Erol Gelenbe - US grants

9422065 Board This award is to purchase a large, shared memory, multiprocessing workstation with accelerated 3-D graphics which will be dedicated to support research in computer and information science and engineering. The equipment will be used for several research projects, all of which require expensive computations to be performed on large data sets. The jump from two dimensional to three dimensional modeling in many of the application areas listed below requires a major increase in system memory and CPU power, and the 1 gigabyte memory shared between several processors will make many 3-D simulations possible. Visualizing the results of 3-D simulations in many scientific disciplines, and other image processing applications, is also a major challenge, requiring both significant CPU power and large memory; the equipment is suited to this task as well. Five specific projects are: 1) parallel molecular dynamics computations, with particular attention to load balancing; 2) image compression using random neural networks; 3) parallel ocean acoustic signal processing; 4) extension of bi-domain methods for simulation of excitations in cardiac tissue to 3-D; and 5) visualization and analysis of large data sets from a 3-D ultrasound machine. ***

EIA-0086251
Guha University of Central Florida
Guha, Ratan K.

CISE Educational Program: Introducing Fundamental Concepts and Evaluation Methods for Distributed Systems and Applications in the Computer Science Undergraduate Curriculum

This CISE Educational Innovation award supports the development of innovative curricula for teaching contemporary concepts of distributed computer systems, computer network technologies, and principles of distributed applications to undergraduate students at the University of Central Florida and three collaborating institutions. The focus of the project is on the development of modules, course materials, courses, a delivery infrastructure, faculty enhancement workshops, and web-based data collection. Module topics include: networks and the Internet, mobile and wireless computing, network management, concepts of distributed systems, network security, performance evaluation, distributed applications, and parallel and distributed simulation. This project provides a web and CD-ROM based mechanism for distribution of modules, courses, support-software and evaluation instruments. A one-week workshop for faculty, government, and industry covering these topics will be conducted in 2002 and 2003. In addition to transferring current research in distributed systems into the undergraduate curriculum at the University of Central Florida, the project also enables three partner institutions with underrepresented student populations (Grambling State University, Florida A&M University, and the University of Houston) to actively participate in the project. The collaborating institutions are involved in development and evaluation of the instructional modules and use them in their programs either as new courses or thread the modules through existing undergraduate courses.

0203446
Michael Georgiopoulos
University of Central Florida
Orlando, FL
"Machine Learning Advances for Engineering Education"

This project, at the University of Central Florida (UCF), integrates research results from the theory and applications of Machine Learning into the Engineering/Computer Science curricula. Two new courses and several revised courses include material from Adaptive Reasoning Theory, Genetic Algorithms, Human Behavior Representation, and Simulation Meta-modeling. The objectives of this CRCD project include: 1. Incorporating current state-of-the-art Machine Learning research results into the undergraduate and first year graduate curriculum to enhance students' critical thinking, intellectual growth and communication skills, 2. Offering a unique curriculum, by traditional undergraduate standards, where the PIs integrate their current research results into the curriculum. This curriculum is timely and dynamic, reflecting the PIs' and the machine learning community's research interest changes with time, 3. Offering the opportunity to a multi-disciplinary group of students (spanning the spectrum of electrical, computer, industrial, civil, mechanical, and computer science students) to benefit from research and its transfer into curricula, 4. Assessing and evaluating the educational impact of the project through a sequence of carefully chosen evaluation instruments developed by an educational consultant, and 5. Disseminating the curriculum development efforts to a number of affiliate Universities.