Slap-Together History of MSU Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering's US-Gov't Research
Ripped from Michigan State University's College of Engineering website, under a section called "Highlights"
This will continue to be updated and formatted moving forward.
For the casual reader, summaries were derived from the university department’s publicly displayed content on their website, not from official paperwork of the gift, grant, or award referenced.
https://www.cse.msu.edu/About/highlights/
2006
MSU-CSE received part of a $50,000 gift from Microsoft as part of Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Curriculum Program to encourage Internet users to better protect themselves from information-privacy threats. "I-Safety: Network Security Begins in the Classroom" worked with K-12 students on online safety issues.
Lenski, Bates & Ofria received a DARPA subcontract.
Betty Cheng received a research grant through the NSF Division of Computer and Network Systems, under the Computing Research Infrastructure Program. The title of the project was: ReMoDD: A Repository for Model Driven Development.
Betty Cheng received a 3-year research grant through the NSF Division of Computer and Communication Foundations under the Computing Processes and Artifacts program. The project title is: Facilitating the Modeling and Analysis of Distributed Real-time Embedded Systems.
Rong Jin received a gift from Intel for his research on semi-supervised learning. The goal of this research is to develop effective algorithms for multi-label learning from a limited number of training examples. The developed algorithms will be useful for a variety of multimedia application, such as image clustering, image classification, and content-based image retrieval.
Matt Mutka and Li Xiao were awarded funding from the NSF Computing Research Infrastructure Program. The title of their project is "A Research Infrastructure for Investigation of Performance, Configuration, and Security Issues of Wireless Sensor and Ad Hoc Networks".
Christina Chan (Chemical Engineering), Rong Jin, and Zheng Li (Chemical Engineering) received a SBIR grant from the NSF. The title of the project is: "SBIR Phase 1: Identifying Toxicity Pathways."
Pang-Ning Tan was part of an awarded grant from the NSF for their project entitled "AOC: A Multidisciplinary Protocol for Assessing Climate Impacts, Vulnerability and Adaptation".
Anil Jain received funding from the Army Research Office Mathematics Division for the project "Fingerprints: Deformation, Individuality, Image Quality and Fusion."
Joyce Chai and Rong Jin were awarded research funding from the Office of Naval Research for the project "Discourse Processing for Conversational QA".
Anil Jain received a grant from the Office of Naval Research titled "Semi-Supervised Learning." The main focus of the grant is improving the performance of these algorithms when presented with a few external constraints or partial information (hence the name "semi-supervised") is available about the data.
2007
MSU Professor Anil Jain was awarded a National Institute of Justice, Army Research Office, and NSF IUC on Identification Technology Research (CITeR) grants for biometrics research at the MSC-CSE, according to MSU’s website.
MSU-CSE received an NIH grant for the project “Mining Large-scale Neural Ensemble Recordings” aimed at developing signal processing tools and machine learning algorithms for mining the spike trains recorded for large neural ensembles.
Alex Liu at MSU-CSE was awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation for a project entitled “A New Approach to Testing and Verification of Security Policies.” The department was also awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation for the project entitled, “LEAPNet: Self-adaptable All Terrain Sensor Networks.”
National Science Foundation, for the project titled “Applying Digital Evolution to Behavioral Models,” awarded Betty Cheng a grant through MSU-CSE. The project addressed digital evolution and using it to improve the design of artificial intelligence systems.
2008
In May 2008, Anil Jain created a system for the FBI to help police to match tattoos to suspects. This funding was continued in 2009 by the FBI Biometrics Center for Excellence at West Virginia University.
Michigan State’s 2008 article reads:
“This is the reason FBI’s Next Generation Identification system calls for an automatic image retrieval system for scars, marks and tattoos.”
In 2008, Anil Jain at MSU-CSE was received a grant from the US Army Research, Development and Engineering Command (RDECOM) for the project “Automatic Image and Video Annotation." Betty Cheng was also awarded "ORCHID: Harnessing Digital Evolution to Design High-Assurance Adaptive Systems.”
Also in 2008, NSF Division of Computing and Communication Foundations (CCF) program Foundations of Computing Processes and Artifacts funded a project titled, “Eigengeometry: Geometric Spectral Computing for Computer Graphics and Computational Science.” It studied brain imaging.
Joyce Chai received a grant from the Robust Intelligence Program at the National Science Foundation in 2008 for the machine translation of multiparty conversations.
A NSF project entitled "CI-TEAM Demonstration Project for Real-Time Interactive and Collaborative Cyberinfrastructure for Teaching and Training of Hands-On Nanotechnology" was awarded in 2008. It was to develop the infrastructure to handle live remote learning for teaching nanotechnologies.
Also in 2008, "Positional candidate genes for resistance to Marek's disease by screening for Marek's disease virus Meq-regulated genes" was awarded by the USDA NRI Animal Genome program.
In late 2008, MSU-CSE was awarded research support from the U.S. Army TACOM for a project entitled "Supermedia Enabled Human/Machine Interfacing for Teleoperation of UGVs". It was to develop a network to handle interfaces that would integrate humans with robots.
2009
In 2009, Anil Jain received funding from the Office of Naval Research. The project was worth approximately $1.4M and was called "Kernel Learning for Fusing Uncertain Information from Multiple Heterogeneous Sources."
MSU-CSE received a grant from the Army Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (DURIP) for a project entitled "Acquisition of a Multi-Robot Mobile Manipulation Systems."
MSU-CSE was awarded nine times by the National Science Foundation in 2009. Most dealt with AI, robotics, data collection, and nanotechnology.
Anil Jain accepted a guest professorship at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China in 2009. It was concurrent with his tenure at Michigan State University and spanned three years.
Anil Jain received funding from the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) for the project "Face annotation at the macroscale and the microscale: tools, techniques, and applications in forensic identification" in 2009.
Anil Jain, University Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, was awarded a grant from the Department of Justice-FBI as a subcontract from West Virginia University for the project entitled "Friction Ridge Support Services (FRSS)" in 2009.
The Digging into Data Challenge was a joint, international grant competition launched in January 2009 by four leading research agencies: the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) from the United Kingdom, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) from the United States, the National Science Foundation (NSF) from the United States, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) from Canada.
MSU-CSE were also awarded a project, “Digging into Image Data to Answer Authorship Related Questions,” as well as a grant for “CPATH-2: CPACE II: Implementing Constituency-driven Curricular Change that Integrates Computational Thinking Across Engineering Disciplines” from the National Science Foundation in 2009.
2010
A unit of the French military contractor Safran SA signed a deal with Michigan State University to sell the tattoo-matching computer technology developed by Anil Jain at MSU, funded by the U.S. DOJ in 2008.
MSU received $25 million for a NSF Science and Technology Center to study “Evolution in Action.” MSU-CSE’s Betty Cheng was named as a recipient.
In February of 2010, Joyce Chai, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, was awarded an NSF grant for the project titled "Towards an Infrastructure for Research on Multimodal Language Processing in Situated Human Robot Dialogue."
Also in 2010, an Assistant Professor of CSE received an NSF CAREER award for the project, “Design and Analysis of Performance-Critical Wireless Sensor Networks: A Fusion-Centric Approach”. It focused on assuring the performance of sensor networks, like in power grid and bridges monitoring, or volcano and earthquake detection.
Also in 2010, an Assistant Professor of CSE received an NSF CAREER award for the project, “New Technologies for Genome-Scale Comparative NcRNA Identification”. This project was for new algorithms and technologies for noncoding RNA annotation in large-scale sequence databases.
Also in 2010, an Assistant Professor of CSE received an NSF CAREER grant for a project entitled "Theory and Practice of Space-Time Variational Integrators for Simulation and Animation." The primary goal of the research project was to develop novel numerical simulation methods to the evolution of virus surfaces immersed in fluids.
Associate Professor of CSE was awarded a research grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) for a project entitled "Automated Program Revision for Embedded Systems."
Alex Liu, Assistant Professor of CSE, and colleagues were awarded a research grant in 2010 from the NSF for a multidisciplinary project titled, "Signal Processing and Information Theoretic Approaches to Denoising and Demystifying Social Network Services". It was to develop an understanding of the nature, underlying models, and dynamics of social networks. Methods for the analysis were designed to answer fundamental questions regarding social networks.
He was also awarded a research grant from the NSF for a project titled "Grammar Aware High-Speed Application Protocol Parsing for Deep Flow Inspection".
Another grant to Alex Liu from the Trustworthy Computing Program of the NSF was for a project titled "An Algorithmic Framework for Distributed Network Security Policies Management". That project employed proactive approaches to reachability management and helped operators design, verify, analyze, troubleshoot, and optimize distributed network security policies.
Cogent Systems was sold around the same immediate timeframe as the funding to MSU. Cogent Systems was owned at the time by now-CEO and Chairman of the Board, Ming Hsieh. Ming Hsieh also owns Fulgent Genetics. Fulgent Genetics is currently embroiled in a Chinese server, data-sharing scandal, nearly identical in circumstances to the current Konnech debacle.
Once again in 2010, MSU-CSE received an Office of Naval Research grant for their project entitled Large-scale Kernel-based Data Clustering. It was a three-year project aiming to develop efficient computational algorithms for large-scale kernel-based clustering.
2011
Michigan State University Computer Science and Engineering received an NSF grant for their 2011 project titled, Evolution Park: An Evolutionary Robotics Habitat for the Study of Crawling, Swimming and Flying Creatures.
Joyce Chai, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, received a grant from Office of Naval Research for her project titled "Towards a Collaborative Model of Interpreting Imprecise Language Descriptions in Situated Dialogue" in 2011.
Also in 2011, Yanni Sun, Assistant Professor in Computer Science and Engineering and Donna Koslowsky, Associate Professor in Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, were funded by the NIH for a project entitled "Deep sequence profiling of gRNA transcriptomes in two stages of Trypanosoma brucei". The project was for “insight into both the developmental regulation of editing and the selective use of alternative guide RNAs.”
Later in 2011, Anil Jain and Rong Jin, MSU Professors of Computer Science and Engineering, received a three-year Army Research Office grant for their project entitled "Large scale image retrieval".
Jain was also awarded two grants from the FBI Biometric Center of Excellence for the projects entitled "Latent Fingerprint Enhancement" and "Detection and reconstruction of Altered Fingerprints," in addition to a grant from National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) for the project entitled "Measurement Science of Biometrics".
Continuing in 2011, NSF awarded a research grant to study the effects of cross-scale interactions on freshwater ecosystems across space and time. In what the university’s formal announcements made appear to be an add-on research program, MSU-CSE later in the year announced another NSF grant for their project entitled “Exploiting Mobility-assisted Collaboration for Adaptive Aquatic Sensor Networks.” Its goal was to additionally enrich several courses offered in the CSE and ECE departments, and provide opportunities to reach out K-12 students and schools through interactive lectures and participation in a teacher training program at MSU.
The NIH also funded C. Titus Brown, assistant professor in the departments of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) and Microbiology and Molecular Genetics (MMG) through a genomics education grant.
Yanni Sun also secured in 2011 a grant from NSF to produce a plant genome optimized annotation pipeline that can be widely used by the plant research community, and will be incorporated as part of the iPlant Cyberinfrastructure.
In 2011, Michigan State University licensed software that detects altered fingerprints to Morpho, part of the Safran Group. Safran Group was the same French company that licensed the tattoo recognition software from MSU in 2008.
MSU-CSE was awarded a four-year $1.83M grant by the NSF for a 2011 project titled, “VolcanoSRI: 4D Volcano Tomography in a Large-Scale Sensor Network.”
Anil Jain received yet another 2011 grant from the DOJ’s National Institute of Justice under the Sensor, Surveillance and Biometric Technologies for Criminal Justice Applications: Biometric Technologies program for his project entitled “Matching Forensic Sketches to Large Face Image Databases”, as well as a grant for a project entitled "Pediatric Fracture Printing: Creating a Science of Statistical Fracture Signature Analysis.”
2012 Year
Michigan State’s distinguished professor Anil Jain remained a guest professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing from June 2009 through June of 2012.
Early in 2012, MSU-CSE received a research grant from the Office of Naval Research for the project "Learning with UIIC Data: Fusion and Completion of Partial Kernel Matrices." He was also awarded a cluster of grants from DOJ, NSF, and the future partner companies of Cogent Systems.
The NSF in 2012 also awarded a project titled, “Integrated Control of Fidelity and Real-Time Performance in Networked Sensing Systems”. The project had broad implications for intelligent sensing networks.
Joyce Chai, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and Ning Xi, University Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, received a three-year research grant from the National Robotics Initiative program at NSF. The title of the project was "NRI-Small: Contextually Grounded Collaborative Discourse for Mediating Shared Basis in Situated Human Robot Dialogue". The results were expected to benefit many human robot interaction applications in manufacturing, service, assistive technology, and search and rescue.
The same year, the College of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University received an NSF award for the project entitled "An Adaptive and Robust Discrete Geometry Based Helmholtz Solver and Applications to Device Design".
MSU-CSE received a $3M four-year research grant from the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative at the USDA in 2011. The title of the project was "Improving Genetic Resistance of Cattle to Johne's disease".
In 2012, Alex Liu, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, received a research gift from Lionel Ni’s Microsoft Research to support his research on novel authentication schemes for mobile devices such as iPhones and iPads.
2013
Early in 2013, John Weng, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University, received a research gift from Konnech co-founder Lionel Ni’s associative Microsoft Research for autonomous mental development (AMD).
MSU-CSE then received a three-year research grant from the Big Data Initiative program at NSF. The title of the project was "Real Time Observation Analysis for Healthcare Applications via Automatic Hardware Adaptation". The goal was to develop AI algorithms that enabled real-time, hyper-efficient data analysis, while being focused on healthcare applications.
C. Titus Brown, MSU-CSE and Microbiology and Molecular Genetics Assistant Professor received a three-year research award (R01) from the Big Data Initiative Program at NIH. The title of the project was "Low-Memory Streaming Prefilters for Biological Sequencing Data." It was aimed at developing efficient approaches to analyzing vast quantities of sequencing data available from DNA sequencing machines. The project emphasized open source software development, cloud computing, and reproducibility.
C. Titus Brown then also received a 3-year renewal of an NIH R25 grant, "Analyzing Next-Generation Sequencing Data." It was workshop grant that funded a two-week workshop at the Kellogg Biological Station, operating since 2010; the workshop taught experimental biologists how to analyze data from advanced sequencing technologies. Since 2010 over 90 graduate students, postdocs, and faculty from around the world have taken the course, and last year over we had over 200 applicants for 24 slots. (posted Sept. 3, 2013)
Alex Liu, in 2013, received a three-year research grant from the Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace program at NSF. The title of the project was "Semantics Aware Approaches to Automated Reverse Engineering Unknown Application Protocols". The project represented the first effort toward developing semantics aware approaches to protocol inference, a fundamental building block of many network security solutions. The project hoped to enable many new, cutting-edge network security applications and solutions.
Again in 2013, Alex X. Liu received a research gift from Lionel Ni’s friendly Microsoft Research for research on novel authentication schemes for mobile devices. Liu had already been published in a full research paper, which is titled "Secure Unlocking of Mobile Touch Screen Devices by Simple Gestures -- You can see it but you can not do it."
MSU-CSE professors were awarded a medium grant entitled "Geometric and topological approaches to biomolecular structure and dynamics" from the NSF Division of Information and Intelligent Systems.
The MSU College of Engineering received a 3-year NSF grant for a project entitled "Networked Robotic Gerridae for Sensing and Communications in Aquatic Environments." The project helped to develop new robotic sensors and networking technology, enabling inexpensive and rapid deployment of systems that use artificial intelligence to monitor, process, and react to its findings.
MSU announced Guoliang Xing, Associate Professor of CSE to a MSU multidisciplinary team of researchers within a new NSF CyberSEES project. The Cyber-Enabled Sustainability Science and Engineering (CyberSEES) program was to advance interdisciplinary research to keep pace with new advances in computing.
"CyberSEES: Type 2: Towards Sustainable Aquatic Ecosystems: A New Adaptive Sampling and Data-Enabled Monitoring and Modeling Framework", used advances in underwater robotics, sensor networks, signal processing, and biophysical modeling and created new systems primarily for management of water resources.
Cogent Systems also that year, operated then by Fulgent Genetics founder and owner, Ming Hsieh, donated a 3-year $50,000 annual gift to Anil Jain through MSU, and his research group to support biometrics research.
2014
Xiaoming Liu, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University, received funding for two projects in the area of computer vision for agriculture from the Michigan Sugar Company, and the Herrick Foundation from Detroit, MI.
Guoliang Xing, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, with Xiaobo Tan, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Charles Krueger, Professor in the Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability, all of Michigan State University, in collaboration with Chris Holbrook, research ecologist of the US Geological Survey, were awarded an NSF Cyber-Physical Systems grant on the topic "Tracking Fish Movement with a School of Gliding Robotic Fish".
Alex Liu received a three-year research grant from the Computer Systems Research program at NSF. The title of the project was called "Behavior Based User Authentication for Mobile Devices". It was done in collaboration with again, Lionel Ni’s friends at Microsoft Research.
Immediately around the same time, Alex Liu received a research gift from AT&T Research on automatic debugging of performance bugs in cellular networks. It sought to improve system performance end-to-end in real time at the service provider level.
Guoliang Xing, in MSU-CSE, and Jun Huang, Research Associate of Computer Science and Engineering were awarded an NSF Networking Technology and Systems grant on vehicular networking. It was centered around autonomous driving.
Alex Liu and Eric Torng, Associate Professors of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University, and Chad Meiners, Member of Technical Staff at MIT Lincoln Labs received a patent for "Systematic framework for application protocol field extraction".
2015
Alex Liu and Amir Khakpour, former Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at MSU were issued a patent entitled "Method for Computing Network Reachability". It seems to provide a method of packet transfer between subnetworks within a network.
Alex Liu received a three-year research grant from the Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace program at NSF. "Multipath TCP Side Channel Vulnerabilities and Defenses" was in collaboration with Univ. of Iowa Prof. M. Zubair Shafiq, who graduated from Michigan State University in 2014 under the supervision of Alex Liu.
Xiaoming Liu, Asst. Prof. of CSE and Arun Ross, Assoc. Prof. of CSE, were awarded a NIH R01 grant entitled "Quantitative Molecular and Cellular MRI of Hepatocyte Transplantation."
Alex Liu received a research gift from Google for research on detecting and localizing performance degradation for virtual cellular data services.
2016
Kevin Liu, Asst. Prof. of CSE was awarded an NSF CISE Research Initiation Initiative (CRII) grant for the project "Novel evolutionary models and algorithms to connect genomic sequence and phenotypic data".
Jiayu Zhou, Asst. Prof. of CSE was awarded an NSF CISE Research Initiation Initiative (CRII) grant for the project "Integrating Domain Knowledge via Interactive Multi-Task Learning," aimed at “machine learning,” or Artificial Intelligence.
H. Metin Aktulga, Asst. Prof. of CSE was awarded an NSF CISE Research Initiation Initiative (CRII) grant for the project "Algorithms and Tools to Facilitate the Development of High Fidelity Reactive Molecular Dynamics Models".
Betty Cheng and Philip McKinley, Professors in the Dept. of CSE were awarded a research grant from the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory for a project titled "X-PLORE: Combining Model-Driven Engineering, Bio-Inspiration, and Formal Analysis to Mitigate Uncertainty in High-Assurance Software Systems." A focus of the X-PLORE project was on cyber-physical systems with discrete and continuous components, making it difficult to provide system assurance.
Mi Zhang, Asst. Prof. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Alex Liu and Anil Jain, Profs. of Computer Science and Engineering, with Jingbo Meng, Asst. Prof. of Communication Arts and Sciences, and David C. Mohr, Prof. of Preventive Medicine, Psychiatry, and Medical Social Sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and Director of the Center for Behavioral Intervention Technologies, have been awarded a three-year NSF grant for a project titled "iSee - Intelligent Mobile Behavior Monitoring and Depression Analytics Service for College Counseling Decision Support".
Mi Zhang, Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Michigan State University, and Alex X. Liu, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University, have been awarded a Ford-MSU Alliance grant for a project on developing a low-cost contactless respiratory and heart rate monitoring system, which can serve as a key component of non-intrusive in-vehicle health monitoring systems in smart vehicles. The project aimed to develop a low-cost way to use in-vehicle speakers and microphones into an active sonar [sound monitoring] system to continuously and passively monitor the driver and passengers' respiratory and heart rates.
Anil Jain was elected as a Foreign Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE). The INAE elects only 5 foreign members each year.
Joyce Chai, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering was awarded a three-year NSF grant for a project entitled "Extending Verb Semantics with Causality towards Physical World" in regards to “human-robot communication”.
Arun Ross and Anil Jain were awarded a three-year NSF grant under the Secure & Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program. Their proposal entitled "Imparting Privacy to Biometric Data in Cyberspace" investigated privacy of biometric information of an individual. It was intended in part to determine how much privacy a biometric image could have to, in turn, quantify the amount of private information that can be derived from it.
Guoliang Xing, Assoc. Prof. of Computer Science, Wei Peng, Assoc. Prof. of Communication Arts and Sciences, and Barbara Smith, Prof. of Nursing, in collaboration with Jina Huh, Asst. Prof. of Biomedical Informatics at University of California-San Diego School of Medicine, was awarded a four-year NSF grant titled "Unobtrusive Sensing and Motivational Feedback for Family Wellness".
MSU was awarded a Big Data project in Ecology through a $4.2M NSF Project. An interdisciplinary team of ecologists, statisticians, computer scientists and data scientists scaled up traditional ecology, to regional and continental scales in a project called "A Macrosystems Ecology Framework for Continental-Scale Prediction and Understanding of Lakes".
Nasir Memon (NYU) and Arun Ross (MSU) were awarded a three-year NSF grant for their project entitled "The Master Print: Investigating and Addressing Vulnerabilities in Fingerprint-based Authentication Systems". The project, funded under the Secure & Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program, investigated the vulnerabilities of fingerprint systems deployed in consumer electronics such as smartphones.
2017
Hu Ding, Asst. Prof. of Computer Science and Engineering was awarded an NSF CISE Research Initiation Initiative (CRII) grant for "Novel Geometric Algorithms for Certain Data Analysis Problems". The research was to garner further development in computational geometry and bring fresh ideas to other areas, including machine learning, computer vision, data mining, and bioinformatics.
Jiayu Zhou, Asst. Prof. of Computer Science and Engineering and Anil Jain received a grant from the Office of Naval Research entitled "Large-Scale Information Fusion from Multiple Modalities," centered around artificial intelligence and utilizing a wide scope of data of countless different types.
Arun Ross (PI), Xiaoming Liu (Co-PI) and Anil Jain (Co-PI) was awarded a 4-year project from IARPA for their proposal "Presentation Attack Detection: Solutions for Fingerprints, Face and Iris Systems".
Alex Liu and his former Ph.D. student, Zubair Shafiq, Asst. Prof. in the Dept. of Computer Science at The University of Iowa, were issued a patent entitled "Cellular Connection Sharing", in collaboration with researchers Lusheng Ji, Jeffrey Pang, Jia Wang, and Shobha Venkataraman from AT&T Labs. It seems to resemble “mobile hotspot” technology.
MSU-CSE was awarded a grant for a project entitled "Highly Efficient Parallel MLFMA for Computational Electromagnetics" from Riverside Research under a prime agreement from the Air Force Research Lab.
Kevin Liu, Asst. Prof. of Computer Science and Engineering was awarded an NSF grant entitled "Fast and accurate computational tools for large-scale evolutionary inference: a phylogenetic network approach".
Guowei Wei, Professor of Mathematics, and Yiying Tong, Assoc. Prof. of Computer Science and Engineering were awarded a three-year NSF DMS grant titled "Geometric and Topological Modeling and Computation of Biomolecular Structure, Function, and Dynamics".
Alex Liu and Zubair Shafiq were issued a patent entitled "Optimization of Cellular Network Architecture Based on Device Type-Specific Traffic Dynamics", in collaboration with researchers Jia Wang and Lusheng Ji from AT&T Labs.
Jiliang Tang, Asst. Prof. of Computer Science and Engineering was awarded an NSF grant entitled "A General Feature Learning Framework for Dynamic Attributed Networks".
Jiliang Tang and Jiayu Zhou, Assistant Professors of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University, were awarded an NSF grant entitled "Unsupervised Feature Selection in the Era of Big Data".
An excerpt of the MSU College of Engineering “Highlight” read:
“It has potential to benefit a number of real-world applications from various disciplines such as Computer Science, Business, Education, Politics, Healthcare and Bioinformatics.”
Kevin Liu received a Dimensions of Biodiversity grant from the NSF for the project entitled "Dimensions: Phylogenetic and Functional Diversity of Tripartite Plant-Fungal-Bacterial Symbioses".
Dr. Jiayu Zhou, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, was selected to receive a gift award in the amount of $180,000 from DiDi Research of Xiaoju Science and Technology, Hong Kong, for his research on large-scale machine learning (AI) on big traffic data (cloud computing).
2018
Jiayu Zhou, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, has just been notified to receive an NSF CAREER award. The algorithms and tools developed in this project were meant to directly impact biomedical informatics and AI data systems, and to build models from electronic medical records and traffic state models from cloud data. The project would be used to develop a new curriculum to incorporate research into classrooms and provide students from under-represented groups with opportunities to participate in AI research.
Arun Ross was elected Fellow of the International Association of Pattern Recognition (IAPR) and presented at their conference in Beijing, China.
“Arun Ross…was an invited speaker at the NATO Advanced Research Workshop on Identity and Security in Lausanne, Switzerland. The event, conducted from July 10 - 12, 2018, featured international experts in policing, border security, cybersecurity, counter-terrorism, asylum policy and identity management. Ross discussed the impact of biometric technology on personal privacy, and presented ways in which the technology could be enhanced to impart privacy to biometric data such as face, fingerprint and iris images. He also discussed the ethics of collecting and sharing biometric data across organizations…The delegates also discussed ways to reliably determine the identity of an individual in the wake of the recent migrant crisis.” - cse.msu.edu
Dr. H. Metin Aktulga (PI) and Dr. Shanker Balasubramaniam were awarded an NSF grant entitled "SPX: A Geometry and Architecture Agnostic Scalable Framework for N-body Problems with Oscillatory Potentials".
Dr. Guan-Hua Tu (PI) and Dr. Jiliang Tang (Co-PI) were awarded a $499,976 NSF grant entitled "SaTC: CORE: Small: Side-channel Attacks Against Mobile Users: Singularity Detection, Behavior Identification, and Automated Rectification." The project, in part, aimed to conduct a comprehensive investigation of side-channel attacks against mobile users by collecting, labeling, mining, and analyzing mobile users' encrypted mobile data.
Alex X. Liu (PI), Yunhao Liu (Co-PI), and Guoming G. Zhu (Co-PI), were awarded an NSF grant titled "Mechanical Vibration Based Prognostic Monitoring of Machinery Health with Sub-millisecond Accuracy Using Backscatter Signals".
2019
Metin Aktulga received an NSF CAREER award. “CAREER: Scalable Sparse Linear Algebra for Extreme-Scale Data Analytics and Scientific Computing”:
“Research plans are tightly integrated with educational and outreach objectives at various levels. The centerpiece of the outreach efforts is the Computer Science summer school and mentorship plans by the PI for high school students.”
Jiliang Tang, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, received the NSF CAREER award. “CAREER: Signed Networks: Modeling, Measuring, and Mining”:
“Most existing network analysis research has focused on unsigned networks that only have positive links (e.g., friends, followers, and trust). However, in many real-world social systems, in addition to positive links, relations between people can be negative (e.g., foes, blocked and unfriended users, and distrust)…
…The core intellectual merit lies in the fact that the project offers the first systematical investigation on this emerging research area and the designed advanced methodologies and novel tasks will deepen our understanding of how negative links can be synergized to advance the field of network analysis; improve our knowledge of real-world networks; and contribute to real-world applications.”
Guowei Wei, Professor of Mathematics, and Yiying Tong, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, were awarded an NSF grant ($1,184,362) titled "De Rham-Hodge theory modeling and learning of biomolecular data ".
Chen Bin, Asst. Prof. of Pediatrics and Human Development, and Jiayu Zhou, Asst. Prof. of Computer Science and Engineering, were awarded an NIH grant ($2.11M) titled “Repurpose open data to discover therapeutics for understudied diseases”.
Jiliang Tang was awarded an NSF grant entitled "Effective Labeled Data Generation via Generative Adversarial Learning".
Jiliang Tang and MSU colleagues were awarded an NSF grant entitled "Intelligent Social Network Interventions to Augment Human Cognition for Bolstered Interdisciplinary Interactions in Project Teams".
Kennie Merz, Professor of Chemistry, and H. Metin Aktulga, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, were awarded an NIH grant ($1.3M) titled "Modeling Transition Metal Ion Binding to Proteins"
Arun Ross was awarded a grant from the NSF titled "Collaborative Research: Converging Genomics, Phenomics, and Environments Using Interpretable Machine Learning Models”. It dealt with AI in genomics.
“Machine learning (ML) methods are better able to cope with complex biological systems and can incorporate genetic information, but require a lot of work to obtain and prepare the data; further, the prediction models themselves can be hard to interpret. This project will solve these problems by harnessing cyberinfrastructure-enabled computing and data storage, designing faster techniques for preparing biological data for ML, and developing interactive visualizations to better understand the prediction models and their outputs. If successful, these integrative advances will immediately, responsibly, and transparently inform policy to maximize resources. For example, American seed and livestock companies will be able to increase their competitiveness and natural resource managers will be able to better predict population fluctuations using this technology.”
Michigan State University was approved by the National Science Foundation as a University Site of CITeR - the Center for Identification Technology Research. CITeR’s mission is to work in partnership with government and industry stakeholders to advance the state of the art in human identification technology through coordinated university research. Current CITeR affiliates include Northrop Grumman, Qualcomm, Department of Homeland Security, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Veridium, Aware, Inc., HID Global and IDEMIA to name a few. The fees paid by the affiliates are used to fund and develop the research and educational portfolio of CITeR.
University Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Engineering Anil Jain of Michigan State University was elected a Foreign Member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). He was selected for his scientific achievements and contributions to promoting the development of science and technology in China.
Year-2020
Anil Jain and Jiayu Zhou were awarded an Office of Naval Research grant titled “Deep Learning: Integrating Domain Knowledge and Interpretability”.
Pang-Ning Tan and Abdol-Hossein Esfahanian were awarded a grant from the NSF and Amazon, titled “FAI: Fairness-Aware Algorithms for Network Analysis”
This research fills a major gap in current research on fairness in AI, which has primarily focused on independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) data…
…the link structure of the network often contains information about the protected attributes (e.g., gender, race, or sexual orientation), and thus, must be taken into consideration in the design of fairness-aware machine learning algorithms.
To address this issue, the objectives of this project are two-fold: (1) To develop metrics for assessing fairness in network learning algorithms and (2) To design, implement, and evaluate network learning algorithms that consider the tradeoff between fairness and utility of the models for various network analysis tasks and applications (including community detection and link prediction).
The innovative methods developed in this project will be a step forward towards bridging the gap between current understanding of fairness in i.i.d. data and its application to network analysis.
Dr. Xiaoming Liu, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, was elected as Fellow of the International Association of Pattern Recognition (IAPR).
Xiaoming Liu and Anil Jain were awarded a grant for a project entitled “Manipulated Face Detection" from Facebook. The goal of was project is to develop effective visual forensics solutions against threats from face image/video manipulation.
Jiliang Tang was awarded an NSF grant entitled " New Frontiers of Graph Neural Networks: Scalability, Interpretability, Vulnerability and Stability".
Jiayu Zhou was awarded an NSF grant as a co-PI: “Collaborative Research: NCS-FO: Intelligent Closed-Loop Neural Interface System for Studying Mechanisms of Somatosensory Feedback in Control of Functional and Stable Locomotion”
Jiliang Tang awarded an NSF grant to initiate an institute in quantitative and computational methods for STEM education research through a collaboration between researchers at the University of Chicago and those at Michigan State University.
Pang-Ning Tan and Lifeng Luo were awarded a grant from the NSF for their project entitled “Prediction and Characterization of Extreme Events in Spatio-Temporal Data”. To achieve this goal, the planned research centers around the following three key areas: (1) development of deep learning algorithms with extreme value theory for predicting and characterizing extreme events in time series forecasting problems, (2) development of convolutional methods for joint extreme event forecasting at multiple locations, and (3) development of extreme event prediction methods for spatial trajectory data. As proof of concept, the planned methods will be applied to a variety of environmental monitoring applications, including the prediction of extreme weather events such as heat waves, droughts, and hurricanes.
Borzoo Bonakdarpour was awarded a grant from the NSF into specification patterns for hierarchical functional requirements and synthesize predictive models to enable better, more automated creation of runtime verification configurations to meet scalability demands of modern CPS. Flight tests of small aircraft swarms will validate our approach.
Vishnu Boddeti received a Facebook Research Award to automatically design coevolving learning agents, i.e., either cooperative or competing, to automatically identify both system vulnerabilities and solutions to mitigate them.
Xiaoming Liu and Sijia Liu were awarded a grant from DARPA to build a generalizable and scalable learning system for reverse engineering of deception (RED), which can automatically recover and index attack toolchain signatures in both machine-centric and human-centric attack scenarios, with targets to fool machine learning (ML) decisions and human decisions, respectively.
Wolfgang Banzhaf was awarded a grant from USDA Agriculture and Food Research Initiative. The main objective of this project was to develop prediction models that make use of large-scale environmental and genomic data to model genetic, environmental and gene-by-environment interactions.
“The new prediction models accounting for environmental parameters will be a powerful management tool for American agriculture and should help guide selection decisions in different environments. The quantification of effects of climate on agricultural production will be broadly significant for improved production and long-term resilience in a changing environment.”
2021
Jiliang Tang was awarded funding from Army Research Office.
Jiliang Tang and other colleagues were awarded NSF grant to develop a computer simulation platform that will integrate field trial data, DNA sequences, and historical weather records into models that will enable researchers and breeders to predict plant phenotypes under likely weather conditions. With respect to broader impacts, the project will provide interdisciplinary training in data science and genomics to students and postdoctoral fellows and will leverage existing programs to provide outreach for high school students and the general public.
Jiliang Tang received an NSF award for computer programs that can predict the connections between DNA sequence and traits and transfer information across species. Using these programs, scientists can better understand how plants work and this knowledge can ultimately be used to create more productive and resilient plants.
Borzoo Bonakdarpour and Dr. Houssam Y. Abbas from Oregon State University were awarded a 3-year NSF grant for $500,000, which is equally divided between MSU and OSU, and focused on runtime monitoring of edge applications with emphasis on IoT and networks of UAVs.
“…three research thrusts: (1) the first theory for distributed monitoring of continuous-time, asynchronous signals. The algorithms perform distributed optimization on the edge nodes themselves, thus eliminating the need for a central monitor. Convergence proofs establish soundness. The algorithms incorporate partial knowledge of signal dynamics, where available, to accelerate convergence. (2) A theory and algorithms for incremental monitoring, where intermediate calculation results are still usable by the application should some nodes crash. The monitors will also accommodate nodes that intentionally falsify their data. (3) A rigorous validation of the algorithms on realistic autonomous vehicles, to establish their performance within a full software stack and in the presence of real-world noise and failure conditions.”
Dr. Wolfgang Banzhaf was awarded an NIH grant in 2021 for new avenues for developing powerful bioactive peptides to solve critical biological questions and to create new diagnostic/therapeutic approaches to currently devastating human diseases.
2022
Dr. Kevin Liu received an NSF CAREER award. “CAREER: Future phylogenies: novel computational frameworks for biomolecular sequence analysis involving complex evolutionary origins”
Dr. Vishnu Boddeti was awarded a $530K NSF grant all about AI.
Dr. Xiaoming Liu, Dr. Arun Ross, and Dr. Anil Jain were awarded a 4-year project from IARPA.
“The goal of this research program is to establish a multi-university consortium consisting of Michigan State University, Purdue University, University of Texas at Austin and University of Oregon, in order to design, implement and evaluate methods for recognizing individuals from images and videos captured at a distance or from a drone. In particular, the consortium will develop methods to restore atmospheric turbulence distorted imagery, detect individuals, and recognize them using various biometrics modalities.”
Drs. Jiliang Tang and Guan-Hua Tu, faculty members in Computer Science and Engineering received the Amazon Faculty Research Award