Electrical & Computer Engineering - Computing & Information Technology

Miloš Žefran, ECE; Matteo Corno, ECE; Maxim Kolesnikov, ECE Primary Grant Support: NSF; UIC College of Dentistry

Problem Statement and Motivation •

New surgical procedures are introduced at a high rate. Each requires costly training.

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Haptic simulators provide a cost-effective alternative to traditional training: no need to travel, 24/7 availability, easy to create additional units as needed.

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Existing paradigm for haptics is not suitable for teaching sensorimotor skills. Lack of good models and of realistic haptic rendering are main obstacles to creating useful simulators.

Key Achievements and Future Goals

Technical Approach Position and force information are simultaneously displayed to facilitate motor skill acquisition. The user is modeled as a three-input, single-output system.

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Developed a new paradigm for teaching of sensorimotor skills with haptics.

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Proposed a new model for a user responding to haptic and visual stimuli. The model experimentally verified.

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The model of the human enables stability analysis through the Lyapunov second method; traditional passivity techniques can not be used. Time delays are critical for stability and are explicitly modeled.

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Stability analysis of the system performed. Stability boundaries explicitly identified.

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Implemented a new method for haptic rendering.

The Euclidean group SE(3) used to develop haptic rendering algorithms that properly account for translations and rotations. Kinetic energy provides an intrinsic way to define the penetration which is in turn used to compute the reaction force.

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Future work: applications in medical training, rehabili-tation; faster implementation of the haptic rendering; implementation on cheap haptic displays; extensions of the new paradigm for collaborative haptics.

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Primary Investigator: Hulya Seferoglu

Energy Efficiency in Cooperating Mobile Devices

Problem Statement and Motivation • Increasing popularity of applications such as video streaming in mobile devices introduces: • Higher demand for throughput; • Strain on cellular links.

• Cooperation among mobile devices by exploiting both cellular and local area connections (WiFi, Bluetooth) is promising.

• Popularity of applications  exponential increase in data rates.

• The energy per delivered bit needs to be reduced in cooperating mobile devices.

Technical Approach • Goal: Develop energy efficient cooperation schemes for mobile devices by taking into account energy consumption cost of mobile devices while maximizing throughput.

• Approach: • Develop stochastic network control algorithms that take into account practical requirements of cooperating mobile devices.

• Investigate energy consumption cost of mobile devices and its impact on the control algorithms.

• Investigate energy storage (battery) levels of mobile devices.

• Develop energy efficient stochastic network control algorithms for cooperating mobile devices.

Key Achievements and Future Goals • The PI has published several conference and journal papers in the broader area.

• The PI is planning to submit a proposal on this topic.

Investigators: M. Dutta, ECE, M. Stroscio, ECE and BioE Primary Grant Support: AFOSR, ARO, NSF, SRC, DARPA, DHS Quantum Dots in MEH-PPV Polymer

Problem Statement and Motivation

Gold contacts •

Design, fabrication, characterization of QD-based photon-absorbing media embedded in conductive polymers for optoelectronic devices

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For underlying concepts see group’s paper on “Applications of Colloidal Quantum Dots,” Microelectronics Journal, 40, 644-649 (2009).

ITO Glass

Top view MEH-PPV Polymer / CdSe Quantum Dot Composite

Key Achievements and Future Goals

Technical Approach •

Design of quantum-dot (QD) ensembles in conductive polymers

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Fabricating quantum-dot (QD) ensembles in conductive polymers

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Modeling electrical and optical properties including robustness and sensitivity to QD-QD separation

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Experimental characterization of integrated structures

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Multi-wavelength optoelectronics

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Numerous simulations of electrical and optical properties including robustness and sensitivity to QD-QD separation

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Numerous simulations for a variety of QD—conductive-polymer systems

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Current sensing AFM measurements of I-V curves for a variety of QDs embedded in conducting polymers

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Ultimate goal is realization of multi-wavelength photodetectors

P.I. Igor Paprotny Funding: new faculty startup, California Energy Commission

Problem Statement and Motivation • • •

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Integrating discrete components on flexible substrates Using ultra low-power wireless radios and microcontrollers to implement low-power wireless networks Algorithms reconstruct system parameters from sparse (distributed) sensory data

Energy harvesting enables potentially perpetual operation of the sensor nodes

Key Achievements and Future Goals

Technical Approach • •

Low-power radios and ancillary electronics introduce the possibility of ubiquitous low-cost wireless sensor networks.

Distributed sensors are predicted to be an integral part of our every day life Enable many important applications: • Energy systems sensing • Body sensor networks • Environment systems

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Created a 4 mm x 4 mm sized low-power sensor node using discrete components Developed a self-calibrating current sensor system Future goals: • Develop a co-location system for 1 mm3 wireless sensor node • Integrate a wireless sensor network in underground coal mines • Create a smart bandaid body sensor node

Wenjing Rao, ECE department

Problem Statement and Motivation

Post-manufacturing defect-tolerant logic implementation on nano-crossbars • Models, algorithms, yield analysis

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Exploiting time / hardware / information redundancy at multiple design hierarchical levels and granularities • Logic gate level: nano-PLAs • Arithmetic level: fault tolerant adders • Processor architecture level: speculative computation based fault tolerance paradigm

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Redundancy sharing on a locally connected network • Flexible, dynamic assignment schemes • Network analysis

Future electronic systems on nanoscale devices

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Promises • Boosts of computational power • Wide application domains

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Challenges • Severe unreliability (manufacturing defects + run time faults) • Localized interconnect

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Need: • New system design and computational paradigms for constructing future reliable nanoelectronic systems.

Key Achievements and Future Goals

Technical Approach •

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Low-cost defect / fault tolerance approaches exploiting • Reconfigurability • Multiple hierarchical levels and granularities • Regularity

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Decentralized resource allocation protocol on locally connected network • Low communication overhead • Scalable • Generalizable framework for self-adaptive systems

Rashid Ansari, ECE; Ashfaq Khokhar, ECE/CS Primary Grant Support: NSF, U.S. Army

Problem Statement and Motivation •

Real-time visual tracking is important in automated video scene understanding for applications such as surveillance, compression, and vision-based user interfaces

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Visual Tracking: Locate moving objects from visual cues.

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Low computation complexity (Real-time requirement)

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Tracking rapid motion, in presence of occlusion (self and foreign-body)

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Tracking multiple objects using multiple cues

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High dimensionality (articulated human body tracking)

Key Achievements and Future Goals

Technical Approach •

Combine particle filtering with efficiency of mean shift tracker.

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New formulation of visual tracking in a set theoretic framework.

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Graphical models (Markov Random Field and Bayesian Network) provide high-level modeling for single object and multiple object tracking in high-dimensional spaces.

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Real-time tracking with improved efficiency compared with the standard particle filter-based tracker by 20-40%.

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Improved performance with robust tracking under rapid motion

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Handles partial occlusion and short-time full-occlusion

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Naturally extends from single to multiple object tracking

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Convenient fusion of multiple cues (no pre-adjustment of tracker needed).

Easy incorporation of additional cues.

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Application in foveated video compression and event recognition in scenes will be investigated

Jezekiel Ben-Arie, ECE Primary Grant Support: NSF

Problem Statement and Motivation This project is focused on the development of methods and interactive tools that enable efficient querying, recognition and retrieval of video clips in a video database of human motion. Natural and symbolic languages are not suited to accurately describe human motion.

An Example of a query composition of human activity along a trajectory. The humanoid then animates it for visual feedback.

Key Achievements and Future Goals

Technical Approach Our Approach: is to represent human motion by novel temporal scripts that define the 3D pose and velocity of important body parts. The human body is represented by an hierarchic structure. This enables not only efficient representation but also robust recognition from any viewpoint. The user is also allowed to interactively compose practically any desired motion query and to view it.

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An innovative method for human motion Recognition by Indexing and Sequencing (RISq) was developed. The RISq requires only few video samples. An interactive GUI based tool for composing articulated human motion was also established.

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This project has also broader Impacts. Since our interactive-graphic approach does not require reading or writing, it could be also applied to enhance the creativity and educational participation of groups such as children in authoring animated plays and movies.

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Our future goals is to extend the range of activities and the number of persons that can be composed. We are also extending our activity recognition system –RISq (which is currently patent pending) to include speech and object recognition.

Jezekiel Ben-Arie

Problem Statement and Motivation •

Key Achievements and Future Goals

Technical Approach •

The recognizer uses a novel approach called RISq (Recognition by Indexing and Sequencing) which requires for training only few stored exemplars for each word class. User can train the recognizer to user's personal speech in any language and accent simply by recording their vocabularies.

Developing a robust method for continuous speech recognition which can be easily trained to any speaker with any accent at any language and even several languages.

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Achieved Recognition rates which are better than prevalent methods based on HMM. Currently improving training and recognition rates by developing additional phoneme classification.

Jezekiel Ben-Arie

Problem Statement and Motivation •

Key Achievements and Future Goals

Technical Approach •

Developed a novel approach Employing Tensor Recognition with additional improvements by a new Exemplar Compounding which enables to represent much larger variety of stored models with few exemplars

Developing a detection and recognition methods of various object and animal classes in a very large image database which includes a variety of these classes from different views, poses and partial occlusions.

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Much better detection and recognition rates than the best known state of the art methods

Jezekiel Ben-Arie

Problem Statement and Motivation •

Key Achievements and Future Goals

Technical Approach •

Developing a novel method named RISq (Recognition by Indexing and Sequencing).

RISq is recognizing sequences of vectors derived from the 3D skeletal joints of the humans tracked.

Recognize in Real time a large variety of Human Activities using 3D Video acquired by 3D Kinect Cameras.

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Achieved Robust human activity recognition invariant to view points and action speeds.

Recognition rates are much better than the prevalent HMM based approaches.

Natasha Devroye (ECE) NSF CAREER Award 1053933: Foundations of Two-way Communication Networks NSF CIF 1216825: Wireless Relay Networks: Coding Above Capacity and Exploiting Structure

Problem Statement and Motivation • • • •

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Key Achievements and Future Goals

Technical Approach • •

We have devised a key technical tool: a lattice list decoder We tailor and devise new technical approaches to mimic random coding proofs using nested lattice codes

Random codes have traditionally been used to demonstrate the information theoretic achievability of rates in networks Structured codes such as lattice codes for Gaussian channels are more practical, and have linearity properties which classical random codes lack We know lattice codes may mimic random codes in certain single-hop scenarios (point-to-point, broadcast, multiple access channels) We know lattice codes surpass the known performance of random codes in certain scenarios (two-way relay channels, N>2 user interference channels) Question: can structured codes replace random codes in general networks, and furthermore achieve better rates?

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We have used this, and other careful manipulations to show that lattices may achieve the same rate as random codes as • The Decode-and-Forward rate of the relay channel • The Compress-and-Forward rate of the relay channel We have used the lattice list decoder to generalize two-way relaying schemes to two-way relaying scenarios with direct links Long-term goal: demonstrate that lattice codes may replace and improve upon random codes in Gaussian networks Y. Song and N. Devroye, ``Lattice codes for the Gaussian relay channel: Decode-and-Forward and Compress-and-Forward,’’ submitted to IEEE Trans. Information Theory, October 2011.

Natasha Devroye (ECE) NSF CAREER Award 1053933: Foundations of Two-way Communication Networks

Problem Statement and Motivation •

Classical information theory is suited to one-way communication

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In recent years much progress has been made in bounding the theoretical limits of one-way communication networks

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Communication is inherently two-way We ask: what is the fundamental performance of two-way networks?

Key Achievements and Future Goals

Technical Approach • • •

We approach two-way networks from an information theoretic perspective We seek the capacity region, or inner and outer bound to the capacity region of two-way networks We start by considering three simple two-way networks, and initially seek to characterize when the ability of nodes to adapt future transmissions (channel inputs) to past channel outputs does not increase capacity:

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For certain deterministic two-way networks, were able to obtain capacity: showed that equal to two one=way channels in parallel Future goal: what is the most general class of network for which this holds?

Future goal: When does adaptation (exploiting previously received outputs in two-way networks) help, when is it useless?

Z. Cheng, N. Devroye ``Two-way Networks: When Adaptation is Useless,’’ submitted to IEEE Trans. On Information Theory, June 2012.

Z. Cheng, N. Devroye, ``On Constant Gaps for the Two-way Gaussian Interference Channel,’’ Allerton 2012.

Z. Cheng, N. Devroye, ``On the Capacity of Mult-user Two-way Linear Deterministic Channels,’’ ISIT 2012.

Natasha Devroye (ECE) AFOSR FA9550-10-1-0239: ``Fundamental bounds on information fusion with focus on waveform-based intent detection and avoidance’’

Problem Statement and Motivation • •

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Key Achievements and Future Goals

Technical Approach •

We use Directed Information (DI) as waveform scheduling metric

Numerous defense applications rely on closed-loop, or adaptive, information gathering systems As radar waveform generators and processing abilities become more capable, the question is how one should design waveforms in an adaptive fashion (cognitive radar) to extract maximal information from an imaged scene Waveform adaptation, sensor scheduling and waveform library design have all been approached from classical statistical signal processing perspectives We ask: • Can information theory provide bounds on the performance of closed loop information gathering systems such as cognitive radar?

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Proposed a new information theoretic framework for obtaining fundamental bounds on the distortion in the radar scene reconstruction for closed loop adaptive waveform scheduling systems Future goals: • demonstrating the utility of this framework in tangible channels which accurately model radar situations of interest • tightening the theoretical results P. Setlur, N. Devroye, ``Waveform Scheduling via Directed Information in Cogntiive Radar,’’ IEEE SSP workshop, August 2012.

P. Setlur, N. Devroye, ``Adaptive waveform scheduling in radar: an information theoretic approach’’, SPIE, April 2012.

Stefano Rini, Alex Dytso, Daniela Tuninetti, Natasha Devroye (ECE) NSF CCF, CIF Small Award 1017436: Fundamental Limits of Layered Wireless Networks

Problem Statement and Motivation • • •

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Key Achievements and Future Goals

Technical Approach • •

We first consider a symmetric Gaussian interference channel with a cognitive relay to reduce the complexity We obtain general inner and outer bounds which we are able to tighten for certain classes of channels such as the linear high SNR deterministic channel model

Cognition is a rapidly emerging new paradigm in wireless communication whereby a node changes its communication scheme to efficiently share the spectrum with other users in the network One way of modeling cognition is through non-causal message knowledge at certain nodes in a networks The interference channel with a cognitive relay consists of a two user interference channel where a third node, a cognitive relay knows the messages of both source nodes and aids in their transmission This channel generalizes numerous multi-user information theoretic channels including the interference channel, broadcast channel and cognitive interference channel We seek the capacity region of this channel to characterize its fundamental limits

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We have characterized the capacity region of the linear high SNR deterministic and symmetric channel model for many, but not yet all subsets of parameters We have characterized the capacity in the strong interference regime We will address these remaining cases before using the intuition gained to determine capacity to within a constant gap for the Gaussian channel S. Rini, D. Tuninetti, N. Devroye ``Capacity to within 3 bits for a class of interference channels with a cognitive relay,’’ ISIT 2011.

S. Rini, D. Tuninetti, N. Devroye ``The capacity of an interference channel with a cognitive relay in strong interference,’’ ISIT 2011.

A. Dytso, S. Rini, D. Tuninetti, N. Devroye ``On the capacity region of the symmetric, high SNR deterministic interference channel with a cognitive relay,’’’ ICC 2012.

Natasha Devroye, Daniela Tuninetti (ECE) NSF CCF, CIF Small Award 1017436: Fundamental Limits of Layered Wireless Networks

Problem Statement and Motivation • • •

Key Achievements and Future Goals

Technical Approach • •

We take an information theoretic approach to derive both inner and outer bounds to the capacity of such layered wireless networks We consider both centralized and distributed layered networks

Inefficiencies in spectrum usage have led to a interest in alternative secondary spectrum licensing paradigms The underlay secondary spectrum licensing paradigm allows for secondary users to simultaneously access the spectrum licensed to the primary users as long as they do not ``disrupt’’ the primary users We seek to determine the fundamental limits of layered secondary networks which share the spectrum with primary users under the constraints that: • Lower layers remain oblivious to higher layers (seamless layering, backwards compatibility, incentives for primary users) • Higher layers are more ``intelligent’’ and may thus opportunistically access the network and exploit added knowledge such as codebook knowledge

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Our proposed opportunistic interference cancelation scheme and rates has won the Best Paper Award at CROWNCOM 2011 (N. Devroye, P. Popovski `Receiver-side Opportunism in Cognitive Networks,’’ CROWNCOM, June 2011.

A. Dytso, N. Devroye, D. Tuninetti, ``The sum-capacity of the symmetric linear deterministic complete K-user Z-interference channel,’’ Allerton 2012.

D. Maamari, N. Dvroye and D. Tuninetti, ``The Sum-Capacity of the Linear Deterministic Three-User Cognitive Interference Channel’, ISIT 2012.

Future goals: extensions to Gaussian noise and oblivionincorporating outer bounds

Shantanu Dutt, ECE Primary Grant Support: National Science Foundation Partitioning

Floorplanning

Placement

Problem Statement and Motivation

Routing Simulation

Incr. Place

VLSI CAD Flow:

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Current and future very deep submicron chips are so complex and minute that they need “corrections” or re-optimizations in small parts after initial design & simul.

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Need to keep the correct parts of the chip as intact as possible – good resource usage, time-to-market req.

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Need incremental CAD algorithms that re-do the “incorrect” parts fast and w/o significant effect on the correct parts

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This project focuses on such incremental algorithms at the physical CAD or layout level of chip design – placement & routing

e.g., for timing closure

Key Achievements and Future Goals

Technical Approach •

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Use of a constraint-satisfying depth-first search (DFS) process that explores the design space for the incremental changes to: • Optimize them (e.g., power, critical path, signal integrity) • Subject to not deteriorating metrics of the larger unchanged chip beyond pre-set bounds (e.g., <= 10% increase in wirelength)

Use of a new network-flow based methodology to explore the design space in a more continuous manner (as opposed to discrete in DFS) for faster solutions: • Some approximations involved for discrete -> continuous optimization mapping

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Incremental routing for FPGAs: • optimal DFS algorithm wrt # of tracks– if a solution exists will find it; 13 times faster than competitor VPR

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Incremental routing for VLSI ASICs: • 98% success rate in completing routes – up to 9-12 times fewer failures than Std and R&R routers

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Timing-driven incremental routing for VLSI ASICs: • 94% succ rate; 5 times fewer timing violations

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Incremental placement for VLSI ASICs: • Prel results: applied to timing closure – 10% improv

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Future Work: (1) Apply to timing, power closure via logic & circuit re-synthesis at the physical level + re-placement & re-routing; (2) Integration of incremental routing & placement

Ashfaq Khokhar and Rashid Ansari Multimedia Systems Lab. (http://multimedia.ece.uic.edu) Primary Grant Support: National Science Foundation

Problem Statement and Motivation • •

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Key Achievements and Future Goals

Technical Approach • •

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Develop efficient watermarking techniques that can imperceptibly embed information in the media Embedding capacity (#of bits embedded) of the proposed techniques should be large and embedded information should withstand different types of adversary attacks including re-sampling, compression, noise, desynchronization, etc. – exploit temporal and spatial correlation in the multimedia data.

Develop detection algorithms that can detect the embedded information in the face of modifications and other adversary attacks.

Develop distributed protocols based on trust metrics to recover modified contents

Emergence of peer to peer networks and increased interest in online sharing poses challenges for preserving and protecting online digital repositories.

Existing efforts are mostly focused on text data. Research challenges are amplified when the contents are multimedia – just re-sampling of voice or image data, which is difficult to detect, compromises the authentication and validation.

Developing multimedia asset management tools and distributed protocols that embed signatures, evaluate authentication, and help perform recovery using copies at peer nodes, if contents have been compromised.

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Developed novel watermarking techniques that embed information in selective frequency subbands. The embedded information is 10-15 times more than existing techniques and can withstand adversary attacks.

Developed an Independent Component Analysis based detector that can detect embedded information in the presence of extreme noise (less than 1% error probability even in the presence of 80% noise).

Developing a comprehensive digital asset management system using data hiding for fingerprinting and authentication.

Developing a suite of distributed protocols for content validation and recovery in case of compromised data.

Gyungho Lee, ECE Primary Grant Support: NSF

Problem Statement and Motivation

Key Achievements and Future Goals

Technical Approach instruction-level program behavior description with execution path

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Achievement • program counter encoding for low cost control flow validation • augmented branch predictor for complete control flow validation

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Future • Data Flow Validation • Industrial Control System - SCADA • mobile devices – 4G cell phone environment

Dan Schonfeld, ECE; Wei Qu, ECE; Nidhal Bouaynaya, ECE Primary Grant Support: Motorola, Inc., NeoMagic Corp.

Problem Statement and Motivation • • • • • •

Key Achievements and Future Goals

Technical Approach • • •

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Particle Filter Motion Proposal Detection Proposal

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Magnetic-Intertia Model Interactive Distributed Model Mixture Hidden Markov Model

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Video Surveillance (Activity Monitoring) Video Communications (Virtual Background) Video Enhancement (Handheld Camera Quality) Video Animation (Virtual Conference Room) Video Steroegraphy (3D from a Single Camera) Video Retrieval (Visual Search Engine)

ztm

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Real-Time (No Offline Processing Required) Very Fast (Few Particles Required) Low-Power (Embedded Processors) Complete Occlusion (Hidden Targets) Multiple Camera Tracking (Information Fusion) Video Auto-Focus (Fixed Lens Camera) Video Stabilization (Handheld & Vehicle Vibrations) Randomly Perturbed Active Surfaces (Robust Contour)

Primary Investigator: Hulya Seferoglu

Practical Network Control (NC) for Wireless Networks

Technical Approach • Goal: Develop a new theory for optimal network control that takes into account practical constraints.

• Approach: Consider practical issues that arise at multiple levels of the system hierarchy including; • Device-level issues: Investigating the impact of device limitations, • Protocol-level considerations: Investigating the interaction of between legacy protocols and the optimal control framework.

• Network-level migration: Developing control algorithms for a network with a mix of controllable and uncontrollable nodes.

• Test-bed implementation: Implementing our control algorithms using commodity off-the-shelf devices.

Problem Statement and Motivation • Problem: • Growth in mobile and media rich applications  Increasing demand for wireless bandwidth • Dramatic increase in demand poses a challenge for current wireless networks • Existing approaches: • Significant research on the theory of network control • Deployment of theory is rather limited due to the gap between theory and practice • Motivation: • New network control mechanisms are needed • Better use of scarce wireless resources • Taking into account practical constraints

Key Achievements and Future Goals • The PI has published several conference and journal papers in the broader area.

• The PI has submitted a proposal about this project to NSF. The proposal submission is currently under review.

Daniela Tuninetti, Natasha Devroye, Stefano Rini, ECE Primary Grant Support: Dr. Tuninetti’s NSF CAREER grant.

Problem Statement and Motivation

+ 2. Bits received at the same power as the noise are `erased’.

3. Approximate the real sum with a bit-wise sum

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In multi-terminal additive Gaussian noise networks two factors determine the network performance: the noise and user interference.

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While we understand how to operate networks in the noise limited regime (i.e., the interference power is comparable to the noise power), we still do not have a clear grasp on how to operate networks in the interference limited regime.

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A promising tool towards this goal is to approximate the (probabilistic) Gaussian network with a deterministic one in which the effect of the noise is neglected and the interference among users is deterministic.

1. Translate the received powers in bit levels

XOR The noise `erases’ some bits.

The remaining bits interfere with each other.

Key Achievements and Future Goals

Technical Approach •

The signals and the noise are approximated with binary vectors whose length equals the number of bits that we can be send over a link.

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We determined the capacity region of the deterministic two-user cognitive interference network.

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All the bits received below the noise level are considered erased (i.e., unreliable).

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This result provided some inside on the the capacity of a general Gaussian cognitive network.

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Real-value summations are approximated by binary XOR operations.

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Our future goal is to determine the capacity of Gaussian cognitive interference channels within a constant gap.

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We will extend this framework to more general cooperative networks.

In this simplified framework, the effect of the noise and of the interference becomes deterministic. Determining the optimal network performance is expected to be easier for the deterministic network than for the original probabilistic Gaussian network.

Oliver Yu, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Primary Grant Support: DOE, NSF On-demand Lightpath (10 Gbps) Cluster All-optical LAN

Cluster Chicago StarLight

Amsterdam NetherLight

PIN All-optical MAN UIC

Cluster

PIN

Lambda Grid reserves lightpaths or lambdas of light (10 Gbps transport capacity) among a distributed collection of data, computing, visualization and instrumentation resources that are integrated to provide collaborative capability to end users.

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To support a Multi-domain Lambda Grid with on-demand lightpath provisioning over multiple optical network domains with heterogeneous control planes.

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To support e a Multi-purpose Lambda Grid for multidisciplinary collaborative applications.

PIN University of Amsterdam

ISON

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All-optical LAN ISON

ISON

Problem Statement and Motivation

Chicago OMNInet

Key Achievements and Future Goals

Technical Approach •

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Photonic Inter-domain Negotiator (PIN) is developed to support the Multi-domain Lambda Grid. It provides an open secure inter-domain control plane to interoperate multiple optical network domains with non-compatible signaling and routing functions.

Integrated Services Optical Network (ISON) is developed to support the Multi-purpose Lambda Grid. It provides multiple traffic transport services: Gigabit-rate stream (single lambda per application); Kilo/Megabit-rate stream (multiple applications per lambda); Tera/Petabit-rate stream (multiple lambdas per application); and variable bit rate bursty traffic.

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Publication O. Yu, “Intercarrier Interdomain Control Plane for Global Optical Networks,” in Proc. IEEE ICC, June 2004.

O. Yu, T. DeFanti, “Collaborative User-centric Lambda-Grid over Wavelength-Routed Network,” in Proc. IEEE/ASM SC 2004, Nov. 2004.

Three journal papers has been submitted to IEEE/OSA Journal of Lightwave Technology.

Demonstration Through collaboration with University of Amsterdam, on-demand lightpath provisioning was demonstrated over Lambda Grid between Chicago & Amsterdam in SC 2003, November 2003.

Future Goals Extend multi-domain and multi-purpose Lambda Grid with photonic multicast capability by splitting incoming light into multiple outputs.

Demonstrate the new prototype in iGrid 2005 symposium at San Diego.

Zhichun Zhu, ECE Primary Grant Support: NSF

Problem Statement and Motivation •

Multi-core and many-core processors have increasing demands on memory capacity and bandwidth

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Conventional memory systems are heading to a scalability wall • Memory power consumption becomes a significant part of system power profile • Memory thermal emergency becomes an important design consideration

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New memory technologies emerge to address the memory scalability issue; but there lack architectural supports for them

Key Achievements and Future Goals

Technical Approach •

Universal memory architecture to support diverse memory modules

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Thread-aware memory scheduling to improve memory performance

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Memory management schemes for heterogeneous memory systems

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Coordinated memory thermal management schemes

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Processor-memory cooperation to optimize system performance and power-efficiency

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Decoupled memory organization to optimize memory power-efficiency and performance

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Memory thermal models and simulators

P.I. Igor Paprotny Funding: new faculty startup

Problem Statement and Motivation • • • •

200 m •

Key Achievements and Future Goals

Technical Approach • • •

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Use MEMS techniques to create robotic chassis several micrometers in size A stress-engineering post processing solution adds precisely controlled curvature to planar silicon structures Power is provided externally through a set of underlying interdigitated electrodes to the propulsion component, which is a scratch drive actuator (electrostatic inchworm) Patterned stress-engineering layer defines the out-of-plane deflection of the steering arms Difference in deflection results in different control voltage, which can be used to independently control several microrobots

New, largely unexplored area of robotics Difficult to achieve due to component scaling Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) Components difficult to implement at the microscale: • On-board power • Sensing • On-board control Many application opportunities, such as in: • Medicine, • Manufacturing • Information security

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Demonstrated independent control of several (four) MEMS microrobots Controlled self-assembly of microscale structures Developed a new stress-engineering process to design the robots that does not require a photo lithography stage Future goals: • Develop designs and algorithms that allow for simultaneous control of large numbers of microrobots • Create new microrobotic systems that operate in liquids • Use 2-photon stereolithography to create new types of microrobotic systems