This Integrative Graduate Education and Research (IGERT) award supports a Ph.D. training program at the Colorado School of Mines to pursue integrative research and education in Intelligent Geosystems. Graduate students will be trained to add real time, adaptive, sensing capabilities to the monitoring of natural or engineered earth structures, e.g., an earth dam, a ground water system, or a geoconstruction site (tunneling, urban excavation, highway); the sensor networks employed will allow a geosystem to sense its environment, diagnose its condition, and make decisions to improve the management, operation, or objective of the geosystem. The goals are to advance the development of the "intelligent" geosystems while educating and training a new generation of leaders who are able to operate effectively in this emerging interdisciplinary area. The proposed IGERT program will institute an interdisciplinary and holistic approach to trainees. Key components of this IGERT award include: (1) a multi-disciplinary collaborative research team framework to foster team development and interdisciplinary innovation in intelligent geosystem concepts; (2) a leadership and teamwork development program to train the next generation of geosystem leaders for industry, academia and government; (3) a PhD minor in social/environmental ethics & policy to broaden trainee understanding beyond the technical challenges to the social, environmental and political aspects of intelligent geosystems; (4) a self-paced cross-disciplinary technical course using modules in intelligent geosystems; and (5) an internship with a government laboratory or industry in intelligent geosystems. These five components of this IGERT program will produce diverse, highly skilled leaders with the strong social and environmental awareness required in multidisciplinary environments. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating U.S. Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the interdisciplinary background, deep knowledge in a chosen discipline, and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing innovative new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries.
IGERT Grant- NSFThis award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
Numerous interesting applications have been enabled by embedded sensing technologies and significant research progress on wireless sensor networks. To further ensure a wider adoption of this emerging technology, seamless integration of wireless sensor networks with other existing networks such as WiFi and the Internet is a must. In order to address challenges that arise from such an integrated infrastructure, this project builds HeteroNet, a heterogeneous networking infrastructure, by augmenting an existing flat and homogeneous sensor network test bed. HeteroNet integrates resource constrained sensor nodes and more powerful sensing devices, stationary nodes, mobile nodes, and resource sufficient servers. These nodes communicate in wireless or wired fashion. This test bed establishes an experimental infrastructure to serve as a platform for development, testing, validation, and evaluation of the investigator's current research on middleware services for emerging applications on hybrid networks.
Research benefiting from HeteroNet includes: integration of interoperable sensor networks to the Internet, amorphous event monitoring in sensor networks, and system status monitoring for QoS-aware mobile applications.
HeteroNet enables research that is not possible via simulation or current small homogeneous sensor network test bed. The findings from the research enabled by HeteroNet have a profound impact on pushing the state-of-the-art of next-generation distributed systems and networks. The development of HeteroNet also benefits educational activities at the graduate and undergraduate levels. HeteroNet is used to facilitate and improve courses on networking, distributed systems, multimedia systems, and computer architectures at the graduate and undergraduate levels. The test bed is open to other research groups on campus to enable many as yet unforeseen CISE-relevant projects, stimulating more fruitful interactions among different researchers.
II-EN Grant- NSF
The Colorado School of Mines proposes a project to develop CONNECT (Creating Open Networks aNd Expanding Connections with Technology), a tool that provides networking assistance for attendees of conferences aimed at broadening participation. Attendees at such conferences as the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, the Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing, and the Colorado Celebration of Women in Computing, for example, consistently state that networking is an extremely valuable component of the conference. Professional networking is particularly important to underrepresented populations, as barriers to participation include a lack of mentors and the feeling of isolation that one doesn't belong. CONNECT uses technology to help BPC conference attendees develop a support network at the conference and, more importantly, sustain those connections after the conference ends. With CONNECT, attendees of a conference set networking goals prior to the event. Then, when two (or more) people want to CONNECT and exchange contact information, conference badges are scanned. CONNECT attendees also receive networking tips, a daily progress email that details which of their networking goals are being met, and suggestions on the types of people to try and meet the next day. At the end of the conference, contact information of the connections made by an attendee is shared. Feedback from an initial pilot of the system will be used to significantly improve upon the CONNECT system, adding, for example, the development of stationary CONNECT stations that do not require personnel to oversee, the ability to make a connection by transmitting a text message from a cell phone, which avoids the need to scan badges, the integration of connections with other social network systems, a face-to-face mentoring opportunity at the conference venue, a networking game component that can be used as an icebreaker, and the facilitation of forming BPC communities of individuals that share common interests. The CONNECT system will be deployed and evaluated at several different types of BPC conferences and meetings.
CONNECT Grant- NSFEmerging applications using wireless sensor networks for critical areas such as environmental monitoring and emergency response highlight the urgent need for more powerful algorithms for tracking amorphous events or phenomena with dynamic identities. Several such events may combine into a large whole or one event may disintegrate into several smaller ones. Current efforts in event detection and tracking have mostly assumed that either events remain distinct, never crossing or passing too close together to become indistinguishable, or if they do cross that they were identified prior and nothing new has formed. This project addresses the research challenges in designing and implementing a system that is capable of tracking events with or without well-defined shapes and identities in the presence of stringent energy constraints and unpredictable network failures posed by wireless sensor networks. Specific research objectives include: design and evaluation of algorithms that detect and track any types of events including amorphous phenomena with dynamic signatures and events that possess a static shape with a crisp boundary; design and evaluation of algorithms that form and reform communication structures around events of interest; and development of an integrated system that provides interfaces to high level application tasks to execute on each identified event. Successful completion of this project will result in a rich set of tools that can be used by applications monitoring all different types of events. The tools will be made publicly available via the Internet. This project provides opportunities for recruitment of female students and undergraduate students.
NeTS:Small Grant- NSFThis award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
There is a growing need for wireless networks that can sustain high data rates, are robust to interference, make efficient use of battery resources, and offer secure communications. This project introduces cooperative beamforming (CB), a novel technique that enables high throughput and power efficient communications in a secure manner. CB consists of two stages. In the first stage, the sources share their data with neighboring nodes via low-power communications. Various approaches for such information sharing are considered, with a goal to minimize queuing delays, conserve energy, and achieve high throughput. In the second stage, the cooperative nodes apply a weight to the signal received during first stage, and transmit. The weights are such that a specific objective criterion (e.g., signal to interference at the destination) is maximized. In CB, although each node uses low power, all nodes together can deliver high power to a faraway destination. This increase in power offsets power reduction due to propagation attenuation. CB can be viewed as an alternative to multihop transmission and, unlike multihop transmission, does not deplete the power resources of other nodes. Since CB can achieve long distance communication, new paths can be found to improve the overall network performance. Also, CB improves network security by avoiding eavesdroppers; unlike traditional cryptographic-based protocols that operate at higher layers and are sensitive to the broadcast nature of the transmission medium, CB improves security at the physical layer. CB will be implemented on a hardware network testbed to demonstrate how the developed techniques can revolutionize wireless communications.
