"Digital Libraries"
Speaker: Dr. Edward A. Fox, Virginia Tech
Location: Torgersen 3100
Date: Friday, November 20, 2009
Time: 1:25 PM - 2:15 PM
See: Abstract

Publish Date: 11/13/2009

Computer Science alumnus Brian Sutton was awarded the 14th Leslie Fox Prize in Numerical Analysis this summer. Dr. Sutton competed against five finalists from Britain, France, Belgium, China and the United States. Each finalist gave a 40-minute lecture during the prize ceremony, which was held June 29, 2009, at the Mathematics Institute, University of Warwick in the United Kingdom. Dr. Sutton’s winning paper, “Computing the Complete CS Decomposition,” presents an algorithm that computes the cosine-sine decomposition of a partitioned unitary matrix.

The Leslie Fox Prize is one of the most prestigious awards in applied mathematics. It is awarded every other year to promising mathematicians under the age of 31. The submissions are judged by a committee of respected peers based on originality and quality of the subject. Special consideration is also given to the suitability of the material for a 40-minute lecture to an audience of numerical analysts.

Dr. Sutton earned bachelor's degrees in both mathematics and computer science at Virginia Tech in 2001 and his Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is currently a faculty member of the Mathematics Department at Randolph Macon College.

Publish Date: 11/11/2009

Congratulations to CS Faculty members who have received new research funding in the month of October! CS faculty members received awards as principle investigators and as collaborative partners from the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, and the National Institute for Allergy and Infection Disease.

Doug Bowman has been awarded funding through the Office of Naval Research on a collaborative proposal with the University of California, Santa Barbara titled “Evaluating The Effects of Immersion on Naval Training Applications”.

Military training has been one of the most successful applications of virtual reality (VR) technologies. VR systems provide a realistic first-person view of a synthetic world, and allow trainees to interact directly with that world, making them useful for training motor skills, decision-making, and navigation. However, there are a wide range of VR technologies, and very little is known about which technologies provide the most benefit for various military training scenarios. We propose to characterize both augmented reality (AR) and VR training systems by the level of immersion they provide. Using this concept, we propose a series of empirical studies, based on the most common tasks found in AR/VR training systems, to determine the effects of various components of immersion. Since actual AR/VR technologies differ in many ways, we propose to run controlled studies using an AR/VR simulator. In addition to the controlled studies using the simulator approach, we propose to validate our results using actual AR/VR technologies. All of this data will allow us to deliver a set of guidelines and recommendations to the Navy regarding the required and desirable levels of immersion for military training systems.

Yong Cao and Francis Quek have been awarded funding through the National Science Foundation for a proposal titled “Creative IT: Hyper Drama Storytelling: Engaging and Nurturing Creativity in K-12 Students”

This research explores the concept of grounded imagination where creativity is grounded in knowledge and informed by experience. How might one nurture and cultivate such grounded imagination in K-12 students? To address this question, this project will develop and deploy a storytelling system for authoring and interacting with hyper-dramas. It incorporates the theory advanced by Lev Vygotsky, that creativity involves a process of combinatory imagination by which an individual creates new things for herself from elements of prior experience encoded in everyday concepts and new culturally transmitted information. This situates creativity within two developmental streams: intellectual development (acquiring grounding in the form of knowledge and experience), and the process of flexible re-combination. The aspect of social-cultural engagement suggests that creativity is a discourse with the larger culture and society. Drawing from this theoretical foundation, this project explores whether the creativity trough (decline in creativity from the 4th grade through middle school) may occur because social-cultural awareness precedes intellectual development so that the student judges herself an inadequate contributor. Facilitating hyper-drama authoring will allow students to draw on their experience in hyper-media and dramatic presentation, and thus nurture the combinatory creativity process.

Joseph Gabbard and Deborah Hix have received funding as co-investigators on an interdepartmental proposal with the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute titled “PathoSystems Bioinformatics Resource Center”.

The proposal was awarded to the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The $27M award is the single largest award Virginia Tech has received to date and is a 5-year contract to the CyberInfrastructure Group (CIG) of VBI to support the biomedical research community’s work on infectious diseases. The funding will be used to integrate vital information on pathogens, provide key resources and tools to scientists, and help researchers to analyze genomic, proteomic and other data arising from infectious disease research. Gabbard and Hix will be contributing research under the portion of the proposal that focuses on “human computer interaction (HCI), usability engineering and visualization.”

Scott McCrickard has been awarded an extension to an ongoing NSF proposal titled “Collaborative Research: BPC-AE:   The Alliance for the Advancement of African American Researchers in Computing (A4RC)”

A4RC aims to increase the number of African-Americans obtaining advanced degrees in computing, particularly at the Ph.D. level. A4RC establishes and develops student pipelines from HBCUs to universities offering advanced degrees in Computing. With this extension, A4RC plans to expand the alliance to include a greater number of HBCU/R1 research collaborations, and to build new partnerships. A new category of partners -- Affiliate Partners -- will engage additional HBCUs and national labs and A4RC will become formal partners with the very effective BPC Demonstration Project, African-American Researchers in Computing Sciences (AARCS). A4RC will build collaborations with the BPC STARS and Empowering Leadership Alliances, and ADMI: The Symposium on Computing at Minority Institutions.

Adrian Sandu has received funding through the National Science Foundation for a new award titled “Collaborative Research: A Multiscale Unified Simulation Environment for Geoscientific Applications”.

The goal of our interdisciplinary effort between computational scientists, physicists, engineers and applied mathematicians is to build an all scales unified simulation system that can exploit the next generation of petascale systems and beyond. The advances proposed herein hold the potential of greatly enhancing possible breakthroughs in various research disciplines involved with continuum mechanics. Specifically, the novelties will include: high-order discontinuous Galerkin methods with simultaneous adaptive h-p unstructured non-conforming meshes, multi-step methods for time integration including multirate, implicit-explicit (IMEX), strong-stability preserving (SSP), exponential integrators, Parareal time-integration, adjoint-based error estimates, and new optimal iterative solvers. These ideas will ultimately be targeted for use on a deep atmosphere and ocean model.

"Evaluating the effects of immersion in mixed reality"
Speaker: Dr. Doug Bowman, Virginia Tech
Location: Torgersen 3100
Date: Friday, November 13, 2009
Time: 1:25PM-2:15PM
See: Abstract

Publish Date: 11/06/2009

Naren Ramakrishnan, Virginia Tech professor of computer science (CS), is one of 84 professionals worldwide to be recognized as a 2009 Distinguished Member by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

The Distinguished Member Grade recognizes those ACM members with at least 15 years of professional experience and five years of continuous professional membership who have achieved significant accomplishments or have made a significant impact on the computing field. This year, ACM named nine Distinguished Educators, 17 Distinguished Engineers, and 58 Distinguished Scientists, with Ramakrishnan being one of the noted scientists.

Ramakrishnan’s work is in the area of data mining - the science of processing massive quantities of data to discover patterns and to produce new insights. Recently, Ramakrishnan received a 2009 Hewlett Packard Labs Innovation award, another globally competitive honor. It enabled him to conduct collaborative research with HP in the area of data mining for assessing the sustainability of complex information technology systems, such as data centers.

Ramakrishnan received his Ph.D. in CS from Purdue University and has been at Virginia Tech since 1998. He is the recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER grant, the New Century Technology Council Innovation award, and a certificate of teaching excellence from the College of Engineering. He has been both program chair and general chair of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers’ Conference on Data Mining (ICDM), the premier research conference in data mining, which is held annually in different parts of the world.

In 2007, Ramakrishnan was named one of Computerworld’s “40 innovative IT people to watch, under the age of 40,” for his research on the data mining concept of “storytelling.” He was co-organizer of the recently concluded 2009 Frontiers of Engineering Conference organized by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE).

Publish Date: 11/06/2009

Computer science graduate student Guanying Wang’s paper titled “A Simulation Approach to Evaluating Design Decisions in MapReduce Setups” was recently recognized as “Best Paper” at the annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Modelling, Analysis and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunications Systems (MASCOTS ’09).

Guanying is a 3^rd year Ph.D. candidate whose current research focuses on designing efficient computer systems for supporting the emerging Cloud Computing paradigm. Guanying’s paper provides insights into designing better clusters for running Hadoop – a publicly available implementation of the MapReduce programming model that is used for creating compute clouds. Collaborators on the paper include Wang’s advisor, Dr. Ali Butt, as well as Prashant Pandey and Karan Gupta of the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California.   

MapReduce has emerged as a model of choice for supporting modern data-intensive applications. The model is easy-to-use and promising in reducing time-to-solution. It is also a key enabler for cloud computing, which provides transparent and flexible access to a large number of compute, storage and networking resources.

Setting up and operating a large MapReduce cluster entails careful evaluation of various design choices and run-time parameters to achieve high efficiency. However, this design space has not been explored in detail. In this paper, we adopt a simulation approach to systematically understanding the performance of MapReduce setups. The resulting simulator, MRPerf, captures such aspects of these setups as node, rack and network configurations, disk parameters and performance, data layout and application I/O characteristics, among others, and uses this information to predict expected application performance.

Specifically, we use MRPerf to explore the effect of several component inter-connect topologies, data locality, and software and hardware failures on overall application performance. MRPerf allows us to quantify the effect of these factors, and thus can serve as a tool for optimizing existing MapReduce setups as well as designing new ones.

MASCOT ’09 webpage

Full Version of Paper

Start Date: 09/15/2009
End Date: 08/31/2011

Grant Institution: National Science Foundation

Amount:

People associated with this grant:

Francis Quek
Yong Cao

Start Date: 09/01/2009
End Date: 08/31/2012

Grant Institution: National Science Foundation

Amount:

People associated with this grant:

Adrian Sandu

Start Date: 09/01/2009
End Date: 08/31/2010

Grant Institution: National Science Foundation

Amount:

People associated with this grant:

Scott McCrickard

Start Date: 08/01/2009
End Date: 12/31/1969

Grant Institution: ONR (through agreement with University of California, Santa Barbara)

Amount:

People associated with this grant:

Doug Bowman