Salim Hariri - US grants

EIA-0087585
Salim Hariri
University of Arizona

CISE Next Generation Program: Workshop on Active Middleware Services

This workshop will provide an outstanding opportunity to explore new, Internet-oriented software technologies that will open new research and application opportunities not only for the multimedia and commercial world, but also for the scientific and high-performance computing community.

We will invite researcher in active networks, Middleware, mobile and intelligent agents, distributed computing, and intelligent applications to investigate the research issues and opportunities enabled by the development of active Middleware services. The workshop will help in defining the important research issues and challenges that must be solved before we can realize an open framework to the development and the implementation of active Middleware services and the workshop will enable the research community to brainstorm on these issues and define the framework that must be followed to address the research challenges facing the develop0ment of active Middleware services.

Contributions will be solicited from well-known researchers in areas related to active middleware services to be presented at the AMS workshop.

EIA-0121099
Salim Hariri
University of Arizona

NGS: Support for the Third International Workshop on Active middleware Services

This workshop will provide support for invited speakers and students to attend the Third Annual International Workshop on Active Middleware Services, being held on August 6, 2001 in conjunction with the 10th IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing in San Francisco, CA. This workshop will bring together researchers to discuss systems software issues on middleware for supporting distributed, heterogeneous, networked and grid environments.

EIA-0126623
Salim Hariri
University of Arizona

The overall research goal of this proposal is to design, develop, evaluate and deploy Pragma, the next generation adaptive runtime infrastructure capable of reactively and proactively managing and optimizing application execution using current system and application state, predictive models for system behavior and application performance, and an agent based control network. The overarching motivation for this research is to enable very large-scale, dynamically adaptive scientific and engineering simulations on widely distributed and highly heterogeneous and dynamic execution environments such as the computational "grid". The design, development and evaluation of the proposed Pragma framework will be conducted in collaboration with the Astronomy Department at the University of Arizona in the context of a real-world astrophysical hydrodynamics simulation using adaptive mesh refinement and including multigroup flux-limited diffusion, self gravity, nuclear burning, and a complex equation of state.

EIA-222359
Salim Hariri
University of Arizona

NGS: The Fourth Annual Workshop on Active Middleware Services (AMS 2002) and The Third Annual International Workshop on Grid Computing (Grid 2002)

The increasing complexity of the emerging ubiquitous grid network infrastructure in conjunction with active technologies requires additional support for application developers and users. Middleware will play a crucial role in the degree to which active technologies achieve their full potential. Such middleware will in all probability be deployed in grid environments. For these reasons, two workshops are proposed: one in active middleware and another in grid computing. While these two workshops will be held separately, each will bring together leading researchers in their respective fields. Research in related areas will be invited to add their expertise to the discussions. While the main focus of each workshop in different, there is nonetheless a synergy between them. Both could explore the advanced area of active grid middleware.

Fueled by Moore.s law of exponentially expanding computational and networking infrastructure, we are witnessing a trend toward ever-larger software structures to drive business, science, and military systems on such infrastructure. Unfortunately, the science of system design has lagged behind to guide the development of such software-intensive systems.

Many issues arise in the design of such large, highly decentralized, collections of interacting parts. The increased connectivity and capability create new complexity that is difficult to control and dynamics that are difficult to predict.

Computer-based modeling and simulation (M&S) methodology is required to address these issues since the scale is well beyond what analytical tools alone can handle and there is limited ability to do controlled experiments. Traditional M&S approaches have focused on the micro-level components rather than the macro level integration of these components. However, large software-intensive systems demand new M&S approaches for understanding the dynamic behaviors of very large inter-connected networks with very few loci of control and many interacting components.

The goal of the proposed workshop is to explore directions for a science of M&S-based design for large software-intensive systems. To do this researchers in the theory and formalisms of M&S will be brought together with researchers in software development concepts and methodologies. Among software elements to be considered for their contribution to a science of design are:
o Spiral development, a normative, flexible, risk-driven process model that is used to guide multiple stakeholders through concurrent engineering of software-intensive systems.
o Formal method including the possibilities of .lightweight. variants that allow for inclusion of informal elements trading rigor for expressibility.
o Architectural principles that provide uniform structures with known properties to organize the complexity of large systems. Architectural styles, design patterns and Unified Modeling Language constructs provide instances of such principles

This is a proposal to organize the Autonomic Computing Workshop (ACW 2003) which will be held in conjunction with the 12th IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing (HPDC-12), June 25th, 2003 at Seattle, Washington and with the 8th Global Grid Forum. More information about the workshop can be found at http://www.caip.rutgers.edu/ams2003/. The proliferation of Internet technologies, services and devices, have made the current networked system designs, and management tools incapable of designing reliable, secure networked systems and services. In fact, we have reached a level of complexity, heterogeneity, and dynamism that our information infrastructure is becoming unmanageable and insecure. Furthermore, current design techniques and software tools that control and manage the information infrastructure are incapable of handling its complexity, heterogeneity, uncertainty, and security requirements. On the other hand, biological systems have developed successful strategies and techniques to handle these issues. The main goal of the Autonomic Computing Workshop is establish a world-class forum to investigate the research issues and enabling technologies toward the convergence of biological technological and information systems (called Autonomic Computing). Autonomic computing research will enable the design of the next generation of networked systems and services that are capable of managing and controlling themselves, and can anticipate their workloads and automatically adjust the configurations of their resources to meet the new loads. NSF sponsored the second through the fourth Active Middleware Services that were held in conjunction with the IEEE High Performance Distributed Computing Symposiums (HPDC-9 - HPDC-11). These three workshops were very successful, with invited and contributed research papers presented at each workshop. The proceedings of the Second AMS Workshop was published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2000 as a book entitled "ACTIVE MIDDLEWARE SERVICES" and edited by Salim Hariri, Craig A. Lee, and Cauligi S. Raghavendra. The Third and Fourth Annual AMS workshop proceedings were published by IEEE Computer Society. The success of the AMS workshops has motivated the organization of the present workshop which is the fifth workshop in this series . The fifth AMS workshop will focus on the research issues and challenges facing the development of autonomic computing systems that have the capabilities of being self-defining, self-configuring, self-healing, self-optimizing, self-anticipating, being contextually aware of their environments, are and open.

The emergence of computational Grids and the potential for seamless aggregation, integration and interactions has made it possible to conceive a new generation of realistic, scientific and engineering simulations of complex physical phenomena. These applications will symbiotically and opportunistically combine computations, experiments, observations, and realtime data, and will provide important insights into complex systems. Furthermore, the underlying Grid infrastructure is similarly heterogeneous and
dynamic, globally aggregating large numbers of independent computing and communication resources, data stores and sensor networks. The combination of the two results in an application development, configuration and management complexities that break current paradigms based on passive components and static compositions. This projectwill make the following specific contributions:
1. Definition of Autonomous Components: We will define programming abstractions and supporting infrastructure that will enable the definition of autonomous components. Together, the aspects, policies, and policy engine allow autonomous components to consistently and securely configure, manage, adapt and optimize their execution.
2. Dynamic Composition of Autonomic Applications: We will develop mechanisms and supporting infrastructure to enable autonomic applications to be dynamically and opportunistically composed from autonomic components. The composition will be based on policies and constraints that are defined, deployed and executed at run time, and will be aware of available Grid resources (systems, services, storage, data) and components, and their current states, requirements, and capabilities.
3. Online Performance Modeling of Component-based Applications: We will investigate the formulation of
predictive performance functions that hierarchically combine analytical, experimental and empirical performance models for application components and elements of the Grid.
4. Autonomic Middleware Services: The project will design, develop and deploy key services on top of the emerging Grid middleware infrastructure to support autonomic applications. One of the key requirements for autonomic behavior and dynamic compositions is the ability of the components, applications and resources (systems, services, storage, data) to interact as peers. Furthermore the components should be able to sense their environment. The project will extend the Grid middleware with (1) a peer-to-peer substrate, (2) context aware services, and (3) peer-to-peer deductive engines for composition, configuration and management of autonomic applications. An active peer-to-peer control network will combine sensors, actuators and rules to configure and tune components and their execution environment at runtime and satisfy requirements, and performance and quality of service constraints.

The proliferation of Internet technologies, services and devices, have made the current networked system designs, and management tools, incapable of designing reliable, secure network systems and services. In fact, we have reached a level of complexity, heterogeneity, and dynamism that our information infrastructure is becoming unmanageable and insecure. Furthermore, current design techniques and software tools that control and manage the information infrastructure are incapable of handling its complexity, heterogeneity, uncertainty, and security requirements. Autonomic computing research will enable the design of the next of the next generation of networked systems and services that are capable of managing and controlling themselves, and can anticipate their workloads and automatically adjust the configurations of their resources to meet the new loads.

The ICAC workshop will be focused on the research issues and challenges facing the development of autonomic computing systems. The goal of the CLADE workshop is to encourage innovation by addressing the complex issues that arise in large-scale applications of distributed computation and to promote the development of innovative applications that effectively use distributed resources and adapt to a wide range of heterogeneity and dynamics in space and time. This includes development, deployment, management and evaluations of large scale applications in science, engineering, medicine, business, economics, education, and other disciplines, on Grids and other distributed heterogeneous and dynamic computing environments.

A stochastic information fusion methodology is developed to assimilate electrical resistivity tomography, high-frequency ground penetrating radar, mid-range-frequency radar, pneumatic/gas tracer tomography, and hydraulic/tracer tomography to image fractures, characterize hydrogeophysical properties, and monitor natural processes in the vadose zone. The information technology research will develop: (1) mechanisms and algorithms for fusion of large data volumes; (2) parallel adaptive computational engines supporting parallel adaptive algorithms and multi-physics/multi-model computations; (3) adaptive runtime mechanisms for proactive and reactive runtime adaptation and optimization of geophysical and hydrological models of the subsurface; and (4) technologies and infrastructure for remote (pervasive) and collaborative access to computational capabilities for monitoring subsurface processes through interactive visualization tools.

The combination of the stochastic fusion approach and information technology can lead to a new level of capability for both hydrologists and geophysicists enabling them to "see" into the earth at greater depths and resolutions than is possible today. Furthermore, the new computing strategies will make high resolution and large-scale hydrological and geophysical modeling feasible for the private sector, scientists, and engineers who are unable to access supercomputers, i.e., it is an effective paradigm for technology transfer.

The proliferation of Internet technologies, services and devices, have made the current networked system designs, and management tools incapable of designing reliable, secure networked systems and services. In fact, we have reached a level of complexity, heterogeneity, and dynamism that our information infrastructureis becoming unmanageable and insecure. A series of preceeding workshops have focused on the research issues and challenges facing the development of
autonomic computing systems. The objectives of this conference are two-fold. First, by bringing together researchers in this field, this meeting further understand and address the challenging research issues facing the development and deployment of autonomic systems and applications and support dynamic, data-driven application systems, i.e., applications that dynamically interact with others by sharing processing and data in novel ways. Second, its output can be helpful in focusing and crystallizing potential directions of future NSF emphasis areas to maximize the scientific and technological returns from those research investments.

The primary goal of the International Conference on Autonomic Computing is to establish a world-class forum to investigate the research issues and enabling technologies toward the convergence of biological technological and information systems (called Autonomic Computing). Autonomic computing research will enable the design of the next generation of networked systems and services that are capable of managing and controlling themselves, and can anticipate their workloads and automatically adjust the configurations of their resources to meet the new loads.

The objectives of this conference are two-fold: first, by bringing together researchers in this field, to further understand and address the challenging research issues facing the development and deployment of autonomic systems and applications and support dynamic, data-driven application systems, i.e. applications that dynamically interact with others by sharing processing and data in novel ways and second, to focus and crystallize the needed direction of future NSF funding to maximize the scientific and technological "returns" from those research investments.

The objective of this project is to develop a theoretic framework and a hierarchical methodology for autonomic power and performance management of distributed computing centers through (a) online modeling, monitoring, and analysis of power consumption and performance; (b) adaptive learning and automatically identifying strategies to minimize power consumptions while maintaining the required quality of service requirements for a wide range of workloads and applications; and (c) dynamically reconfigure the computing, storage and network resources according to the selected optimization strategies. The proposed methodology exploits the emerging hardware and software standards to improve power efficiency of processors and devices such as such as Intels quickstart and SpeedStep processors, disk spindown, power aware page allocation and RDRAM that offer a wider range of low-power states and reducing the cost of transitions.

The impact of this project is in the significant reduction of power consumptions of Internet services and Web servers that account for 8% of the US electricity consumption. In addition, the project results have a profound impact on the environment because by reducing the demand for energy, the amount of CO2 produced each year by electricity generators is reduced significantly.

A planning meeting will be held to determine if a multi-university Industry/University Cooperative Research Center for Autonomic Computing will be formed at the University of Florida, Rutgers University, and the University of Arizona. The mission of the proposed center is to advance the knowledge of how to design and engineer systems that are capable of running themselves, adapting their resources and operations to current workloads and anticipating the needs of their users.

The center will not only advance the science of autonomic computing, but will also accelerate its transfer to industry by closely working with partners in the definition of projects to be pursued, and contributing to the education of a workforce capable of designing and deploying autonomic computing systems.

This award establishes the Industry/University Cooperative Research Center (I/UCRC) for Autonomic Computing at the University of Florida, University of Arizona and Rutgers University. The I/UCRC will focus on multi university research on improving the design and engineering systems that are capable of funning themselves, adapting their resources and operations to current workloads and anticipating the needs of their users. The center will work on improving hardware, networks and storage, middleware, service and information layers used by modern industry.

The research performed at this center is important for U.S. industry to help maintain its lead in the information technology field. This I/UCRC will have a broad impact on the participating students and faculty through involvement with the industrial members. This center has the potential to develop new knowledge in this area that will increase US industrial competitiveness.

This project's goal is to acquire and develop an instrumented datacenter testbed spanning the three sites of the NSF Center for Autonomic Computing (CAC)-the University of Florida (UF), the University of Arizona (UA) and Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey (RU). Datacenters are a growing component of society's IT infrastructure, including services related to health, banking, commerce, defense, education and entertainment. Annual energy and administration costs of today's datacenters amount to billions of dollars; high energy consumption also translates into excessive heat dissipation, which, in turn, increases cooling costs and increases servers' failure rates. The proposed testbed will enable a fundamental understanding of the operations of data centers and the autonomic control and management of their resources and services. The design of the underlying infrastructure reflects the natural heterogeneity, dynamism and distribution of real-world datacenters, and includes embedded instrumentation at all levels, including the platform, virtualization, middleware and application layers. Its scale and geographical distribution enables studies of challenges faced by datacenter applications, services, middleware and architectures related to both "scale-up" (increases in the capacity of individual servers) and "scale-out" (increases in the number of servers in the system). This testbed will enable fundamental and far-reaching research focused on cross-layer autonomics for managing and optimizing large-scale datacenters. The participant sites will contribute complementary expertise-UA at the resource level, UF at the virtualization layer, and RU in the area of services and applications. The collaboration between the university sites will bring coherence across ongoing separate research efforts and have a transformative impact on the modeling, formulation and solution of datacenter management problems, which have so far been considered mostly in terms of individual layers.
The testbed will also provide a critical infrastructure for education at multiple levels, including providing students with hands-on experience via course projects, enable development of new advanced multi-university and cross-disciplinary courses, as well as multi-site group projects focused on end-to-end autonomics, which will use the proposed testbed. Students from underrepresented groups will be actively involved in the research and their participation will be increased through ongoing collaborations with minority institutions. Even broader community participation will result from an evolving partnership with the recently proposed industry cloud initiatives.

This proposal seeks funding for the Center for Autonomic Computing (CAC) studies conducted by the University of Florida site (lead) and the University of Arizona site. Funding Requests for Fundamental Research are authorized by an NSF approved solicitation, NSF 10-507. The solicitation invites I/UCRCs to submit proposals for support of industry-defined fundamental research.

This project proposal focuses on autonomic computing and systems, applicable to the important areas of security, fault management, and data centers. Planned are the prototypes to be deployed on test bed environments driven by the requirements from industry. The most interesting part of the proposal are applications to SCADA environments, which integrate monitoring, multi-level behavior analysis, decision fusion and risk analysis relative to security of SCADA environments. Other areas include autonomic peer-to-peer systems, as well as study related to the data centers, both at the application layer and data center hardware, where focus is on robustness.

The successful completion of this project will represent a significant step toward the design and deployment of highly secure SCADA systems and networks. In addition to security, the autonomic detection of anomalies in applications or subsystems of a datacenter addresses inefficiencies in data center design by eliminating the dependence on over-provisioning, which is a resource-inefficient strategy for ensuring quality of service by trying to offset any sub-system failures and malfunctions. The project has also potential for broader impact on data-intensive applications that leverage the availability of ad-hoc desktop grids for high-throughput computing.

Center for Autonomic Computing (CAC)
Proposal #1127965

This proposal seeks funding for the Center for Autonomic Computing (CAC) sites at the University of Florida (lead), Rutgers University, the University of Arizona, and Mississippi State University. Funding Requests for Fundamental Research are authorized by an NSF approved solicitation, NSF 10-601. The solicitation invites I/UCRCs to submit proposals for support of industry-defined fundamental research.

A unified cloud computing environment enabling anytime, anyplace access to limitless computing resources still represents an ideal given the current environment of heterogeneous resources distributed geographically and offered by vastly different service providers. The proposed effort spans the expertise and capabilities of the four center sites. The work aims to apply autonomic computing principles to address elements such as security, inter-cloud networking, and resource provisioning via thermal sensing and model-based adaptive performance control in order to create a framework for realization and management of trustworthy unified cloud computing environments. Results will be derived from the implementation of the proposed approaches on a planned distributed cloud testbed.

Advancement of the cloud computing paradigm has the potential to enable transformative change to user access to information technology enabling major advances in economic productivity and access to a broad range of new services. The proposed center effort works with a small member company and large systems integrator member. Industry will further benefit via dissemination of the results through the center membership and the extension of the center?s project portfolio into this area. Efficiency gains potentially realized at cloud computer centers from the proposed efforts has the potential to reduce energy costs system wide. The work plans to bring together a distributed cloud environment deployed across CAC sites to establish an open testbed for research and development of inter-cloud interoperability that has the potential to serve as a resource for the work of the broader community in this important area.

This project intends to create a new CyberCorps(R): Scholarship for Service (SFS) program at the department of Management Information Systems (MIS) of the University of Arizona (UA) especially aimed at recruiting from across the state, with particular emphasis on minority recruitment and retention. The proposed program encompasses several important areas of activity such as student mentoring and development; independent research study integrated into the program; assessment of student progress; internship and post-graduation placement assistance; and program assessment and evaluation. Cybersecurity and Information Assurance are critical to ensuring the integrity and availability demands of a modern, globally-networked infrastructure. The biggest challenge facing employers is finding employees with the right security skills, including operations security, information security risk management, and security management practices thus proving the SFS program timely, relevant, and beneficial. The MIS department at UA is renowned for its consistent ranking in the top five MIS programs in the country (U.S. News and World Report) for over 20 years. The approach to managing the program is deliberately cross-disciplinary and intended to support the broadest definition of cybersecurity, including information assurance, network security, trustworthy computing, risk management for IT, etc. The program is intended to address the great need for security training in the U.S. The curriculum includes dedicated coursework and significant research with world-class faculty in security and risk management, operations security, information security risk management, and security management practices. The ultimate goal of this program is to help broaden representation in science and technology and increase interest in and technological competence for government service. The program addresses a burgeoning need for knowledgeable security specialists by providing a pool of carefully cultivated and highly trained personnel. The project contributes to meaningful curriculum development that can serve as a model to other programs.

As society becomes more dependent on cyber infrastructure, the security of networks and information technologies has become a growing concern. Individuals, businesses, and governmental organizations are now common victims of cyber-attacks that seek to steal private data, gain remote control over remote systems, and cause harm to networks and systems through other malicious means. Additionally, critical infrastructures such as smart power grids and communication networks are facing an increasing number of cyber-based threats. As a result, many researchers and security practitioners have begun to investigate cyber attacker communities in order to learn more about cyber attacker behaviors, emerging threats, and the cybercriminal supply chain. Unfortunately, there is a lack of established science for cyber security research. The lack of literature is problematic for researchers wanting to learn more so that they may contribute to and advance the current state of cyber security research. For example, many cyber attacker communities take careful measures to hide themselves by employing anti-crawling measures. This would be a challenge for many researchers and security practitioners. Furthermore, some may find cyber attacker community discussion difficult to interpret due to cyber attacker jargon, advanced security concepts, or foreign contents belonging to cyber attacker groups spanning across different countries or regions.

For these reasons, research studying hacker communities is greatly needed, as well as research that advances others? capacity to understand and investigate contents from such communities. Specifically, the development of automated tools and analyses increases the potential for more cyber security research. Web mining and machine learning technologies can be used in tandem with social science methodologies to help answer many questions related to hacker behaviors and culture, illegal markets and covert networks, cybercriminal supply chain, malware analysis, emerging security threats, and other matters. There are many opportunities for extending current cyber security research by combining hacker community data with social science methodologies, computational techniques, and security analysis.

In this research, important questions about hacker behaviors, markets, community structure, community contents, artifacts, and cultural differences are explored. Automated techniques to collect and analyze data from forums, Internet Relay Chat, and honeypots will be developed. The development of such tools will help further proactive approaches for preventing cyber-based threats, rather than taking the traditional approach of reacting when something "bad" happens. Better understanding of hacker communities across multiple geopolitical regions will support a better understanding of cybercriminal behavior, and improved and safer practices for security researchers and practitioners.

The proposed integrated computational framework and the resulting algorithms and software will also allow social science researchers and security practitioners to closely examine how cyber attacker groups form, develop, and spread their ideas; identify important and influential cyber criminals in the online world; and develop the means to recognize online hacker identities through their communication and interaction styles. Knowing more about cyber criminals, hackers, and their illegal black markets can help policy makers and security professionals make better decisions about how to prevent or respond to attacks.

The proposed work also contributes to the educational and professional development of the student research associates who contribute to it. They will learn sound research methods, and how to write about and present their work for scientific and other professional audiences.

This project will provide financial support to allow a number of graduate students, especially those from underrepresented groups, the opportunity to learn about the latest research results and tools in the Cloud and Autonomic Computing (CAC) field. In addition, it will give the supported students the opportunity to network and interact with active researchers and other students doing research in this important and emerging research area. Networking and interactions among the conference attendees are facilitated through the CAC conference's structure. For example, the conference provides breakfast, lunches, one reception during the poster/demonstration session, and a dinner banquet. By providing all these activities, the supported students will have invaluable experiences and plenty of opportunities to interact with and learn from CAC researchers and other graduate students about their research activities and approaches.

Recent advances in computing, networking, software and mobile technologies have lead to the development of cyberspace services that are pervasive and ubiquitous, such as cloud services, that will touch all aspects of our life and economy. Cloud services will revolutionize the way we do business, maintain our health, conduct education, and how we secure, protect, and entertain ourselves. However, along with these advances, there are grand challenges in how to ensure that our cyberspace resources and services are manageable and secure. The main focus of the CAC conference is to be the premier international forum to present the latest research, applications, and technologies to make cloud and autonomic computing systems and services self-manageable with little involvement of human or system administrators.

The explosive growth of IT and cloud infrastructures, coupled with the diversity of their components and a shortage of skilled IT workers, have resulted into systems whose control and timely management exceeds human ability. The mission of the NSF Industry/University Cooperative Research Center for Cloud and Autonomic Computing (CAC) is to advance the knowledge of how to design and engineer computing systems and applications that are capable of managing themselves, adapting their resources and operations to current workloads and anticipating the needs of their users. The CAC with three university sites (the University of Arizona, the Mississippi State University, and Texas Tech University) will lead research of innovative designs and programming paradigms for cloud and computing systems that can self-configure, self-heal, self-optimize and self-protect with minimal involvement of IT administrators or users. We are planning to involve the Auto Industry through the University of Detroit Mercy (UDM), who is an affiliated member with UA. The CAC not only advances the science of autonomic computing but also accelerates its transfer to industry by closely working with industrial partners in the definition of projects pursued by the CAC, and contributing to the education of a workforce capable of designing and deploying cloud and autonomic computing systems. The CAC will involve students and faculty from underrepresented groups through several dissemination and recruiting initiatives at each site.


Today's IT and cloud infrastructures face significant management challenges that result from, among other factors, their distributed nature, their need to adapt to unanticipated demands, their heterogeneity, their size, large numbers of users and great complexity and diversity of IT and cloud services. The mission of CAC is to engage academics, industrial and government partners in joint efforts that accelerate both our understanding of the fundamentals of cloud and autonomic computing, and the transfer of these fundamentals into industry solutions and education of a workforce capable of designing autonomic systems in general and cloud systems in particular. The CAC will conduct research on how to enable systems to be self-managed with respect to performance, fault, security, resilience, power consumption, etc. Unlike past attempts that address these properties in isolation, the CAC will endeavor to pursue integrated approaches that address more than one property. The technical scope of the Center?s activities includes design and evaluation methods, algorithms, architectures, software, mathematical foundations and benchmarks for cloud and autonomic systems. Solutions are studied for different levels of both centralized and distributed systems, including the hardware, networks, storage, middleware, services and information layers. The CAC solutions will focus more on self-management and security issues in Internet of Things (IoT), critical infrastructures and cloud systems and applications. The following are concrete examples of industry-relevant technical challenges that the CAC will address in the context of autonomic IT infrastructures: Automatic management of performance and energy consumption in large scale data centers and cloud systems; Securing and protecting the operations of sensors and actuators in IoT environments and their applications or services; Predictive modeling of quality-of-service of IT and cloud resources and applications; Dynamic resource provisioning and scheduling of computer resources; Autonomic management and protection of critical infrastructures; and Automation of system management operations of Internet of Things (IoT) resources and services.

This award is to support the Doctoral Symposium at the IEEE International Conference on Cloud and Autonomic Computing (ICCAC) in Tucson, AZ, September 18-22, 2017. The doctoral symposium is meant to engage PhD students attending the symposium with interactions that provide the attendees with research and career mentoring. The primary objectives of the doctoral symposium are:
*Provide a venue for PhD students to present their research and obtain feedback from experts in the area. Students will be given the opportunity to present their research even if they did not have a paper in the main conference.
*Allow PhD students to present their work at the main conference's poster session. This will enable students to receive further mentoring about their research.
*Mentor PhD students by providing sound career advice from representatives in industry as well as academia.

The overall impact that such a meeting can have on PhD students, both early and late in their studies, can be invaluable. The findings at the Doctoral Symposium will be made publicly available to increase the dissemination of the keynotes and the results of the Q&A session on career mentoring.

This award is to assist US-based graduate students to attend the 2018 ACS/IEEE International Conference on Computer Systems and Applications (ACS/IEEE AICCSA)) to be held in Aqaba, Jordan, October 28 - November 1, 2018. Participation in AICCSA and similar conferences are valuable and important activities of the graduate school experience. It provides a venue that may expand the experiences of the participating graduate students to enable interactions with researchers in general from all over the world and from the Middle East in particular. This may have an important impact on their career development and will give some experiences to participate effectively in the global economy and information services.

The conference held in Aqaba, Jordan will span five days and will consist of technical paper presentations, industry participation, posters, a Doctoral Symposium and a Career Mentoring session. It will also feature keynote speeches from leading researchers and practitioners.

Student travel to conferences is an important activity. Funds will be dispersed with preference given to students who would not otherwise be able to attend the conference and students who are not already scheduled to present a paper, paying particular attention to provide opportunities to under-represented groups.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

The University of Arizona's (UA) AZSecure SFS program seeks to further expand and develop training of service-motivated students to be critical public defenders of America's cyberspace. To support this, UA has obtained a designation by the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as a Center of Academic Excellence (CAE) in Cyber Defense (CAE-CD), Research (CAE-R), and Cyber Operations (CAE-CO), making UA one of the few public institutions with all three prestigious CAE designations. In 2018, UA was granted Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) status by the Department of Education, the first of Arizona's three state universities to receive this designation. Through targeted recruitment efforts, the program's goal is to increase the representation of women, underrepresented minorities, and active or veteran military members in cybersecurity fields. The program is deliberately multidisciplinary, integrating cybersecurity education and research across the campus. Due to the success of the university's SFS program and as direct evidence of program sustainability and institutionalization, the UA recently launched a multidisciplinary MS in Cybersecurity program. In addition, in 2018 UA developed a new industry-focused Scholarship-for-Industry (SFI) program with significant funding from the college and university. This project will help fuel a sustained, institutionalized cybersecurity education program that will have significant impacts on the state of Arizona and the nation.

The program consists of an innovative curriculum that combines coursework with hands-on experiential learning through research, teaming students with experienced faculty mentors to develop deeper expertise than coursework alone can provide. University of Arizona will continue to focus the current efforts on building a program for Arizona, and to capitalize on its many geographic strategic advantages. Arizona has a higher percentage of Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) and a greater number of military bases than many states. By leveraging its four-year colleges, working professionals with an undergraduate degree, and military veterans and reservists reentering civilian life, UA have a diverse and talented recruitment pool to draw from. The goal is for these groups to account for at least 50% of the university's qualified applicant pool and a commensurate part of accepted scholarship recipients. The proposed SFS program renewal fuses education and experiential learning through research to produce knowledgeable professionals in key and emerging cybersecurity domains, such as: cyber threat intelligence, large-scale vulnerability assessment, social engineering, and cybersecurity big data. Its innovative and cross-disciplinary curriculum includes dedicated coursework and significant research with world-class faculty mentors. The program will contribute to meaningful curriculum development, sustained institutionalization of critical cybersecurity education, and a well-trained workforce of cybersecurity professionals for the U.S. government.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.