Since June, 12 Stony Brook University Computer Science faculty members earned awards for 13 different research projects totaling $6,548,456. Notably, C.R. Ramakrishnan won the largest grant at $1.5 million, and many faculty earned two awards each.
“Computer Science researchers at Stony Brook are top-notch, and submit proposals that promise fundamental developments in hot topic areas such as big data, security and privacy, biology, neuroscience, visualization, and system development and verification,” said Scott Smolka, professor and one of the funding awardees. Smolka, as lead investigator, was awarded $620,861 for the project, Adaptive Runtime Verification and Recovery for Mission-Critical Software, funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. The project proposes to extend runtime verification, an approach used in complex software testing and development.
Professor C.R. Ramakrishnan’s project titled Big Data Modeling and Analysis with Depth and Scale, which involves other faculty members Yanhong Annie Liu, Maureen O’Leary, I.V. Ramakrishnan, Scott Smolka and David Warren as co-principal investigators, earned from the NSF the largest award of the group and focuses on modeling and analyzing Big Data, or large sets of data that are difficult to process.
Assistant Professor Mike Ferdman earned a total $294,912 for two projects — one demonstrating the advantages of Field-Programmable Gate Arrays over Graphic Processing Units, the other hosting a small computing cloud at Stony Brook so researchers can experiment directly with an open and complete cloud infrastructure. Fellow faculty members Donald Porter, I.V. Ramakrishnan, and C.R. Ramakrishnan serve as Co-PIs on the cloud computing grant.
Professor Samir Das also earned two awards, totaling $999,393 for two projects. One project will rethink how we approach building spectrum databases for enabling seamless wireless communications in the TV spectrum. The other will develop a new programmable communication platform for future Internet of Things (IoT) where the battery-less devices communicate entirely via backscattering. This second award is in collaboration with Electrical Engineering faculty Petar Djuric and Akshay Athalye.
The following Computer Science faculty also earned awards since June, contributing to the grand total of over $6.5 million in grant funding for Computer Science related research projects at Stony Brook.
Leman Akoglu — Collective Opinion Fraud Detection: Identifying and Integrating Cues from Language, Behavior, and Networks
Michael Bender, Rob Johnson and Don Porter in Collaboration with MIT and Rutgers University — FTFS: A Read/Write-Optimized Fractal Tree System
David Gu and Jie Gao — Geometric Analysis of Computer and Social Networks
Phillipa Gill — Detecting and Characterizing Internet Traffic Interception Based on BGP Hijacking
Rob Johnson, Michael Bender and Rezaul Chowdhury — Cache-Adaptive Algorithms: How to Share Core Among Many Cores
Steve Skiena — ABI Innovation: Sequence Optimization for Synthetic Biology
Scott Stoller — Towards Trustworthy Access Control Policies
Stony Brook’s Department of Computer Science is ranked among the top computer science departments in the nation. Interdisciplinary collaboration and research recognition elevates and attracts internationally renowned faculty who have made significant contributions in visual computing, networking, computer systems, cybersecurity, algorithms, verification and intelligent computing.
-Written by Brian Smith, University Communications