An interdisciplinary study conducted by researchers at Virginia Tech suggests the secret to obtaining your summertime fitness goals might not be the amount of weight you’re bench pressing or how many miles you run, but generating friendly competition to keep you one step ahead of your fitness buddies.
The concept of friendly competition in group exercise being explored by the researchers uses a smartwatch app that could help people in a group exercise program get —and stay — more active.
At the heart of the group exercise research is a Fitbit-like smartwatch and its software developed by Andrey Esakia, a Ph.D. candidate in Virginia Tech’s Department of Computer Science who worked on the project to study the effects of technology in group physical activity. The work is supported by a multidisciplinary seed grant from Virginia Tech’s Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology.
Exascale computing — the ability to perform calculations at 1 billion billion per second — is what researchers are striving to push processors to do in the next decade. That’s 1,000 times faster than the first petascale computer that came into existence in 2008.
Achieving efficiency will be paramount to building high-performance parallel computing systems if applications are to run in environments of enormous scale and also limited power.
A team of researchers in the Department of Computer Science in Virginia Tech’s College of Engineering discovered a key to what could keep supercomputing on the road to the ever-faster processing times needed to achieve exascale computing — and what policymakers say is necessary to keep the United States competitive in industries from everything to cybersecurity to ecommerce.
“Parallel computing is everywhere when you think about it,”said Bo Li, computer science Ph.D. candidate and first author on the paper being presented about the team’s research this month. “From making Hollywood movies to managing cybersecurity threats to contributing to milestones in life science research, making strides in processing times is a priority to get to the next generation of supercomputing.”
Daphne Yao, an associate professor of computer science, is the principle investigator on a new three-year $1.2 million Office of Naval Research (ONR) grant, title “Data-driven Vulnerability Repair in Programs with a Cloud Analytics Architecture for Practical Deployment.” Na Meng, computer science assistant professor, and Trent Jaeger, computer science professor at Penn State University, are co-principle investigators on the grant. Yao is also the Elizabeth and James E. Turner Jr. ’56 and L-3 Fellow.
Abstract:
The proposed effort is toward a secure software ecosystem that enables the automatic attack detection, vulnerability localization, code repair against attacks including stealthy exploits. In this project, we will focus on vulnerability location and code repair that leverage and build upon existing security detection solutions, i.e., detection-guided localization and repair. In preparation for near-term deployment, we will also develop a new cloud data analytics framework that minimizes the client-side effort and substantially enhances the transparency and usability of data-driven security tools.
We already have smartphones, smart clothing, and smart appliances, but emerging “smart cities” are still a concept of our imagined future. A Virginia Tech team wants those smart cities to feature zero energy, zero outage, and zero congestion. Their tools: big data and interdisciplinary technology.
Walid Saad, the Stephen O. Lane Junior Faculty Fellow and assistant professor in electrical and computer engineering; Harpreet Dhillon, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering; and Naren Ramakrishnan, the Thomas L. Phillips Professor of Engineering and director of the Discovery Analytics Center in the Department of Computer Science, are leading a three-year, $1.4 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to develop a new planning framework for smart, connected, and sustainable communities.
The goal of the program is to introduce undergraduates, with interests and background in both computing and music, in multidisciplinary research that creates computational and artistic approaches for exploring musical scores, with possible applications for automated performance guidance and advanced musical analysis.
In addition to serving as a Computer Science faculty, Tilevich is also pursuing a parallel career as a professional clarinetist, engaged with various orchestral and chamber music ensembles nationwide as well as in solo performances. Influenced by his music background and experiences, he has recently become interested in music informatics, applying computational approaches to music. The ideas that influenced this work stemmed from his recent work with students Galina Belolipetski and Arman Bahraini.
The world is increasingly connected through not only smart phones and email, but new and hungry gadgets, such as webcams, sensors, and monitors, which demand an ever-larger slice of the bandwidth pie.
Ali R. Butt, professor in the Department of Computer Science in Virginia Tech’s College of Engineering, was recently awarded a $516,000 grant to examine how to keep those gadgets from depleting the cloud computing bandwidth that the internet currently depends on.
“We are now just beginning to experience living super-interconnected lives,” said Butt. “Imagine five or 10 years from now when we will live in smart houses that use all kinds of sensors to monitor your safety, adjust the cooling or heating, and many other little devices and things that are only beginning to be used. These things require valuable computing abilities and information on the cloud to work properly and be useful.”
Butt, who also holds a courtesy appointment in electrical and computer engineering, is the principal investigator on the collaborative research project. He is partnering with Muhammad Shahzad, assistant professor of computer science from North Carolina State University, to design new techniques for massive data management and processing in the cloud, as well as study the actual nodes computers use to transfer information. The project is funded by the National Science Foundation.
Wu Feng, Elizabeth and James E. Turner Jr. Faculty Fellow, and colleagues Adrian Sandu (CS), Eric DeSturler (Math), Chris Roy (AOE), and Danesh Tafti (ME) received funding from AFOSR for a project entitled “A Deep-Learning Approach towards Auto-Tuning CFD Codes”.
Wu Feng
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Francisco Servant’s paper was accepted in the International Conference of Software Engineering 2017: Francisco Servant, James A. Jones, “Fuzzy Fine-grained Code-history Analysis”. Proceedings of the 39th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2017), Buenos Aires, Argentina, May 2017. Dr. Servant also gave a talk about his research at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Francisco Servant
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Chris North, professor and associate director of the Discovery Analytics Center, along with colleagues Naren Ramakrishnan and Nicholas Polys received new funding from General Dynamics for a project entitled “CHITA: Computer Human Interactive Text Analytics”.
Dr. Chris North
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Ing-Ray Chen, along with his U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) collaborators Dr. Jin-Hee Cho and Dr. Ananthram Swami, won the 2016 ARL Publication Award. The award ceremony was held on 11/8/2016 at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory in Adelphi, MD. This award goes to Dr. Chen for his outstanding contributions toward a group effort on the publication “A Survey of Trust Management for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks”. This publication provides a survey of trust management schemes developed for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) and discusses generally accepted classifications, potential metrics, and trust metrics in MANETs. Future research areas on trust management in MANETs based on the concept of social and cognitive networks are also discussed in this publication. The team’s outstanding contributions reflect great credit upon them, the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, the U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command, and the Department of the Army.
The goal of the program is to introduce undergraduates, with interests and background in both computing and music, in multidisciplinary research that creates computational and artistic approaches for exploring musical scores, with possible applications for automated performance guidance and advanced musical analysis.
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Eli Tilevich
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Ed Fox took part in the Coordinated, Behaviorally-Aware Recovery for Transportation & Power Disruptions project. Read More
Edward A. Fox
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Daphne Yao and Xiaokui Shu from IBM Research gave a 1.5-hour-long tutorial at the 23rd ACM Computer and Communications Security (CCS) Conference at the Hofburg Palace in Vienna, Austria on October 25th. The tutorial is on program anomaly detection techniques, specifically how to use data analytic and program analysis methods to accurately predict anomalous behaviors of complex software and protect critical systems against zero-day exploits. ACM CCS is a top computer security conference with record breaking 1,000+ attendees this year. The Yao group is one of the leading research groups on systematizing and democratizing data-driven security techniques for programs. Xiaokui is a former PhD student of Dr. Yao, who graduated in the spring of 2016.
Lenwood Heath gave the Clavius Distinguished Lecture in the Department of Computer and Information Science at Fordham University in New York City on Thursday, November 10. Read More
Dr. Heath
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Kirk Cameron (PI) and co-PIs Ali Butt, Yili Hong, Layne Watson, Danfeng Yao, and Godmar Back received funding for a significant new project entitled, “VarSys: Managing variability in high-performance computing systems.” This high-profile award will allow the PIs and their students to pursue important research in systems, and add to the visibility of stack@cs and the CS department. Read More
Kirk CameronAli ButtDanfeng YaoLayne WatsonGodmar Back
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Daphne Yao and her collaborator at Texas A&M Chemical Engineering Department, Victor Ugaz, are excited to start their new inter-disciplinary NSF EAGER project on anonymous crowdsensing for citizen science, specifically for early epidemic detection. Daphne’s group is working on designing novel and scalable cryptographic signature schemes to support anonymous-yet-accountable sensing. If successful, this anonymous sensing framework together with the miniature smartphone-powered bacteria-testing PCR devices being invented in Victor’s lab will allow volunteers to contribute to national or global epidemic monitoring anywhere and anytime, without any privacy concerns. The NSF’s EAGER program is specifically designed for this type of new and high-risk high-reward research.
Daphne is an associate professor of computer science, Turner Fellow, and L-3 Fellow at Virginia Tech. Professor Ugaz is the holder of the Charles D. Holland ’53 Professorship and Thaman Professorship at Texas A&M University.
Danfeng Yao
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Eli Tilevich received funding from NSF for his project entitled, “Addressing Resource Scarcity via Distributed Mobile Services.”
Eli Tilevich
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Steve Edwards’s newly funded NSF project, “Promoting a Growth Mindset Using Automated Feedback” is a collaboration with Dr. Manuel Perez at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and with Berea College.
Yang Cao’s newly funded NSF project, “Identifying and modeling the advantages of regulating protein abundance in Caulobacter crescentus” is a collaboration with John Tyson (VT Biological Sciences) and Kathleen Ryan (UC Berkeley).
Yang Cao
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Ed Fox (PI) and Andrea Kavanaugh received funding from NSF for a new project entitled, “Global Event and Trend Archive Research (GETAR).”
Edward A. Fox
Andrea Kavanaugh
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Chandan Reddy’s newly funded NSF project is entitled, “An Integrated Predictive Modeling Framework for Crowdfunding Environments.”
Chandan Reddy
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T.M. Murali and Kurt Luther received NIH funding for their collaborative project “Using Crowdsourced Design to Visualize Effects of Environmental Chemicals on Signaling Networks”.
T.M. MuraliKurt Luther
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Adrian Sandu received NSF funding for his proposal “Multirate Multimethod Time Integration Algorithms for Multiscale Multiphysics Problems”.
Adrian Sandu
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C.T. Lu received support from Northrop Grumman for “Cyber and Advanced Data Analytics and Processing.”
Dr. Lu
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Wu Feng and PhD student Vignesh Adhinarayanan received the Best Paper Award at the IEEE International Symposium on Workload Characterization.
Computer Science Department faculty and students presented six research papers and one tutorial at the 22nd ACM Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2016), held in August in San Francisco. KDD is the premier annual international conference on knowledge discovery and data mining. Virginia Tech was among the top-10 represented university and industry groups at KDD. In addition the most viewed video and the second most downloaded papers at KDD were written by Virginia Tech CS PhD students and faculty.
The Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation recognizes Anil Kumar Vullikanti, an assistant professor of computer science in the College of Engineering and the Biocomplexity Institute, who develops methods to forecast significant societal events, such as disease outbreaks.
He is a member of the Biocomplexity Institute’s Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Laboratory, which integrates informatics, analytics, and large complex system modeling across diverse domains to build synthetic information tools for real-world, stakeholder-defined problems.
Vullikanti studies dynamical systems, wireless networks, social networks, computation epidemiology, and the modeling, simulation, and analysis of socio-technical systems.
Danfeng Yao, an associate professor of computer science and head of the Human-Centric Security Laboratory is part of a multidisciplinary team awarded $1.1 million grant to focus on smart city infrastructure. Read More
