海角论坛

March 17, 2015鈥擳hree Georgetown 海角论坛 professors from the Department of Computer Science鈥擫isa Singh, Grace Hui Yang, and Wenchao Zhou鈥攔ecently received awards from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The NSF funds research and education in science and engineering through grants, contracts, and cooperative agreements.

厂颈苍驳丑鈥檚 , 鈥淧lanning the Future of Big Data R&D,鈥� will run through December 2015 and is part of the NSF鈥檚 Big Data Science & Engineering Program. is developing a report that will provide guidance for furthering big data research, development, and education.

鈥淕iven the vast amount of data that is accumulated every day, we need to pause and think about how to leverage this data for the greater good,鈥� she explained. 鈥淲e need to consider privacy, security, and ethics challenges, and think outside the box to develop systems that can adapt to changing data environments. Just as importantly, we need to determine intelligent ways to convert this data to actionable knowledge that can be used to advance both the traditional sciences and social sciences.鈥�

To gather content for the report, Singh proposed a workshop that would 鈥渆ngage a range of experts鈥�to share concerns and ideas.鈥� The took place in late January 2015 in Washington, DC. Speakers and panelists included Tom Kalil from the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy and Andrew Moore, Dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.

and received awards from the NSF鈥檚 Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program. awards support 鈥渏unior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education, and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations.鈥�

Yang鈥檚 CAREER , 鈥淪tatistical Information Retrieval Modeling for Complex Research,鈥� will focus on creating 鈥渘ext-generation search engines.鈥�

鈥淚 view search as a much more complex process than Google鈥檚 query box and 10 returned blue links,鈥� Yang explained. 鈥淐urrent search engines leave too much burden on users to make decisions about reformulating smart enough queries. [They] examine quite a lot of documents for non-trivia search tasks, such as planning a family trip to Paris or writing a survey paper on hydropower.鈥�

Estimated to run through January 2020, Yang鈥檚 project 鈥渁ims to provide both theoretical and practical support to complex and tasked-based search.鈥�

鈥淎 lot of user and search engine interactions are modeled and used to provide more effective search results,鈥� Yang said. 鈥淲e are passionate about developing novel algorithms and more powerful search engines in this new dynamic information retrieval paradigm.鈥�

Zhou鈥檚 CAREER , 鈥淒iagnosing Distributed Systems with Provenance,鈥� is projected to last through May 2020 and will focus on improving the functionality of distributed computer systems. “The award will propel my research and teaching agenda towards the long-term vision of enhancing the reliability and security of distributed systems in an automated manner,鈥� Zhou said.

Distributed systems are collections of computers that are connected by networks and operate with a user-specified protocol. 鈥淒espite the ubiquitous adoption of distributed systems,鈥� Zhou wrote in his proposal, 鈥渄esigning and deploying distributed systems remains challenging because of the ever-increasing scale, complexity, and unpredictability of system executions.鈥�

Zhou鈥檚 project will introduce 鈥渁 framework that leverages dependency information exposed during system execution for diagnosing distributed systems.鈥� The work will provide 鈥渉olistic support for diagnosing practical applications that concern performance, availability, and security.鈥� He also plans to develop new tools that will be freely distributed, and his findings will be incorporated into networking and database courses.