Lab Descriptions

Department of Computer Science and Engineering - Laboratories
Texas A&M Engineering (Dwight Look College of Engineering)
Texas A&M University
2008—2009

Brain Networks Laboratory
Yoonsuck Choe - 322B H.R. Bright Building, MS #3112 - 979/845-5466 - Email: choe@cse.tamu.edu
Studying the geometry and connectivity of the brain's architecture is a natural way to explore neural computation, but there are no quantitative, 3D reconstructions of mammalian brain architectures for any species. Ongoing projects in the Brain Networks Laboratory will fill this void and reconstruct an entire mouse cortical network, allowing for global analysis and simulation studies of an actual cortical network. The lab's enabling technology is a unique Brain Tissue Scanner (BTS) of our own invention that achieves the data acquisition rates necessary to make possible for the first time scanning and imaging an entire mammalian brain. The data processed is produced by the BTS to reconstruct the three-dimensional structure of the scanned tissue. The central goal is to map and understand the connectivity and geometry of cortical networks - critical to understanding natural computation.
Amato, Nancy - 425H HRBB - 979/862-2275 - amato@cse.tamu.edu
Keyser, John - 527C HRBB - 979/458-0167 - keyser@cse.tamu.edu
Rauchwerger, Lawrence - 425E HRBB - 979/845-8872 - rwerger@cse.tamu.edu

Center for the Study of Digital Libraries (TEES)
Richard Furuta - 402C H.R. Bright Building, MS #3112 - 979/845-3839 - Email: furuta@cse.tamu.edu
The Center's program of research provides a leadership role in the on-line development and application of world-wide access to digital library services. Development of this technology provides valuable fundamental research and supports the broader goal of research and education through improved means for collaboration and distance learning. The Center is not limited to one discipline; rather the development of digital libraries may be viewed as a fundamental contribution to research in all disciplines.
Frank Shipman - 404 979/862-3216 - shipman@cse.tamu.edu
Andruid Kerne - 402A - 979/862-3217 - andruid (at) cse.tamu.edu

Electronic Design Automation Lab
Hank Walker - 515B H.R. Bright Building, MS #3112 - 979/862-4387 - Email: walker@cse.tamu.edu
The EDA Lab develops software tools for design, manufacturing, assembly and test of semiconductor integrated circuits. The current research thrusts focus on test and diagnosis of integrated circuits. Current research projects include defect-based test, quiescent current testing, delay fault testing, realistic fault modeling and defect diagnosis. The nature of this research requires close cooperation with industry in order to fabricate and measure designs, and provide manufacturing data.

Embedded Systems & Codesign Group
Rabi Mahapatra - 520B H.R. Bright Building, MS #3112, 979/845-5787 - Email: rabi@cse.tamu.edu
As the world of engineering advances, the complexity demands of both hardware and software grow at a phenomenal rate. The trade-offs between hardware and software within a system are at the forefront of this complexity and demand attention unto themselves. Hardware software codesign is the study of how to make these tradeoffs and meet the constraints of a system. The group's research includes Codesign Framework, Power-Aware Scheduling, Real-Time Embedded Systems, Systems-on-Chip and Re-configurable Architectures.

Geometry and Graphics Group
John Keyser - 527C H.R. Bright Building, MS #3112, 979/458-0167 - Email: keyser@cse.tamu.edu
The Geometry and Graphics Group performs research dealing with geometric calculations and computer graphics algorithms. Particular areas of emphasis in geometry are in highly robust and precise geometric computations, particularly with application to geometric modeling. This includes work on exact computation with algebraic systems. Within the broader computer graphics category, research emphasizes physically-based modeling and simulation.

High Performance Computing Laboratory
Eun Jung Kim - 427C H.R. Bright Building, MS #3112 - 979/845-3660 - Email: ejkim@cse.tamu.edu
The faculty and students in this Lab conduct research in the general area of Computer Architecture and Parallel and Distributed Systems. The primary focus of our lab is on providing architectural support for efficient networking in high performance systems.

As rapid advances in technology, the communication between computing components has become a bottleneck in providing high performance. Along with high and predictable performance, optimization of energy consumption, management of temperature and enhancing security are critical issues in designing efficient networks. We investigate innovative ideas by exploiting the new features of modern architecture, operating systems and circuit technology to design high performance, energy-efficient, and secure systems.

Hypermedia Research Laboratory
Richard Furuta - 402C H.R. Bright Building, MS #3112 - 979/845-3839 - Email: furuta@cse.tamu.edu
The Hypermedia Research Laboratory (HRL) provides an enhanced environment for student and faculty research in the areas of hypermedia, multimedia, computer-supported cooperative work, and digital library systems. Research includes the study, design and prototypic implementation of hypermedia architectures, systems and environments that support the above research areas. Most recently, research has centered on the design and implementation of open and distributed hypermedia architectures, spatial hypertext systems, metadocument-based reshaping of distributed collections, and the applications of hypertextual technologies in support of education and scholarship.

Interface Ecology Laboratory
Andruid Kerne - 402A H.R. Bright Building, MS #3112 - 979/862-3217 - Email: andruid (at) cse.tamu.edu
Interface ecology is an emerging metadisciplinary approach, in which the creation of rich interactive experiences spans an n-dimensional conceptual space. The interface ecology lab develops interactive ecosystems that support and instantiate human creative processes. The recombinant media research area develops multimodal visualization mechanisms for presenting collections as combinations of existing media elements. The work focuses on the generation of emergent experiences by using machine-learning techniques to model users interests and interactivity as means to allow participants to express themselves and effect the generative models. CollageMachine is an ongoing instance of this research, in the field of web browsing and visual hypertext. New initiatives recombine video. The work is moving into the space of multimodal gesture as a means of integrating human computer interaction with physical activities, using computer vision-based video tracking, and physiological sensors.

The body state representations research area integrates psychology, machine leaning, visualization, and physical practices to derive new forms of interactivity and communication based on expressive physiological data.

Internet Research Lab
Dmitri Loguinov - 515C H.R. Bright Building, MS #3112 - 979/845-0512 - Email: dmitri@cse.tamu.edu
Internet Research Lab (IRL) at Texas A&M University conducts research in several areas of networking with a focus on Internet-related technologies and protocols. The research areas include real-time video streaming, end-to-end congestion control, overlay networks, scalable content distribution and caching, peer-to-peer networks, Internet traffic measurement, modeling, and performance analysis, emerging Internet quality-of-service (QoS) architectures, wireless and multicast communications.

Laboratory for Distributed Information Systems
Anxiao (Andrew) Jiang - 427B H. R. Bright Building, MS #3112 - 979/845-7983 - Email: ajiang@cse.tamu.edu
Our lab pursues research on the theory and applications of distributed information systems. We currently focus on wireless ad hoc and sensor networks as well as file storage and retrieval in networks.

Laboratory for Embedded Networked Sensor Systems
Radu Stoleru - 509D H. R. Bright Building, MS #3112 - 979/862-8349 - Email: stoleru@cse.tamu.edu
The Laboratory for Embedded Networked Sensor Systems at Texas A&M University performs research in several areas of sensor network protocols, architectures and applications. We currently focus on: distributed coordination algorithms such as localization, time synchronization, clustering, and topology control; QoS in sensor networks; failure resilience and fault isolation; energy management; data storage and management; sensor network programming abstractions.

Laboratory for Software Research
William Lively - 326 H.R. Bright Building, MS #3112 - 979/845-5480 - Email: lively@cse.tamu.edu
The Laboratory for Software Research (LSR) has as its mission the development of methodologies, techniques and automated tools to assist in the development of complex software systems. The specific thrusts in the LSR are object oriented development techniques, user interface development and evaluation systems and a life cycle artifact manager. This research supports the development of students for Texas industries and knowledge to be incorporated into our teaching program in software engineering.

Parasol Laboratory
Lawrence Rauchwerger - 425E H.R. Bright Building, MS #3112 - 979/845-8872 - Email: rwerger@cse.tamu.edu
Nancy Amato - 425H H.R. Bright Building, MS #3112 -979/862-2275 - Email: amato@cse.tamu.edu
The Parasol Laboratory is a focal point for research related to next-generation high-performance computing systems and for the development of algorithms and applications that exploit these systems to solve computationally intensive applications. Due to its application-centric focus, the Parasol Lab creates a uniquely favorable environment for collaboration between systems and application developers. Parasol systems projects include: the study and development of novel architecture and compiler techniques for the optimization of parallel and distributed systems, the design and implementation of compiler driven software productivity improvement tools, software verification, and performance modeling and prediction. Parasol applications projects include: the development of optimized algorithms for applications from domains such as computer-aided design (CAD), computational biology, computational geophysics, computational neuroscience, computational physics, robotics, and virtual reality. This interdisciplinary college-wide lab provides an array of systems to support research related to parallel and distributed computing, including a Hewlett-Packard 16 processor V-class multiprocessor.

PRISM Laboratory
Ricardo Gutierrez-Osuna - 520A H.R. Bright Building, MS #3112 - 979/845-2942 - Email: rgutier@cse.tamu.edu
The goal of the Pattern Recognition and Intelligent Sensor Machines Laboratory is to develop systems that sense, interact with, learn from and adapt to the environment under a number of modalities, including chemical, acoustic, visual, temporal and spatial. This requires a cross-disciplinary perspective to integrate concepts from sensors, computer vision, robotics, embedded systems, pattern recognition and biological cybernetics.

The current research thrust of the PRISM Lab is the study of biologically-plausible computational models for sensor based machine olfaction. Additional projects include mobile robotics perception, speech-driven facial animation and event classification in power distribution systems.

Real-Time Distributed System
Steve Liu - 502B H.R.Bright Building, MS#3112 - 979/845-8739 - Email: liu@cse.tamu.edu
This group is interested in solving the underlying principles of complex systems in order to convert them into real solutions to real world problems. With the rapid evolution and acceptance of computing and communication technologies in our society, this group strives for long-term impact with short-term relevance and success in its research and in its educational process. Its aim is to provide lab members with a balanced view of information technology by focusing on the entire process of design, analysis and implementation.

Real-Time Systems Group
Riccardo Bettati - 509C H.R. Bright Building, MS #3112 - 979/845-5469 - Email: bettati@cse.tamu.edu
This group focuses on research and development of real-time computing and communication technology for mission critical information systems, including multimedia, command and control, transportation, process control, etc. The group's NetEx and NetCamo projects have made significant progress that has been recognized by various awards, including the outstanding paper award from the IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems in 1992; the best paper award from the IEEE National Aerospace and Electronics Conference in 1997; an award on technology transfer from the Defense Advanced Research Program Agency (DARPA) in 2002; and the 2nd prize in the International ACM Student Research Contest in 2002.

Virtual Network Engineering Laboratory (VNEL)
Willis Marti - 217A O.E. Teague Building, MS #3112 - 979-845-0372 - Email: wmarti@tamu.edu
The VNEL provides an environment where experiments and course exercises addressing every layer of network technology may be accommodated. The goal of the VNEL is to provide a "hands on" experience entirely through remote access. The lab is designed to support teaching needs in traditional coursework as well as continuing education for network professionals. It also provides a realistic environment for testing and experimenting with protocols that cannot be done in regular operational networks. Access is provided to real equipment, not simulations. It includes services to support various pedagogical techniques and reconfiguration on demand.