http://www.cs.fsu.edu/ Computer Science News http://www.cs.fsu.edu/site/calendar.php?id=7An interdisciplinary FSU team, coordinated by SCS professor Fredrik Ronquist, has received a $2.25 million NSF grant to develop MorphBank. The team of PIs include faculty at the Departments of Biological Science (A. Mast, G. Erickson), Computer Science (D. Gaitros, R. van Engelen), Mathematics (G. Erlebacher), and at the School of Information (G. Riccardi, C. Jorgensen, P. Jorgenson). MorphBank is a web image database of biological images, used for comparative studies of animals
and plants. http://www.cs.fsu.edu/site/calendar.php?id=8The department congratulates Alec Yasinsac for his promotion to associate professor and being tenured. The department also congratulates Michael Burmester and Gary Tyson for being tenured. The new position and status for all three faculty are effective Fall 2005.
http://www.cs.fsu.edu/site/calendar.php?id=11The CS department received a Graduate Assistance for Areas of National Need (GAANN) award from the Department of Education. This $633,360 award will provide PhD fellowships for five students for three years starting in the Fall 2006 semester. http://www.cs.fsu.edu/site/calendar.php?id=10The Department of Defense has re-certified FSU's Information Security program for
compliance with with NIETP (National IA Education & Training Program) training standards,
and re-affirmed FSU's designation as a National Center of Academic Excellence in Information
Assurance Education for academic years 2006-2009.

For more information about this award and FSU's Information Security programs, please visit:
http://www.nsa.gov/ia/academia/acade00001.cfm
http://www.sait.fsu.edu/home.shtml http://www.cs.fsu.edu/site/calendar.php?id=13Michael Burmester is honored as the first professor to recieve the Harris Endowed Professorship from Harris Corporation. This professorship honors faculty for outstanding achievement in research, teaching, and service. http://www.cs.fsu.edu/site/calendar.php?id=14Carl and Ermine Owenby have established the Owenby Scholarship in Computer Science. This scholarship is designated to help undergraduates complete the Computer Science degree. Carl Owenby is an FSU CS Alumnus, graduating in the Fall 2005 semester. http://www.cs.fsu.edu/site/calendar.php?id=15This award program is designed to recognize FSU faculty who are several years advanced into their careers. This competition is intended to help identify FSU's future academic leaders.

For more information, please visit the Developing Scholar Award Web Page. http://www.cs.fsu.edu/site/calendar.php?id=18Dr. Steve Leach has been in the department since it was established in 1984. Throughout the years, he has taught almost all of the undergraduate courses in CS curriculum and also served as the associate chair for many years. He received several teaching and advising awards, including the University Distinguished Teaching Professor Award in 1995.

Steve Leach will be serving as the Assistant Dean at the FSU Panama City campus and his service to our department will be greatly missed. http://www.cs.fsu.edu/site/calendar.php?id=25Piyush Kumar has received the prestigious NSF CAREER award.
The National Science Foundation offers these awards in
support of the early career-development activities of those
teacher-scholars who most effectively integrate research
and education within the context of the mission of their
organization. The title of his grant is "Core-Sets for
Geometric Optimization and Their Applications." The award
is for $400,000 over a five year period. http://www.cs.fsu.edu/site/calendar.php?id=22The 2006 Computer Science Homecoming "Grads Made Good" speech will
be given by Tom Leonard, an bachelor's and master's alumnus who
went on to found a series of successful businesses. Tom will will
talk about lessons he has learned, both as a student at FSU and as
an entrepreneur in information technology. Tom's first product
was the TML Pascal compiler
(http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.04/04.06/Jun88Letters/index.html).
His current business is RedRocket solutions.
(http://www.redrocketsolutions.com/).

2:00-3:30 P.M., Friday, November 17th
Room 499 Dirac Science Library http://www.cs.fsu.edu/site/calendar.php?id=28The department congratulates Ashok Srinivasan for his promotion to associate professor and being tenured. Both his promotion and tenure will become effective starting in the Fall 2007 semester.
http://www.cs.fsu.edu/site/calendar.php?id=27Title: Flow-Sensitive Program Analysis for Speculative Parallelization

Abstract:

The rise of chip multiprocessors (CMP) featuring tens to hundreds of processing units on a single chip promises to significantly boost the performance of desktop systems, rivaling the performance of yesterday's supercomputers. Supercomputing applications typically exploit a high degree of parallelism present in the application's computational tasks, which allows multiple processing units to work on solving the problem simultaneously to obtain a solution fast.
However, common software applications are not written for specialized supercomputer architectures and lack sufficient explicit exposure of parallelism to gain speedups from CMPs automatically. Therefore, a successful exploitation of CMPs requires a rethinking of design, coding, and debugging by application developers. Programming languages and program annotations that natively support parallel
concepts will be increasingly more successful, as well as programming languages in which sequential code can be more easily converted into parallel code.

This research investigates the combination and enhancements of several successful approaches to expose more parallelism in program code automatically. Firstly, the investigators will merge flow-sensitive loop-variant variable detection and optimization with the chains of recurrences (CR) algebra together with the NLVI (nonlinear variable interval) test that is based on interval theory. This aims to reduce the number of false positives prohibiting parallelization
of loops with array dependences. Secondly, techniques for speculative parallelization of loops will be enhanced with a new run-time
dependence analysis algorithm based on the CR algebra, NLVI test, and the theory of axiomatic semantics. Thirdly, a set of program annotations will be introduced to support speculative
parallelization. This benefits source-to-source compilers and programmers who can leverage these annotations to extract more parallelism from loops by exercising application-specific knowledge. http://www.cs.fsu.edu/site/calendar.php?id=32A new interdisciplinary undergraduate degree program in Computer Criminology will be offered by FSU starting in Fall 2007. This new degree program was developed jointly by the Department of Computer Science and the College of Criminology and Criminal Justice.

Computer crime can be broadly defined as any criminal activity that involves the use of information technology. These crimes include illegally accessing information, intercepting data, damaging or deleting data, interfering with the functioning of a computer system, identity theft, etc. Information-related crime and computer/network security issues are already major concerns.

These issues affect all levels of business, government, and academia and have grown in importance as most organizations link their networked computer environments to the Internet. A Computer Criminology student will learn both how to use computers to facilitate the study of crime and will study how crimes are accomplished through the use of computers.

We anticipate there will be a significant demand for graduates of the Computer Criminology program. It is well known that there is a shortage of information technology experts. Similarly, there is a pressing need for information technology specialists to handle issues related to information crime, cyberforensics, and computer/network security. However, there is also a need for computer skills for the prevention, detection, and study of all types of crime, whether or not they involve the use of information technology. Graduates of the program will be prepared to work either for law enforcement agencies as information crime specialists, within companies or organizations as network security specialists, or within academia and government to study the causes of crime and the best methods for its prevention. http://www.cs.fsu.edu/site/calendar.php?id=34Computer Science 2007 Newsletter can be found at this link.
2007 CS Newsletter http://www.cs.fsu.edu/site/calendar.php?id=42Betty Stanton is a recipient of the FSU Undergraduate Advising Award for 2007-2008. This award is established to honor faculty or staff for excellence in undergraduate advising. http://www.cs.fsu.edu/site/calendar.php?id=43Andy Wang has received the prestigious NSF CAREER award. The National Science Foundation offers these awards in support of the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who most effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their organization. The title of his grant is "Tags: A Unifying Primitive to Build Storage Data Paths for Swiftly Evolving Workloads and Storage Media." The award is for $400,000 over a five year period. http://www.cs.fsu.edu/site/calendar.php?id=45Due to the efforts of Mike Burmester, the Center for Security and Assurance in Information Technology (C-SAIT) was established this year as an official FSU center. C-SAIT is dedicated to the synthesis of education and research through combined focus on the theory and applications of Information Security. C-SAIT is a Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education as designated by the National Security Agency. Establishing C-SAIT will allow the CS department and other FSU units to continue to apply for various security related grants. http://www.cs.fsu.edu/site/calendar.php?id=46Peng Chen, Woon Hyung Cho, Zhenhai Duan and Xin Yuan received the best paper award at IEEE GLOBECOM in 2008. There were 2854 paper submissions to this conference that year. http://www.cs.fsu.edu/site/calendar.php?id=37The CS department has hired two new assistant professors that started in the Fall 2007 semester. Feifei Li received his PhD in Computer Science from Boston University in the Summer of 2007. His research interests include security and privacy in both streaming and relational database systems, management and indexing of large databases, spatio-temporal database applications, and stream and sensor databases. Zhenghao Zhang received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His research interests include network security systems, scheduling algorithm design, performance analysis, wireless access networks, cross-layer design, optical networks, and wireless sensor networks. http://www.cs.fsu.edu/site/calendar.php?id=40Dr. Xiuwen Liu is a recipient of the FSU Developing Scholar Award for 2007-2008. The Developing Scholar Award is based on evidence of a clearly established program of teaching, research and creativity lasting over a number of years.
http://www.cs.fsu.edu/site/calendar.php?id=41Mainline Information Systems has established the Mainline Information Systems Professorship to honor a Computer Science faculty member who exemplifies excellence in the performance of teaching, research, and service. This is the first award for this professorship and Dr. Baker will be the Mainline Information Systems Professor for the next three academic years.
http://www.cs.fsu.edu/site/calendar.php?id=36Dr. Liu recieves 4-year NSF grant with total of $655981 and first increment of 157,697.

ABSTRACT

Project: Novel Computational Methods for the Analysis, Synthesis and
Simulation of Shapes of Surfaces

Proposal Number: DMS-0713012

PI: Washington Mio
Co-PI: Xiuwen Liu

The main goal of this project is to develop novel computational models and strategies to analyze the shapes of spherical surfaces in Euclidean 3-space.
In recent years, there has been a substantial progress in the computational study of shapes of curves with methodology based on the geometry of infinite-dimensional spaces of curves. However, attempts to extend these approaches to surfaces have encountered tall obstacles. In this project, an effective computational solution is proposed that encompasses all fundamental aspects of the problem. Shape spaces will be constructed equipped with geodesic metrics, which will provide a natural environment for the quantitative study of shapes of surfaces. A full set of computational tools will be designed and implemented to quantify shape similarity and divergence, to develop statistical models from samples, to synthesize shapes from learned models, and to analyze and simulate shape dynamics. Techniques will be developed to convert a noisy point-cloud representation of a surface of genus zero to a minimum-distortion parametrization over the standard sphere. Alignment algorithms will be designed to best match the geometric features of surfaces and to extract optimal parametrizations for modeling a family of shapes. Riemannian metrics inherited from weighted Sobolev spaces will capture geometric similarities and discrepancies between shapes to any desired order. The project will focus on first-order metrics, as they offer a good balance between geometric accuracy and robustness for computations.
Due to the typical complexity of the geometry of surfaces, many algorithms will employ a coarse-to-fine approach both for the processing of point clouds and triangular meshes. Localization of spherical shapes in the frequency or spatio-temporal domains will also be employed for
statistical modeling and to achieve computational efficiency.
The proposed research on shapes and forms of 3D objects is motivated by a series of problems arising in areas such as computer vision, medical imaging, and computational biology. Shape is a key attribute associated with patterns arising in geometric data and its effective computational representation and analysis will have an impact on application domains such as the recognition of objects or targets from various modalities of images, modeling brain anatomy and functions, the simulation of biological growth and motion, and anatomical changes associated with diseases and aging.
As such, the proponents will make the tools of shape modeling and analysis developed under this project available to the broader research community and will also actively pursue collaborations with researchers in these areas. http://www.cs.fsu.edu/site/calendar.php?id=47FSU has already been re-designated as a National Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education (CAEIAE). FSU has been now also been designated as a National Center of Academic Excellence in Research (CAE-R). The goal of these programs is to reduce vulnerability in the national information infrastructure by promoting higher education and research in IA and producing a growing number of professionals with IA expertise in various disciplines. The vision for the CAE-R program is to establish a process that will present opportunities for IA research centers to investiage solutions to securing the global information grid and provide NSA, DHS, and other federal agencies with insight that can support advanced academic research and development capabilities. http://www.cs.fsu.edu/site/calendar.php?id=48Advanced Micro Devices has donated hardware for a 32-core shared memory machine hosted by the CS Department for doing research in parallel computation and geometric optimization. Both AMD engineers as well FSU researchers are currently using the machine for various research projects. The machine has 8 quad core Shanghai CPUs with 128GB of RAM, 128GB of Intel SSD storage, and more than 6TB of hard drive space. The machine was assembled by Colfax International.

http://www.cs.fsu.edu/site/calendar.php?id=50Bo Sun and Zhenghao Zhang received a best paper award at IEEE Internationa Conference on Communications (ICC) in 2009. There were about 3000 paper submissions to this conference. 14 papers received the best paper awards among the different tracks in the conference. More information can be found at:
http://www.comsoc.org/confs/icc/2009/bpa.html http://www.cs.fsu.edu/site/calendar.php?id=51Title: "Reducing Virus Propagation in Mobile Devices".
PI: Gary Tyson
co-PI: David Whalley
Amount: $499,981
This grant is a 3 year grant from the NSF

Abstract:

Mobile computer systems and software are increasingly subject to a host of security threats and malicious software (malware) attacks due to vulnerabilities in their coding. The difficulty in achieving secure systems is further compounded by prevalence of unsophisticated users and the increasing reliance on third party software integration by enabling software module plugins for such user applications as web browsers and search engines. Traditional approaches have sought to provide an absolute defense to specific malware attacks by patching software vulnerabilities or detecting and blocking malware. One difficulty with these approaches for small mobile platforms is that the design constraints on these devices often favor low power to maximize battery life over enhancements to support security protocols. The current situation also represents a programmatic arms race between patching existing vulnerabilities and exploiting vulnerabilities in new application code. This research develops a new secure mobile computing environment based on current mobile technology widely available as consumer end products that seeks to use program differentiation to reduce the propagation rate of malware when a software vulnerability exists. This results not in the direct elimination of security vulnerabilities, but in the dramatic reduction in scope of any security exploit to infect large numbers of systems. By constraining the outbreak to only a few systems, counter measures can be employed before significant economic damage can result. By modifying aspects of the execution of the application, application executables can be permuted into unique versions for each distributed instance. Differentiation is achieved using hardware and/or systems software modifications. Areas of differentiation include function call/return and system call semantics, as well as a proposal for hardware-supported Instruction Register File access and intrusion detection monitoring. Differentiation of executables hinders analysis for vulnerabilities as well as prevents the exploitation of a vulnerability in a single distributed version from propagating to other instances of that application. By focusing on prevention of malware propagation in addition to traditional absolute defenses, we target the economics of malware in order to make attacks prohibitively expensive and infeasible. http://www.cs.fsu.edu/site/calendar.php?id=52Title: "Collaborative Research: Ultra Low Latency Optical Packet Switched Interconnects with Novel Switching Paradigm"
PI: Zhenghao Zhang
Amount: $150,000
This is a 3 year grant from the NSF.

Abstract:

With the advances of modern computer architectures, interconnects are playing an ever increasingly important role for processor interconnection. Advanced optical switching technologies, such as optical packet switching and wavelength-division-multiplexing, provide a platform to exploit the huge capacity of optical fiber to meet the increasing needs. This research proposes a new switching paradigm - optical cut-through with electronic packet buffering, and systematically investigates the fundamental and challenging issues in the optical interconnect under this switching scheme, with the objective of designing cost-effective ultra-low latency and pragmatic interconnects for future high-performance computing and communications systems. A unique feature of the proposed interconnect is that those packets that do not cause contentions can pass the interconnect directly in optical form and experience minimum delay, while only those that cause contentions are buffered. This research proposes to combine optical packet switching with electronic buffering, such that the interconnect will enjoy both fast switching and large buffering capacity. This research will (1) design the switching fabric and packet scheduling algorithms, (2) design practical Forward Error Control (FEC) for the interconnect, and (3) conduct extensive performance evaluations by means of simulation and emulation tools and analytical models. http://www.cs.fsu.edu/site/calendar.php?id=53Title="Small Efficient Ranking and Aggregate Query Processing for Probabilistic Data."
PI: FeiFei Li
Amount: $328,831
This is a 3 year grant from the NSF.

Abstract:

When dealing with massive quantities of data, ranking and aggregate queries are powerful techniques for focusing attention on the most important answers. Many applications that produce such massive quantities of data inherently introduce uncertainty in the same time, for example, probabilistic match in data integration, imprecise measurements from sensors, fuzzy duplicates in data cleaning, inconsistency in scientific data. Hence, the importance of these queries is even greater in probabilistic data, where a relation can encode exponentially many possible worlds. Uncertainty opens the gate to many possible definitions for ranking and aggregate queries. This project systematically examines the underlying properties associated with the rich semantics of ranking and aggregate queries for large amounts of probabilistic data. More importantly, this project investigates the issue of how to design novel and scalable algorithms for processing these queries efficiently in various settings, such as the offline, centralized environment, distributed systems and the streaming model. With the emergence of probabilistic data in many important application domains, the demand for understanding and processing the ranking and aggregate queries efficiently from the scientific community and beyond (e.g., government and military agencies) is expected to intensify in the coming years. The results of this project lay down a firm foundation for this important problem. For further information, such as publications, data sets and source code, please see the project website at http://www.cs.fsu.edu/~lifeifei/rankaggprob.