New Research Launched in Smart Grid Security and Computer Vision

The Advanced Digital Sciences Center (ADSC) has awarded funding for three new research projects to be conducted at ADSC's Fusionopolis research center. The projects were chosen based on their intellectual merit, strong connections with Singaporean collaborators, and potential commercial impact for Singapore and beyond. The approved research will be part of the Human Sixth Sense Project (HSSP), which is funded by Singapore's Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR).

Illinois graduate and ADSC senior research scientist Bernard Ghanem and Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) professor Narendra Ahuja of Illinois will receive grant funds for their "Semantic Analysis of Sports Video" research project. Professor Pierre Moulin (ECE, Illinois) and researcher Bing Bing Ni (ADSC) were awarded funds for their study of "Emerging Multimodal-Data Analytics". Finally, professor Zbigniew Kalbarczyk (Illinois), professor David Nicol (ECE, Illinois), distinguished scientist David Yau (ADSC), and ECE professor and Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL) director William H. Sanders (Illinois) will receive funding for their study of "Integrative Security Assessment of Smart Grid Cyber Infrastructure."

Ghanem and Ahuja's "Semantic Analysis of Sports Video" project will investigate and develop a computational framework suitable for the semantic analysis of complex activities and interactions inherent to the sports domain. The research plans to create ways to recognize and detect important events and activities in videos, such as scoring of a soccer goal or running of a play in football, by recognizing patterns of movement. Video activity analysis has been established in security surveillance and military applications, but there have been few opportunities for it in the sports world. The ability to browse and query large collections of sports video automatically or semi-automatically will impact coaches and sports analysts, sports broadcasting companies, and sports fans, making it easier to incorporate video streaming quickly into broadcasts or advertising.

Moulin and Ni's "Emerging Multimodal-Data Analytics" research project aims to create new algorithms and prototype systems for depth and color video data, using visual analytics to detect, classify, and recognize events and actions in video. This research could be applied to the field of rehabilitation or athletics by having a video-based system capture, analyze, and give feedback on the movement of a patient or athlete. Additionally, the ability to recognize movement of the human body could be important to video surveillance teams attempting to watch for people fighting, crowds gathering, or someone dropping an unattended item.

The researchers with the "Integrative Security Assessment of Smart Grid Cyber Infrastructure" project believe that different types of security assessments should be applied at different times in the design, implementation, and operation cycles of constructing a smart grid information infrastructure. They want to develop methods for describing different types of security evidence and use that information to create a template for assessing a system's security. This research will make it possible to obtain integrated security metrics for complex systems and guide the researchers as they develop prototypes that have the potential for commercialization in Singapore and other parts of Asia. It will also serve as a guideline for system development firms in developing similar "smart grid" projects.

The HSSP grant now funds eleven projects, including the latest three awards. ADSC funds for the three new projects were awarded by the Technical Review Panel (TRP) and received final approvals at the Program Management Steering Committee (PMSC) meeting held August 29 in Singapore. The PMSC provides general oversight of the HSSP grant, reviewing research progress and authorizing the decisions of the TRP. The TRP is composed of three University of Illinois faculty and three Singaporean academics. William H. Sanders and Chua Kee Chaing (an ECE professor at the National University of Singapore) serve as co-chairs; the other members include Rob Rutenbar (head of the department of Computer Science at Illinois), Andreas Cangellaris (head of ECE at Illinois),Terence Hung Gih Guang (deputy executive director of Singapore's Institute of High Performance Computing), and Geok Leng Tan (deputy executive director of Singapore's Science and Engineering Research Council).

ADSC is a research facility in Singapore for faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Its research focuses on transforming the way people and organizations use and interact with information technology.