Engineering Home Contact Us

Projects

Advanced Biometric Techniques

This project is investigating various biometric sources (face, iris, hand, fingerprint, and gait) and sensors (2D, 3D, infra-red, ...) with the goal of developing more accurate biometric techniques. Our research group is supporting the government programs on the Gait Challenge Problem, the Face Recognition Grand Challenge, and the Iris Challenge Evaluation.
Faculty: Bowyer, Flynn Graduate Students: Chris Boehnen, Deborah Thomas

Algorithms and Software for Problems in Radiosurgery, Radiation Therapy, and Other Medical Applications

This project is on the design, analysis, implementation, and experimentation of new algorithms and software for solving geometric optimization problems arising in radiosurgery, radiation therapy, and other related medical applications. A key step in radiotherapy and radiosurgery is to develop a treatment plan that defines the best radiation beam arrangements and time settings to destroy the target tumor without harming the surrounding healthy tissues. At the core of the planning process is a set of substantially challenging geometric optimization problems. We have been investigating a number of such geometric optimization problems, such as beam selection, beam shaping, surgical navigation and routing, sphere packing, shape approximation, leaf sequencing, field covering and partitioning, image segmentation, and beam source path planning. This is a joint project with the Department of Radiation Oncology, University of Maryland School of Medicine. Our goal is to incorporate our new algorithms and software into clinical radiation treatment planning systems for treating cancer patients.
Faculty: Chen

Compucell: Computational Methods for Simulation of Biological Development

http://www.cse.nd.edu/~lcls/compucell/
We are creating a model that includes how genetics at the subcellular level interacts with biophysics at the cellular level to orchestrate the development of organisms. This model is implemented in a software package called CompuCell. Users define the model to simulate using BioLogo, a domain specific language that generates a simulation package for the desired model. We also work with biologists, physicists, and mathematicians in the development and validation of simulations of chicken limb development as part of a National Science Foundation Biocomplexity project.
Faculty: Izaguirre

DARTS - Design and Analysis of Real-Time Systems

http://www.cse.nd.edu/~codes/time.html
Real-time embedded systems can be found in many applications such as communication devices, transportation machines, entertainment appliances, and medical instruments. This research targets at two important problems in real-time system design: performance analysis and scheduling algorithm design. Our current focus is on dealing with uncertainty and flexibility presented in many real-time control applications.

Data Intensive Abstractions for High End Biometric Applications

http://www.cse.nd.edu/~ccl/research/abstr.shtml
Research in biometrics depends upon the effective management and processing of many terabytes of digital data. Because these workloads are so data intensive, they are very challenging to scale up to large clusters and grids. To address this, we are designing a data repository and web-enabled tools that simplify browsing and processing large data sets. Our work has produced some of the largest data analysis results to date in the field, reducing the execution time of some problems from years into days.
Faculty: Flynn, Thain

Debugging Grids with Machine Learning Techniques

http://www.cse.nd.edu/~ccl/research/debug-grids.shtml
Debugging large computing grids is notoriously hard. What can an end user do when a workload of millions of jobs experiences thousands of failures? We propose that data mining techniques are an effective way of explaining what happens to large workloads in grids. We are building and deploying tools that explain failures in computing grids of thousands of processors.
Faculty: Chawla, Thain

Designing Ultra-Dense Computers with QCAs

http://www.cse.nd.edu/~cse_proj/qca_design/
Problem: Most projections of CMOS technologies perceive an ultimate limit of about 0.05 micron feature sized devices in about 10 years." The QCA Solution: Utilize a new technology termed Quantum Cellular Automata (QCA) to build real computers orders of magnitude denser than the limits of CMOS from molecularly sized devices where information is moved by Coulombic interactions rather than current flow.
Faculty: Kogge

Dynamic Data-Driven Applications Simulation (WIPER)

http://www.cse.nd.edu/~dddas/
This project is developing an integrated Wireless Phone Based Emergency Response System (WIPER) that is capable of real-time monitoring of normal social and geographical communication and activity patterns of millions of wireless phone users, recognizing unusual human agglomerations, potential emergencies and traffic jams. WIPER will select from these massive data streams high-resolution information in the physical vicinity of a communication or traffic anomaly, and dynamically inject it into an agent-based simulation system to classify and predict the unfolding of the emergency in real time. The agent-based simulation system will dynamically steer local data collection in the vicinity of the anomaly. Multiple distributed data collection, monitoring, analysis, simulation and decision support modules will be integrated using a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to generate traffic forecasts and emergency alerts for engineering, public safety and emergency response personnel.
Faculty: Madey

Energy Aware Wireless Multimedia

http://www.cse.nd.edu/~csesys/power/index.shtml
In this research, we are concerned with the key challenge of developing techniques that transition the system components to lower power consuming states in order to achieve overall end-to-end energy saving. We utilize techniques to exploit the various power states of the mobile devices to achieve overall energy savings. We use application level cooperative scheduling of network resources to reduce the time spent in high power consuming states. We explore the practical implications of a cooperative scheduling mechanism that reduces the amount of time spent in high energy consuming idle states to achieve energy consumption reduction.
Faculty: Chandra, Huang

Environmental Simulation (NOM)

http://www.cse.nd.edu/~nom/
This project consists of an interdisciplinary team of environmental (biology, chemistry, geology) and IT scientists that is developing a stochastic model for the time-dependent evolution of NOM in the environment. The scientific objectives are to produce both a new methodology and a specific program for predicting the properties of NOM over time as it evolves from precursor molecules to eventual mineralization. The methodology being developed is a mechanistic, stochastic simulation of NOM transformations, including biological and non-biological reactions, as well as adsorption, aggregation and physical transport. It employs recent advances in agent-based simulation, web-based deployment of scientific applications, a collaboratory for sharing simulations and data, and scalable web-based database management systems to improve the reliability of the stochastic simulations and to facilitate analysis of the resulting large datasets using datamining techniques.
Faculty: Madey

ExPERTS - Energy/Power Efficient, Real-Time system Scheduling

http://www.cse.nd.edu/~bmochock/ResearchGroup/VoltageScheduling.htm
A collaborative research that aims at developing scheduling algorithms to minimize the energy/power consumption of real-time embedded systems. Some techniques being considered include Dynamic Voltage Scaling (DVS), Dynamic Frequency Scaling (DFS), Sleep Mode Control (SMC), etc.
Faculty: Hu

Intelligent Edge Devices

In this research, we design and implement prototypes of intelligent network edge devices such as routers, modems, or wireless base stations. The goal is to build sophisticated network and system management stations which exploit their location at the edge of a network and their ability to communicate directly with their end devices to provide efficient and centralized resource and network management functionalities.
Faculty: Chawla, Poellabauer, Striegel

Judicious Resource Management

This project studies the complex relationships between resources and the effect resource adaptation has on application performance. This work is driven by the insight that careless (non-cooperative) adaptation of multiple resource or multiple communicating devices can lead to sub-optimal savings in resource utilization or degraded application performance; effects which are often difficult to capture with theoretical models alone, thereby requiring extensive experimental studies.
Faculty: Poellabauer

Languages and Systems for Data Intensive Scientific Compuing

http://www.cse.nd.edu/~ccl/research/cluster.shtml
Many problems in science and engineering can only be solved by harnessing large collections of computers called cluster, clouds, or grids. Unfortunately, these systems are very challenging to use, particularly for data intensive applications. To address this, our lab is designing new languages and systems that allow end users to easily specify and execute workloads that run on hundreds of processors.
Faculty: Thain

Morph: Morphable Computer Architectures for Highly Energy-Aware Systems

http://www.cse.nd.edu/~cse_proj/morph/
Adding an Energy Gear to High Performance Embedded Systems.
Faculty: Brockman, Kogge

PIM: Processing in Memory

http://www.cse.nd.edu/~pim/
With the current trend of rapidly increasing CPU speeds and ballooning RAM capacities, the bottleneck between the processor and main memory is becoming more and more costly. PIM is an attempt to solve this problem by combining processor and memory macros on a single chip. The benefits of such an architectural shift include very high bandwidth and multi-processor scaling capabilities. These possibilities and more are being enthusiastically explored by our group.
Faculty: Brockman, Kogge

Protomol: Computational Methods for Simulation of Proteins

http://www.cse.nd.edu/~lcls/protomol/
We are developing multiscale methods for simulation of proteins and other biological molecules. These methods are useful for understanding important post-human-genome biological questions, such as the folding pathways of proteins or the relationship between structure and function. Our goal is to provide algorithms that scale with system size and simulation length. We also provide efficient and extendible implementations of these algorithms using a high performance object-oriented framework called ProtoMol. This project is funded by the National Science Foundation.
Faculty: Izaguirre

SPIRIT: Spontaneous Information and Resource Sharing

http://www.cse.nd.edu/~darts/spirit.html
The objective of this project is to overcome the limitations of mobile wireless devices by allowing them to spontaneously request access to resources (such as storage, CPUs, network bandwidths) and information (e.g., obtained from sensors) residing on wireless peers in their proximity. The project addresses the resource-efficient and reliable discovery and access of such resources and information.
Faculty: Poellabauer

Sensor Networks

The objective of this project is to develop techniques for the flexible and efficient collaboration among sensors in a wireless sensor network, including techniques for energy-efficient real-time routing of sensor data or resource-efficient in-network data aggregation and fusion.
Faculty: Chawla, Poellabauer

Software Engineering of Scientific Software

http://www.cse.nd.edu/~izaguirr/
We try to develop tools that simplify the design and implementation of high-performance software, utilizing object-oriented and generic programming in languages such as C++ and Eiffel. Examples are tools to automatically generate tests from semi-formal specifications of programs that are part of the code itself. We use Eiffel and design by contract. We also are trying to build self-adaptive programs that can choose the best algorithms and parameters for particular problems at run time.
Faculty: Izaguirre

Spanids

http://www.cse.nd.edu/~spanids/index.php
The SPANIDS project is developing a scalable architecture for real-time intrusion detection on high-speed networks. We are developing techniques that exploit concurrency in network traffic to distribute high-bandwidth network streams across several sensors to significantly improve the capabilities of existing NIDS systems. We implemented a prototype system built from scalable inexpensive hardware and open source software that demonstrates the scalability and flexbility of our approach.
Faculty: Freeland

Study of the Open Source Software Phenomenon

http://www.cse.nd.edu/~oss/
This research project seeks to understand the free/open source software (F/OSS) phenomenon and to predict the pattern of growth exhibited by F/OSS projects over time. The F/OSS community is a genuine behavioral and technical puzzle, one with significant, far-reaching impact on the world's economy. The F/OSS community has developed a substantial amount of the infrastructure of the Internet, and has several outstanding technical achievements, including the most popular web server (Apache), the most popular scripting language (PERL), and an operating system which successfully competes with Windows (Linux). These programs were written, developed, and debugged largely by part time contributors, who in most cases were not paid for their work, and without the benefit of any traditional project management techniques. We are developing a conceptual model to explain the motivations and key work processes underlying this extraordinary phenomenon. Our preliminary analyses indicate that the F/OSS community can be usefully modeled as a social network, one that has the characteristics of a self-organizing, emergent system. Drawing on the social psychological theories of motivation, self-managing teams, and communication, we are creating a model of the social and task characteristics that predict the emergent properties of the system.
Faculty: Madey

TeamTrak: Collaborative Mobile Computing

http://www.cse.nd.edu/~teamtrak/

Mobile teams such as first responders and military units require the ability to communicate in sensor-rich environments using short-range links without the benefit of a communications infrastructure. We are constructing a mobile handheld system that allows for such teams to navigate and collaborate by forming ad-hoc wireless networks. Users carry handheld devices that report their location and situation to nearby peers, allowing participants as well as commanders a wide-area view of a situation. We are exploring the interaction of technology and sociology in these unreliable but data-rich environments.

Faculty: Chawla, Pollebauer, Thain

© 2009 Department of Computer Science and Engineering College of Engineering University of Notre Dame
384 Fitzpatrick Hall
Notre Dame, IN 46556 Phone: (574) 631-8320
Fax: (574) 631-9260