Fundamental Algorithms

This large National SCience Foundation Information Technology Research (NSF ITR) is an umbrella grant for many CITRIS activities, and supports both fundamental work in the above listed CITRIS technologies (rows) and driving applications (columns), as well as synergies among them.
The driving applications include
(1) boosting efficiency of energy production and consumption, and
(2) saving lives and property and establishing emergency response IT infrastructure in the wake of disasters, among others.

The BRAND program is a development and demonstration of two network applications that require the capacity and/or low latency of an open testbed communications network such as that provided by the Next Generation Internet (NGI) system program at DARPA. The resulting demonstrations created by this effort (sensor Web and networked MEMS CAD) will demonstrate the benefits of an open research network capability based on an optical transport system and associated high performance/high capacity networks and management systems that are ultimately necessary to enable these new stressing applications.

Many software security issues cannot be addressed without a specification defining what security means. This project investigates secure API's and disciplined styles of programming that reduce the likelihood of security flaws and combines two related efforts: first, development of specification languages that enhance security without much cost to programmers, and second, tools that enforce these disciplines, such as the efficient insertion of security monitors into existing programs.

Due to the improvements in performance in computer power and storage capacity achieved over the last decade, today's data-intensive scientific applications and simulations are capable of generating massive amounts of data. Sensor networks will soon consist of thousands of (possibly moving) sensors, distributed in a three- dimensional (3D) environment and recording multiple parameters. Standard visualization techniques are not capable to render the huge data sets at interactive frame rates.

Our new notion of a continuous coding for a probability density starts from a general mathematical intuition: if densities are matched, rather than evaluated (as in classical learning theory), then they need not be represented explicitly, but merely need to be coded. The two criteria of uniqueness and continuity that a coding must satisfy are not very restrictive. Indeed, this is exactly why a coding is easier than an explicit representation. Given a density to be coded, is it possible to characterize a minimal coding?

A geotechnical centrifuge is used to conduct model tests to study geotechnical problems such as the strength, stiffness and capacity of foundations for bridges and buildings, settlement of embankments, stability of slopes, earth retaining structures, tunnel stability and seawalls. Other applications include explosive cratering, contaminant migration in ground water, frost heave and sea ice. The centrifuge may be useful for scale modeling of any large-scale nonlinear problem for which gravity is a primary force.
Reason for Model Testing on the Centrifuge

The continual and compelling need for accurately and efficiently simulating dynamical behavior of physical systems arising from a wide variety of applications has led to increasingly large and complex models. Reduced-order modeling (ROM) techniques, also called model reduction or macromodeling, play an indispensable role in providing efficient computational prototyping tools to replace such large-scale models by approximate smaller models, which are capable of capturing critical dynamical behavior and faithfully preserving essential properties of the larger models.