Title: The Pervasiveness of Software Engineering
Speaker: James D. Arthur, Virginia Tech
When: Friday, April 10, 2009
Time: 11:15am-12:15pm
Where: Torgersen 2150
See: Abstract
 

Publish Date: 04/07/2009

Rhonda Phillips, a Computer Science PhD candidate under Dr. Layne Watson, was awarded 1st place in the Engineering category of the recent GSA Annual Research Symposium. Ms. Phillips presented a poster entitled “A Probabilistic Classification Algorithm with Soft Classification Output.” The poster presented her research on using the continuous iterative guided spectral class rejection (CIGSCR) classification method to classify remotely sensed images.

The classification of remotely sensed images is essential to many applications such as land use monitoring, natural resource management, and global climate change analysis and prediction. However, classification is often difficult because training data are difficult and expensive to acquire, and identifying good training classes within those data is problematic.

The CIGSCR classification method addresses these issues by using semisupervised techniques in machine learning to supplement limited training data and automatically locate training classes in the form of clusters. While this technique (clustering to produce classification) is not new, the method of determining which clusters should be used and refining “rejected” clusters is unique to CIGSCR and its predecessor, IGSCR. CIGSCR features a statistical hypothesis test used to select clusters that are representative of classes in the classification scheme. Once a cluster has been targeted for refinement, CIGSCR uses this continuous data to seed additional clusters. Upon termination of the algorithm, multiple clusters associated with classes in the classification scheme are located, enabling classification.

The classification results indicate that CIGSCR has advantages over IGSCR, improves classification results based on clustering alone, and produces high quality, informative soft classifications of remotely sensed data.
 

Publish Date: 04/06/2009

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is an open international community of network designers, operators, vendors, and researchers concerned with the evolution of the Internet architecture and the smooth operation of the Internet.

Russ Housley, an alumnus of the Virginia Tech Computer Science department, was reappointed as chair of the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG), which provides the final technical review of Internet standards and is responsible for the day-to-day management of the IETF. Russ received his first appointment as chair of the IESG in March, 2007.

Russ received a B.S. in Computer Science from Virginia Tech in 1982 and earned a M. Sc. in Computer Science from George Mason University in 1992. He is the owner and consultant for Vigil Security, LLC which he founded in 2002.

DT Gillespie, Y Cao, K Sanft, and LR Petzold, The subtle business of model reduction for stochastic chemical kinetics J. Chem. Phys. 130, 064103 (2009).

K Wendelsdorf, Z Song, Y Cao and D Samuels, An Analysis of Enzyme Kinetics Data for Mitochondrial DNA Polymerase-gamma Inhibition by Nucleoside Reverse Transcriptase Inhibitor, PLos Computational Biology, vol 5, Jan 2009

D Barik, M Paul, W Baumann, Y Cao and J Tyson Stochastic Simulation of Enzyme-Catalyzed Reactions with Disparate Time Scales, Biophys. J. 95, 3563-3574, 2008.

Title: Blended Program Analysis
Speaker: Dr. Barbara Ryder, Virginia Tech
When: Friday, April 03, 2009
Time: 11:15am-12:15pm
Where: Torgersen 2150
See: Abstract

Publish Date: 03/26/2009

Naren Ramakrishnan, Professor and Associate Head in the Computer Science department at Virginia Tech, was invited to serve on the organizing committee for the 2009 US Frontiers of Engineering (US FOE) Symposium, which will be held at the National Academies' Beckman Center in Irvine, California, on September 10-12, 2009.  

The annual event, sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), brings together outstanding engineers ages 30 to 45 who are performing exceptional engineering research and technical work in a variety of disciplines. Other than the organizers and speakers, about 100 participants are selected through a competitive two-stage process, from academia, industry, and government, so being selected to participate is itself considered an honor.

Along with J. Christopher Love of MIT, Ramakrishnan is organizing a session on “Engineering Tools for Scientific Discovery” for this year’s symposium. Speakers in this session will present the latest advances in engineering, instrumentation, and computational modeling that are leading to major scientific advances. Speaking about the session, Ramakrishnan said “New technologies are often the foundation on which major scientific discoveries are made. Previously ‘technologies’ used to mean primarily physical instrumentation but now computational methods and algorithms are key to simulation and integrating knowledge gained from data. The session will highlight a number of futuristic technologies, spanning a range of scales, from molecular biology to oceanic systems.” Other sessions planned at the symposium deal with Resilient and Sustainable Infrastructures, Engineering the Health Care Delivery System, and Nano/Micro Photonics and New Applications.

Ramakrishnan said the primary advantage of this type of meeting is to bring together a diverse cross-section of people who might not otherwise meet in a single forum. “It is a great networking opportunity. Everybody is an expert in their respective field and you might find overlaps and connections between your work and theirs.”

Naren Ramakrishnan joined Virginia Tech in Aug 1998 as an assistant professor after receiving his Ph.D. in computer sciences from Purdue University. His research interests include computational science, especially computational biology, data mining, and information personalization. He has received an NSF CAREER grant, the New Century Technology Council Innovation award, and was named to Computerworld’s list of “40 under 40” innovative IT people to watch (2007). He serves on the editorial board of IEEE Computer and was a general chair of the recently concluded Eighth IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM'08) held in Pisa, Italy, Dec 2008.

NAE's annual Frontiers of Engineering symposia were started in 1995 to bring outstanding younger engineers (ages 30-40/45) from different disciplines together to discuss leading-edge engineering research and technical work in order to foster the transfer of new techniques and approaches across fields, facilitate collaborative work, and establish ongoing contacts among the next generation of engineering leaders. For more information, please see the FOE website at www.nae.edu/frontiers.

Title: Towards a new infrastructure for the World Wide Web  
Speaker: Dr. Godmar Back, Virginia Tech
When: Friday, March 27, 2009
Time: 11:15am-12:15pm
Where: Torgersen 2150
See: Abstract

Publish Date: 03/20/2009

Jing (David) Dai, Arnold Boedihardjo, and Feng Chen, doctoral students in the Computer Science program, were awarded second prize in the Security Category of the National Academy of Engineering's (NAE) Grand Challenges Summit poster contest. The judging took place during the two-day summit held March 2-3 at Duke University in North Carolina. The poster, "HOMES: Highway Operation Monitoring and Evaluation System," introduces an advanced transportation information system developed in the Spatial Data Management Lab at the Falls Church Northern Virginia Center (NVC), in collaboration with the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT).

Under the direction of the project's principal investigator (PI) and the students' faculty advisor, Chang-Tien Lu, the students designed a system that helps improve the efficiency and safety of the roadway network. "HOMES" enables detection, monitoring, and analysis of trends, patterns, and abnormalities in traffic flow to provide decision support to VDOT. It supports browsing the spatial-temporal dimension hierarchy via integrated roll-up and drill-down operations and ensures quick system response by employing advanced data management techniques.

Dai, who is planning to graduate this year, presented the poster at the summit on behalf of the team. Virginia Tech, one of 20 universities across the United States to participate in the summit, sent 10 graduate students to the event. Dai was the only student from the National Capital Region selected to attend. Matthew Tolentino, Blacksburg PhD student working with Dr. Kirk Cameron, also attended the event.

More than 50 companies were also represented among the more than 1,100 registrants. The Grand Challenges Summit was convened to address the fourteen Engineering Grand Challenges identified by the NAE that, left unsolved, threaten our current standard of living. These problems lie at the intersection of science, engineering, and policy and, for the purpose of the summit, were grouped into four broad categories. In addition to the Security category, they included Energy/Environment, Health, and Learning/Computation.