May 03, 2010 –
Top from left: Lott, Tomlinson, Hayes
Bottom from left: Li, Majumder, Mehrotra
CALIT2 academic affiliates are amassing grants, honors and awards.
In April, two affiliates got good news. Pediatric neurologist Dr. Ira Lott received a five-year, $2.4 million National Institutes of Health grant to investigate ways to prevent or delay the onset of dementia in Down syndrome patients. Those born with the congenital disorder have a higher risk of developing dementia by age 40. Lott, one of two U.S. researchers awarded NIH grants for this purpose, will investigate whether imaging or biomarkers could help predict the dementia.
Informatics associate professor Bill Tomlinson was named this year’s UCI Engaged Scholar in conjunction with the 2010 Engage UCI celebration. The award, which recognizes one faculty member for exemplary leadership in advancing students’ civic learning and enhancing higher education’s contributions to the public good, will be awarded May 4.
Tomlinson was selected based on his integration of civic and community engagement in teaching and research, as well as his demonstrated leadership in developing programs that promote meaningful engagement on campus, within higher education, and in his field.
March brought a $50,000 NSF grant to Chen Li, associate professor of computer science, to support his family reunification project for helping victims of the Haiti Earthquake locate family members.
“RAPID: Supporting Family Reunification for the Haiti Earthquake and Future Emergencies” crawls and scrapes data from Web pages for a repository of names, and also includes a powerful data search interface.
The research will now focus on ways to support powerful search in a cloud-computing environment and will have a broad impact on information systems that are moving to the cloud-computing paradigm.
Computer science associate professor Aditi Majumder and graduate student Behzad Sajadi received the Best Paper Award at the IEEE Virtual Reality 2010 conference held last March in Boston.
Their paper, “Auto-Calibration of Cylindrical Multi-Projector Systems,” explores registering multiple projectors on vertically extruded and cylindrical displays, a feat which previously was only possible with a calibrated stereo camera.
This paper demonstrates that multiple projector registration is possible on a cylindrical display using a single uncalibrated camera without display markers. The new method also enables use of multiple overlapped projectors across corners of a vertically extruded surface with sharp edges, information that benefits virtual reality display systems like CAVEs.
IEEE Virtual Reality 2010 is the top international venue for virtual reality researchers and practitioners.
Informatics assistant professor Gillian Hayes, along with a researcher at Charles Drew University of Medicine & Science (CDU), was awarded a two-year, $480,000 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) to investigate how clinical care for low-weight babies can be improved through the use of recorded observations of daily living. The research team was one of five in the nation selected to test the effects of information technology on creating better-informed patients and healthcare consumers.
Computer science professor Sharad Mehrotra received two grants recently. In February, he and colleague Dmitri V. Kalashnikov were awarded a $50,000 Google Research Award to explore a novel graphical, domain-independent framework for improving data quality.
The grant will fund “Exploiting Entity Resolution for Web People Search,” an effort to develop an online search engine that can exploit Web queries and search engine statistics for search disambiguation.
Mehrotra won another grant with postdoctoral student Bijit Hore, a $60,000 NEC Research Award to study risk containment in cloud computing services for data-centric applications.
The goal of this study is to understand information disclosure risks and design mechanisms in an effort to prevent disclosure in multi-tenant cloud environments and dynamic data-integration applications such as mashups.
As cloud computing becomes prevalent for enterprise data management, increasingly privacy-sensitive user data will be managed in such systems.
In addition, the project will address reducing the risk of memory-based leakage of critically sensitive information.
The NEC Research Award is a gift from the Nippon Electric Corporation’s R&D division.
