Robert Young - US grants

Thermal Plasma Synthesis of Fine Ceramic Powders: This award recommendation is made under the U.S.-Industrialized Countries Program for the Exchange of Scientists and Engineers, 1987/1988 Competition. The program is designed to enable U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct long-term research at research institutions in the industrialized countries of Western Europe as well as Japan, Australia and New Zealand. Exchange awards provide opportunities for the conduct of joint research and the utilization of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions in foreign countries. Awards are selected on the basis of scientific criteria relevant to his/her field of science, the prospective potential of the applicants for professional growth, as well as criteria relevant to the furthering of international cooperation in science and engineering. The program is particularly directed to scientists and engineers who are embarking on their research careers. This research project will address the study of particle formation mechanisms occurring during thermal plasma synthesis of fine-powdered ceramics. This will be investigated by use of equilibrium-composition computer codes, and the selection of suitable model systems for experimental powder production. This project is under the direction of Dr. Robert M. Young, Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Minnesota, 111 Church Street, S.E., Minneapolis, MN 55455, U.S.A., and Professor I. J. Polmear, Chairman, Department of Materials Engineering, Monash University, Clayton Victoria, 31268, Australia. This award recommendation provides funds to cover, as appropriate, international travel, local travel abroad, stipend, dependents allowance, if applicable, language training, if required, and a flat administrative allowance of $250 for the U.S. home institution.

The goal of this research is a quantitative understanding of the function of proteins in terms of their static and dynamic structure. Initially, the project was entirely an experimental and descriptive one but now the investigations are connected to fundamental physicochemical theories. Some specific goals include: 1) a continuation and expansion of the study of the properties and the classification of protein motions; 2) an expansion from simple proteins to more complex ones to understand protein function; and 3) a collaboration with theoretical chemists and physicists. The last is important not only for understanding protein dynamics and function but also for developing a deeper understanding of chemicl reactions and the physics of amorphous solids and gasses. Improved theories of chemical reactions in the condensed phase, molecular tunneling and protein motions and structure will be developed.

The primary objective of this U.S.-Hungary cooperative research project between Dr. Hans Frauenfelder of the University of Illinois and Dr. Lajos Keszthelyi of the Biological Research Center, Szeged, is to study the influence of electric fields on protein functions and the generation of electric signals during protein action. Efforts will address proteins that emit measurable signals after light absorption, specifically membrane-bound retinal proteins and the water soluble protein myoglobin. Results of the joint research should contribute to our general understanding of the electric phenomena of living cells. Specific contributions are expected in basic knowledge of protein kinetics and changes due to external electric fields as well as the dynamics of proteins, through determination and classification of functionally important motions. This project in biophysics fulfills the program objective of advancing scientific knowledge by enabling experts in the United States and Eastern Europe to combine complementary talents and share research resources in areas of strong mutual interest and competence.

Life-Cycle Engineering is the simultaneous consideration during the product design stage of product function, design, materials, manufacturing processes and cost, testability, serviceability, quality, and reliability. Since most life-cycle costs are dictated in the design phase, it is important that life-cycle information be accessible to the designer so that it can influence product design. This project investigates a new way to support Life-Cycle Engineering, one that involves using constraint network technology to provide the designer with life-cycle information. The constraint network represents the constraining influences from various aspects of a product's life-cycle that exert themselves on the product and must be satisfied by the parameters of the overall system. With such a constraint network, the designer has a means by which he can access and take into account information from all phases of the product life cycle, e.g., standards and regulations, company policy, manufacturing capability, requirements for testability, reliability, and serviceability, and cost and delivery deadline considerations. The project is a cross-disciplinary endeavor of scientists and engineers from industry and the university, with technical support and input coming from major national laboratories and programs.

9314090 O'Grady This is a Small Grant for Exploratory Research in support of the Intelligent Manufacturing Systems (IMS) Initiative. In an unprecedented world wide effort, numerous commercial organizations and universities have joined together under the aegis of the IMS test case for concurrent engineering to conduct a one year feasibility study. This grant provides partial support for a student to work in this effort. This support is important in that it provides student involvement in a project that may be the forerunner of a new paradigm for the way research is to be performed.

9352362 Martin The enormous progress in computational technology has generated a new methodology, computational science, for learning and advancing the traditional sciences such as physics and chemistry. We are initiating fundamental change in undergraduate science education by providing a model for computational-science laboratory instruction in physics and chemistry. We are setting up a seed laboratory devoted to computational science and developing a curriculum for computational degree options in undergraduate physics and chemistry. The faculty involved are developing the necessary courses and course materials and the computer hardware to implement the courses has been obtained. The project personnel consist of interdisciplinary teams of faculty with expertise in computational physics and chemistry education and research, and computer science. We anticipate that results of the project will be transferable to the national scene in science education. ***

This award supports Ronald Giachetti, a graduate student of Professor Robert Young at North Carolina State University (NCSU), to spend six months carrying out research at the Laboratory for Machine Tools and Production Engineering of the Technical University of Aachen, Germany, where the expertise and facilities will greatly enhance his doctoral dissertation work. The goal of Mr. Young's research (and that of the participating U.S. and German research groups) is to design an approach to satisfy the huge information management requirements of concurrent engineering. In particular, he is focusing on an approach for uniting two different types of data management systems: the object-oriented database and the constraint-based processing system. The Technical University of Aachen is in the process of developing a large system to implement such an approach, building on the German research group's expertise in object-oriented databases and their application to the challenge of concurrent engineering. The research group at NCSU headed by Professor Paul Young has developed substantial expertise in constraint technology. Professor Young is currently spending a sabbatical visit working with the German group. This award will enable Mr. Giachetti, a very promising U.S. graduate student, to join him and gain valuable professional and international experience. Concurrent engineering involves the simultaneous consideration of the `life-cycle functions` of a product during the design phase. The goal is to improve the design, reduce the cost of the product and shorten the time to market. Each of these stages involves tremendous amounts of information and, often, different or even conflicting goals. Managing this enormous amount and variety of information is one of the main problems in implementing concurrent engineering. This proposal addresses these information requirements with an approach that combines state-of-the-art expertise from the U.S. and Germany.

virus; plants; AIDS; immunology; communicable diseases; lymphatic system; biomedical resource; biological products;

9724190 Bierman This grant, made through the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, provides $106,166 as partial support of the costs of acquiring equipment to be used in integrated studies of surficial and environmental geology at the University of Vermont. Specifically, the equipment to be purchased will include a real-time kinematic global positioning system receiver and hand-held GPS field unit, a carbon/nitrogen analyzer and a whole core magnetic susceptibility system. This equipment will benefit the analytical needs of these young researchers and their students for a variety of interesting and environmentally significant studies including, landscape evolution research that relies on AMS dating of exposed surfaces using cosmogenic nuclides, studies of tectonic and post-glacial isostatic tilting in New England fluvial terraces, documenting historical lake level changes and coastal wetland transgression in response to rising sea level, investigating the carbon dynamics of coastal wetlands, and assessing nitrogen transformations in forested ecosystems and through aquatic food webs. The GPS equipment will help to carefully document the geographic location of samples for subsequent exposure age dating and will provide accurate delineation of changes in lake and wetland shorelines through time. The C/N analyzer is necessary for characterization of lake and marsh sediments and will complement the stable isotopic investigations of co-PI Andrea Lini in studies of nutrient dynamics in coastal, lacustrine and forest ecosystems. Finally, the magnetic susceptibility system will be invaluable for stratigraphic control in the tectonic, isostatic and geomorphologic studies of Bierman as it will aid in the correlation of individual strata. ***

Young OCE 9903922


Although there has been a general understanding that development may have a variety of negative impacts on nearshore reef ecosystems, researchers have had difficulty tying specific land use practices directly to changes in the physical environment, and ultimately to reef degradation. This project will use previously collected physical and biological data, combined with new data collected after Hurricane Mitch (the largest storm in the region this century) to examine how various land use practices impact coastal storm processes along a developing, mountainous Caribbean shoreline. The island of Roatan is the largest of the Bay Islands, a chain of islands roughly 60 km off the north coast of Honduras. The Bay Islands are a part of the Belize Reef System, the second longest coral reef tract on the globe. In response to the certainty of increased development, a long-term monitoring program was initiated in the summer of 1998. This program involves the monitoring of sediment accumulation, sediment spatial distribution, terrigenous sediment input, percent live coral, water quality, and fecal coliform bacteria. Roatan is a mountainous island that can be divided into distinct watersheds with distinct nearshore ecosystems that have little apparent exchange along shore of sediment or other physical characteristics. This provides a natural setting to study the impacts of particular land-use practices on offshore physical parameters, and ultimately on the reef. Monitoring stations were placed to monitor conditions immediately offshore of watersheds with varying types of land use, varying drainage, and varying human impact. For example, there is a site offshore of a steep watershed that has little development, but it has been cleared for grazing cattle. There is a site offshore of a similar watershed that is being subdivided and developed and a control site offshore of a similar drainage where there has been no human impact at all. We hope to be able to directly tie particular land-use practices to storm-induced changes in offshore physical parameters, and then assess any impact to coral mortality. Because baseline data were collected so soon before the hurricane, and there were no other events between site placement and the storm's passage, there should be an excellent record of storm-caused damage. This study will provide the first good approximation of the relative impact of varying land use on coral mortality in response to the passage of a large tropical system. The data gathered will be of important scientific and management interest.

This is accomplished through an interlocking collection of textual and graphical discourse engines, a plan recognition system, and an interaction manager that harnesses the power of these tools. Users begin by asking questions about the data stored in their dataset. The system answers using a combination of text and graphics. Text responses are built by a discourse engine, while graphical images are constructed using a perceptual visualization assistant. The collection of all possible responses is evaluated to select the most effective answer, be it text, graphics, or a combination of the two. A plan recognition system is used to analyze the users' queries and their reactions to the responses they receive. This allows the system to anticipate future queries, cache relevant statistics, and guide the discourse and visualization systems during the evaluation and selection of appropriate answers to each user query. Results from this project will include: (1) plan recognition and interaction plan construction performed by the system to identify and model current and future analyses conducted by the users; (2) presentations that are sensitive to both the current and anticipated future state of users' investigations; (3) assisted navigation techniques; (4) methods for evaluating the effectiveness of the use of text and/or graphics; and (5) perceptual visualization techniques. Results will be disseminated through journal and conference publications, online datasets with results and analysis, and online software demos of relevant research components. Although this project will study applications from the oceanography and public school domains, these results are relevant in any situation where interactive exploration of large, complex datasets is required.
http://www.csc.ncsu.edu/faculty/healey/NSF-IDM-00

Exploratory environments - virtual worlds in which users interact with a simulation of a physical or abstract space to form, pursue and achieve their goals - have shown great success in applications ranging from education and training to entertainment to social interaction. A principal limitation of these systems, however, is that users' activities within them are typically greatly over- or under-constrained. To address this problem, the PI will develop new plan-based models for the structure of user interactions within exploratory environments. Planning techniques will be used to create novel activity within the environment that encompasses both the system-controlled characters, the environment and the actions of the user. The PI will build on his prior work in plan generation and plan-related communication to develop an architecture for creating, monitoring and controlling interaction in intelligent exploratory environments. This architecture will integrate: planning algorithms that create plans for interaction in virtual worlds whose structure is readily understandable by users; discourse generation algorithms that effectively communicate the currently unfolding plan-based activity; and execution monitoring algorithms that mediate the execution of actions between the user interface and the virtual world, intervening in appropriate ways when actions that the user intends to perform deviate from the system's current plan structure. If successful, the work will greatly increase our ability to produce engaging, novel and effective virtual environments in which users' domain- and task-oriented learning are enhanced across a range of applications and contexts.

ABSTRACT

The Rising Tide Project: Changing How University Researchers and Secondary Educators Work Together

The Rising Tide Project raises the level of scientific awareness and confidence on a local level by making collaboration between researchers and educators the norm, rather than the exception. Teacher/student teams, each consisting of one local high school teacher and one Coastal Carolina University (CCU) undergraduate, work with CCU marine science faculty mentors on summer research projects. Each team participates in a different local marine-related research project. Using the methodology and data from its research experience, each team designs locally relevant discovery and inquiry based classroom activities for high school students. Activities are designed in a web-based format, tested and assessed in the classroom, and incorporated into the South Carolina Aquarium's web site where they become part of the Aquarium's statewide aquatic curriculum. The goals of this program are to improve the scientific competence of local high school science teachers and enable local high school science teachers to motivate their classrooms by incorporating classroom activities based on locally relevant scientific research that is pedagogically sound and is consistent with national and state standards.

The goal of this project is to quantify the roles of mobile link animals, mainly fishes and decapod crustaceans (collectively called nekton), in processing and transporting materials within and between marsh-estuarine systems and subsystems. At short time scales, previous work indicates that mobile organisms are probably a major source of dissolved nutrients, ammonium and phosphate. On longer time scales, they accumulate organic biomass. Simultaneous observations of the fluxes of materials and mobile organisms between salt marshes, mud flats, oyster reefs and tidal channels will furnish estimates of the relative importance of each of these components in processing and transporting materials within and across boundaries. A replicated Before-After Control-Impact (BACI) approach will determine the statistical significance of these fluxes. Hypothesized decreases in inorganic fluxes following the exclusion of mobile link animals from flooded intertidal creek basins, particularly under dark conditions, will provide an empirical measure of the role of these animals in material processing.
This project has broader impacts. The research will take place in North Inlet Estuary, South Carolina, which is a nearly pristine ecosystem, that is part of the National Estuarine Research Reserve System. Many of the mobile animals are also economically important components of coastal fisheries. Furthermore, these studies will provide an attractive mechanism and opportunity for educating students, teachers and laypersons in marine and wetland science.

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. This project is investigating the generation of natural language descriptions of computer plans.

This work is developing a cognitive and computational model of task context and its role in the generation of action descriptions, specifically, the means by which negative constraints and justifications are used to create more effective task descriptions. The project methodology includes both experimental and theoretical aspects; naturally occurring text corpora collected by the project is used to form a computational model for the production of plan descriptions that accounts for the discourse features described above. This model is then empirically evaluated to determine the model's efficacy.

The work demonstrates the effective use of automatically generated plan structures as underlying knowledge representations for task-based discourse. The results have a direct impact on the use of intelligent information technologies used in training and education. This enables applications that provide context-sensitive help to computer users that are themselves not experts in information technology, for example in the automatic generation of instructions in situations where pre-designed instructional materials or other resources are not available.

This problem will give teachers experiences using web-based gaming and simulation software. Teachers will use authoring systems to develop educational games and try the games out in their classrooms. In the process, they will be learning content as well as programming and technology skills.

Teacher participants will be recruited from an existing NSF-funded teacher fellowship program at North Carolina State University. They will attend a summer program, working with project staff and university faculty, to develop their activities. They will then spend a year refining their products and helping other teachers use them in their classrooms. A special focus will be on teachers of students with special needs and of students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

The outcome of this project will be 15 web-based science games that are classroom-tested, teacher-developed, and linked to state and national standards. An instructional guide for each game will also be produced.

The instructional guide, as well as the games themselves, will be made available on websites. Other forms of dissemination will include workshops and presentations at professional meetings.

Evaluation, both formative and summative, will be done by an outside organization. Items to be evaluated center on teachers' improvement in pedagogy, guidance counselors' awareness of IT career paths, and students' content knowledge in technology and basic sciences.

Track 1: Elwha Education Project: Increasing the Relevancy of Geosciences for Native American Youth Through Participation in Environmental Restoration Projects on Tribal Lands

Native Americans are poorly represented in all science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields. This underrepresentation results from numerous cultural, economic, and historical factors. The broad goal of the Elwha Education Project (EEP) is to increase interest in the geosciences among Native American young people and their communities. The primary intellectual merit of the EEP involves development of unique approaches to informal geoscience education using environmental restoration as a focus. Hands-on geoscience education activities are integrated into traditional, culturally appropriate summer activities sponsored by the Elwha Tribe. Tribal members/educators are integrated into all phases of the project. Technical expertise is provided by the PI, access to land and data related to the planned Elwha River Restoration Project is provided by Olympic National Park, and educational activities are carried out by the non-profit, Olympic Park Institute. Nationally, many tribes are using environmental restoration projects to reclaim their altered cultural heritage. Projects like the EEP, emphasize the importance of the geosciences in environmental restoration and enable Native youth to carry out restoration-based geoscience research projects. This will ultimately increase the representation of Native Americans in geoscience careers and raise the profile of the geosciences within Native American communities.

Native Americans are poorly represented in all science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields. This under representation results from numerous cultural, economic, and historical factors. The broad goal of the Elwha Science Education Project (ESEP) is to develop a network of partners delivering culturally-integrated, geoscience education to Native American young people in grades 6-12 in the northern Olympic Peninsula of Washington while ultimately increasing the number of these students that pursue a geoscience career and/or geoscience degree by creating a pipeline of interested high school graduates into our higher education partners. The ESEP will develop unique approaches to informal geoscience education using environmental restoration as a consequence of dam removal as a centerpiece. Hands-on, geoscience education activities will be delivered in a culturally integrated manner. Tribal elders and educators will participate in all phases of the project. Local school districts will be involved during the academic year. All student participants will have access to year-round mentors and activities. Technical expertise will be provided by the PI; access to land and data related to the planned Elwha River Restoration Project will be provided by Olympic National Park; and educational activities will be carried out by the non-profit, Olympic Park Institute. Additional partners include the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, Port Angeles (WA) School District and Crescent (WA) School District. It is estimated that the project will directly involve 80 Native American students, 10 local science teachers, and indirectly, 600-700 Olympic Peninsula young people. Broader impacts of the ESEP are realized by the development of a culture-based model for investing an entire Native American community in the geoscience education of their young people. This project is the continuation of a successful two-year pilot.

A collaboration among educators, engineers, and mathematicians in three universities, the proposed project will create, implement, and evaluate a new, one-year curriculum and textbook for teaching a non-calculus, fourth year, high school mathematics course and accompanied assessment instruments. The curriculum will draw on decision-making tools that include but go well beyond linear programming, to enhance student mathematical competence (particularly solving multi-step problems), improve students' attitudes toward mathematics, and promote states' adoption of the curriculum (initially NC and MI). The first semester of the curriculum will focus on deterministic decision models and the second semester on probabilistic decision models. Corresponding materials and professional development experiences for teachers, including a one-semester university course, will be produced and field-tested, so that a support community is created and sustained. The core assumption for producing the new curriculum is that students are likely to be motivated and successful in learning mathematics via solving problems of relevance and interest to them here and now - not in some remote future. The team will select problem situations/contexts that are conducive to attracting females and underrepresented groups into mathematics and related fields, such as running a T-shirt business, choosing a deductible on collision insurance, and selecting a college or a used car. To assist teachers who implement the curriculum, a web-based teacher support infrastructure will be created, alongside a 'Rapid Response Traveling Help Team' that will provide onsite assistance as needed. Using pre- and post-treatment instruments, an external evaluator will analyze the impact of the new curriculum on student outcomes in a total of 50 experimental and 50 control classrooms in both states (about 3,000 students in all). These classrooms will be selected, stratified, and data of student outcomes analyzed based on socio-economic and underrepresented groups. Seven dissemination strategies will be utilized, including securing a contract with Key Curriculum Press by Year 3, and publishing the textbook and submitting it for adoption to the state-relevant decision-making bodies by Year 5.

GRADUATE TEACHING FELLOWS IN K-12 EDUCATION
ABSTRACT


Proposal #: 0742419
PI: Craig Gilman
Institution: Coastal Carolina University
Title: GK-12 Fellows Linking Marine and Wetland Research with Science Education in Coastal South Carolina Schools

Using the theme of Coastal Marine and Wetland Studies (CMWS), the GK-12 project at Coastal Carolina will support 6-8 Fellows each year who will work one-on-one with grade 6-12 teachers in the Coastal Carolina schools. The program will partner with the Horry County School District in South Carolina and accept teachers from any of the ten middle or nine high schools in the county. Horry County is the largest county in S. C. It is both suburban and rural. The program encompasses the foundational STEM disciplines of biology, chemistry, geology, physics, and mathematics, as well as specialized disciplines such as marine science and environmental science.

The GK-12 program at Coastal Carolina University (CCU) will team GK-12 Fellows from the CMWS graduate program with cooperating teachers to build STEM-related partnerships between the university and local schools and to enhance the educational programs and experiences for students at the middle school, high school, and university level. The fellows, who all conduct field-based research in the multidisciplinary fields of coastal and wetland science, will bring an interdisciplinary approach to the curriculum of local middle and high school science classrooms.

Broader impacts include increasing interest and learning in STEM disciplines by historically underrepresented students in South Carolina, and to provide these diverse students with role models and mentors. Teachers will increase their content knowledge in various STEM disciplines and inquiry-based activities will be disseminated through the Horry County science curricula.

Crime scene investigation (CSI) is a highly visual and quantitative analysis characterized by a time-sensitive need to gather, organize, analyze, model, and visualize large, multi-scale, heterogeneous and context-rich data. CSI is also characterized by a fundamental need for rapid coordination and data translation across disciplines, agencies and levels of expertise as crime scenes are processed, reconstructed, solved and ultimately prosecuted over time, often critically in front of laypeople comprising a jury. The core intellectual contributions of this research include a shift to 3D virtual crime scene reconstruction and collaboration protocols for virtual CSI work. Embedded within the virtual scene will be all of the conventional evidence data, but will also include advanced data resulting from the development of non-invasive nano-scale methodologies and databases for advanced surface and cross-sectional materials chemistry analysis, especially fibers. The new data will lead to development of revolutionary high statistical significance when comparing similar materials commonly encountered in CSI. Further, collaboration protocols for dynamic virtual team assembly and interaction will be developed, assessed and optimized for contextual knowledge transfer.

The broader impacts of this research and education agenda include critical benefits to research and education infrastructure, public health and safety, and the justice system. The resulting system will be used as a novel research tool to increase the level of scientific rigor and advance the knowledge of forensic analysis. It provides a platform for integrating research with engaging science and engineering education opportunities for K-12, undergraduate and graduate students, including those from underrepresented groups and communities.

The primary objective of this research is to develop new cognitively informed plan-based models of narrative action and to demonstrate that these models can be used both to control a virtual environment and to make effective predictions about the results of users' mental models of the stories that they characterize. Motivated by psychological models of plans and plan reasoning, this research builds on prior work in plan generation and plan-related communication to develop an architecture for creating understandable interaction in narrative-oriented virtual environments. The specific research program can be divided into two high-level thrusts: 1) Developing new generative knowledge representation schemes for the control of narrative action, focusing on the structures of conflict and goal dynamics. 2) Formally validating the results from the items via large-scale empirical evaluations.

This work will develop computational models of narrative, focusing on elements of creativity in narrative (as defined roughly by coherence and expectation violation). The project will explore the hypothesis that creativity in the design of many artifacts (and in the design of narrative in particular) is not only a property of the algorithms used to create the artifacts but also a property of how the artifacts are experienced or understood by human users.

This work will have a significant impact on the theory and understanding of the relationships between computation and cognition, particularly in the context of narrative. Because of the multidisciplinary nature of the research objectives, the project will produce significant advances in both computer science and cognitive science. It is anticipated that the resulting model will serve as a foundation for a new generation of tools that support mixed-initiative virtual world design, particularly focusing on the generation of narrative systems. In addition, the research will explore the use of the models to create customized, context-sensitive storylines for computer game-based learning environments.

The project will contribute to the infrastructure of science and education by training new researchers (graduate research assistants) in an area that is broadly multidisciplinary (computer science, cognitive science and narrative theory). These new researchers will gain from the project a unique integrated view of the contributing disciplines. The project will train undergraduates through involvement in formal and informal research exposure efforts supported in part by REU supplements.

The primary objective of this research is to develop new, cognitively informed computational models of the generation of narrative that is told within three-dimensional virtual environments. Motivated by theoretic models of narrative structure and psychological models of narrative comprehension, techniques will be developed for creating accounts of sequences of events and the techniques needed to convey them to users. These techniques will use these models to search for narratives that are at once coherent and effective at communicating the underlying event structure. The project will explore how computational models of the mental processes performed by people when experiencing film or machinima can inform an automatic process used to generate the films themselves. Extensive empirical studies will provide a comprehensive evaluation of the effectiveness of the models.

The research program has three major thrusts: (1) Integrating generative models of character plans with narrative theoretic structural models to create storylines that reflect both rich character goal structures and recognizable narrative elements. (2) Developing methods for shot sequence selection that build on pragmatic models from linguistic communication to effectively convey characters' plans and goals. (3) Developing and then evaluating a system that integrates these parts to search for narratives that are both coherent and effective.

The project will contribute to the infrastructure of science and education by training new researchers (graduate research assistants) in an area that is broadly multidisciplinary (computer science, cognitive science and psychology). These new researchers will gain from the project a unique integrated view of the contributing disciplines. Team members will participate in the dissemination of results through journal articles and presentations at national and international conferences on creativity, artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction and psychology. It is expected that the work will have a significant impact on the theory and understanding of creativity, particularly in the context of narrative, serving as a foundation for a new generation of tools that support the creative process.

Abstract

Award: DMS 1612061, Principal Investigator: Robert Young

This project proposes to study the geometry of surfaces in some spaces arising from mathematics and computer science. Surfaces are fundamental objects in geometry, and the shape of surfaces in a space provides insight into the space. The behavior of surfaces that are minimal or near-minimal is especially important. For example, minimal surfaces, like soap films, are known to be smooth under many conditions, but surfaces that are only close to minimal can be rough. The PI intends to develop new tools to study minimal and close-to-minimal surfaces in a variety of spaces and use them to study geometric and analytical problems. One proposed application of these tools is the study of the accuracy of the Goemans-Linial algorithm, an algorithm to approximate the best way of cutting an object into two roughly equal pieces. This algorithm is a key ingredient in many "divide-and-conquer" algorithms, which solve complex problems by decomposing them into simpler ones.

The PI plans to develop new quantitative tools for studying the geometry of surfaces in groups and spaces and apply them to questions in geometric group theory, geometric measure theory, and theoretical computer science. First, the project aims to prove a conjecture of Gromov and Thurston on the filling functions of lattices in symmetric spaces, providing new understanding of the large-scale geometry of these spaces. Second, the project will explore decompositions of surfaces embedded in Euclidean space and try to use new tools from geometric measure theory to bound the geometry and topology of these surfaces. Third, the project will analyze surfaces of finite perimeter in the Heisenberg group and other nilpotent groups. If this last goal is successful, it would lead to sharp bounds on embeddings of the Heisenberg group into Banach spaces and sharp bounds on the accuracy of the best known approximate solution to the Sparsest Cut problem.

1512705 / 1512670
Rosario-Ortiz / Young

With the increasing frequency and extent of wildfires, understanding the effect of wildfires on disinfection byproduct formation potential will provide a foundation for drinking water utilities to adapt to changes in affected watersheds. Wildfires chemically transform soil organic matter, and mountainous slopes are more prone to erosion after wildfires. Increased sediment transport can lead to increased deposition and accumulation of pyrogenic soil organic matter in surface waters (i.e., rivers and lakes), and the concern is that dissolved organic matter characteristics from wildfires affects the formation of disinfection byproducts. The results from this research will provide beneficial information for utility operators, managers, researchers, and regulators.

Wildfires in forested watersheds transform ecosystems and affect surface water quality. Previous work by the principal investigator (PI)demonstrated that leachates from sediments in wildfire-impacted areas have a greater potential (i.e., increased yield of disinfection byproducts) to form haloacetonitriles after chlorination. Haloacetonitriles, along with other nitrogenous disinfection byproducts, are an emerging area of concern. Although not yet regulated by the USEPA, haloacetonitriles and haloacetamides are more toxic than regulated carbonaceous disinfection byproducts. The proposed study investigates the effect of thermal processes on the formation of nitrogenous disinfection byproducts (haloacetonitriles and haloacetamides) from soil organic matter. Soil organic matter is nitrogen-rich, containing peptide-like material from in situ microbial processes. Soil organic nitrogen is transformed into cyclic dipeptides and heterocyclic aromatic compounds by thermal processes. The objectives are to simulate the transformation of organic matter due to thermal processes, leaching into surface water, and the formation of disinfection byproducts during disinfection processes. Samples will be collected from burned and unburned locations within a wildfire-impacted watershed. Organic nitrogen characterization (i.e., amino acid and NMR analysis) will be used to elucidate which organic nitrogen characteristics are associated with increased haloacetonitriles and haloacetamide formation. In addition to high quality publications, the students involved in this research will have the opportunity to operate the analytical equipment required to produce the needed data during the new Laboratory class that will be designed as an outcome of this project. This will enhance the quality of the teaching and training derived from this proposal. Additionally, the PIs committed to promote the dissemination of these research results through several organizations, such as the Front Range Drinking Water Consortium and the Water Research Foundation.

This NSF award provides funding for a project to develop new methods for working with objects with complicated geometry at many different scales. Coastlines, clouds, and leaves are examples of such objects that occur in nature. The famous coastline paradox states that since a coastline is so rough at so many different scales, it has no defined length. The PI plans to develop and study new methods to build such multiscale objects and to break them down into easily handled pieces. New ways to decompose objects often lead to great advances in mathematics, where simple problems can have complicated, multiscale solutions. The project?s three-prong approach includes studying ways to break down complex objects, build complex objects out of simple pieces, and to measure multiscale complexity. In addition to the research, the PI will train graduate students and postdocs in the techniques developed by this project through advising, seminars, minicourses, and reading groups and disseminate material on his webpage for public access.

The project aims to study problems in metric geometry, geometric measure theory, and harmonic analysis related to maps and surfaces with multiscale structure, that is, objects like Lipschitz and Holder maps or fractals, that are hard to approximate by affine maps or by planes. One focus is the study of geometric problems that have non-smooth solutions but no smooth solutions, such as the Nash Embedding Theorem. Solutions to these problems often use multiscale or self-similar structure to break rules that smooth maps have to satisfy, and one aim of this project is to understand when and why this phenomenon occurs. Another focus is quantitative and uniform rectifiability. Uniform rectifiability has been a powerful tool for studying singular integrals and geometric measure theory in Euclidean space. Recent work has made it possible to find sharp bounds on the quantitative rectifiability of surfaces in the Heisenberg group, and this project will explore the possibility of extending notions of uniform rectifiability to the Heisenberg group and using them to solve problems in the geometry of Euclidean space and the Heisenberg group.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

Effective community-level post-disaster response and recovery requires that actions of all stakeholders involved in response be coordinated. But existing approaches to disaster response and recovery management typically underemphasize the role of such multi-stakeholder coordination, particularly the involvement of community residents. Literature also provides limited advice on how to address overlapping or concurrent disasters, especially where one of the disasters is a pandemic. This becomes problematic when local authorities must respond to multiple events at once; when response to specific disasters (e.g., pandemics) is siloed; and when disaster concurrency exacerbates disproportional impact on socially vulnerable community members. Effective and equitable response planning for ‘overlapping’ or ‘concurrent’ disasters, therefore, requires better and more effective understanding and this Smart and Connected Communities Planning Grant (SCC-PG) study advances the NSF’s mission to promote the progress of science by generating scientific knowledge of factors affecting disaster response actions of diverse community stakeholders in the face of multiple hazards. This study also advances knowledge of the role and value of inter-stakeholder collaboration in disaster response planning as well its success factors. Lastly, this study advances NSF’s mission to promote national health, prosperity, and welfare of local communities by focusing on disaster response in the Intermountain West, which is at significant risk from fast and slow-onset disaster events such as wildfires, extreme heat events, earthquakes, and climate change.

This SCC-PG project employs community engagement techniques, qualitative inquiry methods and table-top role-playing games (RPGs) to lay the foundation for development of an online multi-player AI-mediated RPG to improve inter-stakeholder collaboration in response planning for concurrently occurring disasters. The project examines four research topics: i) factors affecting response decisions of various community stakeholders (such as residents, non-profits, government, and utility providers); (ii) types of information, data or communication structures needed to improve inter-stakeholder interaction and collaboration for response; (iii) effect of information exchange and collaboration on response decisions made at the individual and collective level; and (iv) characteristics of effective and equitable communication or collaboration structures for multi-stakeholder response planning for concurrent disasters. The results of this study and the subsequent SCC-IRG research will help any community undertaking disaster response planning to identify response actions that are at once more equitable, can work simultaneously for pandemics and other disasters, and integrate social and infrastructural dimensions.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.