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university of illinois at urbana-champaign

Department of Computer Science

research

Research Themes Trustworthy Systems Parallel Computing Cyber-Physical Systems Data Sciences Institute for Advanced Computing Applications and Technologies Universal Parallel Computing Research Center National Center for Supercomputing Applications Coordinated Sciences Laboratory Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology Institute for Genomic Biology Multi-Modal Information Access & Synthesis Information Trust Institute The Program in Arms Control, Disarmament, and International Security Cloud Computing Testbed Information Network Academic Research Center Advanced Digital Sciences Center Explore by Theme Explore by Center Explore by Area Explore Student Research

Trustworthy Systems

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Designated a National Center of Excellence in Information Assurance Education and Research, Illinois provides national leadership through education and research in Trustworthy Computing. There is an increasing reliance on computer systems that affect our daily lives, health, and security. This reliance has great breadth, ranging from embedded systems in home appliances to networked computers used for shopping and entertainment. It also has great depth, involving safety critical applications such as the use of computer systems in automobiles and aircraft, and key security considerations in areas such as the management of the global financial system and the national electric power grid.

Computer scientists at Illinois accept great responsibility for the trust that people vest in computer systems. Our efforts include the dependability of hardware and software and addressing threats to security and privacy that computer systems can enable.

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Parallel Computing

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It's only natural Illinois would help define the landscape of multi- and many-core computing. After all, parallel computing is in our blood. Over four decades ago, we began paving the way for parallel computing research and innovation.

Current research continues to position Illinois as a globally recognized leader in parallelism.

From handhelds to supercomputers, Illinois researchers are developing the technologies that will efficiently exploit parallelism for scalable performance.

Our mission requires collaborative research across the computing stack, from applications to hardware. We are engaged in the design of new parallel application frameworks and patterns, new programming and metaprogramming languages, software engineering techniques, compilers and autotuners for parallelism discovery and optimization, runtime systems for resource management and virtualization, new hardware designs, and formal methods to reason about the correctness of future parallel systems.

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Data Sciences

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Our ever-growing ability to collect data has placed new pressures on our ability to make use of it.  Tomorrow's data-driven world will rely increasingly on methods and tools that can access, retrieve, and synthesize information from disparate sources and modalities.

As home to unrivaled national assets in data intensive computing, Illinois has a long and distinguished history in data-intensive computing.  Illinois combines excellence and leadership in data systems, artificial intelligence, systems and networking, architecture and parallel computing, to pursue unprecedented applications in multi-modal intelligence information systems and data-intensive computing, and in new computing architectures to support a data-driven world.

Research at the University of Illinois aims to discover new computational and algorithmic principles and software systems that facilitate access to, understanding of, and transformation and synthesis of natural language, images, and other forms of semi-structured and unstructured data.

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Cyber-Physical Systems

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When the National Science Foundation launched its program in Cyber-Physical Computing, it turned to Illinois to lead its efforts.

Illinois research into Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) has contributed significantly to the birth of the discipline. Source of the most cited paper in real-time computing, Illinois faculty and researchers set new standards and established foundational theory in the field.

Illinois now combines its leadership in computer and software systems with some of the most exciting research in Human-Computer Interaction to address new challenges in CPS.

Illinois researchers are addressing computing challenges in Cyber-Physical Systems including:

  • Complex reduction and control architectures, co-stability of CPS.
  • Distributed sensing systems
  • Knowledge discovery
  • Troubleshooting interactive complexity
  • Predictable integration of COTS-based cyber-physical systems
  • New abstractions at the confluence of sensing, actuation, and control
  • Verification of cyber-physical systems

Institute for Advanced Computing Applications and Technologies

http://iacat.uiuc.edu

The Institute for Advanced Computing Applications and Technologies at Illinois combines the campus' 50 years of leading the world in computer science and engineering, its two decades of providing computing power to thousands of researchers around the country through the NCSA, and its expertise in a broad array of disciplines that stand to make the most of emerging approaches to simulation- and analysis-based research.

CS research at IACAT is creating a future in which computational simulation and data analysis will be integrated into researchers' everyday life, and innovative approaches are revolutionizing science, engineering, the arts, and the humanities.

At IACAT, CS researchers lead and contribute to advances in:

  • Advanced Information Systems
  • Extreme-Scale Computing
  • Computing and Creativity

Universal Parallel Computing Research Center

in collaboration with Microsoft and Intel

http://www.upcrc.illinois.edu

Multi- and many-core computing is becoming pervasive; client-focused mass market applications are now driving parallel programming. We face a new challenge: one that places emphasis on productivity over high performance; and one that addresses the needs of the broad community of application developers. In such an environment, parallel programming must be accessible to all programmers.

With funding and support from Microsoft and Intel, UPCRC Illinois is paving the way for mass-market systems-such as desktops, servers, and PDAs-to utilize supercomputing parallel programming techniques.

National Center for Supercomputing Applications

http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu

NCSA provides powerful computers and expert support that help thousands of scientists and engineers across the country better understand our world.

With the computing power available at NCSA, researchers simulate how galaxies collide and merge, how proteins fold and how molecules move through the wall of a cell, how tornadoes and hurricanes form, and other complex natural and engineered phenomena.

For more than 20 years, NCSA has been a leader in deploying robust high-performance computing resources and in working with research communities to develop new computing and software technologies.

The center focuses on:

Developing and supporting powerful, reliable computing, data, and networking resources that enable researchers to solve demanding science and engineering problems. We develop and explore innovative architectures and techniques to accelerate scientific computing.

Coordinated Sciences Laboratory

http://www.csl.illinois.edu

The University of Illinois' Coordinated Science Laboratory is a premier, multidisciplinary research laboratory that focuses on information technology at the crossroads of computing, control and communications.

With a rich history of nearly 60 years of innovation, CSL has developed and deployed new technologies that have achieved international scientific recognition and transformed society.

Led by a faculty of world-renowned experts and researchers, CSL uses these innovations to explore critical issues in defense, medicine, environmental sciences, robotics, life-enhancement for the disabled and aeronautics.

Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology

http://www.beckman.illinois.edu

The Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology is an interdisciplinary research institute devoted to leading-edge research in the physical sciences, computation, engineering, biology, behavior, cognition, and neuroscience.

The Institute was founded on the premise that reducing the barriers between traditional scientific and technological disciplines can yield research advances that more conventional approaches can not.

Computer science researchers make major contributions to research in the following themes:

  • Human-Computer Intelligent Interaction
  • Molecular and Electronic Nanostructures

Institute for Genomic Biology

http://www.igb.uiuc.edu

The Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois is dedicated to advancing life sciences research. IGB scientists and researchers are changing the landscape of medicine, making important advances in biomedical research, and working to make biofuels not only environmentally sustainable but also economically viable.

CS researchers assist scientists collaborate with IGB scientists to discover the answers to some of life's most fundamental questions through application of bioinformatics, data mining, information access and synthesis, and more.

Multi-Modal Information Access & Synthesis

In collaboration with the US Department of Homeland Security

http://mias.cs.uiuc.edu

The MIAS Center, designated a Center of Excellence in information research, performs research on advanced methods for information analysis and decision science.

Most of the world's information is unstructured: text, images and sensory data. Accessing it in a meaningful way and extracting relevant content is inherently difficult - relevant concepts may be expressed in a wide variety of ways. The MIAS mission is to develop the theories, algorithms, and tools for analysts and researchers to access a variety of data formats, integrate unstructured data with existing resources, and transform raw data into useful and understandable information.

Information Trust Institute

http://www.iti.illinois.edu

ITI brings together over 90 faculty and senior researchers, many graduate student researchers, and industry partners to conduct foundational and applied research to enable the creation of critical applications and cyber infrastructures. In doing so, ITI is creating computer systems, software, and networks that society can depend on to be trustworthy, that is, secure, dependable (reliable and available), correct, safe, private, and survivable. Instead of concentrating on narrow and focused technical solutions, ITI aims to create a new paradigm for designing trustworthy systems from the ground up and validating systems that are intended to be trustworthy.

ITI is an academic/industry partnership targeting application areas such as electric power, financial systems, defense, and homeland security, among others.

The Program in Arms Control, Disarmament, and International Security

http://acdis.illinois.edu

The Program in Arms Control, Disarmament, and International Security (ACDIS) is a multidisciplinary venture at the University of Illinois that facilitates objective basic research, education and outreach on international security issues. A central objective is to disseminate the findings to the policymaking community, academia, educators, and students. The strength of the Program rests in its ability to integrate insights generated by engineers, natural scientists, social scientists, and scholars of the humanities to produce comprehensive analyses that do not reduce security issues to singular and simplifying explanations. International security challenges are approached as complex phenomena that can only be understood through an examination of multiple causes and impacts.

Cloud Computing Testbed (CCT)

in collaboration with Yahoo!, HP, and Intel

http://cloud.cs.illinois.edu

Illinois combines is leadership in complex systems and data intensive computing in an unmatched effort to explore challenges of data intensive computing in a distributed cloud environment.

With the Cloud Computing Testbed, Illinois focuses its world-renowned expertise in systems and networking issues to test the limits and unlock the potential of cloud computing.

We live in a world populated with enormous amounts of data from a wide variety of sources such as satellite telemetry, medical and agricultural sensors, and billions of web pages. There is a compelling human need to represent, analyze, query, manage, understand, and respond to such data for knowledge extraction and decision making.

The CCT effort at Illinois addresses these needs with research in:

  • Operating systems
  • Distributed monitoring
  • Monitoring and management systems
  • Virtual machines
  • Network analysis
  • Data mining
  • Distributed systems

Advanced Digital Sciences Center

www.adsc.illinois.edu

The Advanced Digital Sciences Center will be focused on breakthrough innovations in information technology that are expected to have a major impact in transforming human beings' utilization of information technology. The initial program to be undertaken at ADSC is the Human Sixth Sense Programme (HSSP). The bold vision of HSSP is to develop the information technology infrastructure and human-machine interfaces necessary to enable humans to interact with the digital world in a manner that is as seamless and natural as the use of any of our other senses.

Information Network Academic Research Center

Funded by the Army Research Laboratory, INARC is addressing the research challenges inherent in complex, mobile, self-forming, and rapidly-changing networks such as those utilized on the battlefield by the Army and its soldiers. This unique environment has guided the development of the Illinois INARC research agenda focused on building a foundation for scalable, hierarchical, and most importantly, dynamic and resilient information networks. The proposed research addresses critical issues of connected and interrelated entities that form sophisticated relationships and networks.

The center will focus on the most critical issues and consists of five projects: (1) Integrated Modeling and Analysis of Networks, (2) Distributed and Real-time Data-Source Integration and Information Extraction, (3) Scalable, Human-Centric Information Network Systems, (4) Knowledge Discovery in Information Networks, and (5) Designing Trusted Information Networks