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News Releases
September
17, 2003
Media Contacts:
Jacobs School of Engineering Doug Ramsey
(858) 822-5825
San Diego Supercomputer Center Greg Lund
(858) 534-8314
Chemistry-Biochemistry/Physics Kim
McDonald (858) 534-7572
Scripps Institution of Oceanography Cindy
Clark (858) 534-1294
UC San Diego Researchers Receive
$14 Million from
NSF for 10 New Information Technology Research Projects
Researchers at the University of California,
San Diego (UCSD) will receive more than $14.3 million from the National
Science Foundation (NSF) for ten new projects in the information-technology
arena. Twenty-one faculty members and researchers will investigate topics
ranging from how to make cryptography easier to use, to the development
of better computer simulations of cell physiology.
Today the NSF announced eight large awards from its Information
Technology Research (ITR) program, with UCSD participating in three of
the projects. Large ITR projects focus on long-term innovations through
coordinated research and education efforts at the intersection of computer
science and other science and engineering fields. Researchers from the
Jacobs School of Engineering, San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and
the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology
[Cal-(IT)2] will lead UCSD involvement in the largest projects. (All dollar
figures in italics represent funding to UCSD entities.)
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Francine Berman and Ramesh
Rao lead UCSD involvement in three large ITR projects |
Large ITRs
- Constructing a "Family Tree" for Life on Earth.
PI: SDSC director Francine Berman. Co-PI: Philip
Bourne (SDSC, School of Medicine/Pharmacology). This project
is part of a wider $11.6 million collaborative ITR led University of
New Mexico professor Bernard Moret, and involves ten other universities
and the American Museum of Natural History. This project will develop
new analytical techniques and harness the power of many supercomputers
around the world to map the evolutionary relationships among all species
of living organisms. $4.1 million 2003-08
- Responding to the Unexpected. UCSD PI: Cal-(IT)2 UCSD
division director Ramesh Rao. Co-PIs: Bhaskar
Rao, Mohan Trivedi (Electrical and Computer
Engineering). This project is part of an overall $12.5 million collaborative
ITR among five universities, led by UC Irvine professor Sharad Mehrotra.
The goals of this project are to create robust information systems that
enable first responders and decision-makers 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. Such information
systems must provide access to the right information by the right individuals
and organizations at the right time. $3.5 million 2003-08
- Simplifying the Development of Grid Applications. Senior
Personnel: Francine Berman (SDSC), Henri Casanova
(SDSC) and Andrew Chien (CSE). The researchers from
UCSD and six other universities will work on this overall $8.2 million
project led by Ken Kennedy of Rice University. This project will create
software tools to simplify and accelerate the development of grid applications
and services. It will also look at novel scheduling techniques based
on abstract "virtual grids" to deliver high efficiency on
grids of real machines. $1.7 million 2003-2008
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Apart from the large ITRs announced today, the NSF is also
funding a wide range of smaller projects—bringing total ITR funding
this year to $169 million. In addition to the eight large projects, more
than 175 mid-sized projects have been awarded up to $4 million for three
to five years, and 180 smaller projects will each receive up to $500,000
for up to three years. The projects were selected from a landslide of
more than 2,500 merit-reviewed proposals from the academic community.
UCSD researchers are PIs or co-PIs on seven newly-funded projects:
Medium ITRs
- Real-Time Data Aware System for Earth, Oceanographic,
and Environmental Applications. PI: John Orcutt (Scripps
Institution of Oceanography) Co-PIs: Frank Vernon (SIO),
Arcot Rajasekar (SDSC), and Bertram Ludaescher
(SDSC). This project will focus on dynamically adapting downstream processing
and modeling as multidisciplinary sensors are added to or removed from
a real-time data network. The research will also include work on methods
to detect automatically the occurrence of interesting phenomena in real-time
data streams and to trigger responses such as data analysis, modeling
computations or turning on or off parts of the sensor network. The project
will also investigate how to extend data grid ideas to include real-time
data streams, permit feedback between observations and the operation
of the observing network,and integrate knowledge about the event and
location from peer-reviewed, on-line journals. $2,344,407 2003-05
- Asynchronous Execution for Scalable Simulation of Cell
Physiology. PI: Scott Baden (Computer Science and Engineering).
This project will develop novel programming methodology and a run-time
library for large-scale biological simulations. More generally, it is
expected to yield new knowledge about software techniques in support
of scheduling and latency-tolerant formulation. $550,000 2003-06
- Optical Control in Semiconductors for Spintronics and
Quantum Information Processing. PI: Lu Sham (Physics)
This ITR program is focused on fundamental studies of control of quantum
electron dynamics, and the development of 'designer' electronic processes
for applications in the emerging fields of spin-based electronics and
quantum information processing. New courses on nanotechnology and quantum
information science will also be developed at UCSD and the two other
institutions that are part of this collaborative ITR—Rice University,
and the University of Florida. $525,000 2003-08
Small ITRs
- Materials for InAs MOSFETs: The Enabling Transistor for
Low Power, 100 GHz+ Information Transfer and Processing. PI: Andrew
Kummel (Chemistry-Biochemistry) This project addresses atomic
and electronic structures formed by a series of vapor deposited oxides
onto antimony-based semiconductor alloys (InAs, GaSb, AlSb, and their
alloys). The aim is to achieve understanding of basic mechanisms of
Fermi level unpinning of oxide-ternary semiconductor interfaces. $499,859
2003-06
- Universal Compression of Infinite Alphabets with Applications
to Language Modeling. PI: Alon Orlitsky (ECE). This
project builds on a new approach to the compression of strings over
large alphabets. Orlitsky has already shown that patterns of strings
drawn according to independent and identically distributed random variables
can be compressed as if the distribution were known in advance. Now,
he will investigate sequential compression algorithms that compress
the sequence one symbol at a time, practical algorithms that can be
performed using few operations per symbol, and extensions of these results
to distributions with memory; such distributions model several practical
applications. $428,000 2003-07
- Querying Sequentially Accessed XML Data. PI: Yannis
Papakonstantinou (CSE) Co-PI’s: Alin Deutsch,
Victor Vianu (CSE) and Bertram Ludaescher (SDSC).
High-volume data streams exchanged in XML form are becoming crucial
to a wide range of applications in the scientific, government and business
domains. This project will develop a comprehensive approach to querying
data streams in XML form, covering the spectrum from formal foundations
all the way to systems. The expected outcome of the project will be
a qualitatively new architecture, technology and query processor for
XML data streams, with impact on a wide range of applications. The approach
will be tested on seismic data provided by the UCSD-based ROADNet project,
but the research is expected to have a broad impact on voluminous XML
data streams. $375,000 2003-06
- Cryptography: from user needs to protocol design. PI:
Daniele Micciancio (CSE). Co-PI: Russell Impagliazzo
(CSE). This project investigates approaches to making cryptography easier
to use at three levels: easier for the protocol designer, for the software
applications, and the policy maker. In doing so, researchers aim to
facilitate increased and better informed use of cryptography. $300,000
2003-05
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