Current Computer Science Research Projects (by end date)
The funded projects listed below are active projects and the funded running total for the active projects is on the left navigational menu.
CAREER:Expanding Developers' Usage of Software Tools by Enabling Social Learning
Emerson Murphy-Hill
$495,721 by National Science Foundation
08/ 1/2013 - 07/31/2018
Tools can help software developers alleviate the challenge of creating and maintaining software. Unfortunately, developers only use a small subset of the available tools. The proposed research investigates how social learning, an effective mechanism for discovering new tools, can help software developers to discover relevant tools. In doing so, developers will be able to increase software quality while decreasing development time.
CAREER: Secure OS Views for Modern Computing Platforms
William Enck
$400,000 by National Science Foundation
02/ 1/2013 - 01/31/2018
Controlling the access and use of information is a fundamental challenge of computer security. Emerging computing platforms such as Android and Windows 8 further complicate access control by relying on sharing and collaboration between applications. When more than two applications participate in a workflow, existing permission systems break down due to their boolean nature. In this proposal, we seek to provide applications with residual control of their data and its copies. To do this, we propose secure OS views, which combines a new abstraction for accessing data with whole-system information tracking. We apply secure OS views to modern operating systems (e.g., Android and Windows 8), which use database-like abstractions for sharing and accessing information. Similar to a database view, secure OS views uses runtime context to dynamically define the protection domain, allowing the return of the value, a fake value, or nonexistence of the record.
Co-Design of Hardware / Software for Predicting MAV Aerodynamics
Frank Mueller
$666,666 by Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (US Air Force)
09/ 1/2012 - 10/31/2017
This proposal provides subcontractor support to Virginia Tech for a proposal submitted under the Air Force's Basic Research Initiative. The proposal will focus on development of reconfigurable mapping strategies for porting multi-block structured and unstructured-mesh CFD codes to computing clusters containing CPU/GPU processing units.
Lecture Hall Polytopes, Inversion Sequences, and Eulerian Polynomials
Carla Savage
$30,000 by Simons Foundation
09/ 1/2012 - 08/31/2017
Over the past ten years, lecture hall partitions have emerged as fundamental structures in combinatorics and number theory, leading to new generalizations and new interpretations of several classical theorems. This project takes a geometric view of lecture hall partitions and uses polyhedral geometry to investigate their remarkable properties.
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.
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.
Comprehension-Driven Program Analysis (CPA) for Malware Detection in Android Phones
Xuxian Jiang
$556,488 by Iowa State University/US Air Force-Research Laboratory
02/ 3/2012 - 08/ 2/2016
Our goal is to develop new automated program analyses capable of proving that the application programs have security properties of interest to the DoD and demonstrate those analyses in the form of tools designed specifically to keep malicious code out of DoD Android-based mobile application marketplaces.
CISCO-NCSU Internship Program
Peng Ning
$32,000 by Cisco Systems, Inc.(Supplement)
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.
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.
CISCO-NCSU Internship Program(Supplement III)
Peng Ning ; George Rouskas ; Mladen Vouk
$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 or graduate 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/graduate program they are enrolled in) in general relevant skills
CPS: Breakthrough: Collaborative Research: Bringing the Multicore Revolution to Safety-Critical Cyber-Physical Systems
Frank Mueller
$225,000 by National Science Foundation
02/ 1/2013 - 01/31/2016
Multicore platforms have the potential of revolutionizing the capabilities of embedded cyber-physical systems but lack predictability in execution time due to shared resources. Safety-critical systems require such predictability for certification. This research aims at resolving this multicore ``predictability problem.'' It will develop methods that enable to share hardware resources to be allocated and provide predictability, including support for real-time operating systems, middleware, and associated analysis tools. The devised methods will be evaluated through experimental research involving synthetic micro-benchmarks and code for unmanned air vehicles ``re-thinking'' their adapting to changing environmental conditions within Cyber-Physical Systems.
Detection and Transition Analysis of Engagement and Affect in a Simulation-Based Combat Medic Training Environment
James Lester ; Bradford Mott
$478,592 by Columbia University/US Army Research Laboratory
12/19/2012 - 12/18/2015
The project will develop automated detectors that can infer the engagement and affect of trainees learning through the vMedic training system. This project will combine interaction-based methods for detecting these constructs (e.g., models making inference solely from the trainee?s performance history) with scalable sensor-based methods for detecting these constructs, towards developing models that can leverage sensor information when it is available, but which can still assess trainee engagement and affect effectively even when sensors are not available. The automated detectors will be developed, integrated together, and validated for accuracy when applied to new trainees.
TWC: Small: Collaborative: Characterizing the Security Limitations of Accessing the Mobile Web
William Enck
$167,000 by NSF
10/ 1/2012 - 09/30/2015
Mobile browsers are beginning to serve as critical enablers of modern computing. With a combination of rich features that rival their desktop counterparts and strong security mechanisms such as TLS/SSL, these applications are becoming the basis of many other mobile apps. Unfortunately, the security guarantees provided by mobile browsers and the risks associated with today's mobile web have not been evaluated in great detail. In the proposed work, we will investigate the security of mobile browsers and the mobile specific websites they access. Characterizing and responding to the threats in this space is critical, especially given that cellular devices are used by more than five billion people around the world
III: Small: Optimization Techniques for Scalable Semantic Web Data Processing in the Cloud
Kemafor Ogan
$446,942 by National Science Foundation
09/ 1/2012 - 08/31/2015
Achieving scalable processing of the increasing amount of publicly-available Semantic Web data will hinge on parallelization. The Map-Reduce programming paradigm recently emerged as a de-facto parallel data processing standard and has demonstrated effectiveness with respect to structured and unstructured data. However, Semantic Web data presents challenges not adequately addressed by existing techniques due to its flexible, fine-grained data model and the need to reason beyond explicitly represented data. This project will investigate optimization techniques that address these unique challenges based on rethinking Semantic Web data processing on Map-Reduce platforms from the ground, up - from query algebra to query execution.
Collaborative Research: Understanding Climate Change: A Data Driven Approach
Nagiza Samatova ; Frederick Semazzi
$1,815,739 by National Science Foundation
09/ 1/2010 - 08/31/2015
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.
SHF: Small: Scalable Trace-Based Tools for In-Situ Data Analysis of HPC Applications (ScalaJack)
Frank Mueller
$457,395 by National Science Foundation
06/ 1/2012 - 05/31/2015
This decade is projected to usher in the period of exascale computing with the advent of systems with more than 500 million concurrent tasks. Harnessing such hardware with coordinated computing in software poses significant challenges. Production codes tend to face scalability problems, but current performance analysis tools seldom operate effectively beyond 10,000 cores. We propose to combine trace analysis and in-situ data analysis techniques at runtime. Application developers thus create ultra low-overhead measurement and analysis facilities on-the-fly, customized for the performance problems of particular application. We propose an analysis generator called ScalaJack for this purpose. Results of this work will be contributed as open-source code to the research community and beyond as done in past projects. Pluggable, customization analysis not only allows other groups to build tools on top of our approach but to also contribute components to our framework that will be shared in a repository hosted by us.
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
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.
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.
Type I: ENGAGE: Immersive Game-Based Learning for Middle Grade Computational Fluency
James Lester ; Kristy Boyer ; Bradford Mott ; Eric Wiebe
$16,000 by NSF (Supplement)
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.
SHF: Small: Expressive and Scalable Notifications from Program Analysis Tools
Emerson Murphy-Hill ; Sarah Heckman
$250,000 by NSF
10/ 1/2012 - 09/30/2014
A wide variety of program analysis tools have been created to help software developers do their jobs, yet the output of these tools are often difficult to understand and vary significantly from tool to tool. As a result, software developers may waste time trying to interpret the output of these tools, instead of making their software more capable and reliable. This proposal suggests a broad investigation of several types of program analysis tools, with the end goal being an improved understanding of how program analysis tools can inform developers in the most expressive and uniform way possible. Once this goal is reached, we can create program analysis tools that enable developers to make tremendous strides towards more correct, more reliable, and more on-time software systems.
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.
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.
SHF: Small: Towards Regulatory Compliance Software Engineering with UCONLEGAL
Ana Anton ; Jon Doyl
$400,000 by the National Science Foundation
08/ 1/2012 - 07/31/2014
Software engineers need improved tools and methods for translating complex, changing legal regulations into workable information technology systems. Compliance with legal requirements is an essential element in system governed by regulations. The research proposed herein advances the cutting edge for creating more accurate, efficient, and reliable Regulatory Compliance Software Engineering (RCSE), resulting in significantly more trustworthy systems. Software systems that handle sensitive information records must comply with regulations. Access control models, given their ability to represent the components that constitute the access rules in legal texts, can aid in modeling these regulations. Based on our analysis of the HIPAA Privacy Rule, we have identified the components needed to model access rules that comply with regulations. The HIPAA Privacy Rule limits access to and usage of health records. In this proposal, we propose to create a formal model for UCONLEGAL, an extension to UCONABC with components to model purposes, cross-references, exceptions, conditions, and logs for expressing the access and usage rules in HIPAA. We have identified seven types of conditions specific to HIPAA and include them in UCONLEGAL. In this project we propose to validate UCONLEGAL within the context of financial regulations, and reason about the science of ensuring regulatory compliance by developing a formal usage control model that applies for three domains: health care, finance, and homeland security ? specifically for the Information Sharing Environment. We plan to develop automated testers and verifiers to ensure the safety and reliability properties of critical systems.
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. 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. During the project, the Leonardo virtual science notebook system will be rolled out to 60 classrooms in North Carolina, Texas, and California.
NeTS:Small: Computationally Scalable Optical Network Design
George Rouskas
$429,995 by NSF
08/ 1/2011 - 07/31/2014
Optical networking forms the foundation of the global network infrastructure, hence the planning and design of optical networks is crucial to the operation and economics of the Internet and its ability to support critical and reliable communication services. With this research project we aim to make contributions that will lead to a quantum leap in the ability to solve optimally a range of optical design problems. In particular, we will develop compact formulations and solution approaches that can be applied efficiently to instances encountered in Internet-scale environments. Our goal is to lower the barrier to entry in fully exploring the solution space and in implementing and deploying innovative designs. The solutions we will develop are "future-proof" with respect to advances in DWDM transmission technology, as the size of the corresponding problem formulations is independent of the number of wavelengths.
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.
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.
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).
Learning Environments Across Disciplines LEADS: Supporting Technology Rich Learning Across Disciplines: Affect Generation and Regulation During Co-Regulated Learning in Game-Based Learning Environments
James Lester
$46,970 by McGill University/Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
04/ 1/2012 - 03/31/2014
Contemporary research on multi-agent learning environments has focused on self-regulated learning (SRL) while relatively little effort has been made to use co-regulated learning as a guiding theoretical framework (Hadwin et al., 2011). This oversight needs to be addressed given the complex nature that self-and other-regulatory processes play when human learners and artificial pedagogical agents (APAs) interact to support learners? internalization of cognitive, affective, and metacognitive (CAM) SRL processes. We will use the Crystal Island learning environment to investigate these issues.
Investigation of Application Service Architectures for Future Internet Testbeds
Injong Rhee
$100,000 by ETRI (Research Inst.-Electronics & Telecommunications)
10/15/2010 - 01/14/2014
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
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 - 01/14/2014
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.
Graduate Industrial Traineeship for Sagar Jauhari
Douglas Reeves
$50,980 by SAS Institute, Inc.
01/ 7/2013 - 01/ 6/2014
"NC State University (NCSU), through the graduate industrial traineeship (GIT) student, will provide research and analysis to SAS. Such research and analysis shall include, but is not limited to, research, generation, testing and documentation of operation research software. GIT student will provide such services for SAS' offices in Cary, North Carolina, at such times as have been mutually agreed upon by the parties. GIT student agrees to abide by SAS' policies and procedures regarding security of SAS' facilities and computing resources."
Triangle Computer Science Distinguished Lecturer Series
Franc Brglez
$55,300 by Army Research Office
01/ 3/2011 - 01/ 2/2014
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
BPC-AE: Scaling the STARS Alliance: A National Community for Broadening Participation Through Regional Partnerships
Tiffany Barnes
$150,000 by UNC-UNC Charlotte ( NSF)
01/ 1/2013 - 12/31/2013
The Beauty and Joy of Computing project presents a unique opportunity to scale the STARS Alliance further while also enhancing national efforts to engage more high school teachers and students in teaching and learning computing and build stronger university/college/K12 partnerships. Through this supplement, we will extend the Alliance with at least three new STARS Computing Corps, providing leadership training to a group of 8-10 students in each Corps, all focused on supporting the BJC effort. New Corps will provide teaching assistance to high school teachers implementing the BJC course through classroom visits and monthly Computer Science Teacher Association chapter meetings. These new STARS Computing Corps will also teach BJC material either through in middle school Citizen Schools after-school programs, and K-12 summer camps. This will provide a vibrant community of support for high school teachers and students engaging the new BJC course.
Collaborative Research: Dynamic Staging Architecture For Accelerating I/O Pipelines
Xiaosong Ma ; Scott Klacky
$133,933 by National Science Foundation
04/ 1/2010 - 12/31/2013
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.
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.
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 - 12/31/2013
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).
Diagraph Method in Detecting Rule Faults For Attribute Based Access Control Polices
Tao Xie
$50,000 by US Dept. of Commerce (DOC)/NIST
01/ 1/2013 - 12/31/2013
Even though Access Control (AC) policies can be implemented based on different AC models, the most common and generic AC policies are composed by AC rules in propositions of privilege assignments described by attributes of subjects, actions, objects, and environment variables of the protected systems. Such modeless AC policies are called Attribute Based Access Control (ABAC) policies. Incorrect implementations of AC policies result in faults that not only leak but also disable access of information, and faults in ABAC polices are difficult to detect without support of formal embedded models such as Multi-Level Security (MLS) and Chinese Wall. This research proposes a diagraph analysis method that detects faults including conflicts of privilege assignments, leaks of information, and conflicts of interest assignments.
Social Computing and Community Engagements for Collaborative Service Marketplace
Munindar Singh
$55,000 by Xerox Corporation
12/ 1/2012 - 11/30/2013
We propose to investigate the challenges of understanding social computing applied in the enterprise in the context of facilitating engagements among communities of service providers, requesters, and partners in enterprise service marketplace. Specifically, we will study the problems of (1) detecting and recommending relevant communities based on an analysis of interactions and transactions in the service marketplace to improve the engagement, and (2) building an intelligent model for recommending services and workflows to maximize value in the marketplace.
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 - 11/30/2013
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.
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.
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 - 09/30/2013
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.
Differential Analysis on Changes in Medical Device Software
Tao Xie
$60,000 by NSF
10/ 1/2012 - 09/30/2013
As medical device technology evolves, so too does the software upon which the technology often relies. Changes in device software, after it has been approved or cleared, may compromise the safety of that device. Assessing the safety of such changes presents special challenges to regulators at the FDA. This project explores differential analysis techniques to assess the effects of software changes on device safety.
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 - 08/31/2013
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.
CT-ISG: Understanding Botnet C&C Communication Protocols
Xuxian Jiang
$400,000 by the National Science Foundation
08/28/2008 - 08/31/2013
Botnets are recognized as one of the most serious threats to today's Internet. To combat them, one key step is to effectively understand how the botnet members communicate with each other. Unfortunately, the trend of adopting various obfuscation schemes (e.g., encryption) in recent bots greatly impedes our understanding. The main thrust of this research is the investigation of several interrelated key techniques to overcome the above challenges and significantly enrich the understanding of botnet command and control.
Collaborative Research: II-NEW: OpenVMI: A Software Infrastructure for Virtual Machine Introspection
Xuxian Jiang
$225,000 by National Science Foundation
09/ 1/2009 - 08/31/2013
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.
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.
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.
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 - 08/31/2013
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.
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.
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.
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 - 08/31/2013
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.
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.
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.
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 - 08/31/2013
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.
SHF:Small:Collaborative Research: Constraint-Based Generation of Database States for Testing Database Applications(Supplement)
Tao Xie
$8,000 by NSF
06/ 1/2012 - 08/31/2013
The objective of this project is to write parameterized mock objects for the database API to facilitate the application of Pex on database applications written in the Microsoft .NET platforms.
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.
TC: Small: Collaborative Research: Towards a Dynamic and Composable Model of Trust
Ting Yu
$242,334 by National Science Foundation
09/ 1/2009 - 08/31/2013
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.
Application Skelleton Generation for Exascale HPC (previous title: Application Skelleton Generation for Exascale HPC Simulation)
Frank Mueller
$60,000 by Oak Ridge National Laboratories - UT-Battelle LLC(US Dept. of Energy (DOE))
01/ 1/2013 - 08/30/2013
The objective of this work is to complement ORNL's xSim simulator with benchmark generation capabilities. ScalaBenchGen from NCSU will be extended to auto-generate source code suitable for evaluation under xSim. ScalaBenchGen will complement these capabilities with the ability to extract communication benchmark skeletons from actual HPC runs of applications. These skeletons include timings for computational parts and actual MPI communication calls. We propose to combine the ScalaBenchGen and xSim capabilities for sample HPC benchmarks/applications. Timings for the computational part will be enhanced to allow adaptation with respect to future (exascale) architectures. This co-design exploration supports the research path toward exascale.
A Hybrid Computing Testbed For Mobile Threat Detection and Enhanced Research and Education in Information
Xuxian Jiang ; Peng Ning
$150,000 by US ARMY - ARO
08/21/2012 - 08/20/2013
This proposal proposes to build a hybrid computing testbed for detecting emerging mobile threats and improving research and education in information security at North Carolina State University (NCSU). The proposed computing testbed will be developed on the basis of the current Virtual Computing Lab (VCL) environment to provide a prototyping environment, which will be used for rapid development and evaluation of a variety of ongoing research projects funded by DoD and other government agencies. Also, it supports research-related education components in system oriented information security courses at NCSU. Moreover, we propose to equip the hybrid testbed with various mobile devices for detecting and experimenting with emerging mobile threats (e.g., Android malware). One key use of this hybrid testbed is to detect emerging or new threats against current mobile gadgets (e.g., smart phones and tablets), which is not available or possible yet based on current computing resources. The results and experience gained from operating and managing a real computing testbed will also provide practical insights into emerging threats on mobile Internet for students and researchers. The experience in managing and operating such a hybrid computing testbed will also be valuable to identify new security and performance problems and develop their practical solutions.
Joint Faculty Agreement, Xioasong Ma (Supplement)
Xiaosong Ma
$80,868 by ORNL - UT-Battelle LLC
08/16/2012 - 08/15/2013
This joint appointment will allow the PI to continue her long-term collaboration with ORNL researchers. Specifically for 2012-2013, the joint teams will focus on several HPC projects, including active storage on new memory media, automatic creation of parallel I/O benchmarks, and application I/O workload analysis based on server-side aggregate I/O load traces. The PI will supervise NCSU graduate students performing PhD research on these joint projects, who will also receive mentoring from ORNL collaborators.
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.
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
HCC: Small: Plan-Based Models of Narrative Structure For Virtual Environments
R. Michael Young
$513,860 by National Science Foundation
08/ 1/2009 - 07/31/2013
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.
CAREER: Trust and Privacy 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.
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.
Scalable Statistical Computing For Physical Science Applications
Nagiza Samatova ; Anatoli Melechko
$354,646 by US Department of Energy (DOE)
12/ 2/2011 - 06/30/2013
Physical science applications such as nanoscience, fusion science, climate and biology generate large-scale data sets from their simulations and high throughput technologies. This necessitates scalable technologies for processing and analyzing this data. We plan to research and develop advanced data mining algorithms for knowledge discovery from this complex, high-dimensional, and noisy data. We will apply these technologies to DOE-mission scientific applications related to fusion energy, bioenergy, understanding the impacts of climate extremes, and insider threat detection and mitigation.
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.