William J. Tolone - US grants

This program will graduate 30 graduate students specializing in Information
Assurance (IA) over a period of four years. The program will be accomplished through the close
collaboration of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNC Charlotte) and North
Carolina A&T State University. UNC Charlotte will offer an NSA-recognized IA curriculum over
the North Carolina Education and Research Network (NCREN), a real-time two-way video
system designed for distance education in North Carolina. The IA curriculum emphasizes critical
thinking, development of teamwork and effective communication skills. Student research and
presentation are integral parts of every course. Students are strongly encouraged to participate in
on-going research projects. The program is distinguished through its close partnership with
industry, program diversity, distinguished faculties, state-of-the-art laboratory facilities, and
expanding IA career opportunities to under represented groups in our society.

Each student is required to complete a qualified industry-sponsored internship. Each internship
project must originate from a company or organization focusing on a real-world IA problem;
require creative design and/or research that are appropriate for a Master's level student; and has
clearly defined deliverables, which typically would include documents and/or prototype software.

EIA 02-24423
PI(s): Xiao, Jing
Tolone, William J.
Institution: University of North Carolina - Charlotte

Title: CISE RR: Acquisition of a Haptic Device


This proposal, acquiring a PHANTOM haptic device that can display full force and torque feedback to the user, aims at supporting two haptic research projects inspired by applications such as virtual assembly, virtual prototyping, remote collaboration, and teleoperation. The following projects will benefit from the instrumentation:

Haptic Rendering of Complex Contact States and Compliant Motion and
Cooperative Virtual Object Manipulation.

The former is concerned with how to simulate and render, with high fidelity and in real time, the effect felt by a human operator due to the contacts involving the part he/she holds and other parts during manual assembly in a virtual environment. The device will enable a human operator to feel the resulted collision and reaction forces and torques to test the quality and fidelity of simulation. The latter project is concerned with how to simulate, again with high fidelity and real time, the cooperative manipulation process of physical objects in a virtual world via haptic devices. With full force and torque display from the device, the collaborative parties can obtain the necessary cues for effective coordination. This project provides the opportunity for cross-discipline collaboration between the PIs.

UNC Charlotte, in collaboration with NC A&T State University is continuing and expanding the SFS Cyber Corps program established over the last three years. During the initial program period, UNC Charlotte and NC A&T State University have produced 33 high quality skilled Information Assurance (IA) professionals with a cumulative enrollment of 68 students consisting of 49% African American and 32% women.

Intellectual Merit. The UNC Charlotte SFS program has a well-balanced curriculum that is matching well with the human resource needs of the federal government. It is benefiting from a distinguished faculty and a vibrant and well-funded IA research program. To enhance student learning, the program is building on several innovative features including IA certificates students are earning in conjunction with their B.S., B.A., M.S. or Ph.D. degrees in Information Technology, Computer Science, or Software and Information Systems; research projects, and experiential learning activities. Students are developing a strong commitment to community service through participation in community service activities, and program alumni are serving as mentors to current SFS students to aid in student placement efforts.

Broader Impact. The UNC Charlotte SFS program is helping to address the national need for qualified information technology professionals trained in information assurance and computer security in areas of research and development (in both technology and policy areas), operations, as well as project management. In order to increase the diversity of IA professionals in the federal workforce, the UNC Charlotte SFS program is placing special emphasis on recruiting and graduating highly talented students from underrepresented groups. For many years, NC A&T State University has been a recognized world-leader in producing high quality African-American engineers. It has a very well established mechanism to attract talented minority students from all over the U.S. and a very well developed mentoring and support system to help them succeed, both academically as well as in job placement. NC A&T is a favored recruitment destination for many federal agencies, an important advantage to help place SFS graduates in federal services.

The Planning Grants for Engineering Research Centers competition was run as a pilot solicitation within the ERC program. Planning grants are not required as part of the full ERC competition, but intended to build capacity among teams to plan for convergent, center-scale engineering research.

The pathway to a sustainable carbon neutral electricity ecosystem requires a paradigm shift. While the new operational paradigm is not yet fully known, the new paradigm must cultivate an ecosystem that optimizes for stability, reliability, affordability, and carbon neutrality, while also accommodating a relentless list of needs: new stakeholders, industry models, and regulatory policies, the ever more rapid and numerous digital and technical advances, the increasing pervasiveness of the digital and technical (i.e., IoT), the variability and uncertainty in human behavior, the expected and unexpected transitions to more sustainable energy solutions, the need for flexibility and agility, and the anticipated climate variability. To achieve this, there must be a recognition of the significance of the value of the services enabled by energy rather than the energy itself. If successful, the planned ERC will be the first of its kind to bring convergence to power systems modeling and simulation with human centered modeling and simulation. The approach is critical, transformative, sustainable, and realistic, which not only leads us to a carbon-neutral energy grid, but also provides full human interaction and customer participation on a highly automated, large scale planning and operational framework.

This ERC planning grant will further identify gaps, potential stakeholders including team expansion, key personnel and evaluate the goal and overarching objectives for the future center. Additionally, the potential ERC will have a broad set of university researchers and key industrial stakeholders across a broad range of disciplines and backgrounds including (1) power systems; (2) optimization and control; (3) high performance computing; (3) software engineering; (4) computational social science; (5) data science; (6) policy and government; (7) economics; (8) behavioral science, (9) environmental economics; (10) building architecture and design; (11) transportation planning; (12) cybersecurity. There is no base of modeling and simulation tools, methods, or experience to support such an unprecedented effort. Forecasting has been a science that has evolved slowly, relying heavily on experience from past data. But new science, enabling technology, and systems integration based on revolutionary improvements in predicting interactions by prosumers, a new blend of consumer and producer who responds to the available energy supply in complex ways governed by a system of transactional energy. The proposed center liberates the proposed team from the fundamental problems existing within the scope of current funding which achieve incremental improvements; this ERC aims to achieve a quantum leap by utilizing a digital twin that simultaneously manages complex scale and complex interdependencies. The PIs’ direct involvement in cutting-edge digital-twin development provides them the perspective to note that effectively addressing the challenges of integrating technologies at scale in an uncertain political, financial, and socio-economic landscape requires the type of transformative and convergent work that can only be performed through an ERC.

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.