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Job Possibilities for CS Major Past News Fall 2009 Graduate Orientation Women in Computing Conf. grant Web-bot Masters Thesis Project |
CS Department AccomplishmentsCongratulations to Dr. Tao Xie! Dr. Tao Xie was awarded an NSF CAREER Grant. The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards in support of the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who most effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their organization. Dr. Xie's grant is titled "Architectural Support for Integrating NAND Flash Solid State Disks into Enterprise-Class Storage Systems" and was awarded funding totaling $436,000. Abstract: With recent advances in capacity, bandwidth, and durability, NAND flash memory has been successfully employed in mobile devices like PDAs and laptops and it is starting to replace hard disks in desktop systems. Integrating NAND flash memory into server domain applications, which normally demands a high level of data reliability and exceptional random I/O performance, however, is much more challenging because NAND flash memory exhibits relatively poor random write performance and insufficient reliability due to limited erasure cycles. To address these problems, an architectural support for flash SSD must be devised in order to fundamentally boost its performance and longevity by a software/hardware combined effort. In this project, we will develop a novel flash disk storage architecture that exploits the addition of RAM and dedicated software schemes to incorporate flash SSDs into enterprise-class storage systems. We plan to implement a flash disk array prototype and deploy it in real-world data-intensive application. In addition, we will develop new software techniques such as a double-buffer write ordering management scheme and an inter-disk wear-leveling technique. This project will contribute to energy conservation, performance enhancement, data management, and reliability technology for enterprise-class storage systems by developing the flash disk array storage architecture, accompanied by an array of new software schemes. This project will also promote teaching, learning, an training by exposing both undergraduate and underrepresented students to technological and scientific underpinnings in the field of server-class storage systems. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Collaborative Agreement Signed San Diego State University and Chonbuk National University (CBNU), Korea recently signed an agreement to collaborate on research in the areas of intelligent systems and robotics, and healthcare and medical informatics. The collaborative agreement was signed on August 3, 2009 by SDSU vice president of Graduate Research Affairs, Thomas Scott, and CBNU president, Geo-Suk Suh. The agreement came about as a result of joint research in the area of robotics between our own Mahmoud Tarokh and Malrey Lee, CBNU Computer Science Associate professor, which started in July 2008. The SDSU-CBNU collaborative agreement facilitates submission of joint research proposals to U.S. and Korean agencies, exchange of teaching and research personnel in the areas of intelligent systems, robotics and medical informatics, and student exchange to perform their thesis work at the other university in these areas. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Dr. Rob Edwards teaches a course in Brazil Rob Edwards was invited to Brazil this summer to teach a course at the Brazilian National Laboratory for Scientific Computing (Laboratorio Nacional de Computacao Cientifica). His distinguished co-instructors included faculty members from Ghent and the University of Copenhagen. The course, on microbial genomics and bioinformatics, was attended by students from Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, and more.
____________________________________________________________________________________ Congratulations go out to several of our CS faculty for receiving grant awards this summer. Title: Robotic Helicopter for Monitoring Pollution and Habitat Dr. Marko Vuskovic Title: Anti-Glycan Autoantibodies as Biomarkers in Early Detection of Cancer and Cancer Risk: Study of Lung Cancer and AIDS-Associated Malignancies. Abstract: The search for blood-based biomarkers for early detection, diagnosis and prognosis of cancer and auto-immune diseases is currently one of the most important interdisciplinary research efforts and challenges in biology, medicine and bioinformatics. Currently, the most commonly used approaches include genomics, proteomics, and glycomics-based high through-put platforms. The latter is a newest platform based on printed glycan arrays (PGAs), a prototype of which has been built in the Consortium for Functional Glycomics at The Scripps Research Institute (La Jolla, California) and further developed at Cellexicon, Inc. and the Glyco-Medical Laboratory of NYU School of Medicine, in cooperation with National Cancer Institute and Shemyakin Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia. The PGAs are microarrays similar to DNA microarrays, but contain a library of various carbohydrate structures, glycans, instead of DNA oligonucleotides. Most of these glycans can be found on surfaces of normal human cells, human cancer cells, and on surfaces of many human infectious agents such as bacteria, viruses, and other pathogenic microorganisms. Transformation of cells from healthy to pre-malignant and malignant is always associated with appearance of abnormal glycosylation on proteins and lipids present on surfaces of these cells. The malignancy-related abnormal glycans are called tumor-associated carbohydrate antigens, or TACAs. There is a growing evidence that numerous TACAs are immunogenic, and that human immune system can generate antibodies against them. Since multiple glycans arrayed on PGAs are known TACAs, the antibodies present in human sera which bind to glycans on PGA can reveal the status of response of the immune system to human malignancies and viral infections. The focus of the research under this grant is to further develop bioinformatics algorithms for clustering, classification and evaluation of PGA-based data, with a specific goal to identify putative signatures of lung cancer and lung cancer risk, in HIV-infected and uninfected populations. Dr. Tao Xie Title: CSR-DMSS, SM: Energy-Efficient and Reliability-Aware Data Management in Mobile Storage Systems Abstract: Highly reliable, high performance and energy-efficient storage systems are essential for mobile data-intensive applications such as remote surgery and mobile data center. Existing mobile storage systems generally consist of an array of independent small form factor hard disks connected to a host by a storage interface in a mobile computing environment. Although hard disks are cost-effective and can provide huge capacity and high-throughput, they have some intrinsic limitations such as long access latencies, high annual disk replacement rates, fragile physical characteristics, and energy-inefficiency. Compared with hard disk drives, flash disks are much more robust and energy-efficient, and can offer much faster access times. A major concern on current flash disk is its relatively higher price. This project develops a hybrid disk array system, which integrates small capacity flash disks with high capacity hard disk drives to form a robust and energy-efficient storage system for mobile data-intensive applications. In particular, an array of new data management techniques including energy-efficient data placement, self-adaptive and reliability-aware data redistribution, and self-triggered data replication for data-intensive mobile applications built on the hybrid disk array framework will be developed. In addition, this project implements a simulation toolkit, which will be designed specifically to study a variety of data management techniques on top of the hybrid disk array architecture. This project will also promote teaching, learning, and training by exposing students to technological and scientific underpinnings in the field of energy-efficient storage systems. To enhance education outreach to local underrepresented groups of undergraduate students, this project organizes a summer workshop on energy-efficient computing at San Diego State University. Congratulations Dr. Rob Edwards! Dr. Rob Edwards has had three papers published this year in the journal Nature. This is truly a remarkable achievement. Nature is one of the premier scientific journals in the world. Since its beginning in 1869, SDSU faculty have published a total of only about 70 papers in Nature; it is rare for the whole College of Sciences to have more than one or two per year. The first paper in Nature was about the analysis of viruses on stromatolites, which are really old microbial communities: He also helped with a comparison of microbial communities in coastal oceans: The third paper is an analysis of more sequences than anyone has ever seen before: This was covered in Dr. Edwards was also featured in the San Diego Union Tribune and New York Times for his paper in PLoS One about the effect of microbes on coral reefs. Link to paper: Link to coverage: |
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