Contact: Maridith Geuder
Mississippi State faculty members in computer science, engineering, mathematics, and business are receiving grants totaling $3.7 million under a new federal initiative to improve the nation's information technology capabilities.
Announced to the university Wednesday [Sept. 13], the first-time awards from the National Science Foundation are made under the federal agency's recently launched $90 million Information Technology Research program.
MSU's projects were selected from nearly 1,400 proposals. Nationwide, more than 100 institutions are participating in what NSF director Rita Colwell describes as "major innovations in information technology, rather than routine applications of existing technology."
Mississippi State faculty members and their projects include:
--Bharat K. Soni, Joe F. Thompson, and Edward A. Luke of the NSF/MSU Engineering Research Center, $1.7 million to design a software production platform for computational field simulation. Part of a $5 million effort coordinated by Cornell University, the project will develop general principles for building software systems that can adapt to such changes as hardware failure or evolving computational requirements.
--Joseph Picone of electrical and computer engineering, $1.4 million to develop information access to spoken documents, including improvements in recognition of spontaneous speech. Director of the Institute for Signal and Information Processing, he will collaborate with the Center for Language and Speech Processing at Johns Hopkins University on the MSU-based project.
--Ioana Banicescu of computer science and Jianping Zhu of mathematics and statistics, $425,092 for collaborative research dealing with computational approaches to quantum trajectories. In collaboration with researchers at Florida A&M University, the MSU scientists will focus primarily on developing parallel algorithms for irregular problems such as electron collisions with hydrogen atoms.
--Rayford B. Vaughn of computer science, $136,236 for research at the new multi-institution National Center for Empirical Software Engineering Research based at the University of Maryland. The center is a collaborative effort among MSU, Maryland and the universities of Southern California and Nebraska-Lincoln. Vaughn's work will primarily include software security.
--Kirk Arnett, Charles Litecky and Jung P. Shim of the College of Business and Industry, $49,991 for an E-Business and Business Telecommunications Center. The grant will be used to plan the development and expansion of MSU research, training and education in electronic business and telecommunications. Collaborative research, enhanced course offerings and industry partnerships with major Mississippi-based telecommunications companies will be emphasized.