University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

Published: January 19, 2006

By ELLEN GOLDBAUM
Contributing Editor

The university's best opportunities for achieving international prominence by 2020 in the area of information and computing technology, are, according to the draft white paper on the strategic strength in information and computing technology, clustered in computational science, information science and human-computer interaction.

Approximately 30 faculty members from across the university met on Jan. 12 in 120 Clemens to respond to and augment these and other recommendations in the draft white paper. The meeting was a follow-up to the group's envisioning retreat held last March as part of the UB 2020 strategic-planning process.

The white paper committee members are Ann M. Bisantz, associate professor of industrial engineering; Venu Govindaraju, professor of computer science and engineering; Bharat Jayaraman, chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering; David Mark, professor of geography; Russ Miller, UB Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering; Abani Patra, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering; Hejamadi R. Rao, professor of management systems and sciences; Shambhu Upadhyaya, associate professor of computer science and engineering; and Shahin Vassigh, assistant professor of architecture.

The paper covered the group's vision, research clusters, research challenges and UB's track record in these areas. Based on the outcomes from the meeting, a timeline and resources necessary to implement the recommendations will be added to the white paper, a final version of which is expected to be presented to the UB 2020 Academic Planning Committee and the deans next month.

"What are the areas needed to take information and computing technologies to the next level and what fundamental information and computing research will distinguish UB?" Govindaraju asked the group in presenting an outline of the paper.

According to the paper, the main research clusters in which UB is poised to advance are:

• Computational science, the integration of fundamental disciplinary science knowledge with advanced computing and mathematical modeling, which has emerged as the third method of scientific enquiry after experiments and theory. Examples at UB include strengths in biochemistry and bioinformatics, coupled with the computational power available through the Center for Computational Research, which, the paper states, will position UB well to develop, for example, computational models for understanding the mechanisms behind protein folding and predicting folded structures.

• Information science, the ability of humans and machines to create, discover and reason by advancing the ability to represent, collect, store, organize, locate, visualize and communicate information. Examples at UB run the gamut from document analysis and recognition technologies developed at the Center of Excellence for Document Analysis and Recognition and the Center for Unified Biometrics and Sensors to geographic-information research at the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis to research at the Center of Excellence in Information Systems Assurance Research and Education.

• Human-computer interaction, the design, implementation and evaluation of interface technologies that are useful and appealing to a broad cross-section of people. HCI work at UB has focused on haptics, immersive environments, learning and responsive environments, multimedia, natural language processing and visualization.

In discussing the challenge of identifying research areas that will distinguish UB in information and computing technology, some participants felt the draft of the white paper and its mission statement needed more specificity.

Faculty discussed the roles of information and computing technology as both enablers of all facets of scientific research and as research subjects in their own right.

Noting its function as an enabling discipline, several faculty members said that it was necessary to develop computational infrastructure—commonly referred to as "cyberinfrastructure"—at the university.

"This is more than hardware and software, it's the research and scholarship that will help any researcher at the university do what they need to do from a computing perspective," said Kemper Lewis, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and director of the New York State Center for Engineering Design and Industrial Innovation.

Participants weighed the pros and cons of emphasizing only faculty hires versus hiring both faculty and doctoral-level technical staff whose expertise could be leveraged to assist researchers.

In determining where to focus hiring of faculty at the senior levels, several areas were mentioned, including stochastic modeling, or modeling under uncertainty; atomistic and multiscale modeling; and ubiquitous computing.

Real-time distance collaboration and networking also were mentioned as critical areas for hiring, especially in light of upcoming milestones in computing, such as the expected achievement within the next five years of petaflop computer speeds, in which computers will be able to perform one quadrillion floating operations per second.

In each of the three clusters, the white paper identified the following research goals to be accomplished during the next five to 15 years:

• In computational science, UB will harness the capabilities of multi-teraflop and future petaflop computers and emerging computational grids to support new material design coupled with simulations across multiple length and time scales. Advances will result in physics at the smallest scales, in the discovery of pharmaceuticals at the molecular scale, and in developing methods for enhanced modeling of biological structures.

• In information science, UB will develop pervasive and "context-aware" computer systems based on information gathered from sensors, knowledge and biometrics. Heterogeneous computing and communication devices will be seamlessly integrated, and architectures and protocols and algorithms that enable plug-and-play and automated computing service discovery will be among those to be developed.

• In human-computer interaction, UB will develop visualization techniques for modeling physical, geophysical and biomechanical processes that will be capable of supporting simultaneously multiple design objectives. Virtual-reality interfaces will support real-time decision making with applications in medical systems, military command-and-control and post-disaster response. Computing systems will be built that cater to a user's individualized needs, understanding human language and through recognition of face, speech and other biometrics, resulting in a seamless integration with the environment.