Stanford researchers win
National Science Foundation grants for information
technology research
BY DAWN LEVY
Making the World Wide Web
more useful and ubiquitous. Figuring out the functions of
the genes deciphered by the Human Genome Project.
Visualizing weather, human thinking and other complex
processes as they happen in time and three-dimensional
space. These are some of the heady challenges to be
tackled by five Stanford projects that were awarded more
than $5 million in National Science Foundation (NSF)
grants on Sept. 13. The projects vied with more than
1,400 proposals to receive the first grants in a new NSF
program to spur fundamental research and innovative
applications of information technology.
Jim Plummer, dean of the
School of Engineering, said that "information
technology is the basis of many new initiatives in the
School of Engineering. These grants are tremendously
helpful in strengthening our existing programs and
helping us build these new initiatives."
President Bill Clinton
said the "initiative will help strengthen America's
leadership in a sector that has accounted for one-third
of U.S. economic growth in recent years. High technology
is generating jobs that pay 85 percent more than the
average private-sector wage. I am pleased that the
National Science Foundation is expanding its investment
in long-term information technology research."
Information Technology
Research (ITR) awards went to 62 large projects whose
funding will average $1 million per year for three to
five years, and 148 smaller projects funded up to
$500,000 for as long as three years. Projects range from
creating software, scalable information infrastructures
and human-computer interfaces to managing information and
studying social and economic implications of information
technology. (For a complete list of ITR awards, see
www.itr.nsf.gov/.)
"These projects
represent major innovations in information technology,
rather than routine applications of existing
technology," said NSF director Rita Colwell.
"Our strategy to support long-term, high-risk
research responds to a challenge from the President's
Information Technology Advisory Committee, which called
for increased federal investment to maintain the U.S.
lead in this important sector of the global
economy."
Stanford Professor Hector
Garcia-Molina, Assistant Professor Christopher Manning,
Professor Jeffrey Ullman and Associate Professor Jennifer
Widom won a $2.2 million grant to transform today's World
Wide Web into a Global InfoBase (GIB). The GIB will be a
ubiquitous information resource that is easy to use,
current and comprehensive. The researchers will attempt
to integrate existing technologies into a
"universal" information model and query
language. They hope to personalize information management
to make data relevant and timely for users. And they
expect to create sophisticated tools to analyze semantics
and algorithms to "mine" data for patterns that
reveal new knowledge.
"The Web has created
a resource comprising much of the world's
knowledge," the researchers wrote in their proposal.
"Yet today our ability to use the Web as an
information resource is in a primitive state. The GIB
project is developing technology that will allow society
far more effective and efficient use of the dramatically
growing amount of information available online."
NSF awarded $1,003,417 to
Associate Professor Monica Lam and Assistant Professor
Dawson Engler to create static and dynamic tools for
software design. They are developing a new methodology
whereby programmer, compiler and runtime system all
cooperate to maintain the integrity of a software
program. The proposed system allows programmers to
capture application-level semantics and invariants of
interest at a high level of abstraction. Whereas specific
tools have been developed by compiler writers to detect
common programming errors, this system will allow
programmers to formulate the correctness property or
safety criterion that they wish to check in their
programs. It places the full power of sophisticated
static and dynamic analyses in programmers' hands,
allowing them to analyze and manipulate the program at
ease.
"Success of this
research will have a significant impact on improving
software reliability," Lam says.
Awarded $1 million were
Professors Kincho Law and James Leckie in Civil and
Environmental Engineering, Gio Wiederhold in Computer
Science and Barton Thompson in the Law School. Their
project is to develop a distributed information
management framework called REGNET. The REGNET will be a
formal but practical information-technology
infrastructure to make governmental regulations publicly
and beneficially available online. The pilot application
focuses on regulations related to hazardous waste
management. Federal and state environmental protection
agencies, as well as local governments, impose strict
regulations on the treatment and disposal of chemical
wastes. Locating and using regulatory information can be
daunting tasks. REGNET includes repositories for
regulatory information and tools to locate, merge,
compare and analyze the information. Five phases are
planned: textual storage; semi-structured, indexed
storage; means to resolve semantic ambiguities;
cross-referencing appropriate for automated access from
relevant legal and related documents; and online
compliance checking of governmental regulations.
"We hope this
collaborative, interdisciplinary effort will lead to a
better understanding of legal and social issues related
to information technology," Law says.
Stanford's Assistant
Professor of Computer Science Daphne Koller and Assistant
Professor of Medicine Peter Small in the Division of
Infectious Diseases and Geographic Medicine are teaming
up with Professor Nir Friedman of Hebrew University in
Jerusalem to develop innovative technology for analyzing
biological data. Awarded $494,034, the researchers aim to
aid the analysis of complex structured databases to find
interesting and useful patterns. In recent years, new
technologies and data-gathering projects are turning out
biological data at rates exceeding the analysis
capacities of traditional research methodologies. The
data include information that may reveal functions of
specific genes in an organism's genome, and population
data that may improve treatment of diseases such as
tuberculosis. This project will develop languages for
statistical modeling of biological processes, techniques
for learning the models from data and algorithms for
reasoning using the resulting models.
"These techniques
will allow us to extract the most significant statistical
patterns from the data, thereby providing a deeper
scientific understanding of critical biological
phenomena," Koller says.
Professor Lambertus
Hesselink in Electrical Engineering, Aeronautics and
Astronautics, and Applied Physics was awarded $489,998.
His project will allow new ways of researching
complicated physical phenomena -- such as electromagnetic
fields, behavior of fluids and weather systems, quantum
mechanics and biological processes such as the workings
of the brain -- by using computers to determine how these
systems evolve in space and time. Hesselink will develop
topological methods based on mathematical analysis of
global data. Results will be visualized using 3-D and
time-dependent graphics techniques developed specifically
for this purpose.
"Visualization and
analysis of large multi-dimensional vector and tensor
data sets is a difficult task as traditional 2-D and 3-D
display methods are only suitable for very small data
sets," Hesselink says. Topological information
provides several orders of data compression as well as a
simplified global topological skeleton that can be used
for analysis and visualization of complicated data.
"Using these skeletons as a basis, we have further
developed novel methods to quantitatively compare data
sets and detect similarities and differences between
them, which is very difficult to do with previous
methods," Hesselink says.
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