NSF awards $3.5 million to Rice for IT research

NSF awards $3.5 million to Rice for IT research
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BY JADE BOYD
Rice News Staff

Computer science
researchers at Rice University have been awarded four grants
totaling more than $3.5 million under the National Science
Foundation’s Information Technology Research (ITR)
program.

Research funded
at Rice under ITR includes efforts to develop: computer
programs that collect data from the World Wide Web and use
it to predict international conflicts; a peer-to-peer framework
that will allow programmers to design large-scale, distributed
applications; software tools and algorithms for robotics
researchers who are trying to simulate the movements of
elastic objects on computers; and adaptive compilers that
can improve the efficiency of software running on all computers
and electronic devices.

“Rice is
not a large school, so the fact that a department our size
received this many ITR grants — covering such a broad
range of topics — is a testimony to the quality of
research we’re involved in,” said Keith Cooper,
chair of Rice’s computer science department.

Cooper and fellow
Rice computer scientists Devika Subramanian and Linda Torczon
received one of the grants, a $1.6 million award to develop
adaptive compilers. A compiler is a piece of software that
processes programming instructions written in a specific
programming language, translating them into a binary set
of instructions that can be run on the computer’s processor.
Two trends — the appearance of more specialized computer
chips and the need to execute software differently in various
situations in order to maximize elements like speed, battery
power or stability — have led to a need for intelligent,
adaptive compilers that can optimize application performance.
Building on prior research, the researchers hope to develop
the knowledge and techniques needed to make adaptive compilers
practical within five years.

Subramanian and
political scientist Richard Stoll are working together on
a separate ITR project. The two will develop a computer
system capable of predicting when and where international
conflicts will arise. The $400,000 grant will fund the development
of an automated system that will compile information from
online news accounts of political events and compare those
with records of past events in order to predict impending
conflicts.

Another of Rice’s
ITR grants, led by computer scientist Peter Druschel, is
part of a five-year, $12 million, multi-institutional program
to develop a peer-to-peer framework that will support the
deployment of large, distributed applications. The research
involves a dozen teams at several universities, including
the University of California–Berkeley, New York University
and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Druschel
said the system could ultimately support user cooperatives
dedicated to specific tasks like backup or content delivery.

“Today,
everyone relies on dedicated hardware and software for services
like backup and Web content distribution, “ said Druschel.
“It’s very expensive, and some organizations can’t
afford it. We’re interested in creating an ecology
where people can contribute some of their resources for
the common good and get services in return that they could
not otherwise afford.”

Computer scientists
Lydia Kavraki and Joe Warren were awarded $650,000 to develop
algorithms and representations that computer programmers
need to incorporate elastic, flexible objects into computer
simulations. Such objects include cloth and fabric, human
tissue and organs, cells and cell membranes and large molecules.
There is a growing demand to incorporate these and other
virtual “deformable objects” into scientific simulations,
computer games and movie special effects. The mathematical
complexity involved in modeling these objects requires novel
computational tools. This grant is part of a $3.9 million
ITR award that also involves researchers at Stanford University,
the University of Pennsylvania and Rutgers University.

This is the third
year for the ITR program. NSF awarded $156 million in ITR
grants in 2001. The program was broadened this year to include
not only fundamental research in information technology,
but also new applications of information technology in all
scientific, engineering, and educational areas, as well
as innovative infrastructure to support information technology
research and education.