Mathew Palakal - US grants

This Research Initiation Award will allow Dr. Palakal to experiment with neural-network approaches for extracting speaker- invariant features from speech spectra. The initial work will classify vowels and dipthongs, with planned extensions to plosives, fricatives, nasal sounds, liquids, and glides. Recognition results will be compared to those for conventional approaches such as hidden-Markov modeling.

The Departments of Computer & Information Science and Mathematical Sciences are joining in an effort to improve the programs offered by each department and to create a new undergraduate concentration in scientific computing. The goals are to: (1) keep current a computing science curriculum; (2) educate students from other disciplines in the science of computing; and (3) strengthen the applied mathematics curriculum with the inclusion of strong scientific computing and modeling components. The laboratory will support the hands- on approach of the new curricula.

9307650 Palakal This award will fund an interdisciplinary study focused on furthering the understanding of the bat's echolocating system. It will combine neurophysiological, multi- resolution signal processing and artificial neural network approaches to determine a biologically plausible model of the FM bat's auditory system. The overall goal is to identify the mechanisms underlying auditory perception. This proposal was submitted to the Biosystems Analysis and Control Initiative which encouraged the submission of proposals that through the study of neurophysiological systems could advance engineering science and advance the knowledge of biological systems through the use of engineering analysis techniques. The research being funded by this award has the potential to advance both neurophysiological sciences and the field of engineering through its biological, signal processing and modeling approaches. ***

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CMS-9812723
Pidaparti
The project quantifies the damage due to different sources in aging structures, estimates the severity of the quantified damage, and integrates the developments into an intelligent system so that it can be used to empirically predict the fatigue failure and fatigue life of aging materials and structures. The system provides a safety index to assess long-term durability and size effects on aging structures. The intelligent system and associated developments are validated through a series of selected cases from aging aircraft structutes.***

Abstract

IIS-9817572
Palakal, Mathew
Indiana University
$101,604 - 12 mos.

DLI Phase 2: A Distributed Information Filtering System for Digital Libraries

This is the first year funding of a three year continuing award. The proposed research is aimed at designing and developing a distributed intelligent information distribution and filtering system that provides personalized information services to the user while minimizing direct user involvement. The system is intended to traverse the internet to retrieve the most relevant information of interest to the user. Information filtering will be realized using a information agents, and will involve integration of advanced concepts and techniques from the domains of artificial intelligence, information retrieval, and distributed object computing. The agents will contain models of network-based dynamic information resources and will have the capability to learn changing patterns of an individual user's interest.

Four key basic research areas to be addressed are: methods for adapting various knowledge structures associated with an agent
new and robust agent architectures
agent collaboration protocols based on a natural or artificial economic framework
agent-driven information service operations

The explosive growth of biological information sources, available over the Internet, has given rise to both opportunities and challenges for biological and medical researchers. The opportunities they provide are both scientific (e.g., understanding the information encoded in elementary biological structures) as well as technological (e.g., new drug discovery). The challenges, on the other hand, lie in how to efficiently discover, among the vast volume of information, the items that are relevant or interesting to a given researcher. The objective of the proposed research is to investigate related basic research problems and develop a biological information delivery system in a collaborative project between computer scientists, information scientists, and biological researchers. The specific plans include developing methods to make the proposed system pro-active (surveying evolving on-line sources for relevant information), personalized (cognizant of a particular researcher's interests), adaptive (able to react to changes in the information sources as well as user interests or objectives), and capable of integrating multi-format data. The impact of this research is a significant enhancement in the ability of students and researchers in biological sciences to efficiently utilize on-line resources, while generating methods for computerized analysis of biological data and providing computerized support for new scientific discovery.

0116047
Pidaparti
Structural materials of the 21st century will have to meet increasingly demanding standards for performance and life. The strength and integrity of a structural component deteriorates mainly due to corrosion and fatigue along with other failure mechanisms in structural materials. Among various aspects of corrosion, pitting corrosion is a complex process, and is a major problem in many engineering industries. Pitting corrosion mechanism usually initiate at the micro/nano-structure level and the details of the mechanisms depend on the material composition, electrolyte and other environmental conditions. Even though much effort has been put into assessing the material loss due to corrosion over the years, the mechanical characteristics and its relationship at multiple levels due to pitting corrosion are not yet known. The material loss information along with the topology and its relationship at various material scales are necessary for better understanding and designing of corrosion resistant materials.

The objective of the proposed research is to develop a three-dimensional corrosion growth model to aid in the assessment and design of materials and their effect on structural integrity. Corrosion growth model will be developed as a discrete dynamical system based on cellular automata approach. This approach incorporates both macroscopic (corrosion pit distribution and the material loss) and microscopic (chemical interaction mechanisms) scales of the corrosion process into the model. Mechanisms involving both physical and mechanistic basis will be used to obtain rules in developing corrosion growth models. The developed models will be tested and validated using real data by collaborating with Naval Surface Warfare Center, CRANE division, Indiana, and with the data obtained from Raytheon Systems Company, Texas. A three-dimensional visualization software will be developed to visualize the corrosion growth data in real time to see the corrosion growth process. Algorithms developed through this project will be directly used in materials and simulation courses in Engineering and Computer Science disciplines.

The proposed research will greatly help to understand the corrosion growth process in materials. The 3D visualization capability will provide insight into better understanding of the characteristics of corrosion growth process, and may lead to the development of more efficient corrosion growth and prediction algorithms. A fundamental understanding of the macro- and micro-level corrosion growth models based on local rules will provide valuable information and tools for designing corrosion resistant materials for a variety of engineering applications. The proposed approach will provide a general solution to structural corrosion in materials so that it can be scaled up to other structural materials.

This project is applying advances in digital library (DL) technologies to the emerging domain of bioinformatics, and developing interaction tools that support learning based on identifying and visualizing associations among key dimensions of bioinformatics resources. The project is making these current resources, which are mainly utilized by expert biologists, available to bioinformatics students. The project addresses issues regarding: the use of a wide variety of formats and representations to store bioinformatics information; the application of DL technologies particularly in the realm of data description and exchange; mapping of metadata associated with bioinformatics information to data description standards compatible with DL technologies; and building clients that take advantage of data dissemination protocols such as the Open Archives Initiative in order to support novel browse, search, and analysis functions based on visualizations. The project team is also integrating DL and Grid computing technologies, and utilizes bioinformatics resources of Indiana University such as the Drosophila Genome Flybase, the IUBio Archive that contains euGenes eukaryote genes data, and the Bionet news archive and related software.

The US-India Workshop on Biocomputing brings together leading researchers working in the areas of Biotechnology, Bioinformatics, and Computer Science from both the US and India---providing a forum for discussion of current research trends in the areas of biotechnology and bioinformatics. A staggering volume of data continues to grow in the fields of genomics, proteomics, and systems biology, as new data collection technologies continue to evolve. Thus, bioinformatics and biotechnology have emerged as complementary tools to biologists---assisting them in their efforts to understand biological processes, improve agricultural products, discover new drugs, and so on.

Research presentations focusing on regulatory networks, structural informatics, protein interaction networks, microarrays, text mining of biological literature, and synthetic biology by the invited speakers from both the US and India will spark discussions on open problems and research challenges, advancing the field of Biocomputing. This workshop will provide ample time for researchers to interact closely and exchange ideas for future collaborations. Collaborations that may evolve from this workshop will lead to joint research projects and short-term visits by faculty and students?ultimately leading to economic, scientific, and cultural engagements for both countries.

The project, from Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), investigates the design, development and dissemination of metaphoric aural sound symbols (audemes), audeme dictionary and riddle audeme games to teach scientific concepts to 75-100 students who are blind and visually impaired (BVI). A number of research questions are included. How do audemes and sequences function as metaphors of STEM concepts? Which audeme game structures and strategies work best to engage BVI students? How do audemes and audeme games impact STEM education?

The audeme-to-concept-to-audeme dictionary will build scientific concepts using standards, state-approved science textbooks, teachers and students. They will also examine secondary words that are associated with the science concepts by mining textbooks, identifying tertiary concepts, and establishing a preliminary dictionary of audemes. A team of education, students and professionals who are experts will design the audemes after multiple iterations. A control and experimental group of students will test the audemes through traditional methods and audeme games. Students will complete a pre and post test of scientific concepts with repeated measures ANOVA to examine changes on student scores from the control and experimental groups.

This work using audemes to teach scientific concepts will make contributions to BVI, learning disabilities, and general population students. Audemes and audeme games have the potential for broad implementation in both formal and informal settings for computers, mobile, and other networked platforms.

Empowering informatics Diversity Enhanced Workforce (EiDEW) is a multi-institutional project proposed by the Indiana University (IU) School of Informatics and Computing (SoIC) at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis (IUPUI) and Ivy Tech Community College (Ivy Tech) in Indianapolis. The project seeks to increase the quality and quantity of information technology (IT) professionals - especially economically disadvantaged, academically talented underrepresented minorities - who graduate from college. The EiDEW Scholar program will not only recruit, provide scholarship support to, and educate 80 associate and 60 baccalaureate students, but also create a rich framework of coherent interventions to ensure student persistence in STEM. Typical interventions planned include mentoring, internships and other types of support from freshman year through degree completion. Close to graduation, EiDEW will partner with employers such as Microsoft to facilitate student career placement in the STEM workforce.

Student recruitment will be facilitated by leveraging previously established connections with high schools. In previous NSF-funded research, IUPUI had success with the residential learning community model and cohort-based mentoring. These will be adapted and used in the EiDEW project. The informatics curriculum is based on active learning pedagogies with both Microsoft and CISCO providing various professional certification training during the summer. The project will potentially generate systematic knowledge regarding the value of combining co-curricular activities with provision of scholarship support for talented but financially needy college students. The consortium arrangement between Ivy Tech and IUPUI will provide a national model for two-year to four-year college transition in the S-STEM context.