Lawrence J. Henschen - US grants

There is currently no way for knowledge based reasoning systems to handle inconsistent information, although inconsistent information arises in many important application such as medical diagnosis and other expert systems. Most often during the construction of a knowledge based system, if the knowledge engineer is presented with information, which may come from a number of sources, that is inconsistent, the knowledge engineer simply chooses, sometimes incorrectly, to discard certain piecesof information that have been identified as the cause of the inconsistency. The consequence of such a practice may be disastrous since first of all the engineer may be throwing away important information and secondly, in may instances, the existence of inconsistent knowledge may itself convey important information. However, since most reasoning systems are based onclassical two valued logic, they have no way to correctly handle inconsistent information. A class of logics call annotated logics has been proposed by several researchers as an alternative model or reasoning that allows for inconsistencies. These logicshave been shown to provide nice, theoretical foundations to a variety of formalism in computer science. This work will study the use of annotated logics as a practical computational model. It will implement annotated logic systems that can serve as an environment in which knowledge based containing inconsistencies can be built and in which inferences can be computed. This work should provide a nice bridge across the gap that currently exists between the theory and the practical utility of annotate logics, and provide a reasoning basis for many important practical applications.

9303583 Scheuermann This is the first year funding of a three-year continuing award. Large arrays of small disks provide an attractive approach for high performance systems since they allow for low-cost, reliable storage and can achieve higher throughput compared to large disks. This project proposes to develop an integrated set of algorithms and an intelligent file manager which is applicable to any multi-disk architecture in which the operating system can access the disks independently. The emphasis of the approach is on the use of modular building blocks for file partitioning, allocation, load balancing, and reorganization that can be invoked independently of each other. Thus, the procedure for load balancing can be called regardless of whether striping or declustering is employed and does not depend upon the unit of declustering. The development of a generalized method for load balancing is considered which can be applied to an environment where some files exhibit periodical access patterns and which considers explicitly the cost of performing the cooling actions. The investigation also focuses on reorganization procedures that perform restriping when higher performance standards need to be enforced. The anticipated results of this project are of importance to massively parallel computers to support scalability and to ensure that the I/O is not the limiting factor in achieving high speedup. ***

ABSTRACT
Collaborative Proposals

SES-0549067
Lawrence Henschen
Northwestern University

SES-0548855
Charles Halaby
University of Wisconsin-Madison

SES- 0548999
Robert Kaufman
Ohio State

SES-054897
Evelynn Ellis
Pennsylvania State University

SES-0549106
Aquiles Iglesias
Temple University

SES-0549069
John Hansen
University of Chicago

SES-0548968
Deborah Richie
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign


An alliance of seven universities composed of Northwestern University, The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, The University of Chicago, The Ohio State University, The Pennsylvania State University, The University of Wisconsin, and Temple University seek to broaden the participation of PhD students in the social and behavioral sciences by (1) engaging in coordinated activities across the seven universities, (2) increasing coordination of activities on each campus, (3) and studying the impact of various techniques on promoting diversity in graduate education. The goals include increasing the number of minority students enrolled, the establishment of permanent infrastructure on each campus to support diversity, the establishment of permanent programs on each campus and across the alliance to support diversity and a diverse population of graduate students, and the development of a publishable set of techniques and guidelines that can be used by any university and which we hope will lead to a national forum for the exchange of ideas and best practices for promoting diversity. The four key elements of the alliance include: 1) alliance-level activities (e.g., an annual student research conference and the creation of common recruiting materials and coordinated recruiting efforts; 2) recruitment through the implementation of an Alliance Visiting Scholars Program and coordination of recruiting efforts at major conferences, fairs and university visits; 3) increased retention of students by recruiting a cadre of social and behavioral professors and scholars who will provide instant, multi-level mentoring network and developing transition programs; and 4) increased activities and programs targeted at undergraduates in a wider range of universities and colleges to increase the pool of students. The number of universities in the alliance will allow the alliance to analyze the effectiveness of new strategies for broadening participation and the transference of existing techniques to new settings.

Broader Impact: The alliance will develop written materials that can be distributed to all universities in the US and could be the basis for a national exchange of ideas about alliances as a strategy to broaden participation in US institutions of higher learning.

Wireless sensor networks have the potential to revolutionize research areas and
industries that require the distributed collection and aggregation of data,
e.g., civil engineering, biology, and geology. However, to date their impact
has fallen short of this potential. This is not surprising; wireless sensor
networks are difficult to design and program. Experts in application domains
such as biology and civil engineering have neither the training in embedded
system programming and design required to develop adequate wireless sensor
networks, nor the time or inclination to become embedded systems designers.
For wireless sensor networks to live up to their potential, they must be easy
for application experts to design and program instead of requiring embedded
systems design expertise.

This project seeks to put wireless sensor network design and deployment within
the reach of applications experts. This project will identify a small set of
application archetypes, described in terms meaningful to application
developers, that capture the most common application structures. Each
archetype will be backed by a compilable specification written in a simple
high-level archetype-specific language. After customization, a specification
will be passed to a synthesis algorithm to produce a working hardware-software
system. Synthesis of efficient wireless sensor networks would be intractable
without an appropriate hardware-software platform. Therefore, this project
will also determine the particular types of hardware and software components
necessary to enable support for wide range of archetypes. A configurable
hardware-software platform will be developed based on these findings.

SES-0750621
Lawrence Henschen
Northwestern University

SES-0750599
John Hansen
University of Chicago

SES-0750656
Charles Halaby
Judy Roller
University of Wisconsin-Madison

SES-0750630
Robert Kaufman
Ohio State University

SES-0750618
Evelynn Ellis
Chalandra Bryant
Eva Pell
Pennsylvania State University

SES-0750612
Aquiles Iglesias
Zebulon Kendrick
Temple University

SES-0750612
Deborah Richie
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The grant provides continued (three-years) support for the Great Lakes Alliance for Social and Behavioral Sciences (GLASS) Alliance. GLASS is comprised of seven universities--Northwestern University (Alliance lead institution), University of Illinois atUrbana-Champaign, University of Chicago, Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, University of Wisconsin, and Temple University. The Alliance seeks to broaden the participation of PhD students in the social and behavioral sciences by: (1) engaging in coordinated activities across the seven universities, (2) increasing coordination of activities on each campus, (3) and studying the impact of various techniques on promoting diversity in graduate education. GLASS will focus on increasing the number of minority students enrolled in alliance institutions' graduate programs in the social, behavioral and economic sciences, the establishment of permanent infrastructure on each campus and across alliances to support diversity and a diverse population of graduate students, and the development of a publishable set of techniques and guidelines that can be used by any university and creates a national forum for the exchange of ideas and best practices for promoting diversity in the academy.

The value added of the alliance structure includes: 1) alliance-level activities (e.g., an annual student research conference and the creation of common recruiting materials and coordinated recruiting efforts; 2) recruitment through the implementation of an Alliance Visiting Scholars Program and coordination of recruiting efforts at major conferences, fairs and university visits; 3) increased retention of students due to a cadre of social and behavioral professors and scholars who provide an instant, multi-level mentoring network and enable transition programs; and 4) increased activities and programs targeted at undergraduates in a wider range of universities and colleges to increase the pool of potential graduate students. The number of universities in the alliance also allows the PIs to analyze the effectiveness of new strategies for broadening participation and the transference of existing techniques to new settings.

Broader Impact: The alliance model contribute to creating a diverse graduate education student body and faculty at US colleges and universities. Further the Alliance will develop written materials that can be distributed to all universities in the US could form the basis for a national exchange of ideas about alliances as a strategy to broaden participation in US institutions of higher learning.

The Northwestern University Select Teaching and Research Training program (NUSTART) aims to increase diversity in the professoriate by providing a combined research and teaching postdoctoral experience for nevi? PhDs from diverse backgrounds. The three-year program will integrate a solid three-year research postdoctoral program with mentored teacher training at Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU), a minority-serving institution. The teacher training includes formal training in teaching, mentored teaching and course design at NEIU, and formal training in the art of mentoring itself. IRACDA Scholars will work one-on-one with NEIU students, thus learning what motivates students from diverse backgrounds, which will make the IRACDA Scholars better teachers for a diverse population in the future. The research training will be augmented with many professional development seminars and workshops, thus ensuring that the IRACDA Scholars are among the best prepared to assume leadership roles in research and higher education in the future. A second aim is to enhance and improve the curricula at NEIU and increase the research activities ofthe NEIU faculty. NEIU has been named the most diverse university in the Midwest for the last nine years and ranks 75th in the nation in the number of bachelor's degrees awarded to Hispanics (Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, 2007). A more research-oriented educational experience at NEIU will increase the number of students who are motivated to go on for graduate education and consider careers in academia. Each IRACDA Scholar will work with NEIU faculty to improve the labs and courses at NEIU. They will also initiate research experience at NU through organized student visits and by hosting NEIU students for summer research experience. NEIU faculty will have the opportunity to work on research projects at NU. Finally, NUSTART aims to increase the number of NEIU students who go on to graduate school. The improved and more research-oriented curricula plus the one-on-one contact with the IRACDA Scholars and summer research experience should motivate more NEIU students to consider academic careers.