NSF Net-Centric I/UCRC Meets to Discuss New Research in Cloud Software & IoT Systems
Last April, sixty university faculty, industry members, and students met at the University for the Industry Advisory Board meeting of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Net-Centric & Cloud Software & Systems (NCSS) Industry/University Cooperative Research Center (I/UCRC). The mission of the center is to be the primary source for fundamental software and systems research for the modeling, analysis, design, implementation, verification and validation, testing, deployment, and evolution of net-centric and cloud software and hardware systems.
The two-day Spring NCSS Industry Advisory Board (IAB) meeting was attended by approximately 60 people – eight of whom were industry members, eight who were industry/government visitors, 29 students, and various NCSS University members. During the spring meeting, thirteen project presentations were submitted for consideration including five new proposals and eight in-progress reports. At the meeting, each project was proposed by either industry members or university faculty. Following the presentations was the poster presentation part of the day, which provided the industry and university members the opportunity for direct interaction with each project and its investigators. The Industry Advisory Board then met to evaluate and select projects to be funded for research.
The meeting also included a keynote speech by Dr. Peter DeNagy titled, “IoT – How Big and How Ambitious?” as well as a “Wicked” Problem Industry Panel. The meeting was virtually attended by Dr. Dimitri Perkins, the I/UCRC Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) NSF Director, who provided a brief overview of the I/UCRC program.
Dr. Farokh Bastani, UT Dallas’ NCSS Site Director, remarked on the meeting’s great success saying, “We had a very successful Spring 2017 IAB meeting of our NSF NCSS I/UCRC. Several IAB members and several students and faculty members attended the meeting, including students and faculty from ASU, SMU, UNT, and UTD. Dr. Raymond Paul, who was previously with the Department of Defense and actively helped create the vision of our Center, came all the way from Washing DC to attend the meeting and participate in the research discussions.” Dr. Bastani continued on, stating, “Several innovative project proposals and reports were also presented during the course of this meeting with emphasis on new and innovative approaches that address numerous critical challenges in emerging Internet of Things (IoT) systems, especially methods of developing and deploying high quality and highly dependable and secure IoT systems. I expect that in the coming years, our NSF NCSS I/UCRC will become one of the premier sources of fundamental research and technology for high-quality net-centric and cloud software and system.”
The Net-Centric & Cloud Software & Systems (NCSS) Center industry members include Advance Micro Devices (AMD), Armor, Ashum Corp., Briggs Freeman Sotheby’s International Realty, CompuMatrice, Endometric, Intel, L3 Technologies, Lockheed Martin Missiles & Fire Control, NTT Data, NXP, NWave Technologies, Poundra, Raytheon, Sprint, Texas Instruments (TI), and the US Army Research, Development and Engineering Command (RDECOM) Communications-Electronics Research, Development and Engineering Center (CERDEC) Space and Terrestrial Communication Directorate (S&TCD).
The Net-Centric & Cloud Software & Systems (NCSS) Center is composed of the following universities: the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD), University of North Texas (UNT), Arizona State University, Southern Methodist University (SMU), and Missouri University of Science and Technology (MUST). The Net-Centric Systems researchers at each university are focused on issues related to various aspects of distributed embedded systems, including investigation of core technologies, middleware, and net-centric applications.
The faculty and students at the UT Dallas site focus on Service-Oriented Architectures, software service composition, and QoS when running on net-centric and cloud computing systems. At the University of North Texas campus, the faculty and students concentrate on multicore processing, reliability and resource management of networked and cloud computing systems. At the Arizona State University site, the faculty and students focus on communication systems including signal processing and communication protocols.
UT Dallas Professors involved in the Center include Drs. Farokh Bastani, UT Dallas Site Director, Gopal Gupta, I-Ling Yen, Lawrence Chung, Kendra Cooper, D.T. Huynh, Latifur Khan, Neeraj Mittal, Eric Wong, and Kang Zhang.
The Center has been a host to over 100 research projects across 20 companies over the past five years and is now in its second five-year phase of operation.
Click here to view all the photos from the Spring 2017 NCSS Industry Advisory Board (IAB) meeting
ABOUT THE UT DALLAS COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT
The UT Dallas Computer Science program is one of the largest Computer Science departments in the United States with over 2,100 bachelor’s-degree students, more than 1,000 MS master’s students, 150 PhD students, and 86 faculty members, as of Fall 2016. With The University of Texas at Dallas’ unique history of starting as a graduate institution first, the CS Department is built on a legacy of valuing innovative research and providing advanced training for software engineers and computer scientists.