications and Protocols
Injong Rhee
$298,356 by National Science Foundation
08/ 1/2010 - 07/31/2013
Simulating realistic mobility patterns of mobile devices is important for the performance study of mobile networks because deploying a real testbed of mobile networks is extremely difficult, and furthermore, even with such a testbed, constructing repeatable performance experiments using mobile devices is not trivial. Humans are a big factor in simulating mobile networks as most mobile nodes or devices (cell phones, PDAs and cars) are attached to or driven by humans. Emulating the realistic mobility patterns of humans can enhance the realism of simulation-based performance evaluation of human-driven mobile networks. Our NSF-funded research that ends this year has studied the patterns of human mobility using GPS traces of over 100 volunteers from five different sites including university campuses, New York City, Disney World, and State Fair. This research has revealed many important fundamental statistical properties of human mobility, namely heavy-tail flight distributions, self-similar dispersion of visit points, and least-action principle for trip planning. Most of all, it finds that people tend to optimize their trips in a way to minimize their discomfort or cost of trips (e.g., distance). No existing mobility models explicitly represent all of these properties. Our results are very encouraging and the proposed research will extend the work well beyond what has been accomplished so far. . We will perform a measurement study tracking the mobility of 100 or 200 students in a campus simultaneously, and analyze the mobility patterns associated with geo-physical and social contexts of participants including social networks, interactions, spatio-temporal correlations, and meetings. . We will cast the problem of mobility modeling as an optimization problem borrowing techniques from AI and Robotics which will make it easy to incorporate the statistical properties of mobility patterns commonly arising from group mobility traces. The realism of our models in expressing human mobility will surpass any existing human mobility models. . We will develop new routing protocols leveraging the researched statistical properties found in real traces to optimize delivery performance. The end products of the proposed research is (a) a new human mobility model that is capable of realistically expressing mobility patterns arising from reaction to social and geo-physical contexts, (b) their implementation in network simulators such as NS-2/3 and GloMoSim, (c) mobility traces that contain both trajectories of people in a university campus and contact times, (d) new efficient routing protocols for mobile networks
Investigation of Application Service Architectures for Future Internet Testbeds
Injong Rhee
$100,000 by ETRI (Research Inst.-Electronics & Telecommunications)
10/15/2010 - 01/14/2013
In this collaborate research between NCSU and ETRI, both institutions investigate the application service architectures for future internet testbeds. The collaboration includes surveys, architecture designs and validation of the application service architectures for various types of future internet services
NetSE: Large: Collaborative Research: Platys: From Position to Place in Next Generation Networks
Injong Rhee ; Munindar Singh
$706,167 by National Science Foundation
09/ 1/2009 - 08/31/2013
This project develops a high-level notion of context that exploits the capabilities of next genera-tion networks to enable applications that deliver better user experiences. In particular, it exploits mobile devices always with a user to capture key elements of context: the user's location and, through localization, characteristics of the user's environment.
Analytics-driven Efficient Indexing and Query Processing of Extreme Scale AMR Data
Nagiza Samatova
$149,999 by National Science Foundation
05/ 1/2012 - 04/30/2014
One of the most significant advances for large-scale scientific simulations has been the advent of Adaptive Mesh Refinement, or AMR. By using dynamic gridding, AMR can achieve substantial savings in memory, computation, and disk resources while maintaining or even increasing simulation accuracy, relative to static, uniform gridding. However, the resultant non-uniform structure of the simulation mesh produced by AMR methods cause inefficient post-simulation access patterns during AMR data analytics that is becoming a substantial bottleneck given the exponential increase in simulation output. Toward bridging this gap in efficient analytics support for AMR data, we propose an integrated, three-prong approach that aims: (a) To devise an AMR query model; (b) To explore effective indexing methods for AMR data analytics; and (c) To investigate data storage layout strategies for AMR data retrieval optimized for analytics-induced heterogeneous data access patterns.
Runtime System for I/O Staging in Support of In-Situ Processing of Extreme Scale Data
Nagiza Samatova
$247,414 by Oak Ridge National Loboratory/Dept. of Energy
01/31/2011 - 12/31/2013
Accelerating the rate of insight and scientific productivity demands new solutions to managing the avalanche of data expected in extreme-scale. Our approach is to use tools that can reduce, analyze, and index the data while it is still in memory (referred to as "in-situ" processing of data). ). In order to deal with the large amount of data generated by the simulations, our team has partnered with many application teams to deliver proven technology that can accelerate their knowledge discovery process. These technologies include ADIOS, FastBit, and Parallel R. In this proposal we wish to integrate these technologies together, and create a runtime system that will allow scientist to create an easy-to-use scientific workflow system, that will run in situ, in extra nodes on the system, which is used to not only accelerate their I/O speeds, but also to pre-analyze, index, visualize, and reduce the overall amount of information from these solutions.
Scalable and Power Efficient Data Analytics for Hybrid Exascale Systems
Nagiza Samatova
$364,944 by Oak Ridge National Laboratories/ US Dept. of Energy
01/31/2011 - 12/31/2013
The specific objectives of the proposal are as follows: 1. Design and develop data mining kernels and algorithms for acceleration on hybrid architectures which include many-core systems, GPUs, and other accelerators. 2. Design and develop approximate scalable algorithms for data mining and analysis kernels enabling faster exploration, more efficient resource usage, reduced memory footprint, and more power efficient computations. 3. Design and develop index-based data analysis and mining kernels and algorithms for performance and power optimizations including index-based perturbation analysis kernels for noisy and uncertain data. 4. Demonstrate the results of our project by enabling analytics at scale for selected applications on large-scale HPC systems.
Damsel: A Data Model Storage Library for Exascale Science
Nagiza Samatova
$330,000 by US Department of Energy
09/ 1/2010 - 08/31/2013
Computational science applications have been described as having one of seven motifs (the ?seven dwarfs?), a particular pattern of computation and communication. While the exercise has not been performed, one can imagine that these applications can also be grouped into a number of data model motifs, describing the way data is organized and accessed during simulation and analysis. The goal of this project is to determine the data model motifs present in computational science applications, to identify where current I/O software falls short in usability and performance for each of these motifs, and to construct a software toolkit for developing optimized I/O support for computational science data models at exascale.
Joint Faculty Agreement For Nagiza Samatova
Nagiza Samatova
$395,753 by Oak Ridge National Laboratories - UT Battelle, LLC
08/ 9/2007 - 08/ 8/2013
Dr. Nagiza Samatova's joint work with NC State University and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) will provide the interface between the two organizations aiming to collaboratively address computational challenges in the Scientific Data Management, Data-Intensive Computing for Understanding Complex Biologicial Systems, Knowledge Integration for the Shewanella Federation, and the Large-Scale Analysis of Biologicial Networks with Applications to Bioenergy Production.
Scalable Data Management, Analysis, and Visualization (SDAV) Institute
Nagiza Samatova ; Anatoli Melechko
$750,000 by US Department of Energy
02/15/2012 - 02/14/2017
The SDAV is a unique and comprehensive combination of scientific data management, analysis, and visualization expertise and technologies aimed at enabling scientific knowledge discovery for applications running on state-of-the-art computational platforms located at DOE's primary computing facilities. This integrated institute focuses on tackling key challenges facing applications in our three focus areas through a well-coordinated team and management organization that can respond to changing technical and programmatic objectives. The proposed work portfolio is a blend of applied research and development, aimed at having key software services operate effectively on large distributed memory multi-core, and many-core platforms and especially DOE's open high performance computing facilities. Our goal is to create an integrated, open source, sustainable framework and software tools for the science community.
Ultrascale Computational Modeling of Phenotype-Specific Metabolic Processes in Microbial Communities
Nagiza Samatova ; Anatoli Melechko
$454,311 by Oak National Laboratories - UT Battelle (DOE)
01/15/2010 - 01/14/2013
Ultrascale computational modeling methods will be developed for revealing phenotype-specific metabolic processes and their cross-talks and applied to the critical DOE problem of acid mine drainage (AMD). The apex of the project will be a systematic and iterative computational procedure for: (1) identification and expression-level characterization of phenotype-related genes; (2) reconstruction of phenotype-specific metabolic pathways enriched by these genes; (3) elucidation of the symbiotic and/or competing interplay between these pathways across species; and (4) characterization of evolutionary and environmental adaptation of the community.
Collaborative Research: Understanding Climate Change: A Data Driven Approach
Nagiza Samatova ; Frederick Semazzi
$1,815,739 by National Science Foundation
09/ 1/2010 - 08/31/2012
The goal is to provide a computational capability for effective and efficient exploration of high-resolution climate networks derived from multivariate, uncertain, noisy and spatio-temporal climate data. We plan to increase the efficiency and climatologically relevancy of the network patterns identification through integrated research activities focused on: (a) supporting comparative analysis of multiple climate networks; (b) constraining the search space via exploiting the inherent structure (e.g., multi-partite) of climate networks; (c) establishing the foundation to efficiently update solutions for perturbed (changing) graphs; and (d) designing and implementing parallel algorithms scalable to thousands of processors on multi-node multi-core supercomputer architectures.
Policy-Based Governance for the OOI Cyberinfrastructure
Munindar Singh
$124,688 by Univ of Calif-San Diego/NSF
09/ 1/2009 - 02/25/2015
This project will develop policy-based service governance modules for the Oceanographic Observatories Initiative (OOI) Cyberinfrastructure. The main objectives of the proposed project include (1) formulating the key conceptual model underlying the patterns of governance; (2) formalizing "best practices" patterns familiar to the scientific community and seeding the cyberinfrastructure with them; (3) understanding user requirements for tools that support creating and editing patterns of governance
Policy-Based Governance for the OOI Cyberinfrastructure
Munindar Singh
$10,000 by University of California - San Diego / National Science Foundation (This is a supplement)
09/ 1/2009 - 02/25/2015
This project will develop policy-based service governance modules for the Oceanographic Observatories Initiative (OOI) Cyberinfrastructure. The main objectives of the proposed project include (1) formulating the key conceptual model underlying the patterns of governance; (2) formalizing "best practices" patterns familiar to the scientific community and seeding the cyberinfrastructure with them; (3) understanding user requirements for tools that support creating and editing patterns of governance
Quality of Information-Aware Networks for Tactical Applications (QUANTA)
Munindar Singh
$669,029 by Penn State University (Army Research Laboratory
09/28/2009 - 09/27/2014
This project will develop a computational approach to trust geared toward enhancing the quality of information in tactical networks. In particular, this project will develop a trust model that takes into account various objective and subjective qualities of service as well as the social relationships among the parties involved in a network who originate, propagate, or consume information. The proposed approach will build an ontology for quality of information and its constituent qualities, and will expand existing probabilistic techniques to multivalued settings. The project will develop a prototype software module that realize the techniques for producing trust assessments regarding the information exchanged.
Collaborative Research: CPATH II: Incorporating Communication Outcomes into the Computer Science Curriculum
Mladen Vouk ; Michael Carter (co-PI). Grad
$353,881 by National Science Foundation
10/ 1/2009 - 09/30/2012
In partnership with industry and faculty from across the country, this project will develop a transformative approach to developing the communication abilities (writing, speaking, teaming, and reading) of Computer Science and Software Engineering students. We will integrate communication instruction and activities throughout the curriculum in ways that enhance rather than replace their learning technical content and that supports development of computational thinking abilities of the students. We will implement the approach at two institutions. By creating concepts and resources that can be adapted by all CS and SE programs, this project also has the potential to increase higher education's ability nationwide to meet industry need for CS and SE graduates with much better communication abilities than, on average, is the case today. In addition, by using the concepts and resources developed in this project, CS and SE programs will be able to increase their graduates' mastery of technical content and computational thinking.
Investigation of a Novel Indoor Localization (Navigation) Technique For Smartphones
Mladen Vouk ; Kyunghan Lee
$75,000 by Samsung Telecommunications America, LLC - TX
01/ 2/2012 - 12/31/2012
In this project, we aim at developing a new indoor localization technique relying on low-frequency radio that can penetrate indoor obstacles (or detour obstacles by diffraction in the shortest path) by its long wave characteristics. The smartphone running this system would be able to identify its position by measuring straight-line distances from a few radio transmission towers deployed in a city scale (or in a district scale). Straight-line distances that have not been affected by indoor obstacles would be able to provide a three-dimensional position including floor information and position information in the floor (e.g., store information in a shopping complex).
Improving Energy Efficiency of Smartphones Through Elimination of Unnecessary WiFi Scans Using Cellular Signal Information
Mladen Vouk ; Kyunghan Lee
$75,000 by Samsung Electronics Co, Ltd. - Korea
12/ 1/2011 - 11/30/2012
In this project, a system providing intelligence to WiFi AP scan operations will be studied and developed for Android-operated smart devices, to reduce energy consumption in using WiFi chipsets. We ultimately aim at eliminating WiFi scans when users are mainly moving around their living boundaries by predicting which WiFi AP to connect without scanning. The prediction will be performed based on matching algorithms that find the similarity between a short term observation of cellular signal information measured in a smart device and a database of WiFi APs containing cellular base station IDs and their signal strength information per WiFi AP accumulated whenever the device is connected to a specific WiFi AP. Given our small scale measurement of energy consumption showing that WiFi scan operations drain about 10~15% of battery capacity of smartphones in their daily usages, our proposed algorithm is expected to be able to save substantial amount of energy in smart devices.
Improving Energy and Data Communication Efficiencies of Smartphones through a Receiver-based TCP Control Mechanism for Cellular Networks
Mladen Vouk ; Kyunghan Lee
$75,000 by Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd - Korea
12/ 1/2011 - 11/30/2012
As smart devices like smartphones and tablet computers become prevalent, TCP performance over cellular networks is of growing importance. However, various measurement studies reveal that TCP suffers from excessively long delay as well as throughput degradation in cellular networks. In this project we will conduct extensive experiments over the 3G/4G networks of various cellular network carriers and investigate several under-developed issues: the current 3G/4G networks are over-buffered (termed as bufferbloat) and the excessive buffers void TCP congestion control who relies on packet loss to detect network congestion. Since all the overshot packets are absorbed by the buffers, no packet is lost and TCP will keep increasing its congestion window even if it is already much larger than the underlying bandwidth-delay product. To mitigate such problems, smartphones set the maximum receive buffer size to a relatively small value. Although this simple provisional scheme alleviates the aforementioned problem, it is losing performance in a number of scenarios due to its static nature. Through this project, we aim at proposing an adaptive receive window adjustment algorithm that requires changes only in receiver-side and implement it in Android phones and tablets.
Defect Observability
Laurie Williams
$171,594 by ABB, Inc
08/16/2009 - 08/15/2012
Real-time systems often exhibit some level of non-determinism with regard to defect observability. Testers frequently must run tests multiple times in order to have some assurance that the test actually passes. This costs industry significant time and effort. No one has yet studied these defects to understand why they exhibit non- determinism and what techniques or tools can be used to better observe the software and control the non-determinism.
CAREER: Cooperative Developer Testing with Test Intentions
Tao Xie
$525,727 by the National Science Foundation
08/ 1/2009 - 07/31/2014
Developer testing has been widely recognized as an important, valuable means of improving software reliability. However, manual developer testing is often tedious and not sufficient. Automated testing tools can be used to reduce manual testing efforts. This project develops a systematic framework for cooperative developer testing to enable effective, synergetic cooperation between developers and testing tools. This framework centers around test intentions (i.e., what testing goals to satisfy) and consists of four components: intention specification, test generation, test abstraction, and intention inference. The project also includes integrated research and educational plans.
Fault Localization Based on Combinatorial Testing
Tao Xie
$124,999 by Univ of Texas Arlingtion via NIST
09/ 1/2010 - 08/31/2013
Testing and fault localization are two essential activities performed in virtually every engineering project. These activities can be very laborious and time-consuming. How to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of these two activities has been a major focus in many areas of engineering research. This project will develop effective and efficient fault localization techniques based on combinatorial testing, and adapt these techniques to produce domain-specific techniques applicable to different domains.
Collaborative Research: II-EN: Infrastructure Support for Software Testing Research
Tao Xie
$279,000 by the National Science Foundation
06/ 1/2010 - 05/31/2013
The objective of this project is to enhance the Software-artifact Infrastructure Repository in order to enable the evaluation of various new research projects on software testing such as unit test generation.
Access Control Policy Tool (ACPT) Phase II Development
Tao Xie
$30,000 by National Institute of Standards & Technology
03/19/2012 - 12/18/2012
This project enhances the Access Control Policy Testing (ACPT) tool to support information sharing between affiliated organizations. The sharing of information should comply with security and privacy policies from federal, state, local or tribal security and privacy status. ACPT allows policy authors to compose and combine policies based on predefined templates of practical policy models. ACPT converts resulting models with user-provided attributes to machine-readable XACML representation, which can be directly enforced by information sharing entities.
Mining Program Source Code for Improving Software Quality
Tao Xie
$308,910 by the Army Research Office
09/ 8/2008 - 09/ 7/2012
Improving software quality is becoming an important yet challenging task in software development, especially for those mission-critical or safety-critical software systems. Many software defects related to correctness, security, and robustness are caused by the incorrect usage of system or application programming interfaces (APIs). We propose to develop new approaches for mining API properties for static verification from the API client call sites in existing code repositories, and then detect violations of these mined API properties to find defects in code repositories.
SHF:Small:Collaborative Research: Constraint-Based Generation of Database States for Testing Database Applications
Tao Xie
$249,880 by National Science Foundation
09/ 1/2009 - 08/31/2012
Testing is essential for database applications to function correctly and with acceptable performance when deployed. In practice, it is often necessary for a database software vendor to test their software completely before selling or integrating their package to the database owner. In this proposal, we focus on two bottlenecks in database application testing: functional testing, which is to test whether the applications can perform a set of predefined functions correctly, and performance testing, which is to test whether the applications can function with acceptable performance when deployed.
HCC: Small: Plan-Based Models of Narrative Structure For Virtual Environments
R. Michael Young
$513,860 by National Science Foundation
08/ 1/2009 - 07/31/2012
An increasing number of applications are set within narrative-oriented 3D virtual worlds. Current research on the generation of activities within these worlds holds the promise of tailored experiences customized to individual users? needs. The work described in this project seeks to expand the computational models of narrative being used to AI researchers, specifically to explore formal, plan-based models of actions to create stories that demonstrate complex conflict, rising action, dynamism and intentionality. The work will proceed both formally and empirically, with models being developed motivated by work from narrative theory and cognitive psychology and evaluated using experimental methods.
TC: Small: Collaborative Research: Towards a Dynamic and Composable Model of Trust
Ting Yu
$242,334 by National Science Foundation
09/ 1/2009 - 08/31/2012
In this project, we propose to develop a dynamic and composable model of trust capable of tightly coupling vertical and horizontal trust establishment mechanisms. We will systematically examine the formal and practical aspects of this process in an effort to develop a composite model of trust that is both amenable to formal analysis, as well as efficiently deployable. In addition to formally evaluating the theoretical properties of our proposed model, we will examine the performance of our system in two test deployments examining the benefits of our approach in the pervasive computing and social networking domains.
CAREER: Trust and Provacy Management for Online Social Networks
Ting Yu
$450,000 by the National Science Foundation
08/ 1/2008 - 07/31/2013
Online social networks not only greatly expand the scale of people's social connections, but also have the potential to become an open computing platform, where new types of services can be quickly offered and propagated through existing social structures. Mechanisms for trust management of privacy protection are integral to the future success of online social networks. In this project, we develop theoretical and practical techniques for the management of trust and privacy for social networks. Some of the innovative expected results include a formal trust model and trust policy languages for social networks, privacy preserving feedback management, and graph anonymization techniques for the sharing of social network data.