Current Projects

Computer Science and Software Engineering Education

In this research we are developing novel approaches and course materials, as well as models of partnerships, to advance computer science and software engineering education. We are also developing novel approaches to encourage more students, in special women and minorities, to pursue computer science and software engineering degrees and careers.

Researchers

  • Pete Coughlan
  • Daniel Jones
  • Jennifer Kay
  • Matthew Kulak
  • Christhoper Luna
  • Kevin McGarry
  • Dr Adrian Rusu
  • Amalia Rusu
  • Confesor Santiago
  • David Shanline
  • Hussein Syed Mohammed
  • Robert Webb
  • Hong Zhang

Digital Watermarking of VLSI Designs

Watermarking provides a mechanism for copyright protection of digital media by embedding information identifying the owner of the data. The bulk of the research into digital watermarks has focused on media such as images, video, audio, and text because these media dominate the proprietary material distributed on the Web. A VLSI design is a 2D or 3D orthogonal drawing of an underlying graph. Complex VLSI designs require significant efforts from the people that design them. It is therefore important to extend the watermarking research to VLSI designs. In this research, we are developing fragile and robust watermarks of VLSI designs.

Researchers

  • Dr Adrian Rusu

Efficient Visualization of Information Hierarchies

Information hierarchies are commonly used in a variety of areas such as file systems, hierarchies of object-oriented programs, social networks, bibliographies, and structures of World Wide Web. Since each node in an information hierarchy has a certain level of detail, it is important for the user to interact with the information and be able to investigate further inside the hierarchy, while at the same time be guaranteed that the information is up to date. In this research we investigate methods to efficiently visualize information hierarchies. To assess the effectiveness of our methods, we use such measures as speed, area, planarity, and user-controlled aspect ratio.

Researchers

  • Christopher Clement
  • Angel Hernandez
  • Radu Jianu
  • Dr Adrian Rusu
  • Confesor Santiago
  • Pablo Sarmiento
  • Chu Yao

FAA Data Matching for Reduced Vertical Separation Minimum

Reduced Vertical Separation Minimum (RVSM) reduces the vertical separation between flight level (FL) 290410 (29,000 to 41,000 feet) from 2000 feet to 1000 feet and makes six additional FLs available for operation. The additional FLs enable more aircraft to fly more time/fuel efficient profiles and provides the potential for enhanced airspace capacity. In this research, we developed a novel data matching algorithm for Aircraft Geometric Height Measurement Element(AGHME), which is a FAA proposed system to maintain safety and efficient within the National Airspace System (NAS), with regard to the new constraints of RVSM. AGHME is a constellation consisting of five aircraft height tracking elements. Our data matching algorithm matches data from the five individual elements and provides the matched data to a mathematical model, which computes the geometric height of the aircrafts.

Researchers

  • Christopher Clement
  • Dr Adrian Rusu
  • Confesor Santiago

FAA Flight Conflicts Analysis (FlightGUI)

The Federal Aviation Administration supports the accuracy testing of conflict probe tools. Conflict probes provide air traffic controllers with predictions of conflicts (i.e loss of minimum separation between aircraft) within a parametric time (e.g. 20 minutes) in the future. The accuracy testing requires detailed analysis of the conflict probes predictions. In 2002, FAA's Simulation and Analysis Group aquired an off the shelf animation package, which aids the analyst in examining the testing data. In this research, we introduce a novel visualization system to replace the previous software, called Flight Graphical User Interface (FlightGUI). FlightGUI displays the flights paths for aircrafts simultaneously in real time and indicates when a conflict occurs. FlightGUI has the capability to animate aircrafts flight paths in 2-D and 3-D, as well as presenting more than one conflict. In addition, FlightGUI is an improvement over the previous animation software by its use of free-floating windows and easy to use interface, its scalable design, and the animation of multiple flight paths simultaneously.

Researchers

  • Christopher Clement
  • Robert DeDomenico
  • Michael Lee
  • Dr Adrian Rusu
  • Confesor Santiago
  • David Shanline
  • Robert Webb

FAA PlotASR Radar Simulator

In this research we developed a new visualization sysytem, PlotASR 9 Radar Simulator, which is an improved version of the PlotASR software currently in use by the Federal Aviation Administration. Our version of the software, known as JPlotASR, is a visualization of aircraft position data received from ASR-9 Surveillance Radars. The original radar simulator was written in the 1980s and its functionality is very limited. Our version offers better functionality and portability. Our software does not display real-time radar data, but rather radar data that has been previously received and stored. The software reads in authentic flight information stored in a HEX encoded file and displays the flight data in a radarlike view. It allows the FAA to review received radar data as it was originally displayed on the real-time radar screen, at any time.

Researchers

  • John Robinson
  • Dr Adrian Rusu
  • Jason Snouffer
  • Andrew Tasso
  • Gershon Zebovitz

FAA Trajectory Prediction (TrajectoryGUI)

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) air traffic control system uses Decision Support Tools (DSTs) such as the User Request Evaluation Tool (URET) and the Traffic Management Advisor (TMA) to assist air traffic controllers to separate air traffic. DSTs predict aircraft flight paths and foretell potential conflicts. The accuracy of the trajectories generated by the DSTs determines their overall performance. Various algorithms and relational databases have been fashioned to investigate and calculate the performance accuracy of trajectory prediction. In this research we are exploring with a novel visualization called the Trajectory Graphical User Interface (TrajectoryGUI), with the goal of assisting FAA investigators in measuring trajectory accuracies. The key features of the visualization are its ability to graphically plot from a plethora of different flights and trajectories, view the plotted path, both in horizontal and vertical dimensions, zoom in and out, apply time tags for comparisons, and export plots and statistical analysis results of the investigation for external presentation. We are also exploring with more advanced visualizations such as galaxies.

Researchers

  • Christopher Clement
  • Peter Flanner
  • Gary Gasko
  • Daniel Jones
  • Lan Lin
  • Daniel Marzin
  • Mike Paglione
  • Christopher Reyes
  • Dr Adrian Rusu
  • Confesor Santiago
  • Thomas Snyder
  • Andrew Tasso
  • Richard Wallace
  • Robert Zakreski

Graph and Mesh Encoding

A fundamental algorithmic problem in computer graphics is that of computing a succinct encoding of a triangulation of a polygonal surface model in order to be able to transmit and render it efficiently. We are developing techniques to improve the current best algorithms for this problem, as well as to solve other problems in the areas of graph theory, computer graphics, and computer animation.

Researchers

  • Dr Adrian Rusu
  • Chu Yao

Graph-Based CAPTCHAs and Graphical Passwords

A CAPTCHA is a program that can generate and grade tests that most humans can pass, but current computer programs fail. CAPTCHA tests have several applications for practical security, including online polls, free email services, search engine bots, reducing worms and spam, preventing dictionary attacks. A graphical password is an authentication system that works by having the user solve a puzzle, presented in a graphical user interface. A graphical password offers better security and is easier than a text-based password for most people to remember. In this research we are developing alternative CAPTCHAs and graphical passwords by taking advantage of intrinsic graph properties.

Researchers

  • Christopher Clement
  • Ryan Fitzgerald
  • Stephen LoCastro
  • Dr Adrian Rusu
  • Amalia Rusu
  • John Wanies
  • Chu Yao

NASA Integrated System Health Management

Integrated System Health Management (ISHM) is becoming increasingly important to the future of aerospace, military and manufacturing operations and maintenance. A robust ISHM architecture can improve performance and safety while reducing the costs of maintaining complex, mission-critical systems. Utilizing distributed smart sensor technology, model-based reasoning and advanced visualization techniques, an ISHM-enabled system presents its operators with a complete picture of the system state and the health of the systems components and sensors. Achieving this robust Integrated System Health Management Architecture requires the development of many emergent technologies and tools, including a strong support database. This research proposes a secure, extensible, and scalable Health Assessment Database System (HADS) for the development, deployment and operation of ISHM technology.

Researchers

  • Ali Daneshmand
  • Jonathan Feuss
  • Peter Flanner
  • Dr Adrian Rusu
  • Patrick Valle

Visual Reasoning for Information Security

It is well known that sensitive computers are under attack daily by hackers, spread all over the world. In addition to finding the nature of the attacks and measures to defend against them, it is also crucial to quickly find the locations from where these attacks occur, so the response time to particular groups of hackers to be significantly decreased. In this research we are designing effective visualization systems to allow the analysts to examine large communication networks to understand access patterns for hacker detection. Typical questions that such visualization systems will be designed to answer deal with clustering hackers based on their hacking strategies, detecting and characterizing atypical hacking strategies, and understanding how an interesting subset’s hacking strategies differ from those of the whole. Active worms have been a persistent security threat on the Internet since the Morris worm arose in 1988. The Code Red and Nimda worms infected hundreds of thousands of systems, and cost both the public and the private sectors millions of dollars. Active worms propagate by infecting computer systems and by using infected computers to spread the worms in an automated fashion. They can flood the Internet in a very short time. Visualizing the spread of active worms can help us understand how active worms spread, and how we can monitor and defend against the propagation of worms effectively.

Researchers

  • Dr Adrian Rusu

Visual Summaries

Students who have learning styles different than those of their teachers encounter difficulties in grasping the lecture material in class. In addition, hearing impaired students can find it difficult to follow speech through hearing alone or to take notes while they are lip-reading or watching a sign-language interpreter. In this research we are developing novel software systems which will remove some of the barriers between teachers and students by acting as translators. Our systems take into account several different learning styles and are able to generate a customized summary of the information based on the user’s preferred method of learning.

Researchers

  • Gary Dainton
  • Giovanni DeCristofaro
  • Stephen Ferzetti
  • Jonathan Feuss
  • Vincent Futia
  • Steven Rotter
  • Dr Adrian Rusu
  • Erik Vermullen

Web Visualization and Design

Web pages on the Internet are usually categorized based on context or on the basis of users’ visit-patterns to sites. In order to effectively navigate the voluminous and expanding amount of information, it is important that designers and users of Web sites be able to track usage patterns and also recognize the structure in which Web data is organized. The structure of the World Wide Web can be modeled as a graph: the nodes are HTML documents, and a hyperlink from one document to another is represented as a directed edge. However, trees have much simpler structures than graphs, which makes it easier to display trees in an aesthetically pleasing manner. In addition, it is easier to display trees in small area, thus maximizing the information the users could see at one time. In this research, we are developing a combination of area-efficient aesthetically pleasing tree drawing algorithms, real-time Web crawling, and other visualization techniques, to create new methodologies which will make Web surfing simpler and thus less intimidating to regular Internet-users. This also helps e-commerce Web site designers who are constantly searching for effective Web site designs that present the user with the required data fast and in an enticing manner. We consider both 2D and 3D visualization techniques, as well as displays ranging from small screen PDAs or cell phones, to regular PC screens, and to fully immersive virtual reality environments.

Researchers

  • Vishal Anand
  • Keith Hansen
  • Radu Jianu
  • Christopher Reyes
  • Dr Adrian Rusu
  • Confesor Santiago