10/28/2013 Katie Carr, CSL
Written by Katie Carr, CSL
ADSC and A*STAR recently approved four new research projects that will be conducted at ADSC’s offices in Singapore. The ADSC Technical Review Panel (TRP) and Program Management Steering Committee (PMSC) accepted these new projects during their meetings in August and September, respectively.
ADSC is moving in the direction of cyber security, data analytics and data visualization, which are important as they build upon ADSC’s research developments to-date by moving the human to be the center of focus.
“The beneficial premise is that such human-centered systems will be particularly relevant in urban environments where technology is crucial to improving the quality of life,” ADSC Director Doug Jones said. “Today’s pure information technology remains largely disembodied from the physical world and in locales in which, and with which, citizens interact, live and play. The center’s basic research direction will be to seize the leadership ground in extending the reach of certain technologies into this physical world.”
Jones and ADSC visiting senior research scientist Rama Ratnam will lead a new “Acoustic Event Detection, Classification and Analysis” research project. This project will focus on developing key signal processing and analytical tools to make audio-based monitoring and analytics practical and effective on a large scale, as there has been relatively little research in this area. This project will be a part of ADSC’s new real-time data analytics initiative.
Similarly, ADSC faculty member Deming Chen’s “Heterogeneous Architecture and Design” project will be extended into a new “Next-Generation Compilers and Architectures for Computation Acceleration with Energy Efficiency” project. He and his team will build on the framework, infrastructure and tool flows, in relation to FPGA and GPU programming, that they established in the initial three years of their project. They will be working to develop a complete and mature CUDA/OpenCL to FPGA compilation flow, as well as continuing development of the new high-level synthesis engine and work on the advanced GPU compiler. Their ultimate goal is to provide new tools, compilers and architecture for computation acceleration of complex computer vision and analytics with GPUs and FPGAs.
Faculty member and former director Marianne Winslett will begin a new project, called “Scalable, Real-Time Analytics for Challenging Data,” which will work to design and develop RESA, a general framework for performing common real-time analytics tasks on challenging data. RESA will support real-time processing of fundamental analysis tasks, such as analyzing surveillance video to identify criminals on the run or determining where roadblocks are during major natural disasters to enable first responders to get to the scene quickly.
Additionally, ADSC Associate Director Ravi Iyer, along with co-PIs Zbigniew Kalbarczyk and David Yau, will be conducting research on the smart power grid in a project called “Towards a Resilient Smart Power Grid: A Testbed for Design, Analysis, and Validation of Power Grid Systems.” This project will look at some of the challenges of incorporating a system-wide solution for the power grid that would reduce physical and cyber vulnerabilities and enable rapid recovery from disruptions. Iyer, Kalbarczyk and Yau will analyze these challenges by building a testbed and associated tools to facilitate rapid analysis and characterization of error attack resiliency of software and hardware components of the power grid structure.
“ADSC’s new projects address new directions that are just now emerging as key challenges for creating more intelligent and interactive digital systems that make modern life safer, easier, more efficient and hopefully just more fun,” Jones said.