Nalini Venkatasubramanian - US grants

Global information systems consist of asynchronous, autonomous components that are open and distributed. These components will need to handle multiple media types and satisfy varying Quality-of-Service(QoS)
requirements such as responsiveness, reliability, availability, security and cost-effectiveness. Adapting to changing system conditions and application requirements is often difficult and error prone. Distributed
systems services can potentially interfere with each other in non-compatible ways, especially in the presence of QoS requirements.

This research plan proposes the formulation, specification and implementation of a new paradigm for developing QoS-enabled customizable middleware for the global information infrastructure. The customizable and safe distributed systems middleware infrastructure developed, called ComPOSE/Q (Composable Open Software Environment with QoS), has the ability to effectively address the challenges posed by the evolving infrastructure. The primary distinguishing feature of ComPOSE/Q is that it provides "composable distributed resource management", i.e., it allows the concurrent execution of multiple resource management policies in a distributed system in a safe and correct manner. Safe composability of resource management mechanisms is required to provide cost-effective QoS in a wide area distributed infrastructure. The research develops a semantic model for representing QoS, middleware components and techniques for reasoning about their interaction. The work is based on a formal meta-architectural model of middleware that permits customization of policies for placement, scheduling synchronization and management of
components. The meta-architecture allows for the separate specification of system policies from application requirements and hence permits either to be customized independently to adapt to changing system conditions and application requirements. To ensure non-interference, CompOSE/Q implements core resource management services -- remote creation, distributed snapshot and directory services that are composable and can be used as a basis for creating more complex activities. The proposed methodology will be validated by using the CompOSE/Q middleware to develop systems support for network-centric and mobile computing environments.

The accompanying educational objectives are to strengthen the graduate and undergraduate computer science curriculum at the University of California, Irvine in the principles, practice and applications of wide-area
distributed computing and multimedia technologies. This will involve the establishment of an Instructional Multimedia Laboratory that facilitates teaching both introductory and advanced courses in multimedia, distributed systems and information management. The long-term vision of the lab is to catalyze multidisciplinary application-oriented endeavors that are increasingly the driving force for innovative research as the world becomes highly interconnected and computerized.

Abstract:
The Fourth International Conference on Formal Methods for Open Object-Based
Distributed Systems (FMOODS 2000) will be held at Stanford University September 6-8, 2000. The organizing committee is chaired by Carolyn Talcott (Stanford University) with co-organizers Scott Smith (PC Chair, The Johns Hopkins University) Nalini Venkatasubramanian (University of California at Irvine), and Sriram Sankar (Metamata Inc.).

The conference series was initiated by Elie Najm and Jean-Bernard Stefani, who organised the first FMOODS in Paris in 1996. The second was held in Canterbury in 1997, and the third was held in Florence in 1999. FMOODS 2000
will be the first time the conference is held in the US. By bringing the conference to the US we are hoping to increase the US participation in the series, and to bring more US researchers into the FMOODS community.

The objective of FMOODS is to represent work at the convergence of three important and related fields: formal methods, distributed systems, and object-based technology. This convergence is representative of some of the latest advances in the field of distributed systems (for example, the ODP reference model and the work of the OMG) and provides links between a number of important communities (for example, FORTE/PSTV, ICODP, ECOOP, et cetera).

The Principle Investigators of this proposal propose to organize a PI meeting for the Networking Research Programs (Networking Research Program and Special Projects in Networking) in the ANIR Division of NSF. The PI meeting will be held over a two-day period in addition to an opening night reception. The reception will be Wednesday evening, November 1, 2000 with two full days of technical sessions, Thursday, November 2, and Friday, November 3. The PI meeting will facilitate the exchange of research ideas among the PIs with active NSF awards from the Networking Research Programs and NSF program directors.

The long-term goals of this project are to radically transform the ability of organizations that respond to man-made and natural disasters to gather, process, manage, use and disseminate information both within the emergency response agencies and to the general public. The project explores a multidisciplinary approach consisting of two interrelated research thrusts:
- Scalable and robust information technology solutions to facilitate access to the right information, by the right individuals and organizations, at the right time, and
- Social science research that investigates the distinctive nature of dynamic virtual organizations, and the social and cultural aspects of information sharing across organizations and individuals.

Research challenges addressed include mechanisms to: enable crisis responders to become rich sources of vital situational information; seamlessly collect data from heterogeneous sources; translate low-level noisy data into meaningful information that can be effectively used for damage assessment and situation awareness; facilitate information sharing and collective decision-making across emergent virtual organizations; and rapidly disseminate information in the form most useful to recipients. Close collaborations with multiple government agencies have been developed to test and validate research in live environments.

The project is expected to result in robust information systems that enable first responders to make well-informed and better decisions, to prioritize their response, and to focus on activities that have the highest potential to save lives and property. The resulting timely and effective response can contain or prevent secondary disasters, and reduce the resulting economic losses and social disruption during disasters.

The project will create new shared data sets for text, video and data mining. This will allow a larger scientific community to test algorithmic innovations against these field gathered data sets. Our community outreach programs will help generate greater awareness of the role of IT, stimulating new innovations as first responders interact more closely with researchers. Our educational programs will generate a better trained crisis management work force.

Broader Impact: Timely and effective response to natural or man-made disasters can reduce deaths and injuries, contain or prevent secondary disasters, and reduce the resulting economic losses and social disruption. During a crisis, responding organizations confront grave uncertainties in making critical decisions. There is a strong correlation between the quality of these decisions and the accuracy, timeliness, and reliability of the situational information (e.g., state of the civil, transportation and information infrastructures) and the availability of resources (e.g., medical facilities, rescue and law enforcement units) to the decision-makers. Recently, at UCI and UCSD many projects have been launched that address the technological challenges in with the objective of radically transforming the ability of organizations to gather, manage, use and disseminate information when responding to man-made and natural catastrophes. Dramatic improvements in the speed and accuracy at which information about the crisis flows through the disaster response networks has the potential to revolutionize crisis response saving human lives and property. . The purpose of this infrastructure proposal is to establish an campus-level experimental Information Technology infrastructure, called Responsphere, to serve as a platform for development, testing, and validation of our current research efforts on responding to a crisis.
Intellectual Merit: Challenges in bringing accurate, timely, and relevant information to decision-makers during crisis response arises due to the scale and complexity of the problem, the diversity of data and data sources, the state of the communication and information infrastructures through which the information flows, and the unique character and dynamic nature of the responding organizations. To address these challenges, our research team is exploring a multidisciplinary approach focusing on the following research elements in the context of crisis response: (1) Enabling humans (rescue workers, observers) to become rich sources of vital crisis-related information; (2) Seamlessly collecting data from heterogeneous sources in highly dynamic disaster situations where the IT infrastructure may have partially failed; (3) Translating low-level noisy data into meaningful events useful for damage assessment and situation awareness; (4) Enabling information sharing and collective decision-making across highly dynamic emergent virtual organizations; (5) Rapidly disseminating information in the form most useful to recipients while observing the fundamental limitations of the underlying communication and information technologies. Validation platforms and testbeds will be deployed in close partnership with first responders from the City and County of LA, San Diego and Irvine Police departments as well as the California Office of Emergency Services in live environments and will help us evaluate the effectiveness of the research.

The testbeds created as a part of Responsphere will provide the team with an experimental platform to field-test and refine research on information collection, analysis, sharing, and dissemination in controlled yet realistic settings significantly enhancing their research capability. Specific testbeds include:
Mobile Incidence Level Response (MILLR) Testbed
Crisis Assessment, Mitigation, and Analysis (CAMAS) Testbed
Advanced Traffic Rerouting for Unplanned Events (TRUE) Testbed
At UC Irvine we will (1) expand the campus 802.11b based wireless infrastructure to cover major outdoor regions, (2) add instrumentation and management tools to the campus wireless environment, (3) add compute, visualization and storage capabilities for crisis management and response research, and (4) expand the available pool of mobile devices and embellish them with specialized video capture and streaming capabilities suitable for field response experiments. At UC San Diego we will (1) establish RF propagation modeling capabilities using GIS and 3D data generation and transformation tools, (2) build a wireless communications infrastructure in the Gas Lamp Quarter downtown, (3) build a command and control prototyping environment in a visualization facility, (4) create a vehicular based mobile command and control platform, (5) design a location/tracking system and prototype it along with other sensing and communications equipment in a custom man worn implementation ("manpack"), and (6) participate in the upgrade of the UCSD Police communication environment.. Specific research components tested in Responsphere are (1) a system for accurate position location in uncertain environments; (2) an integrated end-to-end quality aware distributed data collection system; (3) an end-to-end data analysis system; and (4) system for seamless multimodal interaction involving audio/video and image information. Other research efforts at UCI and UCSD in the areas of mobile computing, networking, middleware, security and ubiquitous computing will benefit from the Responsphere infrastructure

Embedded and hybrid system (EHS) applications are highly networked systems with end-to-end requirements that involve interactions among multiple layers (application, middleware, network, OS, architecture) in a distributed environment. A holistic approach to understanding timing in these distributed cross layer systems is critical since:
EHS applications often face end-to-end hard or soft real-time needs; timing granularities for cross-layer systems can vary by orders of magnitude posing a challenge for timing analysis that can account for these variations; and knowledge of timing parameters at the different levels can dramatically improve the utility and performance of EHS applications that often execute in constrained environments where CPU, memory, network bandwidth and device energy is limited.

This project explores the notion of cross-layer timing in highly distributed embedded systems using a blend of formal methods and experimental systems, bringing together researchers with expertise in embedded computing, distributed systems and formal methods. The project will (1) develop novel formal methodologies for modeling and reasoning about cross-layer timing properties in distributed embedded systems, and
(2) design mechanisms/policies that will cost-effectively address the QoS/performance tradeoffs based on the cross-layer timing analyses. The results will be validated and tested in the context of mobile multimedia applications that execute in highly dynamic environments and present interesting opportunities for tradeoff analysis and enforcement.
A comprehensive solution to the timing issue will enable the wider applicability and adoption of distributed embedded applications and lay the groundwork for the unified treatment of other non-functional constraints across multiple abstraction levels.

In crisis response domains, emotional manifestations are very complex and extreme emotions are common. While speech technologies have shown significant progress over the years, recognizing and understanding emotional speech in noisy environments is still a big challenge. Understanding such language is daunting given fragmented and ungrammatical utterances in addition to errors
from automatic speech recognition (ASR). Furthermore, there is little
research on the analysis of the relationship between emotion detection and language understanding which have traditionally been viewed as parallel independent tasks. Even when the output of one of these tasks is used as an input feature to the other, typically, during training a "true" classification is used instead of the "estimated" classes (as would be the case if the system were to be used in a real-setting) resulting in a mismatch and degraded performance. This project attempts to overcome such a limitation of current approaches by focusing on analyzing the degree of the dependencies between emotion and intent and investigating joint classification methods via multitask learning for language understanding and emotion detection tasks.


The primary intellectual merit of the project is integrated research on
developing an end-to-end information processing system that has the potential to very significantly impact the crisis response process. For speech processing, communucation between individuals and emergency dispatch personnel
as well as communications during responders during response pose a big challenge since callers are typically very emotional and the language used reflects that. Processing such speech requires significant research, and this project can is a first step toward this genre.

The goal of this project is to develop a semantic foundation, cross-layer system architecture and adaptation services to improve dependability in instrumented cyberphysical spaces (ICPS) based on the principles of "computation reflection". ICPSs integrate a variety of sensing devices to create a digital representation of the evolving physical world and its processes for use by applications such as critical infrastructure monitoring, surveillance and incident-site emergency response. This requires the underlying systems to be dependable despite disruptions caused by failures in sensing, communications, and computation. The digital state representation guides a range of adaptations at different layers of the ICPS (i.e. networking, sensing, applications, cross-layer) to achieve end-to-end dependability at both the infrastructure and information levels. Examples of techniques explored include mechanisms for reliable information delivery over multi-networks, quality aware data collection, semantic sensing and reconfiguration using overlapping capabilities of heterogeneous sensors. Such adaptations are driven by a formal-methods based runtime analysis of system components, resource availability and application dependability needs. Responsphere, a real-world ICPS infrastructure on the University of California at Irvine campus, will serve as a testbed for development and validation of the overall ?reflective? approach and the cross-layer adaptation techniques to achieve dependability. Students at different levels (graduate, undergraduate, K-12) will be given opportunities to gain experience with using and designing real-world applications in the Responsphere ICPS via courses, independent study projects and demonstration sessions. Students will benefit tremendously from exposure to new software development paradigms for the ICPSs that will be a part of the future living environments.

This project focuses on exploratory research towards the next generation of adaptive socio-technical crisis alerting and warning systems. Alerting systems inform entities affected by crisis ? schools, businesses, hospitals, and the public at large ? about impending dangers, the status of infrastructures, life lines, and available help and actions designed to reduce exposure to natural and human-induced threats ? e.g. evacuate, shelter-in-place etc. The eventual goal is to develop alerting systems that deliver an accurate message to the right targets in the right format and at the right time, however this requires a synergistic exploration of the challenges at multiple levels ? physical/geographical, network and user levels. This effort is an initial exploratory effort that aims to meaningfully combine the three levels into effective alerting schemes.

Intellectual Merit: Specifically, this project offers a new model of geography based alert dissemination that incorporates both the geographical aspects and societal needs. While information needs are strongly correlated to the geographical location in the context of a natural or human induced disaster, this insight has never been fully exploited in the alert dissemination process. The principal investigator (PI) conjectures that societal/user information in combination with geographical context can be used to improve the alert dissemination process. In particular, the research aims to enhance the structural properties of a network to represent both the societal and physical connectivity. This requires an understanding of which aspects of a social network are useful to map and maintain as the situation evolves. The research addresses the above interdisciplinary research issues via the following 3 steps. The first research task develops mechanisms to create and maintain a geo-aware overlay network, in order to model geographical correlations. In the second step, the geo-aware overlay network is enhanced to capture and represent societal characteristics by using a geo-social mapping process, and the outcome of this process is a geo-social overlay network. The final research task is that of effective utilization of the geo-social overlay network in the alerting process, which is adaptive to the given knowledge of potential failure, in order to support reliable dissemination at the societal scale in the presence of geo-correlated failures. The project includes a prototype implementation to test/validate the research on a campus testbed.

Broader Impact: The research paves the way towards a new generation of socio-technical alerting systems that are far more effective than alerting mechanisms in use today and opens new avenues for interdisciplinary research on technologies for alerting systems. If successful the project will lead to new ways of leveraging the capabilities of existing network infrastructures and quickly repurposing them in emergency situations to provide critical situation awareness and disaster management information to diverse organizations and individuals. The PI has strong ties with entities that have a stake in the outcome of this research, including local governments, emergency management agencies and organizations at the state and federal level, and university- and agency-based researchers. A workshop with stakeholders including academic researchers from multiple disciplines, industry participants and government agencies is part of this project to discuss current processes, systems and challenges in disseminating emergency alerts in public. Outreach efforts will also raise awareness of the upcoming communication models for socio-technical alerting systems; it will help demonstrate the possibility of synergistically combining information about the disaster, infrastructure and the public to achieve the desired level of response.

The CCGrid international conference series, jointly sponsored by IEEE and ACM, provides a venue for researchers to share research and experiences at the intersection of Cluster, Cloud and Grid technologies. The meeting format includes keynotes, workshops, expert panels, tutorials, and poster sessions in addition to the SCALE challenge competition. The 11th CCGrid conference (CCGrid 2011) will be held in May 2011 in Newport Beach, California, USA.

Students attending CCGrid 2011 will be exposed to discussions of major challenges in the field; have opportunities to interact and network with experts from academia and industry; have the opportunity to hear presentations from leaders in the field; and will take part in special student events. Student events will include interactive poster sessions and a student scholar roundtable with senior researchers. To ensure student participation at CCGrid the conference organizers will award travel scholarships to a number of graduate students.

The objective of this research is to develop key components of community-based pervasive systems which will allow citizens to respond to disasters. The systems will make use of inexpensive networked sensors and communication devices distributed among families and communities. The sensors/devices will enable the collection of situational information and the dissemination of alerts, by use of fault and delay-tolerant networks, and through the use of Cloud computing and crowd sourcing techniques. The Indo-US partnership in this effort will study these issues in the context of the Indian subcontinent where urban and rural landscapes are unique.

Sensor-based detection technologies will be studied to help identify events, e.g. abnormal ground motion, and fault-tolerant networks will be designed to connect the sensor systems together and to a resource-rich cloud infrastructure. Methods for performing sensing analysis and data fusion in the cloud will be incorporated so as to address tradeoffs among rates of false positive alarms, false negative alarms, and time to detection. The existing infrastructure will also be used to design systems for delivering actionable alerts/information to responders and communities using multiple networks. The community-based sensing and alerting techniques developed will be evaluated in campus testbeds at UCI/Caltech, culminating in a pilot study/drill at one of the Indian institutions with regional experience in disaster management.

Dealing with disasters effectively is a global concern and techniques to leverage communities for data collection and alerting is an effective strategy, especially in nations with diverse populations with varying degrees of technological sophistication. The research will enable a new generation of community-based cyber-physical systems in emerging markets, in which the community helps to detect, communicate and respond to rapidly evolving events such as earthquakes, tsunamis, fires, floods and epidemics. Students at different levels (graduate, undergraduate, K-12) will gain experience with developing real-world applications in a global context via courses and independent study projects. Students will benefit tremendously from exposure to the next generation of community-based cyber-physical systems technologies that will help design safer living environments for the future,

Dr. Sharad Mehrotra and an interdisciplinary team of collaborators at the University of California at Irvine (UCI) will develop I-sensorium, to serve as a "living laboratory" to support research in several related areas of cyber-physical systems: including theoretical foundations and underlying principles of building sentient systems; engineering, software, and systems level challenges; and novel application contexts where such sentient systems can be used. I-Sensorium will serve as a testbed for exploring and testing novel sentient technologies. I-Sensorium augments Responsphere, an existing UCI crisis response test-bed with state-of-the-art storage and computational infrastructure to acquire and process continuous streams of sensory data from Responsphere sensors. The I-Sensorium software will leverage multiple ongoing research projects at UCI on large-scale, heterogeneous sensor databases, sensor middleware platforms for querying and analysis of heterogeneous sensor data, and an event representation system for multi-media data, to provide a high level programming environment for the I-Sensorium allowing a broad group of researchers to participate and benefit from its creation.

The development of I-Sensorium offers opportunities for research-based education and training in many aspects of cyber-physical systems. The infrastructure as well as the sensor data acquisition enabled by it presents research challenges and opportunities in sensor data management, machine learning, computer vision, event modeling, among others. Interactions with industrial partners and government agencies are expected to lead to advances in the applications of cyber-physical systems in real-world settings. Education and outreach efforts are aimed at broadening the participation of women and members of underrepresented groups in computer science and engineering. Further information about this project can be found at: http://www.i-sensorium.org

A wealth of digital information is being generated daily through social networks, blogs, online communities, news sources, and mobile applications in an increasingly sensed world. Organizations and researchers recognize that tremendous value and insight can be gained by capturing this emerging data and making it available for querying and analysis. First-generation Big Data management efforts have been passive in nature -- queries, updates, and/or analysis tasks were mainly scaled to handle very large volumes of data. In contrast, this project will develop new techniques for continuously and reliably capturing Big Data collections (arising from social, mobile, Web, and sensed data sources) and will enable timely delivery of the right information to the relevant end users. In short, this project will provide a scalable foundation for moving from Big Passive Data to Big Active Data. Techniques should be developed to enable the accumulation and monitoring of petabytes of data of potential interest to millions of end users; when "interesting" new data appears, it should be delivered to end users in a time frame measured in (100's of) milliseconds. This project will build such an Active Big Data Management system and make it available as open source to the community. Students will be trained in technologies related to Big Active Data management and applications; such training is critical to addressing the information explosion that social media and the mobile Web are driving today. The general-purpose foundation for active information dissemination from Big Data will have broader impacts in areas such as public safety and public health.

There are many challenges involved in building a foundation for Big Active Data. On the "data in" side, these include resource management in very large scale, LSM-based storage systems and the provision of a highly available, elastic facility for fast data ingestion. On the "data processing" side, challenges include the parallel evaluation of a large number of declarative data subscriptions over multiple) highly partitioned data sets. Amplifying this challenge is a need to efficiently support spatial, temporal, and similarity predicates in data subscriptions. Big Data also makes result ranking and diversification techniques critical in order for large result sets to be manageable. On the "data out" side, challenges include the reliable and timely dissemination of data of interest to a sometimes-connected subscriber base of unprecedented scale. As a software base, this project will be jump-started by using AsterixDB(http://asterixdb.ics.uci.edu/), an open-source Big Data Management System that supports the scalable storage, searching, and analysis of mass quantities of semi-structured data.

For further information see the project web sites at https://www.ics.uci.edu/BigActiveData and http://www.cs.ucr.edu/~tsotras/BigActiveData

SCALE2 explores the design of resilient, inexpensive cyber-physical systems (CPS) technologies to create community-wide smartspaces for public/personal safety. SCALE2 aims to demonstrate that community safety can be realized by augmenting CPS technologies with end-to-end resilience mechanisms. Such a study requires real-world community-scale deployments to understand citizen concerns and can only be achieved through partnerships between various stakeholders - researchers, government agencies, and industry.

The SCALE2 multisensory platform will use inexpensive Internet of things (IoT) components, and support dependable operation by enabling resilient information-flow through multiple system layers. Research will explore mechanisms for (a) ingest of real-time data through flexible rich data models, (b) Quality of Service (QoS)-aware messaging to cloud platforms, and (c) reliable detection of higher-level community events through semantics-driven virtual sensing. SCALE2, through its established partnerships/testbeds, offers a unique short-term opportunity to guide future resilience technologies, train the next generation of students and have broader community impact. SCALE2 will be deployed at Montgomery County, MD, and the Irvine-Sensorium working with local agencies.

This project provides NSF support for students to attend and participate in the 34th IEEE 2015 International Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS) to be held in Montreal, Canada on September 28-October 1, 2015. SRDS 2015 is a premier international technical event that brings together technical research papers, tutorials and workshops centered on various aspects of reliable distributed computing applications and platforms. Additionally, the conference will include multiple keynotes, panels on cutting edge topics, a Ph.D. forum and discussion sessions. The aims of the conference are manifold: 1) to provide a international forum for investigation of major challenges in addressing next-generation of mission critical distributed computing platforms; 2) to stimulate interactive discussions on research in distributed computing and reliability through panels, posters, tutorials, and discussion sessions (3) to motivate and engage future generations of researchers via conference and workshop presentations, interactive poster sessions, panel and breakout sessions.

This effort will promote the next generation of students and researchers to identify scientific foundations for building large scale distributed computing environments that can work reliably and efficiently. This travel support will permit a more qualified and diverse group of student attendees. Students attending the conference benefit from both the technical content of the conference and the professional interaction with senior researchers from other universities and with industry. A Student Scholar Roundtable will be organized where selected students will get a chance to informally interact with senior researchers in the community and get feedback on their research interests. SRDS 2015 will offer many opportunities for students to meet, interact, and exchange ideas in an informal atmosphere including members of the program committee, speakers and organizers.

Water is a critical resource and a lifeline service to communities worldwide; the generation, treatment, distribution and maintenance of water workflows is typically managed by local governments and water districts. Recent events such as water supply disruptions caused by Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and the looming California drought crisis clearly indicate society's dependence on critical lifeline services such as water and the far-reaching impacts that its disruption can cause. Over the years, these critical infrastructures have become more complex and often more vulnerable to failures. The ability to view water workflows as a community wide cyber-physical system (CPS) with multiple levels of observation/control and diverse players (suppliers, distributors, consumers) presents new possibilities. Designing robust water systems involves a clear understanding of the structure, components and operation of this CPS system and how community infrastructure dynamics (e.g. varying demands, small/large disruptions) impact lifeline service availabilities and how service level decisions impact infrastructure control.

The proposal emphasizes a new approach to exploring engineering systems that will result in substantial advances in the understanding of lifeline systems and approaches to make them adaptive and resilient. Building resilience into urban lifelines raises a number of monumental challenges including identifying the aspects of systems that can be observed/sensed and adapted and to developing general principles that can guide adaptation. The key idea is to develop methodologies to understand operational performance and resilience issues for real-world community water infrastructures and explore solutions to problems in cyberspace before instantiating them into a physical infrastructure. The effort includes: 1) Developing a flexible modeling framework that captures system needs at multiple levels of temporal and spatial abstraction; 2) Developing real-time algorithms supporting resilience; 3) Designing adaptations for water systems using a data-driven approach; and 4) Demonstrating the important broader impact of the research on critical water system infrastructure at the Global City Technology Challenge and the longer term impact on infrastructure for a resilient control framework.

Distributed and Event-based System Conference Student Travel Grant
The aim of the student travel grant to the ACM International Conference on Distributed and Event-based Systems (DEBS) in Irvine, CA June 20-24, 2016 is to provide doctoral students a supportive scientific forum to engage in inter- and multi-disciplinary scholarship focusing on distributed and event-based systems. The Scholar Roundtable provides a forum for expert and peer critique of students' doctoral work with the goal of improving their dissertation. Student participants will also have the opportunity to receive networking support and career advice from internationally-recognized experts. Overall, the student travel award enables the 'cross-pollination' of students, researchers, developers, and users as they explore research ideas, evaluate maturing technologies, and develop novel applications using these technologies.

The aim of the Distributed and Event-based System Conference Student Travel Grant is to support doctoral students through constructive remarks and feedback on their interdisciplinary research from prominent researchers and through interaction with other students. Student participants from a broad range of disciplines will give short presentations of their work and receive constructive feedback from internationally respected experts in the areas of distributed and event-based systems. The expert panelists will also provide student participants with career guidance and mentoring through presentations and small group advising throughout the day. In addition, support for travel and registration will allow student participants the opportunity to see the conference and network with conference attendees.

This award establishes a new Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Site at The University of California - Irvine. The REU Site will host students from across the nation to conduct research during the summer with faculty mentors on topics related to the Internet of Things (IoT) for Smart Communities (IoT-SITY). The Internet of Things is an evolving field of connectivity involving networks of physical devices, sensors and other components, and software that can communicate wirelessly over the Internet. The IoT has enabled the proliferation of small, inexpensive devices that can manipulate and control smart spaces such as homes and offices as well as critical infrastructures such as hospitals and airports. The REU students will investigate exciting applications and explore ways in which we can reliably and safely apply and deploy IoT systems to develop the Smart and Connected Communities of the future. The REU Site plans to recruit a diverse cohort of undergraduate students each summer, including students from groups traditionally under-represented in computing. In addition to their research activities, the students will participate in other professional development activities that will prepare them to pursue exciting careers in computer science and engineering including leading the technology research and development of the future.

The REU site is led a team of accomplished faculty mentors from the School of Information and Computer Sciences and the School of Engineering at the University of California-Irvine. The affiliated research laboratories provide students with opportunities to use state-of-the-art equipment and facilities to explore topics that are current and timely. Together, these faculty members will provide an exciting and enriching environment which cultivates inquiry and excitement about learning while developing the students' research skills and interests. IoT-SITY participants will be able to apply computer science and engineering to the next generation of IoT technologies for smart communities, smart spaces, and smart infrastructures. The students will gain the knowledge base for creating IoT devices and understanding design considerations, constraints, and interfaces between the physical world and IoT research. The project has the potential to contribute to the body of emerging research in computer science will preparing students for the computing workforce of tomorrow.

Emerging application domains such as sensor-driven smart spaces and social media platforms require incoming data to be appropriately enriched prior to being consumed by data analysts. Enrichment often requires the use of complex compiled code, declarative queries, and/or expensive machine learning/signal processing modules. Traditionally, enrichment is performed as an offline process prior to making the data available for analysis. The recent trend towards real-time analytics has prompted industrial and research systems to explore enrichment during online data processing. These efforts have focused on optimizing enrichment at the time of data ingestion. This project will develop a new type of data management technology, to support real-time data analytics, entitled EnrichDB, that represents a significant departure from the above ingestion-based enrichment approaches. EnrichDB is based on the premise that enriching data in its entirety at ingestion can be (a) wasteful -- since applications may not require all data to be enriched; (b) result in unacceptable latencies -- if data arrival rates are high, or (c) not be feasible -- if enrichment functions are learned and incorporated into the system at a later time after ingestion. EnrichDB will explore seamlessly integrating data enrichment through the entire data processing pipeline - from ingestion to event-based intermittent enrichment, and progressively during query processing. EnrichDB will benefit real-time data analytics in multiple domains including IoT-enabled smart spaces, text and social media analytics, cybersecurity, network surveillance, etc.

EnrichDB will address a variety of challenges that arise in enabling enrichment through different stages of the data processing pipeline. One such challenge is to explicitly represent the state of enrichment of the objects (i.e., which enrichment functions have been applied to which objects); such a state will drive additional enrichments required downstream in data processing. Another challenge is to develop mechanisms to support enrichment during query processing efficiently since query-time enrichment could result in unacceptable latencies. Techniques need to be designed to enrich data progressively while processing queries to provide answers at acceptable levels of quality and latency. Such progressive processing logic could either be layered on top of existing databases or could be incorporated natively into database engines by rethinking storage, indexing, and query processing to support enrichment. The project will explore challenges that arise for both these cases. Finally, self-driving strategies to decide which objects should be enriched to what degree at what stage of the data processing pipelines need to be designed. Such an approach would complement a strategy wherein such decisions are made by the system administrator. EnrichDB will be used in advanced data management classes and will be integrated into a campus-level smart space testbed at UCI entitled TIPPERS that supports a variety of services including real-time occupancy counts and other building usage analysis, at the UCI campus.

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.

Contact tracing has emerged as a key mitigation strategy to prevent the spread of pandemics such as COVID-19. Recently, several efforts have been initiated to track individuals, their movements, and interactions using technologies such as Bluetooth beacons, cellular data records, and smartphone applications. Such solutions can be intrusive, potentially violate individual privacy rights and are often subject to regulations that mandate the need for opt-in policies to gather and use personal information which, as several studies have shown, limits their adoption. This project takes a novel approach to empower organizations to mitigate spread of COVID-19 at their premises by exploiting connection events between mobile devices carried by individuals and the Wi-Fi infrastructure. There are several advantages of the planned approach. First, it takes an organizational perspective and is intended to help organizations, small and large, keep employees safe and ensure safety on their premises by exploiting network data (already being generated by their network infrastructures). Second, it is decentralized, i.e., instead of empowering/trusting a small number of organizations such as mobile OS companies, it empowers organizations to assume joint responsibility to implement safety measures at their premises. Third, it offers a fully privacy-preserving solution based on computationally and informationally secure cryptography with strong security properties guaranteeing privacy of individuals, including those who might be exposed or carriers. This will prevent misuse of the data collected by any entity against the will of the individuals. Fourth, it is based on connectivity events already generated by existing Wi-Fi infrastructure and does not require users of the network to either download any application and/or give explicit permissions (which is known to limit adoption). Finally, it offers a path to implement technology not just for contact tracing but empowers organizations with awareness about effectiveness of their policies/strategies such as social distancing, disinfecting/cleaning schedules, etc.

The planned approach is built upon several innovations including (a) new algorithms for cleaning noisy Wi-Fi connectivity data to develop models of occupancy, (b) new cryptographic solutions to implement privacy-preserving data analytics and queries over encrypted Wi-Fi connectivity data (collected from mobile devices), to generate a range of information -- e.g., level of adherence to social distancing policies, flow of people in spaces, and exposure hotspots, (c) design of a range of COVID-19 relevant applications that help organizations ensure safety of individuals on their premises. Such applications include publicly accessible organizational portals/dashboards and subscription-based alerting technologies developed in concert with stakeholder (e.g., UCI campus administration). Deployment and testing of the solution will be done at campus scale, particularly focusing on how the technology can empower the university leadership to determine strategies for reopening research labs while maintaining health and safety of all involved and follow the applicable mandates of the public health authorities. It is expected that the project will serve as a vehicle to inform and educate both individuals and scientists about virus transmission and spread and will contribute to the development of processes and actions at the organizational level to mitigate spread of COVID-19.

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.

Smart spaces are characterized by the presence of smart services built on emerging sensing, computing, and communication technologies. This planning grant will create a multi-university Center for Smart Space Research (CSSR) involving Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) and the University of California, Irvine (UCI). CSSR takes an integrated approach to make them versatile and adaptable to situations by ensuring the availability and accessibility of data, knowledge, and services. This planning grant will identify research challenges to build application-focused smart spaces. Applications encompass health and disease monitoring systems, smart buildings, public spaces and cities, mission-critical systems, transportation, intelligent manufacturing, collaborative robotics, and others.

The center’s focus will involve four main areas of relevance to industry, university, and society: creation of adaptive computing and communications infrastructure; trustworthy acquisition, processing, interpretation and sustainability of data and knowledge; applications that span all aspects of life and the environment; and creation of diverse and competent workforce. UCI researchers will collaborate with industrial organizations, technology developers, and users, to investigate: adaptive and resilient multiscale network communications; data-driven real-time adaptations for mission-critical applications; multi-tier and edge-cloud computing methods, IoT data management and security/privacy techniques for instrumented spaces. These collaborations will facilitate transition of research to practice in smartspaces.

The planning phase of CSSR will impact research and pedagogical activities at UCI and stimulate technology transfer to collaborating industries. Our work will emphasize smartspace applications to improve quality of life and enhance community resilience in challenging situations. CSSR will leverage ongoing and future projects to reach underprivileged populations with varying socio-economic backgrounds. UCI is a Hispanic-serving institution with a diverse student body. The planning grant workshops will promote interactions with industry and create opportunities to recruit and mentor diverse groups of students in undergraduate capstone projects, graduate courses and internships creating a future workforce in the area of smartspaces.

In the near future, access to smart spaces and smart infrastructure will impact every individual and will greatly improve quality of life. CSSR activities in fostering innovation in accessible smart spaces will play a major role in the future world. The planning phase will serve as a platform for meetings, discussions, and workshops, to identify critical research to guide the development of smart spaces. CSSR will maintain a publicly-accessible repository comprising meeting materials, workshop information, research topics and details, and publications. This repository will be maintained at a publicly accessible URL at RIT for the lifetime of the center.

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.

Disasters disproportionately impact older adults who experience increased fatality rates; such individuals often live in age-friendly communities and senior health facilities (SHFs). During a crisis, older adults are often unable to shelter safely in place or self-evacuate due to a range of physical conditions (need for life-sustaining equipment, impaired mobility) and cognitive afflictions (e.g. dementia, Alzheimer’s). First responders assisting older adults could benefit from seamless, real-time access to critical life-saving information about the living facilities (e.g., floor plans, operational status, number of residents) and about individual residents (e.g., health conditions such as need for dialysis, oxygen, personal objects to reduce anxiety). Such information, siloed within organizational logs or held by caregivers, is inaccessible and/or unavailable at the time of response. This interdisciplinary project brings together IT, geriatrics and resilience experts with disaster-response agencies and SHF providers to create information preparedness and transform disaster resilience for older adults.

The team will design, develop and deploy CareDEX, a novel community contributed data-exchange platform, that empowers SHFs to readily assimilate, ingest, store and exchange information, both apriori and in real-time, with response agencies to care for older adults in extreme events. The CareDEX information pipeline enables SHFs to capture individual information about changing health conditions and personalized needs and share them with responders to help improve response. Information co-produced with civic partners will identify and refine resident-specific data via tools for proactive collection/update. Given the sensitive nature of personal information, e.g., health-profiles, CareDEX will incorporate policy-based information sharing mechanisms that balance needs for individual privacy with authorized information release. CareDEX’s hybrid-cloud architecture seamlessly enables data to be securely stored on-premise (at SHF) and in the cloud for remote access by responders and temporary caregivers. Relocation of older adults requires regional information (e.g. road-conditions, facility status) - CareDEX will integrate GIS tools to provide first-responders with uptodate region-level situational awareness for dynamic decision-support. The prototype CareDEX platform will be co-developed with core civic partners, e.g. Front Porch (a nation-wide senior-care provider) and deployed at a SHF in Anaheim, CA. Collaborations with local response agencies (Los Angeles, Orange County, San Bernardino, San Diego) and national entities (FEMA, Red Cross, NFPA/FPRF) will mesh needs of emergency responders with caregivers. CareDEX will be evaluated using diverse scenarios - a wildfire event triggering relocation, wildfires coupled with a pandemic, and rapid onset earthquake events with small warning times and increased uncertainty.

The CIVIC Innovation Challenge is a collaboration with Department of Energy, Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and the National Science Foundation

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.