Current Research in the ICS Department

Below are just a few of the highlights of research being undertaken in ICS. Please explore the individual Research Labs for more information on our exciting explorations into the technology of the future.

• Philip Johnson, Professor of Information and Computer Sciences and Director of the Collaborative Software Development Laboratory (http://csdl.ics.hawaii.edu/), has been awarded a four year grant from the joint NSF/NASA program on Highly Dependable Computing and Communication Systems Research. The goal of the NSF/NASA program is to fund projects that promote the ability to design, test, implement, evolve, and certify highly dependable software systems. The initial award is for $400,000 from NSF, with up to $260,000 in additional funding available from NASA. Johnson's grant will fund the application of a software technology developed in his laboratory called "Hackystat" by the Mission Data System development group at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The Mission Data System is a component-based framework for development of future space mission software such as for the Mars Smart Lander. Hackystat provides a novel approach to collecting and analyzing development process data, such as the time spent by developers writing code, the structural properties of the resulting code, and the defects discovered during testing. The goal of the grant is to see if this kind of data can be used to develop models that help predict which MDS software modules are more likely to contain defects and thus require additional development effort.
• The Collaborative Representations Project is supported by a National Science Foundation CAREER Grant ($402,755, 5 years) to Daniel Suthers, assistant professor and director of the Laboratory for Interactive Learning Technologies. This project is exploring ways to design interactive software in which learners can easily collaborate online while learning with rich representations. According to NSF Director Rita Colwell "CAREER awards support exceptionally promising college and university junior faculty who are committed to the integration of research and education." This grant builds upon a previous 3-year grant of $461,462 Suthers obtained from NSF's Learning and Intelligent Systems program.
• Edo Biagioni, assistant professor, Kim Bridges of Botany and Brian Chee of the Advanced Network Computing Lab are developing PODS: networks of wireless sensors to monitor endangered plants in the national parks and other pristine areas. They are supported by a 3-year, $562,762 grant from DARPA. The project encompasses everything from making inconspicuous physical enclosures and power management to embedded computing, routing in wireless networks, and user interfaces and data mining tools to convey appropriate information to the viewers of the data collected.
• Violet Harada, associate professor, and Daniel Suthers, assistant professor, are collaborating with specialists from the Hawai'i Department of Education on Hawai'i Networked Learning Communities, an ambitious initiative that will use distance collaboration and remote sensing technology to improve science, math and technology education in economically and educationally disadvantaged rural areas of Hawai'i. The National Science Foundation awarded the DOE a $191,764 one-year development grant, and a five-year implementation grant proposalhas been submitted.
• Professors David N. Chin and Martha Crosby are funded by the Office of Naval Research for their study, "The Effectiveness of User Models in Reducing Cognitive Load." With computer models of users, Chin and Crosby have developed a crisis management system, EMI, that provides customized map views for different users based on their current role and task. EMI automatically changes the map views to include different types of information as users switch to different tasks. Through experiments with the user models, Chin and Crosby found they could customize the information presented on a computer in ways that reduce the number of errors the computer user makes when he or she must perform tasks quickly.
• Violet Harada, associate professor, received the American Association of School Librarians/Highsmith Research Grant June 28 at the AASL Awards Luncheon in New Orleans, for a study titled, "Dialogic Journaling with Elementary Grade Students As a Means to Deeper Student Understanding of the Information Search Process." Other members of the research team are Joan Yoshina and Claire Sato, library media specialists in the Hawaii Department of Education.
• In software engineering, two research groups, the Software Engineering Research Lab (Isao Miyamoto) and the Collaborative Software Development Lab (Philip Johnson) have pursued well-funded research leading to innovative software technologies in use by many academic and industrial sites world-wide.
• The Advanced Network Computing Lab (Edo Biagioni and Brian Chee) enjoys generous industrial support and provides students with opportunities to work with state-of-the-art networking technologies.
• The Adaptive Multimodal Interaction Laboratory has developed and distributed language learning technologies among other applications.
• The Innovative Computation Laboratory has designed an optimization tool for solving dynamic programming problems, simulation software for Petri net models, and a reconfigurable computer architecture.