This project will address a wide variety of digital identity needs by developing required Flexible, Multiple and Dependable Digital Identity (FMDDI) technology, based on a sound underlying set of definitions and principles. We will apply, expand, and refine the theory of identities, the mechanisms to embody and enforce them, as well as study the implications of their use, and develop appropriate educational vehicles to teach people how digital identities should be used effectively.

This research focuses on how society uses, values, and protects citizens? personal information. From the perspective of system design, software engineers need methods and tools to enable them to design systems that reflect those values and protect personal information, accordingly. This research examines how privacy considerations and value systems influence the design, deployment and consequences of IT. The goal is to develop concepts, tools and techniques that help IT professionals and policy makers bring policies and system requirements into better alignment. An action-oriented set of conceptual tools, including guidelines and privacy- relevant policy templates will be constructed and validated.

Privacy is increasingly a major concern that prevents the exploitation of the Internet's full potential. Consumers are concerned about the trustworthiness of the websites to which they entrust their sensitive information. Although significant industry efforts are seeking to better protect sensitive information online, existing solutions are still fragmented and far from satisfactory. Specifically, existing languages for specifying privacy policies lack a formal and unambiguous semantics, are limited in expressive power and lack enforcement as well as auditing support. Moreover, existing privacy management tools aimed at increasing end-users' control over their privacy are limited in capability or difficult to use.

The goal of this project is to develop an extensible framework for designing and using derived data in answering database queries efficiently. The outcomes of the project are expected to be general and independent of a specific data model (e.g., relational or XML), while giving guarantees with respect to query-performance improvement. The approach consists of developing and evaluating mathematical models and algorithms for common types of queries on relational and XML data. Expected outcomes of the project include automated tuning of data-access characteristics in a variety of applications, thus enhancing the quality of user interactions with data-intensive systems.

The goal of this proposal is to develop effective methods to improve performance of frequent important queries on large databases. This problem is important for improving efficiency of user interactions with relational data-management systems; solving the problem will have effect in query optimization, data warehousing, and information integration. The project focuses on evaluating queries using auxiliary relations, or views. Our main objective is to develop theoretically rigorous yet practically applicable techniques needed to design views that would help in computing sets of frequent and important queries with optimal or near-optimal speedup on large databases with given statistics.

This proposal focuses on a synergistic approach combining runtime and operating system support to fully exploit the capabilities of SMTs. To meet this objective, it studies three different approaches. First, it investigates the benefits of using a helper thread along side the primary thread, by building a reference implementation of an SMT-aware Message Passing Interface library. Second, it investigates the benefits of dynamic mode switching between single-thread and multi-threaded configurations. Third, it modifies the operating system creating an SMT-aware scheduler. The benefits are demonstrated for a variety of applications, including large-scale benchmarks and other nationally relevant parallel codes.

NOAA awarded $12.5 Million to fund the Interdisciplinary Scientific Environmental Technology (ISET) Cooperative Research and Education Center. NC A&T State University is the lead institution. The team includes a diverse network of scientists, and engineers from A&T, NC State University, University of Minnesota, University of North Carolina at Pembroke, City University of New York, University of Alaska Southeast, California State University-Fresno, Fisk University as well as industrial, state and federal government partners. NC State University is the lead university for the research thrust on the analysis of global observing systems that includes numerical and physical research and analysis of hurricanes.

The centroid decomposition, an approximation for the singular value decomposition, had a long but early history within the statistics/psychometrics community for factor analysis research. We revisit the centroid method first in its original context and then generalize and modernize it to arbitrary matrices. We show the centroid method can be cast as an n-step (linear) ascent method on a hypercube. Furthermore, we have shown empirically that the centroid decomposition is statistically sound. A major purpose of this work is to show fundamental relationships between the singular value, centroid and semi-discrete decompositions. This unifies an entire class of truncated SVD approximations.

In the research component of my career development program, I focus on strategies for addressing the challenges and opportunities that face the deployment of structured P2P systems. In particular, I introduce new schemes to locate resources and strategies to serve them. I also introduce new schemes for topology interference, integration, and organization in order to optimize content distribution. The proposed educational aspect of my career development program focuses on (1) enhancing our department�s networking curriculum, (2) extending opportunities for women, under-represented minorities, and undergraduates in research, (3) encouraging students to participate in the computer science community outside the university.

Our focus in this proposal will be on providing seamless and secure transitions between wireless islands for real-time connections, which may be sharing the wireless space with other real-time and non-real-time applications.

This project will investigate methods for navigating complex information spaces. Work will focus on a system designed to help viewers visualize, explore, and analyze large, multidimensional datasets. Detailed local displays will be combined with a high-level global overview of areas of interest within a dataset. Local views will use perceptual cues to harness the low-level human visual system. Global overviews will identify and cluster elements of interest to produce an underlying graph that: (1) support efficient navigation via graph traversal, and (2) provide an effective visualization of the areas of interest and their relationships to one another.

This proposal describes a one-year research project to apply techniques from scientific visualization to the problem of displaying, monitoring, and analyzing network-based data.

Symbolic representations are used in analysis of finite and infinite state concurrent system. However, they could be subjected to constraint explosion much like state explosion in analysis of finite state designs of concurrent systems. The reason for both of these explosions is the consideration of all interleavings, of a concurrent system, during their analysis. Partial-order techniques depend upon the notion of independence among actions to avoid considering all possible interleavings. The proposed research will investigate the notion of unfolding, which aids both in discovery of independent actions and in succinctly representing the state space of systems.

Automation in medical devices has led to the use of software as an integral part of these devices. Given the safety critical nature of these devices it is important to take efforts that such software is free of defects. However, in the event of an accident it becomes important to determine the cause of the error -- an activity that is termed {\em forensic analysis}. We propose to work on formal methods based tools that can be used to understand and identify the source of an error. This project will be carried out at NCSU and at FDA.

The International Conference on Information and Communications Security will be held in December 2006 in the Research Triangle of North Carolina. This is a well-established security conference being held for the first time in North America. Support from NSF is sought to broaden participation, particularly of students, provide improved access for researchers to the latest research results, and to promote the development and dissemination of solutions to some of the nation's pressing security needs in the computing and communications areas.

The Center for Advanced Computing and Communication (CACC) is a membership-based industry/university cooperative research center co-located at North Carolina State University and Duke University. North Carolina State University was selected by the National Science Foundation in 1981 as a site for an industry/university cooperative research center in communications and signal processing. The center was named the Center for Communications and Signal Processing until 1994 when a second center site at Duke University was added. The CACC research goal is to create concepts, methods and tools for use in the analysis, design and implementation of advanced computer and communication systems.

While individual workstations in scientific research environments have become more powerful, they cannot meet the needs of today's interactive data processing tasks. Meanwhile, idle desktop resources are not efficiently utilized. This project aims at harnessing the collective idle resources within institutional boundaries to speed up computation- or data-intensive tasks routinely executed on desktop machines. We will build a novel desktop parallel computing framework, which will integrate distributed computing and storage resources to create an execution platform similar to that provided by a parallel computer, while maintaining the comfort and responsiveness of desktop sequential computing and the autonomy of resource donors.

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.

Many applications currently used on daily basis by scientists fail to take advantage of state-of-the-art computer systems. This problem is more severe for many data-intensive applications, such as bioinformatics and visualization codes, whose parallelization are more recent and less studied in parallel architectures' design, compared to traditional simulations. We propose to address the above problems by investigating efficient runtime data management for data-intensive applications. We plan to build novel technologies for generic, automatic parallel execution plan optimization and enhancing parallel scientific data libraries by hiding I/O costs.

In this proposal, we address the I/O stack performance problem with adaptive optimizations at multiple layers of the HEC I/O stack (from high-level scientific data libraries to secondary storage devices and archiving systems), and propose effective communication schemes to integrate such optimizations across layers. Our proposed PATIO (Parallel AdapTive I/O) framework will coordinate storage resources ranging from processors to tape archiving systems.

This project investigates observation-based execution time estimation for resource planning and usage estimation in the grid environment. The proposed approaches will collect/manage/utilize application characteristics and performance results, and transfer such information across applications and platforms. Thus, performance data from one application's executions on one platform helps predict the performance of another application on another platform. The expected outcome of this research is a meta-predictor, an efficient and sufficiently accurate cross-platform performance prediction tool that provides performance predictions as a service to grid users. These approaches will be validated on production platforms with applications representative for nationally relevant high-end applications.

The long-term objective of this project is to develop computational algorithms and software to gain theoretical and empirical insights in the use of chemical diversity for determining quantitative structure-activity relationships (QSARs). In addition to addressing scientific and technical goals with respect to QSAR modeling, planning-period tasks will include specific activities to bring together the researchers and to facilitate inter-disciplinary communication. Specific Aim 1 is to develop and enhance collaborations between three broad disciplines: statistics, computer science, and chemistry.

Today, high-performance clusters of shared-memory multiprocessors (SMPs) are employed to cope with large data sets for scientific applications. On these SMPs, hybrid programming models combing message passing and shared memory are often less efficient than pure message passing although the former fits SMP architectures more closely. For more information on this project check Dr. Mueller's Web Page

This project addresses issues of adaptive, reliable,and efficient operating and runtime system solutions for ultra-scale high-end scientific computing with the following goals: (1)Create a modular and configurable Linux system based on the application / runtime requirements. (2)Build runtime systems that leverage the OS modularity and configurability to improve efficiency, reliability, scalability,ease-of-use. (3)Advance computer reliability, availability and serviceability management systems to work cooperatively. (4)Explore the use of advanced monitoring and adaptation to improve application performance and predictability of system interruptions. Our focus is on developing scalable algorithms for high-availability without single points of failure and without single points of control.

Embedded systems with temporal constraints rely on timely scheduling and a prior knowledge of worst-case execution times. Static timing analysis derives safe bounds of WCETs but its applicability has been limited to hard real-time systems and small code snippets. This proposal addresses these limitations of timing analysis for embedded systems. It contributes a novel approach to program analysis through parametric techniques of static timing analysis and provides innovative methods for exploiting them.

This work puts forth a two-tier approach to reduce the processor frequency of complex embedded systems. First, tight worst-case timing analysis reduces the perceived upper bound on the number of cycles consumed by tasks. Second, architecture simulation and processors with dual frequency/voltage modes enable significant additional power savings. Architecture simulation produces an approximate worst-case timing estimate. A higher recovery frequency is utilized as a fall-back mode to ensure safe operation bounded by tight worst-case timing analysis. These two approaches complement each other. They initially reduce the power requirements by significant amount when compared with naive approach.

The focus of this project is to develop tool support to provide the ability for scientific programmers to inquire about scalability problems and correlate this information back to source code. Furthermore, we believe that tools should be able to suggest and evaluate optimizing transformations to alleviate these problems. This would constitute a significant improvement over current performance analysis practice. The key intellectual merit is in providing an automatic framework for detecting scalability problems and correlating them back to source code. We will experiment with our framework on the ASCI codes, which is intended to stress high-performance clusters.

While essential for real-time scheduling, deriving worst-case execution times (WCET) for contemporary processors is intractable. The Virtual Simple Architecture (VISA) framework shifts the burden of bounding the WCETs of tasks, in part, to hardware. A VISA is the pipeline timing specification of a hypothetical simple processor. WCET is derived for a task assuming the VISA. Tasks are executed speculatively on an unsafe complex processor. Yet, before deadlines become jeopardized, a simple mode is entered. Overall, VISA provides a general framework for safe operation on unsafe processors.

Sensor networks are ideal candidates for a wide range of applications such as critical infrastructure protection. It is necessary to guarantee the trustworthiness and resilience of sensor networks as well as the sensing applications. The objective of this project is to develop practical techniques for building trustworthy and resilient sensor networks as well as instructional materials that facilitate the education of these techniques. The research activities are focused on practical broadcast authentication, trustworthy and resilient clock synchronization, and light-weight and collaborative intrusion detection in sensor networks, seeking effective integration of cryptographic techniques, application semantics, and other knowledge or constraints.

Security of sensor networks is a critical issue, especially when the sensor networks are deployed in hostile environments for mission critical applications. This project aims at developing efficient and resilient key management techniques for wireless sensor networks, including novel key pre-distribution techniques, effective use of knowledge extracted from practical sensor deployment models as well as application semantics, effective integration of public key and secret key, and specific techniques for key management in hybrid sensor networks consisting of a small number of resourceful nodes and a potentially large number of resource constrained, regular sensor nodes.

We will focus on one thrust of research in the Cyber-TA initiative. We will explore practical schemes for Internet-scale collaborative sharing of sensitive information security log content, while providing extensive guarantees for contributor anonymity. Cyber-TA will enable much greater content sharing of even the most sensitive system and security log content, allowing contributors to release "rich-content" (anonymized) alert information that can enable new directions in ultra-larges-scale repository correlation.

The objective of this project is to develop a comprehensive suite of techniques to prevent, detect, or survive malicious attacks against location discovery in sensor networks. The PIs will investigate key management schemes suitable for authenticating beacon messages, explore techniques to make existing location discovery schemes more resilient, seek beaconless location discovery that uses deployment knowledge instead of beacon nodes, and finally investigate methods to integrate the proposed techniques so that they can be combined cost-effectively for sensor network applications. This project will provide specific technical solutions that can be integrated with the sensor network techniques currently being developed.

This project is motivated by current limitations of intrusion detection systems, which are generally unable to fully detect unknown attacks, or even unknown variations of known attacks, without generating a large number of false alarms. The focus of this project is to integrate intrusion detection with visualization techniques and human computer interaction strategies to address these limitations. Our system will include interactive intrusion detection algorithms that capitalize on human knowledge and judgment, novel visualization and interaction techniques to monitor for potential attacks, and semi-automated tools for constructing and evaluating attack profiles to extend the capabilities of an intrusion detection system.

Embedded systems and networks are used heavily in critical defense applications. The integrity of embedded infrastructures, such as configuration and code, is of utmost importance. New techniques are needed that allow updates to the infrastructure of an embedded system without violating its integrity. This workshop intends to bring researchers that have expertise in a variety of techniques for ensuring the security and integrity of mission-critical embedded systems and networks.

Current intrusion detection systems (IDSs) usually generate a large amount of false alerts, and often do not detect novel attacks or variations of known attacks. Moreover, most of the existing IDSs focus on low-level attacks or anomalies; none of them can capture the logical steps or strategies behind these attacks. This project will exploit alert correlation techniques to reduce false alerts, discover attackers¹ high-level strategies, and predict possible future attacks based on the detected attacks in progress.

This proposal proposes to build a wireless heterogeneous sensor network test-bed consisting of over 200 sensor nodes with varying capabilities in terms of processing, energy efficiency and radio transmission capacities. The proposed test-bed provides realistic large-scale wireless sensor network environments for evaluating and validating the ideas, protocols and systems conceived from various other activities. The data and experience gained from operating and managing a real network environment will also provide practical insights for students and researchers on the operation of large-scale heterogeneous sensor networks which help identify new security and performance problems and develop their practical solutions.

Reliable and sufficient sensor coverage is an important requirement for a successful sensor network deployment. The goal of the project is to study and develop optimal positioning algorithms for sensor network deployment that provide surveillance and monitoring of assets or facilities. This project considers two scenarios: 1) Assuming we would deploy sensors for asset protection, an optimal sensor positioning and deployment algorithm is needed. 2) If sensors are deployed randomly over a geographical region to protect certain asset, what will be the best scheduling plan to turn on some of the deploying sensors such that sufficient surveillance can be provided.

The award will fund research activities aiming to make significant contributions to the capacity planning and automation for monitoring tools by use of modeling, simulation, testbed emulation and on line optimization. Specific goals include the study of models, response surfaces and advanced simulation methods, and, the creation of an automated paradigm for on-line optimization for capacity tuning.

Internet Worms are software that propagate from computer to computer across the network, without intervention by or knowledge of users, for the purpose of compromising the defenses of those machines against unauthorized access or use. Worms have the property that they can spread very quickly to the vulnerable population of hosts, sometimes in only seconds, to achieve worldwide penetration. This speed allows them to bypass conventional methods of positive identification and human response.

Increasingly the nation's infrastructure is connected by the Internet for computing, communication, monitoring, and control. Adversaries(hackers, criminals, terrorists, etc.)can and do exploit this connectivity to attack networked computers and devices. In order to defend against such attacks, and prosecute the adversaries, it is necessary to be able to identify the source of the attack. Tracing an attack back through the Internet to its source is the goal of this research project. As part of this project, tools for watermarking flows and performing timing correlation in real-time will be developed.

As applications for wireless sensor networks are extremely diverse, sensor network designers will benefit immensely from (sensor) network protocols that can provide a wide spectrum of design choices, especially for very low energy budget applications. In this proposal, the PIs plan to develop a suite of new MAC protocols for sensor network applications based on a new approach, called Route-aware Media Access Control (RASMAC), that can greatly diversify design choices for application designers. A comprehensive evaluation of the developed protocols and their performance models is planned that involves design and implementation of a wildlife tracking system.

Traffic quantization is a new approach to supporting per-flow functionality in packet-switched networks in an efficient and scalable manner. We propose the concept of tiered service to alleviate the complexity associated with supporting per-flow QoS: a quantized network offers a small set of service tiers, and each flow is mapped to the tier that guarantees its QoS. Research will consist of four components: develop novel quantized implementations of weighted fair queueing (WFQ); develop Linux implementations of quantized WFQ to validate the theoretical results; extend the quantization approach to multiple traffic parameters; and investigate efficient constraint-based routing algorithms for quantized traffic.

The objective of this project is to formulate a formal framework for a non-layered internetworking architecture in which complex protocols are composed from elemental functional blocks in a configurable manner, and to demonstrate its potential by developing proof-of-concept prototypes. We propose a new internetworking architecture that represents a significant departure from current philosophy. The proposed architecture is flexible and extensible so as to foster innovation and accommodate change, it supports network convergence, it allows for the integration of security features at any point in the networking stack, and it is positioned to take advantage of hardware-based performance-enhancing techniques.

We address the problem of grooming traffic into lightpaths for transport over general topology optical networks so as to minimize the network cost. We will first study the traffic grooming problem in a number of elemental topologies such as rings, stars, and trees. We will consequently develop hierarchical approaches to tackle the problem in general topologies by decomposing it into smaller subproblems involving elemental topologies. The end-result of this project will be a suite of traffic grooming algorithms with formally verified properties that can be flexibly and efficiently applied within a variety of optical network and cost models.

The proposed research is an investigation of fundamental questions involving the structure of combinatorial families and relationships between families with intrinsically different characterizations. The focus is on families of integer partitions, compositions, and combinations. The topics under investigation include new work on partitions and compositions defined by linear inequalities; new tools for investigating classical questions about generalizations of the Rogers-Ramanujan identities; and symmetric chain decompositions with geometric applications.

This project is the U .S. portion of a joint NSF /CNRS proposal for a cooperative research effort involving U.S. faculty from North Carolina State and Drexel Universities and French faculty from the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin. The funds will support travel for the U .S. participants to visit the University of Versailles to establish a cooperative research program focusing on an integrated approach to the analysis of combinatorial structures arising in applications.

Mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) have been the focus of significant research activity in the past decade. Thousands of algorithms and protocols for MANETs have been proposed, evaluated and compared. One of the defining characteristics of MANETs is their mobility. We propose to develop and evaluate a hybrid mobility model that is relatively easy to generate and, at the same time, produces realistic mobility traces, that in turn, result in meaningful simulation results for MANET simulations. The proposed model has the desirable characteristics that it is customizable to match any scenario, while allowing the users to vary key parameters.

Virtual organizations (VOs) are organizations of entities such as people and businesses that collaborate to address their collective and individual goals. We model business partners and the VOs they form as autonomous agents. The objective of this project is to address two major, related challenges: (1) how to ensure that agents interact correctly within and across VOs under different circumstances; and (2) how to specify agents and VOs in a perspicuous policy-based manner that engenders confidence in the functioning of the VOs involved.

Successful interaction relies heavily upon trust. This applies equally to electronic commerce and virtual social communities. However, figuring out who to trust and to what extent is extremely difficult in open networked information environments. Trust is a complex concept and involves aspects of competence and good nature (of the trusted party) and the risk tolerance and urgency (of the trusting party). This project studies distributed, scalable computational approaches for trust management, especially with regard to aggregate phenomena such as the emergence of subcommunities, pivots (which link different subcommunities), and the sensitivity of a community to invasion by nontrustworthy players.

Business protocols structure and streamline interactions among autonomous business partners. Traditional representations of protocols specify legal sequences of actions but not their meaning. Thus they cannot adequately support flexible interactions, e.g., to handle exceptions and exploit opportunities. This project is developing a declarative model of protocols that gives meaning to, and reasons about, states and actions based on the participants' commitments. This approach improves flexibility while maintaining rigor. This project is studying practical protocols from real-life domains such as transactions among financial institutions and other varieties of electronic business.

Tool use is an agent's manipulation of objects in the environment to transform the interaction between the environment and the agent's sensors or actuators such that its goals are more efficiently achieved. We propose four core capabilities for a habile agent: the ability to generalize existing effectivities to those provided by a tool under the agent's control; the ability to perform detailed internal simulations based on hypothetical application of tool-using abilities; the use of symmetry in recognizing opportunities for tool use; and the use of a general image-schematic representation to control tool-using behavior.

The breakthrough information technology that we will develop through this ITR project is an intelligent/adaptive, human-machine interface to support the new role of screening process supervisors in safe and effective, distributed control of high time stress and high risk, automated chemical and toxicity testing. The development of this technology will be based on cognitive modeling of supervisory controller behaviors during actual chemical screening processes and model predictions of operator performance with different interactive information display design alternatives during the (model) design phase and during chemical process run-time.

Collaborative research effort aimed at removing the computational barriers to widespread adoption of Markov chain modeling technology, with its application to performance modeling of concurrent software. We adopt a compositional modeling formalism, in which the underlying Markov chain is kept as a sum of Kronecker products of matrices of small dimension. Goals include (1)Explore relationship between high-level formalisms suitable for modeling concurrent software and their underlying Kronecker structure, (2)Develop efficient solution methods for asynchronous interactions and block-based Kronecker descriptions, and study their complexity, (3)Explore how to combine savings due to lumping with that due to implicit representations.

NCSU graduate student will develop a machine learning approach to linking extreme atmospheric ridging events with extreme surface temperatures, employing a Gaussian Process (GP)-based predictive analysis tool that leverages the predictive value of spatial and temporal correlations and builds on ORNL’s past success in spatial classification, temporal change prediction, and parallelizing GP for large spatiotemporal extents.

With the increasing volume and complexity of data produced by ultra-scale simulations and high-throughput experiments, understanding the science is largely hampered by the lack of comprehensive, end-to-end data management solutions ranging from initial data acquisition to final analysis and visualization. The SciDAC-1 Scientific Data Management (SDM) Center succeeded in bringing an initial set of advanced data management technologies to DOE application scientists in astrophysics, climate, fusion, and biology. Building on our early successes, we will improve the SDM framework to address the needs of ultra-scale science.

Scientific Data Management Center is a SciDAC funded center with a goal to establish an Enabling Technology Center that will provide a coordinated framework for the unification, development, deployment, and reuse of scientific data management software, including scientific workflow technologies, specifically through SDM?s Scientific Process Automation (SPA) focus area. The goal of this technology is to allow for easy and accurate interactions and flows among distributed computational, storage and application resources used in scientific discovery.

This project is a seven-year longitudinal research study of young women who were identified as talented in mathematics in middle school. The purpose of this research is to address the current low participation of young women in IT careers. The project will develop and test a model of the factors associated with young women's decisions to persist in advanced mathematics and computer science courses so as to prepare themselves for, and decide to make information technology [IT] their career. IT careers are defined in this proposal as those requiring an electrical engineering, computer science, or computer engineering degree.

Over the past seven years, we have collected data on 250 high achieving young women, ages 11-20 for an intervention project and an ITWF project. High achieving is defined as those girls selected/electing to take Algebra 1 in middle grades, putting them on track to take calculus in high school. The proposed research provides an opportunity to extend and redirect the current database for a new study. By 2009 we expect to have 100 longitudinal records to inform post-undergraduate analysis, 200 longitudinal records to inform the undergraduate analysis, and 300 longitudinal records to inform the high school analysis.

Drastic improvements in the speed of 3D graphics rendering hardware have been accompanied by even more drastic increases in the size of displayed models. Researchers trying to display these models have been forced to reduce display speed and interactivity or reduce the fidelity of the displayed views of their models. What are the best methods for preserving visual fidelity as model complexity is automatically reduced? What is the most effective way of striking the display speed vs. visual fidelity compromise? Our research will take examine these questions, resulting in prototype systems and investigations of their effectiveness with user studies.

Bringing the rendering technology that created the game industry to personal and business imaging will require achieving interactive display at printer resolution. With such displays, documents might be read directly off desktops, and analysts might spread all of a massive dataset across walls, and then lean forward to see the finest data detail. For such display, verbose pixel-by-pixel representations will not scale. This research will achieve a higher-level representation built on two fundamental technologies: adaptive frameless rendering, which exploits both spatial and temporal coherence in imagery; and change-based rendering, builds imagery using higher-level primitives such as gradients and edges.

Participants of this interactive designed technology hothouse for undergraduate researchers and designers will work with computer science and design faculty and industry on projects spanning artificial intelligence, graphics, visualization as well as visual and interactive design. Sample projects include: advanced AI for interactive narratives and games; including camera control, and story planning and level design; automated tours through virtual and visualized environments; visualizing streaming news feeds using swarming sprites, and interactive, ambient display walls; PDA-based art installations, and real-world navigation tools. Students will gain the cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural teamwork and communications skills so important in designed technology research and industry.

Our nation's critical infrastructure demands that our current and future IT professionals have the knowledge, tools, and techniques to produce reliable and trustworthy software. The objective of this research is to extend, validate, and disseminate a software development practice to aid in the prevention of computer-related disasters. The practice is based upon test-driven development (TDD), a software development technique with tight verification and validation feedback loops. The proposed work extends the TDD practice and provides a supportive open-source tool for explicitly situating security and reliability as primary attributes considered in these tight feedback loops.

The grant involves the collaboration on two projects for improving software quality at Nortel. In one project, a means for identifying "hot spots" in code will be developed and validated based upon historical data (static complexity, code churn, defect history for the module and potentially code coverage data). In the second project, we will examine the efficacy the test test-driven development practice for improving software quality.

The goals of this research project are to come up with a validated method of regression test selection for software components for which source code is not available to software development organizations incorporating the components into their products. This includes all third party components that are used "off the shelf", as well as internal components where the source code is not readily available at the time of the regression test selection. This project will involve an understanding of component changes, regression testing, and release documentation.

This project will apply research framework to provide industry-based research results of agile software development, software process transition, process customization, reliability and quality prediction, requirements prioritization, pair programming vs. inspection, and distrubted software development. Research will also adapt an Eclipse plug-in to enable detailed causal analysis of field failures and to empirically examine the defect-removal efficacy of V&V techniques, such as inspections and unit testing, to build up evidence about these practices.

A special one-day Academy for Software Engineering Educators & Trainers will be offered on the day prior to the start of The Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training (CSEE&T). The purpose of the Academy is to provide an opportunity for software engineering educators and trainers to learn from master instructors in a highly dynamic, hands-on, interactive environment. The Academy will provide a learning opportunity to PhD students who will be entering academic careers in the near term, new faculty members, and mid-career faculty members who are beginning to teach software engineering course(s).

The Extreme Programming methodology was designed for relatively small teams of collocated programmers working on non-critical, small-medium, object-oriented projects. Little empirical assessment has been done on the methodology, though a sizable amount of anecdotal evidence supports the use of the methodology under these conditions. We are proposing collaborative research with the NSA and Galois in which we will empirically assess the efficacy of Extreme Programming practices in a high-confidence, secure, functional programming project. Additionally, we will work on integrating formal methods, reliability, and security testing into the set of Extreme Programming practices.

Our goal is to broaden participation in computing by developing a Southeastern partnership to implement, institutionalize and disseminate effective practices for recruiting, bridging, retaining and graduating women, under-represented minorities and persons with disabilities into computing disciplines. The Alliance will implement a comprehensive set of activities to provide high-quality opportunities to a large audience of post secondary students, including a Student Leadership Corps, pair programming, a Web portal, and Marketing and Careers Campaign, summer REUS, and a STARS Celebration Conference and Exchange.

This ITWF award to NCSU, NCA&T, and Meredith College will support a three-year study of the collaborative aspects of agile software development methodologies. We believe the collaboration and the social component inherent in these methodologies is appealing to people whose learning and training models are socially oriented, such as some minority groups, women, and men. The project?s objective is to perform extensive, longitudinal experimentation in advanced undergraduate software engineering college classes at the three institutions to examine student success and retention in the educational and training pipeline when the classes utilize an agile software development model.

Our objective is to continue development of the Automated Warning Application for Reliability Engineering (AWARE) tool. AWARE will continuously provide the programmer with prioritized and trained information on faults revealed via compilation, static analysis, and dynamic testing. We are extending the functionality of the tool in the following ways: (1) more sophisticated prioritization of alerts; (2) learning of how often to initiate alert runs and how to display the alerts; (3) enhanced automated test case generation; and (4) redundant test case reduction. AWARE will provide the programmer with better diagnosis information, improving programmer productivity and product quality.

Researchers propose to develop "Continuous Checking" tool that would use the computer's available CPU cycles and continuously provide feedback to software developers on compilation, static analysis, and testing defects. The user can train the tool to reduce false positives reported from static analysis. Researchers will implement Continuous Checking as a plug-in for the open source Eclipse development environment and will validate the effectiveness of the tool via empirical studies of open source programs and by working closely with CACC members.

This project will investigate approaches to building a strategy generation engine as a component of a flexible trading agent that converts user preferences, auction rules, and a model of the other agents into a decisionable format. The first strategy generation engine will produce game-theoretic representations of the decision problem. For small problems, the game can be solved and an equilibrium bidding strategy selected. However, for intractable larger problems, alternate strategy generation engines will be constructed which use other decision technologies. Ideally, the agent will be able to make this decision by assessing the structure of the problem instance.

Unit testing is an important activity in assuring high quality of software programs. Although there exist object-oriented test-generation tools for Java programs, two important issues pose barriers for their wide adoption. First, the existing unit-test generation tools usually generate many false warnings that could overwhelm and frustrate developers. Second, the existing unit-test generation tools generate a large number of random input values for the method under test; however, these generated test inputs may not exercise the meaningful, important situations where this method is actually used in the system under test. To address these two important issues in automated unit-test generation, we propose to integrate static and dynamic analysis to improve automatic test generation by considering usage contexts of the unit in the system. We use static and dynamic analysis to collect usage context information for the unit under test, and then use context information to guide test generation. Developers can use the resulting improved Java test-generation tools to augment their manually written tests to better assure high software quality.

Artificial intelligence planning systems are being put to use to determine the activities of a wide range of intelligent interactive systems. The ability for these kinds of systems to explain their plans to human users is essential for the systems' successful adoption and use. We are investigating the generation of natural language descriptions of plan data structures. This work will develop a cognitive and computational model of task context and its role in the generation of action descriptions.

The use of virtual environments has shown success in applications ranging from education to entertainment. One limitation of these systems is that users' activities within them are over- or under-constrained. In this project, I will develop new models for the structure of user interactions within virtual worlds. Because a user's understanding of the activity in a world provides scaffolding for her own exploration, presenting the user with an environment in which action can be readily understood encourages the user to acquire and employ knowledge of the environment. This activity leads to an increased understanding of the world the environment models.

Researchers in science education, computer science, distance education, and the NC Department of Public Instruction are partnering with the Kenan Fellows Program to harness the untapped potential of inexpensive, online multi-user competitive simulation software in improving the science achievement and IT skills of NC's grade 6-12 students. Over three years, teacher participants will learn how to use this technology to increase student science achievement and motivation to enter IT-related science careers. Intellectual merits of the project entail rigorous assessment and evaluation of how these environments most effectively improve the IT skills and science content mastery of students.