Ongoing Research Projects

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A Community-Driven Scientific Workflow Recommender System

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As current satellite measurements rapidly magnify the accumulation of more than 40 years of scientific knowledge, new discoveries increasingly require collaborative integration and adaptation of various data-driven software components (tools). In recent years, scientists have learned how to codify tools into reusable software modules that can be chained into multi-step executable workflows. However, although computing technologies continue to improve, adoption via the sharing and reuse of modules and workflows remains a big challenge. This project tackles this challenge from a novel angle, to study how to leverage peer scientists' best practices to help facilitate the discovery and reuse of Earth science modules developed by others. Service classification, semantic discovery, recommendation, automatic composition, deployment, and scheduling over the cloud are our research focus. This project is sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

 

A Cyberinfrastructure Supporting Collaborative Big Data Analytics on the Internet

 

Modern science and engineering typically require the support of collaboration and workflow/process. This project extends existing single user-oriented workflow tools to support the collaborative design of workflows: 1) to support real-time co-design; 2) to track how a workflow has become as it is for who has done what among multiple contributors; 3) to capture and retrieve collaboration knowledge and decision-making process. Reproducibility and scalability are two major targets demanding fundamental infrastructural support. This project is supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

 

Secure Workflow Provenance for Collaborative Data Analytics

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Collaborative data analysis has become a necessity and trend in the era of big data. In such collaborative environments, intellectual property protection mechanisms are critical to maintain and encourage research partnerships. Such mechanisms shall protect not only data sources and data analysis algorithms, but also protect data provenance. However, existing mechanisms do not provide such fine-grained protection on multi-step data analytics procedure (workflow) provenance. To address such a challenge, this project aims to study and explore novel mechanisms to secure access and querying over collaborative scientific workflow provenance. This project is supported by the National Science Foundation.

 

An Intelligent Assistant Helping Scientists on Research

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In the current era of knowledge explosion, it is becoming increasingly critical to help researchers quickly grasp the core ideas and methods used in the sea of published articles. This project aims to develop an intelligent system serving as a research assistant to scientists. This project is supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

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AI in Healthcare

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We apply deep learning, complex network analysis, and natural language processing to facilitate Alzheimer's disease early detection and progression monitoring, as well as glaucoma OCTA image processing and biomarker detection. These projects are supported by the National Institute of Health and the University of Texas Southeastern Medical Center.