Xiaoyan Hong, Ph.D. - US grants

Project Summary

The goal of this CSEMS project is to increase workforce diversity in computer science and mechanical engineering. To achieve this goal, the program emphasizes participation by students from underrepresented groups, such as women and minority students, first-generation college students and students from economically challenged areas of Alabama. The project is 1) recruiting qualified students at the high school level, 2) ensuring a proper support infrastructure exists to enhance success as students and later as working professionals, and 3) providing financial assistance for students who have demonstrated a commitment to their studies in these fields.

Computer science and mechanical engineering are both challenging curricula. A lack of diversity in those fields is attributed to a) fewer female and minority students choosing those majors, b) a lack of a supportive infrastructure, and c) a lack of willingness on the students' part to take the financial risks associated with pursuing these careers in light of the preceding two reasons.

To address these issues, the project is using the following approach. First, over a four-year time period, the project provides scholarships for 21 undergraduates and 3 graduate students. The distribution of the scholarships is 3 each for sophomore, junior, senior, and first-year graduate students in the Department of Computer Science and 3 each for freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior students in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Providing the scholarships helps alleviate some of the financial risks for students in these fields. The project has a formal structure for assessing and assisting involved students during their academic career, including regular meetings with faculty and student mentors, and involvement of higher-level undergraduate students in research programs for elective course credit. Finally, the program is introducing the participating undergraduate students to the possibility of academic careers.

Intellectual Merit:
Increasing the diversity of students participating in the fields of computer science and mechanical engineering will only come about through the deliberate efforts of educators in those fields. This project builds on known research results regarding the recruitment, retention and matriculation of students who are members of underrepresented groups. Incorporating formal assessment cycles as part of participants' academic careers not only provides for improved retention, but also provides further insight into the difficulties experienced by such students in those fields and allows for the development of new techniques to enhance student success.

Broader Impact:
The experiences gained by the students participating in this program should provide a positive influence on their lives. Beyond those direct beneficiaries, however, a positive impact is also anticipated on both departments involved, on the College of Engineering, and on the institution as a whole. More than half of the faculty serving on this project are members of underrepresented groups who serve as role models for the students, who in turn serve as role models to students at lower academic levels. Furthermore, upon graduation, increased diversity in the workforce in computer science and mechanical engineering impacts our society at large.

0627147

NeTS-NBD: Multihop Wireless Networking: Mobility Changes Anonymity

Abstract

Anonymous communications systems in multi-hop wireless networks are challenged greatly due to node mobility and new anonymity concerns, such as motion traces. In addition, the degree of anonymity is affected by the wireless eavesdropping techniques, encryption methods, user traffic patterns, motion pattern and routing protocols that are in use. The combination of these factors requires an in-depth investigation in order to understand their influence to the degree of anonymity protection and to create comprehensive measurements that can be used as a baseline for performance evaluation. This project is focused around obtaining such understanding and measurement, and developing countermeasure strategies by taking an approach that emphasizes the impact from motion behaviors. Specifically, this project develops formal definitions and conducts analyses of the anonymity problem and emerging anonymity concerns. The project also develops new metrics to quantify new anonymity properties and uses them to develop preliminary results on network performance and possible trade-offs through in-depth simulations. These studies will lead to the development of best-practices regarding routing strategies when dealing with different security assumptions and levels of privacy. This effort will impact the fundamental understanding of the anonymity issue in mobile multi-hop wireless networking and provide an excellent platform for graduate student training.

This S-STEM project increases diversity in computing in two related majors, computer science and management information systems. To achieve this increase in diversity, the program emphasizes participation by students from underrepresented groups, such as women and minority students, first-generation college students and students from economically challenged areas of Alabama. The project 1) recruits qualified students, 2) provides a support infrastructure to enhance success as students and later as working professionals, and 3) provides financial assistance for students who have demonstrated a commitment to their studies in these fields. Students within Computer Science and Management Information Systems are part of a single cohort. These majors share four common required courses and significant overlap in student experience, including student organizations, services such as resume building, and student-led and conducted mentoring sessions. The project provides scholarships for 24 undergraduates, with 12 scholarships for the Computer Science Department and 12 for the Management Information Systems Department. Providing the scholarships alleviates some of the financial risks for students in these fields. The project establishes a formal structure for assessing and assisting involved students during their academic careers, including regular meetings with faculty and student mentors, and involvement of higher-level undergraduate students in research programs for elective course credit. Finally, the program introduces the participating undergraduate students to the possibility of academic careers.

EMT: Collaborative Research: Primate-inspired Heterogeneous Mobile and Static Sensor Networks

Although previous bio-inspired models have concentrated on invertebrates (such as ants), mammals such as primates with higher cognitive function are valuable for modeling the increasingly complex problems in engineering. Understanding primates? social and communication systems, and applying what is learned from them to engineering domains is likely to inspire solutions to a number of problems.
This research involves studying and modeling modes of group behavior and communication of coppery titi monkeys, rhesus macaques, and other primate models, and applying what the investigators learn to the distributed control of heterogeneous mobile and static sensor networks. The investigators will model the social and communication behavior of these primates, which will provide biological inspiration for solving problems in communication and networking. The phases of this research include: 1) identification, interpretation, and translation of primate behavioral models, 2) assessment of the effectiveness of small and large group formations based on primate grouping models in heterogeneous mobile and static sensor networks, 3) development of bio-inspired message-based communications, and 4) development of bio-inspired behavior-based communications. This research aims to achieve a deeper understanding of effectiveness of bio-inspired communications and networking by studying primates, and to establish interdisciplinary research and education in the fields of biological modeling, sensor networking, and robots control.

Computer Science (31)

The proposal presents 100P, an innovative guided discovery curriculum. In the 100P program, students are freed from the classroom; students instead work on 100 concept- and research-related problems throughout their undergraduate careers. The 100 problems guide the students to discover the fundamental knowledge and skills required of a graduate of the degree program. Each student is free to create an individualized mode of learning and discovery. The curriculum fosters deep learning among students and challenges students' intellectual growth. The 100P program encourages students to be agile learners who can draw on a number of resources as needed, to be resilient learners who understand that progress can come from failure, and to be lifelong learners who are better trained for the challenges of globalization. The structure of the classroom is replaced by a new structure: nine problems and an oral exam. This structure repeats throughout a student's career. So not only is 100P a rigorous curriculum, it is a caring curriculum with its emphasis on both faculty and peer mentoring.

Intellectual Merit: 100P provides an alternate paradigm for obtaining a baccalaureate degree. The new curriculum integrates some of the best ideas from educational research in building an educational environment that promotes student-centered learning, allows for early immersion into both the discipline and undergraduate research, and yields agile, resourceful, and resilient learners. The development of the program not only provides an innovative education program and techniques to enhance student success, but also insights into learning diversity and teaching in CS.

Broader Impact: This proposal offers a new paradigm for educating students in CS and, potentially, other STEM disciplines. 100P encourages students to reach their potential more readily than the regular classroom format. The 100P program helps all students strive for excellence and become more self-motivated and self-confident while in a supportive environment. The project disseminates materials that have been vetted by experts in the fields of CS education. These materials, the policies and procedures for the 100P program, detailed concept guides for the major courses, an institutionalization plan, and an assessment instrument for the 100P program facilitate the adoption of 100P by other departments. 100P also has potential economic impact in that it addresses the aspiration of a broadly educated engineer set forth in The Engineer of 2020.

This S-STEM project is Increasing Diversity in Next-Generation Computing (IDNGC) in two related majors, Computer Science and Management Information Systems. Students within Computer Science and Management Information Systems share a close relationship in curriculum and have significant overlap in student experience, including student organizations, colloquium talks, student tutoring sessions and alumni mentoring. The program will emphasize participation by students from underrepresented groups, including women and minority students, first-generation college students and students from economically challenged areas of Alabama. The project: 1) recruits qualified students, 2) provides a support infrastructure to enhance success as students, 3) provides financial assistance for students who have demonstrated a commitment to their studies in these fields, and 4) exposes students to new advances in computing. The project provides scholarships for 24 undergraduates over a four-year time period, with 12 scholarships for the Computer Science Department and 12 for the Management Information Systems Department. Providing the scholarships alleviates some of the financial risks for students in these fields. The project establishes a formal structure for assessing and assisting students during their academic careers, including faculty, peer and alumni mentoring, and exposure to new advances in computing, such as cloud computing, security, business intelligence and robotics. The result is to enhance their professional development and participation in research, which can increase their future success in a STEM field in either industry or academia. This project builds on research results regarding the recruitment, retention and matriculation of students who are members of underrepresented groups. Incorporating formal assessment cycles as part of participants' academic careers not only provides for improved retention, but also provides further insight into the difficulties experienced by these students and allows for the development of new techniques to enhance student success. Increasing the students' knowledge and exposure to cutting edge ideas in the field help them create solutions to future problems. All of the faculty serving on this project are members of underrepresented groups who serve as role models for the students, who in turn serve as role models to students at lower academic levels. Furthermore, emphasis on next generation computing helps to prepare students in our programs with the knowledge and tools to innovate and lead in the field.

The University of Alabama (UA) is designing and deploying a science DMZ herein referred to as UA SciNet to support the rapid expansion in research across multiple science and engineering disciplines. UA SciNet is based on the design patterns and best practices emerging from Internet2 and ESNet. UA SciNet is a dedicated, isolated network connecting to the UA wide-area network at the campus network border. It provides 40 Gbps connections between active data-intensive science areas and high performance computing and research storage resources. It provides an initial 400% bandwidth increase for research and lays the foundation for 100 Gbps connectivity to the wide area network via the UA System Regional Optical network and Southern Crossroads services. It includes a robust performance monitoring and problem resolution component using perfSONAR. It also uses wide-area remote DMA (RDMA) to achieve high-bandwidth remote access to UA Big Data resources.

The research impacted by the project includes hydro-meteorologic modeling, disaster event prediction and mitigation, human behavior, and particle physics, specifically leveraging the data-intensive operations at the recently completed National Water Center on the UA campus. This project also works in coordination with other initiatives both on campus and at the regional and state levels to ensure its effective integration and to ensure its benefits are fully leveraged. Further, the project brings unique education and training opportunities to undergraduate and graduate students, researchers and system and network professionals to the areas of advanced network infrastructure, data-intensive science, and performance monitoring and diagnostics.

The capability to explore and monitor our aquatic environments, such as the ocean, lakes, and seaports, is vital to science advancements and societal needs. Examples of applications include environmental monitoring, geophysical surveys, ocean resource management, and more. The next technological breakthrough is to use a fleet of aquatic robots as a mobile underwater acoustic network that autonomously collect and transmit information while navigating in the aquatic environment. Although recent years have seen many new advancements in related fields, the much-needed underwater network technologies still have not materialized. There is a need within the research community for an at-scale community testing infrastructure for underwater networks that can support a wide array of research to enable this future. This project seeks to identify the fundamental research challenges that the community would like to explore in such a testbed, and also have the community define and specify the type of infrastructure that will be most conducive for such wide-ranging experimentation. To this end, the project aims to organize two workshops to engage personnel from the scientific, federal, and commercial sectors in order to develop an infrastructure blueprint to advance the field of underwater mobile communications and networking. The project advances the progress of science by bringing together resources and facilitating development of a research vision for multiple technical fields, including underwater communications and networking, marine robotics, and ocean monitoring. It incubates innovation to address multiple societal challenges, for example, disaster response in the ocean or water quality monitoring in waterways. The workshops aim to broaden the impact by engaging K-12 educators, for example science teachers and aquarium curators.

The main contributions of the project are a research workshop and an infrastructure workshop. The research workshop engages scientists and practitioners from multiple sectors, domestic and international, including: 1) scholars from diverse technical fields in academia with interest or stake in the ocean/underwater ecosystems; 2) scientific staff from various federal funding agencies; 3) scientists from naval research centers; 4) scientists and practitioners from sub-sea industries. The goal of the research workshop is to identify emerging trends, urgent needs, potential users and innovative technologies that will require the services of a large-scale test infrastructure. The goals of the infrastructure workshop are to generate an infrastructure blueprint and to form an able research team to develop, deploy and maintain the community infrastructure. Through these two workshops, the project fosters collaboration among workshop participants from diverse sectors. The envisioned infrastructure is an open-source mobile underwater acoustic network testbed that provides easy access and shared use by the communities of acoustic communications, underwater networking and systems, marine robotics, and data sciences. It seeks to lower the threshold for the research community to utilize underwater mobile communications and, thus, fosters interdisciplinary research.

The development of new and innovative methods for smart transportation is a critical need of the nation as vehicles continue to evolve. Not long from now, we will see more autonomous vehicles and connected vehicles on the road systems in each state. It is predicted that by 2020 there will be approximately 250 million connected vehicles on the road. Such a vehicular environment, with communication capabilities from the moving vehicles and the transportation systems, presents an extremely large and complex mobile networking scenario where multiple communication technologies are available. The goal of this research is to investigate a vehicle-crowd centered, networked system that has the capability to support high-demand mobile edge computing applications. The benefits could range from more prompt and accurate data inputs and result outputs, to being an alternative for infrastructure-based systems. The applications could include: intelligent transportation system applications, transportation related compute-hungry, time-critical situation-aware applications, and visualizations. Results of this effort will be disseminated to multiple disciplines, and be used to develop education and training materials for both graduate and undergraduate students as well as provide research opportunity for traditionally under-represented groups and undergraduate students.

The proposed research will advance the knowledge about the interdependent relationships between the physical vehicle network and the transportation operation for supporting high-demand applications. This project envisions the capability to support these applications through harvesting the computing and storage resources by collaborations among grouped vehicles which are knitted together via the vehicular networking protocols. Such a network architecture is hierarchical as these groups of connected vehicles are an additional layer on top of vehicle ad hoc networks and vehicle delay tolerant networks of individual vehicles. The unique emphasis of this research will be finding the vehicle-crowd system properties relating to signal control among other factors, and developing adaptive vehicle-crowd schemes in reacting to adverse conditions using data collected from local city transportation systems. This project focuses on three main research tasks: (1) Investigate the properties of an individual vehicle-crowd, namely, the dynamic patterns of its occurrence at a given location in the time domain, and the latency when recovery is desired. (2) Investigate the spatial and temporal properties relating to multiple vehicle-crowds, and how the occurrences coordinate. (3) Investigate prediction methods to help sustain the vehicle-crowds.

The aquatic environments, including the oceans, lakes, and rivers, are the basis for life. An exciting direction is to use a group of robots to support science and discovery in aquatic environments. Currently, there are no shared infrastructures available to the nation?s institutions to investigate how a group of robots can coordinate with each other in the underwater environment. This project develops a low-cost and flexible infrastructure, referred to as mu-Net, to support both laboratory tests and field experiments for users from institutions around the nation. The mu-Net infrastructure, a collaborative project between the University of Alabama and Georgia Institute of Technology, advances underwater technologies by lowering the research participation threshold. It also supports the training of the next generation workforce to manage and preserve marine resources.

The mu-Net infrastructure uses a service-oriented, non-hierarchical software architecture to facilitate integrated sensing, communications, and navigation. It consists of 1) re-configurable, open-source software suites for simulations and emulations, 2) miniaturized aquatic robots for laboratory tests, 3) commercial-off-the-shelf autonomous surface vehicles and autonomous underwater vehicles for lake tests, and 4) user services to support shared usage. The mu-Net framework merges the functionality of network-centric and autonomy-centric structures to enhance flexible networking capability for collaborative robots. The intellectual merit resides in that the infrastructure enables research in multiple directions. Examples of the enabled research include cooperative and coordinated marine robotics, underwater mobile communication networks, joint networking and navigation of marine robots, and underwater Internet of Things.

The mu-Net infrastructure aims to break down the underwater networking-robotics disciplinary barrier and promote close interactions between the two fields. It significantly lowers the participation barrier for researchers in a wide range of areas like marine biology, food sources, and economic development. It has the potential to inspire more exploration of the earth?s vast water bodies for scientific and commercial activities. The project uses a spectrum of community engagement activities, such as annual workshops, conference special sessions, summer training school, and deployment camps, to expand user communities. In addition, enabled by the cost-effective assets and fueled by the participation of users via social media, mu-Net attracts widespread adoption for different education and research purposes, ranging from ocean-literacy education, workforce training, academic research, to industrial technology development.

The project website is gtsr.gatech.edu/munet.html, where users can access experimental management portal, open-source simulators, design repositories, test data, and so on. The project website is regularly updated during the project period and is planned to be maintained through at least three years after the expiration of the project.

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.

This project augments the University of Alabama?s (UA) computing infrastructure to support the increase in computational science and engineering needed to study diverse, interesting problems including: reliable computational chemistry predictions, properties of engineered materials, applied mathematics for image analysis and signal processing, bioinformatics of complex cellular systems, and hydrological simulations. The new high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure removes bottlenecks in local UA resources caused by an increasing number of users and increasingly larger computational solutions to more realistic problems. This infrastructure enables UA researchers to make scientific and engineering advances not possible with previous UA HPC machines. To provide broader impacts, the infrastructure is also available to regional institutions of higher education, including HBCUs and private institutions who lack adequate HPC access, and to similar institutions across the nation through the Open Science Grid.

This project augments the UA HPC system by (1) doubling computing capacity, (2) adding two large-memory nodes for large-scale data analysis and mining, (3) adding ten GPUs for massively data-parallel computations, (4) significantly increasing storage node bandwidth, and (5) shifting from a ?condo? model to a general use, shared model. This infrastructure provides compelling new research and educational opportunities for students, staff, and faculty at UA and other regional and national institutions (including HBCUs and private institutions). In terms of broader impacts, the infrastructure allows undergraduate students to perform state-of-the-art computational research, thereby attracting more diverse STEM participants. The infrastructure provides a platform for educating the next generation of computational and computer scientists in cutting-edge HPC techniques.

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.