Better Ideas in Computing

ODU experts win National Science Foundation support for innovative solutions they propose in wireless communications and digital preservation

Can wireless networks be developed that will guarantee reliable communications during emergency relief operations, such as in the path of hurricanes where landlines are knocked out? Can tactics that are used to disseminate Internet spam be put to noble use in the preservation of digital objects, such as records of important scientific discoveries?

These are questions addressed in the research of two Old Dominion University faculty members, and the National Science Foundation (NSF) has invested nearly $1 million in the researchers’ novel ideas.

The two assistant professors, Min Song in computer engineering and Michael Nelson in computer science, won highly prized Early Career Development awards from the NSF to promote their work for the five years beginning in January 2007. Song’s research is in computer networks and wireless communications, and Nelson’s is in digital data preservation.

Since the beginning of the NSF Early Career program about a decade ago, only two ODU researchers had won the awards. Having two faculty winners in one year is evidence that the university’s research initiative is bringing results, ODU administrators said.

“Career Development awards were created to accelerate the research programs of the brightest young faculty,” said Thomas Isenhour, ODU provost. “Very high standards are used in the selection process. Old Dominion University faculty capturing two career awards in one year is an excellent testimony to the high-quality young faculty we are attracting and supporting.”

For the current year, six faculty members at Virginia institutions received Early Career grants, including the two at ODU, two at Virginia Tech, one at the University of Virginia and one at the University of Richmond.

Science literacy program is a bonus
The award to Song will provide $400,000 in support of the young researcher’s contributions to the next wave of super-reliable, high-performance wireless networks. He proposes to develop fundamental rules—called protocols—that will make wireless networks more reliable, efficient and versatile. One goal of the protocol development is wireless communications technology that can be counted on during emergencies, such as in disaster or combat zones.

Song’s project is titled “Distributed Broadcasting Protocols for Multi-Radio, Multi-Channel and Multi-Rate Ad Hoc Mesh Networks.” In addition to engineering research, the project includes unique educational opportunities for ODU students and a science literacy program for inner-city high school students.

Shirshak Dhali, chair of the electrical and computer engineering department, said, “The Career grants are awarded only to extraordinarily outstanding young professors. Dr. Song’s award demonstrates his distinguished achievements and leading status in his field.”

Song, who came to ODU in 2002, is the founder and director of the Wireless Communications and Networking Laboratory at the university’s Frank Batten College of Engineering and Technology. The NSF and NASA provided financial support for the lab and, together with the U.S. Department of Education, have supported the professor’s research with about $1.4 million in awards.

Repositories can have ‘deadly embrace’
The grant of $541,000 to Nelson rewards his out-of-the-box thinking about the preservation of digital data. He says that the ever-more ingenious Internet strategies used to disseminate spam e-mails may someday be employed to preserve data. The title of his project is “Self-Preserving Digital Objects.”

“Can we create digital objects that preserve themselves?” Nelson asks. “I want to explore this.” He said that e-mail spam and viral videos are the best current examples of the approach he proposes.

Mischievous e-mail or a humorous video clip can “live in the Web infrastructure with minimal hierarchical control,” he said, and that is precisely how he plans to preserve digital objects containing data for technical papers, historical documents, Web pages and the like.

“I’m going to investigate if these properties can be applied to content other than pop culture ephemera,” he said.

Most approaches to preserving digital information involve putting “dumb” objects in “smart” repositories. But, Nelson noted, “This reveals an implicit assumption that the repository is going to be long-lived.” A repository—which he sometimes calls a “fortress”—could be a digital library maintained at a university or the host memory of Yahoo.

The “deadly embrace of repositories” is a phrase coined by computer scientist John Kunze at the University of California, and Nelson likes to repeat it. “Information goes in, but is often difficult to extract. I especially like that phrase as a succinct, vivid description of repositories,” he explained.

Nelson said he is not advocating abandonment of repositories or other conventional digital preservation techniques, but he believes an alternative is needed. “These repositories are expensive and they are complicated software systems that require preservation themselves. I’m interested in digital objects that can live longer than their repositories, in information that can live longer than the people or organizations charged with their preservation.”

Delivering M4’s potential
Oktay Baysal, dean of the Batten College, and Kurt Maly, chair of the Department of Computer Science, praised the young researchers for their early successes and for their willingness to take on complex tasks.

Song is going where few computer engineers have gone before in taking on a project with “simultaneous consideration of multi-radio, multi-channel and multi-rate for distributed broadcasting protocols,” Baysal said.

Wireless mesh networks characterized as single-radio, single-channel and single-rate suffer from serious capacity degradation. A promising approach to improve the capacity of mesh networks is to provide each node with multi-radio, multi-channel technology and permit medium access control protocols to adjust the transmission rate.

Problems arise with the performance of the so-called multi-radio, multi-channel and multi-rate mesh (M4) networks when they employ broadcasting protocols developed for single transmission rates.

“I propose new protocols that will enable M4 networks to be as smart and efficient as they are designed to be,” Song said. This means (1) 100 percent reliability, with each node guaranteed to receive each message, (2) low broadcast latency, with each message getting to all nodes in the network within a shortest possible time and (3) a reduction in the redundant transmissions that can be necessitated by system glitches. Currently, no set of protocols exists that can promise all three.

Computing research at ODU is gaining momentum
In just a few years, Nelson has become an internationally recognized expert in the areas of digital libraries and digital preservation, said Maly. “We are extremely proud of Professor Nelson winning the prestigious NSF Career award and we look forward to integrating the results of his Career award into both our graduate and undergraduate curriculum.”

Nelson, a former NASA employee, earned master’s and doctoral degrees at ODU before joining the computer science faculty in 2002. In addition to this grant, Nelson has been principal investigator or co-principal investigator on eight grants totaling $1.8 million.

Maly and Nelson are members of the Digital Library Research Group @ ODU. The group developed several Web services that are used internationally and was a founding member of the Open Archives Initiative (OAI). The new “mod_oai” module is housed at ODU under Nelson’s direction. Funding for the group comes from many government agencies involved in data preservation.

ODU is one of only a dozen universities in the United States that offer courses in digital libraries.

The university’s computer science department received more good news last year when the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) awarded $7 million to create a center to be housed at ODU that will develop software for scientific problem solving on the next generation of high-performance computers.

Alex Pothen, a professor of computer science and a member of the Center for Computational Science at ODU, is the DOE grant’s principal investigator. His collaborators come from ODU, Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, Ohio State University and Colorado State University.

With the funding, the researchers will establish the Combinatorial Scientific Computing and Petascale Simulations Institute.