Author: Karen Johnson

The ICC Executive Committee recently announced the winners of the 2018 Paul Williams Seed Grant Competition. Two awards of nearly $50K each were granted to two ICC teams with the primary purpose of giving researchers the opportunity to develop a research program that would be eligible and attractive for long-term and higher-level funding from external grants and contracts. Those submitting proposals for the grants were required to submit written proposals and to give a 2-5 minute presentation at the ICC TechTalks which took place on February 16, 2018. The winning teams are:

• Zhaohui Wang and Nina Mahmoudian, The Center for Cyber-Physical Systems, “A Low-Cost Marine Mobile Networking Infrastructure,”
• Keith Vertanen, Scott Kuhl, and Myounghoon “Philart” Jeon, The Center for Human Centered Computing, “Sensing and Feedback for On-Body Input”

Keith Vertanen (CS/HCC) has been awarded a 2018 NSF CAREER Award for his project entitled, “Technology Assisted Conversations”.  This 5-year award has a total budget of $538,799. In this project, Keith will create new real-time communication solutions for people who face speaking challenges, including those with physical or cognitive disabilities. The primary goal of this project is to develop technology that improves upon the Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) devices currently available to help people speak faster and more fluidly. Keith and his team will expand resources for research into conversational interactive systems, and will create a probabilistic text entry toolkit, AAC user interfaces, and an augmented reality conversation assistant. For more information, see the Michigan Tech News story.

ICC member Nina Mahmoudian(CPS)was recently named the first Lou and Herbert Wacker Associate Professor in Autonomous Mobile Systems. William Predebon, chair of Michigan Tech’s ME-EM Department, says the endowment of a professorship is an important recognition of faculty who are rising stars or at the top of their fields.  He added, “Dr. Mahmoudian is a rising star and already a leader in her research in autonomous mobile systems. She is driven and a highly motivated scholar and teacher. Her enthusiasm in the classroom and in her research is infectious and compelling in such a way that students gravitate to her.” Read more in the Michigan Tech News.

The ICC hosted its first TechTalk on February 16. Each presenter had 2-5 minutes to present his or her research using under five slides. This TechTalk was also a platform for researchers submitting proposals for the Paul Williams Seed Grant Competition. Eight researchers discussed their proposals for the competition that awards two $50K grants to the project that best fulfills the mission of the ICC and shows the most promise for future funding. Topics discussed include exascale computing, marine mobile networking, effective clustering algorithms, cybersecurity, on-body sensing, and the IOT implementation. The winners will be announced by February 23, 2018.

Tim Havens, ICC Associate Director and Director of the Center for Data Sciences, will present his research on Sensor-fused Explosive Hazard Detection at the U.S. Capitol in Washington D.C. this week at “STIx on the Hill.” STIx, which stands for science, technology and information exchange, brings together leading experts in the defense research community to discuss innovative areas for research and development for the Department of Defense. Read more in the Michigan Tech News.

Jeffrey Wall (SBE/CyberS) is a finalist in the 2018 Distinguished Teaching Awards presented by The William G. Jackson Center for Teaching and Learning. Nominees are recognized for their outstanding contributions to the instructional mission of the University. Based on more than 50,000 student ratings of instruction responses, 12 finalists have been identified for the 2018 awards. This is Wall’s second year in a row being nominated.

Sumit Paudyal (ECE/CPS) has been awarded an NSF CAREER Award for a project entitled “CAREER: Operation of Distribution Grids in the Context of High-Penetration Distributed Energy Resources and Flexible Loads.” Sumit joins the ranks of 9 other ICC members who have won the prestigious award.

Saeid Nooshabadi (SAS)is the principal investigator on a project that has received $349,988 from the National Science Foundation. This three-year project is entitled, “Collaborative Research: ACI-CDS&E: Highly Parallel Algorithms and Architectures for Convex Optimization for Realtime Embedded Systems (CORES)”.

Philart Jeon, Director of the Center for Human-Centered Computing (HCC), received a research grant from KATRI for his project entitled, “Development of the safety assessment technique for take‐over in automated vehicles.” The goal of the project is to design and evaluate intelligent auditory interactions for improving safety and user experience in the automated vehicles. Research tasks include developing a driving simulator for automated driving model, modelling driver states in automated vehicles, design and evaluating discrete auditory alerts for safety purpose, and the development of real-time

Jianhui Yue (SAS) has been awarded a 3-year NSF grant with a total budget of $176,876. One PhD student will be supported for two years.  The project is titled “Improving Reliability of In-Memory Storage”. The project addresses two challenges of in-memory storage: 1) Memory cells have limited write endurance (i.e., the total number of program/erase cycles per cell), and 2) Nonvolatile memory has to remain in a consistent state in the event of a system crash or power loss. This project will take a holistic approach, spanning from low-level architecture design to high-level OS management, to optimize the reliability, performance, and manageability of in-memory storage.