The National Science Foundation awarded a research grant to Ugur Cetintemel and Stan Zdonik, in the anticipated amount of $500,000, for the automatic design of next-generation database systems. Advanced database systems are being designed to support complex processing of big data, integrate novel hardware such as solid-state storage, and operate on highly distributed, often virtualized computing clouds. The project aims to develop novel, sophisticated automatic design tools for database system configuration and management, addressing the growing complexity and diversity of these newly-emerging systems that render manual solutions ineffective and unscalable. The project will specifically focus on incremental approaches to ...

The Artemis Project, an outreach program designed to encourage young women from local public schools to pursue careers in computer science, recently received funding from the National Science Foundation.

Founded in 1995, Artemis is a five-week summer program in which its participants - female rising ninth graders - are exposed to the breadth of applications of computer science and are introduced to a variety of the technologies underlying computing. The learning process includes a range of both educational and confidence-building activities.

Participants attend lectures from women scientists and other potential role models from both academia and industry. Artemis is provided at no ...

John Savage has been selected to serve as a 2009 Jefferson Science Fellow for the U.S. State Department, where he will work on cyber related issues for one year. Fellows remain on call as science advisers to the State Department for an additional five years. The prestigious Jefferson Science Fellows program was established in 2003 as a way of elevating the role of science and technology in the formulation of U.S. foreign policy. Funding is provided by the State Department, but participants are chosen by independent panels of experts at the National Academies of Science, based on the ...

James Hays and Alexei Efros (Asst. Professor of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University) received an award to investigate the use of Internet imagery for image understanding tasks. Computer vision and computer graphics algorithms benefit from large amounts of training data, and websites such as Flickr and Picasa offer several orders of magnitude more training data than current data sets. However, the annotations and labels that accompany these images are sparse, noisy, and in some cases novel to the research community. James and Alexei are researching robust search and learning methods to address the challenges of this data -- massive scale and ...

Principal Investigator David Laidlaw along with co-Principal Investigators Andy van Dam (Computer Science), Jan Hesthaven (Applied Mathematics) and George Karniadakis (Applied Mathematics) were awarded a National Science Foundation MRI (Major Research Infrastructure) research grant, in the expected amount of $2 million, to develop a next-generation interactive virtual-reality display environment for collaborative research and education.

The new system is expected to support more natural and effective interaction with data than the current 3D point-and-click wand driven Cave by maximally utilizing as appropriate full-body, motion-captured user interactions and gestures. More display information will be made accessible to the human visual system with ...

The National Science Foundation awarded a research grant in the anticipated amount of $1.2M to Ugur Cetintemel, Eli Upfaland Stan Zdonik to develop database technology that would simplify building predictive analytics applications over large-scale data. Predictive analytics involves analyzing historical and current data to make predictions about future data values, events, and trends, and has a wide range of applications in security, marketing, economics, sociology, genetics and computing. The generic predictive database technology to be developed will make computing with predictions easier to express and far more efficient than the prevalent application-level solutions that are known to be ...