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NSF Award Winners
Three Penn faculty members are among the recent recipients of the National Science Foundation grants to 309 recipients for projects to develop innovative uses of information technology in science and engineering. Dr. Rajeev Alur, professor of computer and information science, received $1 million for his project Formal Design and Analysis of Hybrid Systems. For information on his project see Almanac September 4. Dr. Michael Klein, Hepburn Professor of Physical Science and director, Laboratory for Research on the Structure of Matter, received $468,000 for his project Novel Scalable Simulations Techniques for Chemistry, Materials Science, and Biology. Dr. Klein’s multidisciplinary team will work to solve a Grand Challenge problem with potential to impact chemistry, materials science & engineering, geoscience, and biology. The Challenge is to make the Car-Parrinello ab initio molecular dynamics (CPAIMD) more effective and more widely accessible as a simulation tool on high performance computing platforms. The project will yield simulation tools to inspire new designs for cheap artificial materials that mimic nature’s highly efficient catalysts, nanomaterials, with novel behaviors, polymers, with improved properties for use in cars, clothing, and aircraft, as well as engender a new understanding of materials under extreme conditions, to enable improved models of geological processes and the design of temperature resistant ceramics. Dr. Benjamin Pierce, associate professor of computer and information science, received $300,000 for his project Principles and Practice of Synchronization. Dr. Pierce’s project will focus on implementation architectures and conceptual foundations of synchronizers programs that reconcile copies of replicated data after disconnected updates. The goals of the project are: (1) Build and distribute a cross-platform file synchronization tool for maintaining consistency of directory structures stored under different filesystem architectures. (2) Apply our experience with file synchronization to the related but more general domain of synchronizing tree-structured data, represented as XML documents. (3) Develop clear and precise specifications of the behavior of synchronization tools. Almanac, Vol. 48, No. 7, October 9, 2001 |
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