Yaling Yang - US grants

[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Brain imaging research in psychopathy is beginning to reveal functional and structural abnormalities in these individuals. Theories have been proposed suggesting the existence of brain structural abnormalities in psychopathy. Damasio (1994) proposed a somatic marker theory which identifies orbitofrontal deficits as a strong candidate for the development of psychopathy. An alternative theory developed by Blair (2003) speculated that amygdala abnormalities may account for the emotional deficits observed in psychopaths. However, very few studies to date have attempted to evaluate the structural integrity of these brain areas in psychopathic individuals. Using a community sample of 194, state-of-the-art computational image analysis methods will be employed to isolate the neuroanatomical mechanism which may predispose to psychopathy. The first aim of this study is to examine the hypothesis that psychopaths will show gray matter reduction in dorsolateral prefrontal and orbitofrontal regions compared to controls. Second, psychopaths will show global or/and localized amygdala reduction compared to controls. Third, unsuccessful psychopaths (caught) will show greater dorsolateral prefrontal and orbitofrontal gray matter reductions compared to successful psychopaths (not caught) and controls. However, the amygdala volume reduction is expected to be found in both successful and unsuccessful psychopaths. Fourth, it is predicted that antisocial and lifestyle facets of psychopathy will be correlated with reduced dorsolateral prefrontal volume while affective facet will be correlated with reduced amygdala and orbitofrontal volume. Volumetric segmentation and cortical pattern matching methods will be applied to structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) data to identify volumetric and morphological differences in cortical and subcortical structures across groups. The training plan will have a central focus on the assessment of psychopathy, MRI techniques, and computational image analysis. This proposed study attempts to capitalize on what is believed to be a novel community sampling approach to break new ground in our understanding of the neuroanatomical basis of psychopathy. RELEVANCE: Although psychopathy represents an enormously costly health problem, research to date on neuroanatomical factors is very limited. By uncovering the neural basis of psychopathy, this proposal will hopefully provide valuable scientific knowledge that will facilitate the development of prevention and treatment of this disorder. [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable]

Abstract:
The current rich collection of wireless routing designs brings significant compatibility issues between different design choices. A combination of arbitrary designs of routing components with a routing metric may result in catastrophe on a network's normal operation, such as routing loops, inconsistent routing decisions, suboptimal paths and routing instability. Previous works for modeling routing metric designs focused on several IP routing protocols deployed for the Internet. There remains a serious lack of understanding of the compatibility issue for wireless networks. The objective of this project is to address this challenging issue by systematically studying the fundamental compatibility space of routing metrics for different wireless routing designs. The proposed project will move the traditional simple linear wireless routing metric design into the new era of non-linear design and provide in-depth analysis of potential incompatibility issues. The routing theory developed in this proposed project is a major step in the understanding of interoperability and compatibility between wireless routing protocols. In addition, the theory of compatible routing designs also brings insights for developing flexible wireless routing architecture so that designs that potentially may put too many restrictions on the development of routing metrics can be avoided. The proposed research will foster the integration of research and education by expanding the existing curriculum with the new results from this project. The outreach component of the project includes disseminate research results and pedagogical materials via education and industry outreach programs.

Abstract

The objective of this research is to develop a localization system capable of localizing an adversary that is actively trying to disguise its location in a wireless network by distorting its signal features. The approach is a proactive, cross-layer localization design that incorporates attack traceback, cross-layer traffic manipulation, and physical layer position estimation. The attack traceback aspect focuses on narrowing down an adversary?s location to the coverage area of a couple of access points. The traffic manipulation aspect will develop trapping techniques to force or lure the adversary to exhibit their true location-related signal features. Leveraging these true location-related signal features, the physical layer position estimation aspect will develop proactive and robust localization techniques to accurately position the adversary.

Intellectual Merit: The proposed project will help to establish accountability in wireless networks and will result in the development of key attack countermeasures. It is the first to address many technical challenges in localization and traceback. This project can also enhance the security of systems where location information is used to restrict access to critical resources. Furthermore, the proposed research results can be used to improve the accuracy of localization systems in harsh communication environments that severely distort the characteristics of emitted signals from legitimate users.

Broader Impact: The proposed research will foster the integration of research and education by fortifying the existing curriculum with the project?s research results. The outreach component of the project will disseminate research results and pedagogical materials via education and industry outreach programs.

Traditional routing systems have been designed by network engineers based on complex collections of objectives, policies, principles and past experiences. Due to limited human experience and capability, this manual design process severely impedes the design process of routing. The objective of this project is to bring a revolutionary change to this design process by building a highly flexible architecture, called Orchestra, for the automatic assembling and testing of a great variety of routing designs. Orchestra stores a large set of reusable "genes". Each gene is a small piece of computer code that implements a particular design for a small component of a routing system. The correctness of the "genes" and their mutual compatibility are automatically verified. Orchestra assembles various routing systems from verified "genes" and then tests them in both simulation and real environment. Based on the performance of the assembled protocols, Orchestra uses evolutionary algorithms to switch and tune designs of routing components to eventually identify the best design for a network setting.

Orchestra will greatly ease a network engineer's burden of implementing and evaluating an entire routing system. It can efficiently explore a much larger design space for routing systems than any single network engineer can. New areas for routing designs that are not explored by humans can be automatically discovered by Orchestra. The large collection of component designs in Orchestra will also provide a common platform for comparing and evaluating different design choices as well as serving education purposes.

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).

This project will develop a novel tool, named Sunshine, to effectively support joint evaluation and design of sensor network (sensornet) hardware and software.

Intellectual Merit:
A critical roadblock to the success of sensornets is the prohibitively slow and energy-wise impractical software implementations of many important applications. On the other hand, specialized hardware implementation can outperform, energy-wise as well as performance-wise, equivalent software implementations by orders of magnitude. Hence, the joint software-and-hardware design of sensornet applications is a very appealing, yet unexplored, approach. The objective of this project is to develop an effective tool, named Sunshine, to support such codesign. This project may fundamentally transform the relationship between the hardware and software communities of sensornet research. These communities can use Sunshine to efficiently exchange mutual requirements and spread the latest technology advances in each other's fields. Such evolutionary change will greatly improve the state-of-the-art in sensornet technology. Novel hardware architecture and platforms that are unexplored in current designs can be created and tested through Sunshine's cross-domain design environment.

Broader Impact:
Serving as a valuable education tool, Sunshine will also foster the continued integration of research and education at the PIs' institution and benefit curriculum at other institutions. Sunshine can serve as the foundation for lab experiments and course projects in networking and embedded system engineering. Sunshine also offers the opportunity for innovative cross-domain education.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Psychopathy is a clinical condition that affects approximately 2% of the general population, and ~25% of criminal offenders, and reflects a failure in normal social interaction and morality. Despite increasing evidence showing brain structural abnormalities in adult psychopaths, the lack of neuroimaging findings for psychopathic traits among adolescents has prevented further understanding in the etiology of such complex personality traits. The candidate's immediate career goal is to develop expertise in structural brain imaging and quantitative genetic analysis in order to identify which brain morphological characteristics pose as candidate endophenotypes for psychopathic traits. Understanding the genetic contributions of brain morphological variations in relation to psychopathic traits in adolescents will build the necessary foundation for a rigorous examination of the genetic predispositions to psychopathic traits and make possible the candidate's long-term career goal of developing independent large-scale projects using neuroimaging phenotypes and multivariate methods to investigate the genetic contributions of psychopathy and related disorders from childhood through adulthood. Towards this end, using the existing neuroimaging, clinical, and behavioral data of 80 adolescent twins collected from a larger longitudinal twin project, we propose to;1) use several sophisticated neuroimaging analysis methods applied to structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI) and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) data to characterize structural brain phenotypes and examine their association with psychopathic traits (identified using the Childhood Psychopathy Scale and the Antisocial Process Screening Device);2) use structural equation modeling to estimate the relative contributions of genetic and non-genetic factors toward morphological variations;and to 3) collect new imaging and clinical data on an additional 160 adolescent twins from the larger twin project in the R00 phase to determine the genetic overlap between morphological variations and psychopathic traits. The candidate's formal training will take advantage of the rich genetic expertise and neuroimaging resources at UCLA and USC and will include eight didactic courses, two intensive workshops and regular weekly seminars designed to augment the candidate's prior experience in image analysis methods, foster new knowledge in behavioral genetic analysis and child psychopathy, and promote skills for conducting an independent longitudinal twin project. Additionally, the candidate will receive training for the preparation for academic advancement to enhance a smooth transitioning into a tenure-track, full-time assistant professorship for the proposed R00 phase research. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Psychopathic traits in children and adolescents have been linked to several adult psychiatric disorders, however extremely little is known regarding the neural basis of psychopathic traits in adolescents. By identifying structural correlates of psychopathic traits and examining the heritability for morphological characteristics using an adolescent twin sample, we can determine the candidate endophenotypes for psychopathic traits. This proposed study thus has great potential for identifying etiologically relevant precursors of psychopathy, which in turn would be crucial for developing new hypothesis, treatments, and preventative interventions.

There has been an explosive growth of cross-layer designs proposed for wireless networks. These designs break the layered structure to actively exploit the dependence between protocol layers in wireless networks. However, the large number of cross-layer designs creates serious coexistence issues. The violation of layered structure may not comply with restrictions that constrain the coexistence among many cross-layer designs and other network systems, causing significant issues, such as degraded performance, inconsistent distributed decision making, network partition, and instability. The objective of this project is to systematically and rigorously categorize and analyze coexistence restrictions of cross-layer designs in wireless networks. In this project, coexistence restrictions of various cross-layer designs are theoretically modeled and analyzed. Different kinds of coexistence restrictions are defined, the conditions for their occurrences and their impact on network operations are revealed, and methods to check coexistence issues are developed. The project also seeks restriction-compliant protocol design techniques. This project serves as a major effort in the understandings of cross-layer designs in wireless networks and is the pioneer in providing systematic analysis of coexistence restrictions of cross-layer designs. The result of this project can be used to evaluate cross-layer designs? limitations and potential problems. This will promote the acceptance of good cross-layer designs in real systems and prevent architecture failures in design integration. In addition, this project provides practical techniques for designing more compatible cross-layer systems. Ultimately, this will greatly enhance the flexibility and robustness of current and future wireless network systems.

Software Defined Radio (SDR) technology has the flexibility of implementing a large part of physical layer functions in software. It is one of the major technologies that will provide broadband services to millions of US residences. However, unlike conventional radio whose RF signals are tightly regulated by FCC-certified hardware, the software components of SDR can be easily exploited by hackers to create a wide range of unauthorized waveforms to launch attacks on many security-critical wireless systems. The existing preventive software-based security counter measures are not possible to prevent the myriad of potential software security loopholes and themselves often become targets of the malware.

The objective of this project is to design an effective hardware-based SDR integrity assessment and behavior regulation device named SDR Shield. SDR Shield resides between the vulnerable SDR software and the security-critical SDR hardware to detect any malicious configuration of the RF device and prevent it from being used to attack wireless systems. The SDR Shield uses side channel and communication channel information from different SDR components to detect deviations from expected execution status. SDR shield also includes a regulation circuit to enforce safety-critical properties of SDR operation. A secure update process is developed to maintain SDR shield?s flexibility and its own security. The generality of SDR Shield?s design provides a unified security mechanism for SDR design and hence can ease the burden on FCC or any future SDR design verification institutes in certifying security measures of SDR products.

Advancements in maritime communications are severely lagging behind its land counterpart. Existing marine communication technologies usually have very limited capacity and are extremely expensive to operate. Novel solutions are demanded to meet the imminent requirements for broadband marine mobile wireless access. The purpose of this project is to fill the void of marine broadband wireless communications by developing long-range self-powered ocean wireless communication links. The ocean wireless link is composed of compact, maintenance-free and low cost floating wireless base stations (BS) that can be simply dropped into the water. Once in the water, the BSs start to harvest energy from ocean waves and establish communication links with each other. Users' broadband traffic, then, can be delivered to the Internet through these links. This project will bring revolutionary change to the maritime communications. New maritime networked applications and operation scenarios that are infeasible but highly desirable in the past can be enabled by this technology. It can have significant impact on all aspect of ocean related industry, such as fishing, recreational boating, marine transportation, oil and gas industry, ocean scientific study, and national security and defense.

The project will focus on two thrust areas: Thrust 1 is about ocean wave energy harvesting. For a BS to provide large coverage range and high capacity links to its users and other BSs, the BS must consume a large amount of energy. Existing technologies are too large in size and hence are expensive and hard to be stabilized in rough ocean states and require frequent maintenance. This project solves this critical challenge by building a novel ocean wave energy harvester that can effectively harvest tens of watts of power on typical ocean states with a floating buoy of less than 1 meter diameter. Thrust 2 is about building the high capacity marine communication links. The constantly moving ocean waves can affect the capacity, stability and range of the backhaul links among BSs. In this project, we will study how to analyze and model the channel and design antenna and radio hardwares to handle the complex channel of ocean communication links. The researchers will also study the unique features of ocean communication links and their potential beneficial and/or harmful impact on network communications.

Dynamic spectrum access (DSA) technique enables wireless devices, called secondary users (SUs), to use spectrum that are allocated to licensed incumbent users (IUs) as long as they do not interfere with IUs' operation. It has been widely accepted as a crucial solution to mitigate the spectrum scarcity problem for wireless communications. As a key form of DSA, regulators have proposed to release more Federal spectrum for sharing with commercial wireless users, under the umbrella of a spectrum access system (SAS) database to govern the spectrum sharing between IUs and SUs. However, the success of this sharing hinges upon how privacy issues are managed. In current SAS schemes, the operation data of both federal IUs and commercial SUs need to be shared with the SAS database for it to decide if sharing is permitted. Yet, operation data of federal IUs are often classified information and SU operation data may also be commercial secret. Since SAS is not necessarily operated by a trusted third party and can potentially be breached by attackers, these current schemes threaten the privacy of both IUs and SUs. To address this privacy issue, this project develops a privacy-preserving SAS (P2-SAS), which ensures that the SAS system can still accurately decide whether spectrum sharing among IUs and SUs are permitted while it learns nothing about the operation data of IUs and SUs. This project is the first to be able to successfully realize privacy-preserving spectrum allocation in SAS. It addresses regulators' concerns with DSA's privacy issue and hence greatly help the development of the entire nation's broadband networks. The project provides a blueprint on how privacy-preserving mechanisms can be integrated in many other communication systems beyond DSA.

The project realizes its privacy preserving spectrum allocation using secure homomorphic computation. In P2-SAS, IUs and SUs share only ciphertexts of their operation data with the SAS Server, which then performs secure homomorphic computation directly over these ciphertexts, so that none of the IU/SU operation data would be exposed to any snooping party, including the SAS itself. The project aims to convert complex spectrum allocation computation and certification procedures into the limited homomorphic computation types provided by efficient Paillier cryptosystems. Leveraging the unique characteristics of spectrum allocation computation, various refining techniques will be explored to significantly reduce the computation and communication overhead of P2-SAS and prevent potential attacks on the system.

Dynamic spectrum access (DSA) is a spectrum sharing method that allows secondary users (SUs) to opportunistically access under-utilized spectrum bands that were licensed to incumbent users (IUs). It has the potential to dramatically improve the spectrum utilization efficiency and significantly boost the capacity of wireless communications. However, DSA gives rise to many new operational privacy issues because the existing designs require IUs and SUs to provide sensitive operational data to untrusted third parties. As an example, the operational data for many government IUs is classified. The SUs' operational data may also be a commercial secret for their operators. While some existing research has considered privacy protections, these works fail to consider the significant negative impact of their schemes on the efficiency and capacity of DSA systems. Thus, regulators and potential SU/IU operators often are unwilling to adopt DSA before the spectrum efficiency, capacity and operation privacy issues can be jointly addressed. The goal of this project is to solve the above challenges by providing a joint study of efficiency, capacity and privacy for a comprehensive range of possible DSA system designs. This project will provide solutions for addressing operational privacy concerns of DSA systems without sacrificing spectrum allocation efficiency and system capacity. This project can greatly promote the adoption of DSA technologies and hence enhance the capacity of the entire nation's wireless broadband networks. Supporting of underrepresented groups is also integrated in this project effort.

This project has two thrusts. Thrust 1 studies the efficient and secure spectrum allocation in centralized DSA designs, while thrust 2 studies the same issue for distributed DSA. For centralized DSA, both the central entity and end users are considered to be potentially compromised. With these assumptions, the privacy and security threats in each types of centralized designs will be thoroughly studied individually. New schemes will be designed to address these threats for each type of centralized DSA designs with joint considerations on both spectrum allocation efficiency and system capacity. For distributed DSA, the information exchanged among the users may inadvertently reveal sensitive information of these users to other (untrusted) users or expose the system to threats of cheating where some users may lie during information exchange. This project will explore approaches to solve these issues and focus on making sure that the proposed solutions do not reduce the efficiency of the distributed system design while protecting the privacy and trustworthiness of the information exchange.

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.

A crucial tool in the fight with COVID-19 is a contact tracing system that can identify individuals who had close contacts with confirmed cases in the past. Such a mechanism can alarm these individuals so that they can voluntarily self-quarantine. In addition, when these individuals start to have symptoms, a contact tracing system can prioritize them for testing, which will make more efficient use of the limited test capacity and provide early treatment for infected individuals. However, due to strict privacy-protection laws in US and many western countries, it is a challenge to deploy such a system. To solve this urgent problem, this project builds a privacy-preserving contact tracing system, named COVID Detector. COVID Detector relies on smartphones to track both patient and healthy person's past locations and leverages cryptographic computations to ensure that no private data is exposed during the contact tracing computation. This project addresses the broader need to support, in a privacy-friendly manner, user contact tracing in a modern, complex and highly-connected world. This discussion is presently highly relevant in the context of balancing public health and individual user privacy.


While there are a few existing contact tracing apps for COVID-19, anonymity of user/patient identity is the best that they can provide to protect user privacy. COVID Detector is the first that provides strong protection of both user/patient identity and user/patient trajectory data. COVID-Detector uses homomorphic encryption techniques to match the trajectory of confirmed COVID-19 patients with that of healthy users in the ciphertext domain, so that healthy users can determine their infection risk level. The matching process reveals neither healthy users' nor patients' location data to any party. The use of homomorphic encryption technologies in trajectory tracking is novel and has not been applied before.

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.

The Arctic is home to some four million people comprising a diverse range of cultures and an economy worth about $230 billion annually. With global concerns spanning climate change, energy resources, freshwater supplies, and sustainable economic growth, the Arctic has sparked intense research and public interest. International efforts to establish sustained Arctic observing systems, especially for long-term Arctic Ocean monitoring with near-real-time data transfer, are urgently needed. The harsh and remote conditions constraining year-round observation sites present significant logistical challenges and energy needs for sustained Arctic observations. In addition, monitoring of the Arctic Ocean using bottom-anchored stationary platforms is limited by a lack of real-time communication between the sensors deployed and Arctic operators. The ultimate goal of this project is to develop new energy harvesting and communication solutions so that it is feasible to have a real-time under-ice monitoring system in the Arctic Ocean.

This EAGER project tests the capacity to address three key challenges, including sustainable power supply through energy harvesting, near-real-time data communication under the sea ice, and survivability under harsh environmental conditions. Specifically, the project aims to develop novel techniques to harvest ultra-low-speed oceanic current energy using a two-level diffuser augmented turbine and a novel transverse flux generator. The harvested energy will be used to support sensors and power a novel real-time communication system through the sea ice. The proposed communication system adopts a novel antenna design that overcomes seawater attenuation effects on radio waves and creatively leverages satellite protocols to ensure the under-ice communication unit can transmit observational data to satellites. The project also explores techniques to enhance the survivability of the under-ice monitoring system, such as robust material choice and ice ridge/keel detection and avoidance systems and extends science and engineering education among K-12 and PhD-level students in Arctic research with an emphasis on diversity including female and underrepresented students.

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.