Projects

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Big Data-Theoretic Approach to Quantify Organizational Failure Mechanisms in Probabilistic Risk Assessment

Time frame
2015-Present
Investigators
Zahra Mohaghegh, Catherine Blake
Total funding to date
$899,663.00
Funding agency
National Science Foundation

Catastrophic events such as Fukushima and Katrina have made it clear that integrating physical and social causes of failure into a cohesive modeling framework is critical in order to prevent complex technological accidents and to maintain public safety and health. In this research, experts in Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA), Organizational Behavior and Information Science and Data…

Bringing Verification-Aware Languages and Federated Authentication to Enable Secure Computing for a NSF’s Scientific Community

Time frame
2023-Present
Investigator
Anita Nikolich
Total funding to date
$100,000.00
Funding agency
National Science Foundation

This project will enable trusted computing for flagship cyberinfrastructures and their vibrant scientific communities. The project will bring verification-aware languages to provide rigorous mathematical proofs that existing federated authentication implementations are correct, and make rigorous verification an integral part of developing distributed computational science.

security written out with code on a computer

Broadening Access to Text Analysis by Describing Uncertainty

Time frame
2020-Present
Investigator
Ted Underwood
Total funding to date
$73,122.00
Funding agency
National Endowment for the Humanities

A project to study errors and paratextual noise in optically transcribed digital library texts, and the consequences of these errors on historical and humanistic conclusions measuring trends across time.

The noise associated with digital transcription has become an important obstacle to humanistic research. While the errors in digital texts are easily observed, the…

describing uncertainty in research

Building a Motivational-Interviewing Conversational Agent (MintBot) for Promoting COVID-19 Vaccination among People with Multiple Sclerosis

Time frame
2021-2022
Investigator
Jessie Chin
Total funding to date
$74,992.00
Funding agency
Jump ARCHES

Individuals with multiple sclerosis are likely to be hesitant to get the COVID-19 vaccine due to their compromised health condition. This project aims to develop an accessible, generalizable and efficient digital health solution for promoting COVID-19 vaccination among vulnerable populations, such as people with disabilities.

MintBot

CAREER: III: Modeling the Heterogeneity of Heterogeneity: Algorithms, Theories and Applications

Time frame
2019-Present
Investigator
Jingrui He
Total funding to date
$415,836.00
Funding agency
National Science Foundation

Nowadays, as an intrinsic property of big data, data heterogeneity can be seen in a variety of real world applications, ranging from security to manufacturing, from healthcare to crowdsourcing. Many high-impact data mining applications exhibit the co-existence of multiple types of heterogeneity, such as different classification tasks, different data sources, and different labeling oracles.…

modeling heterogeneity

CAREER: Inclusive Privacy: Effective Privacy Management for People with Visual Impairments

Time frame
2019-Present
Investigator
Yang Wang
Total funding to date
$255,203.00
Funding agency
National Science Foundation

Privacy or security mechanisms are usually designed with the generic population in mind. As such, they often fall short of supporting many under-studied or marginalized sub-populations, such as children, older adults, people with disabilities, activists, journalists, victims of crimes or domestic violence, and people from non-western or developing countries. The goal of this project is to…

inclusive privacy

CAREER: Using Network Analysis to Assess Confidence in Research Synthesis

Time frame
2021-Present
Investigator
Jodi Schneider
Total funding to date
$599,963.00
Funding agency
National Science Foundation

Policy in areas such as conservation, energy, healthcare, and sustainable development is informed by a variety of factors, including the best available science. Determining the best available science requires synthesizing multiple scientific results to gauge both the level of scientific consensus and the reliability of the research. However, on some policy-relevant topics, syntheses continue…

network of dots

Changing How We Conduct Inquiry

Time frame
2014-2022
Investigator
Matthew Turk
Total funding to date
$1,500,000.00
Funding agency
Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation

This project aims to develop infrastructure that transforms the process of discovery through semantically-aware analysis and visualization of data from the physical sciences, in the hopes of demonstrating the high impact that interdisciplinary data-driven research can have on scientific research as a whole.

conducting inquiry

Collaborative Research: Changes in Molecular Gas and Galaxy Properties Over Time in the Era of Integral Field Unit Surveys

Time frame
2016-Present
Investigator
Matthew Turk
Total funding to date
$267,664.00
Funding agency
National Science Foundation

Changes of a galaxy's properties over time are driven by the quantity of its cold gas, the raw material from which stars form. Thus, understanding the properties of a galaxy's cold gas component will tell us both how the star formation process changes over time and how this affects galaxies. Using a recently completed survey of carbon monoxide gas in a sample of nearby galaxies, the project…

galaxy

Collaborative Research: Accelerating Synthetic Biology Discovery & Exploration through Knowledge Integration

Time frame
2019-Present
Investigator
J. Stephen Downie
Total funding to date
$211,699.00
Funding agency
National Science Foundation

The scientific challenge for this project is to accelerate discovery and exploration of the synthetic biology design space. In particular, many parts used in synthetic biology come from or are initially tested in a simple bacteria, E. coli, but many potential applications in energy, agriculture, materials, and health require either different bacteria or higher level organisms (yeast for…

synthetic biology