Projects in CReWMaN Lab

In recent years a significant amount of research has focused on problems related to electricity distribution and consumption in the nation. Although the efficiency and robustness of the electricity distribution network can be improved by deploying a smart grid infrastructure, the end users and their consumption behavior continue to play an important role in the overall performance of such a grid, in particular their impact on the peak usage. At the same time, due to rising retail energy prices and growing concerns about the environment, end users have become more interested into technological solutions that can help them reduce electricity consumption. ...

Researchers and providers alike are recognizing that human-centric smart environments can provide health monitoring services and support aging in place through adaptive interventions. The need for the development of such technologies is underscored by the aging of the population, the cost of formal health care, and the importance that individuals place on remaining independent in their own homes. The goal of this project is to design, implement, and evaluate in-home techniques for generating reports of activities and social interactions that are useful for monitoring well being and for automating intervention strategies for persons with dementia. The plan is to design machine learning techniques that make effective use of sensor data to perform automated activity monitoring and prompting-based interventions that are beneficial for the residents as well as for their caregivers and family. The environment is human-centric because it learns information about its human residents and uses this information to provide activity-aware monitoring and intervention services. By transforming everyday environments into smart environments, many older adults with cognitive and physical impairment can lead independent lives in their own homes. A key component of this project is an evaluation of the technologies in actual homes with volunteer older adults and thus will assess the technologies for acceptance with the target population...

Organisms adapt to external perturbations through the optimized structure of their gene regulatory networks (GRNs). In the long-term, the state transition network of a GRN converges to a set of attractors that make the organism resilient to removal or functional impairment of genes. In wireless sensor networks (WSN), such attractors refer to a group of sensors serving as sink nodes for packets sent over multiple hops. This project maps such attractor based genomic robustness onto WSNs to infer optimal topologies and routing strategies that mitigate both sensor failure and a noisy wireless channel. This is being achieved by conducting experimentsin silico gene by simulating the functional removal of a gene from sample GRNs, to understand the dynamics of the attractor state space. This information is next used to design WSN topologies and routing protocols that are resilient to network uncertainty, node breakdown and compromise...

The last few years have witnessed an explosive growth in the number of personal mobile devices, such as smart phones and tablets. This growth has been followed by an even more exceptional increase in the download of mobile applications. Unfortunately, security threats have rapidly expanded along with the diffusion of personal mobile applications. Since mobile devices usually host highly sensitive personal information, application security has become a primary concern for mobile users. Approaches targeted to application security in traditional desktop environments -- such as malware and virus detection, and information leak detection -- are computationally expensive, thus not suitable for mobile devices, as they would impact on both responsiveness and battery lifetime. In this context, the cloud computing paradigm can be leveraged to offload security-oriented functions from the devices to the cloud infrastructure. Furthermore, mobile applications can be encapsulated in a virtual environment in the cloud, and transparently accessed by mobile users through a remote connection. In any case, value-added services can be provided by the cloud provider to improve mobile application security.

This  project  addresses  homeland  security,  an  issue  of  highest  national  priority,  with  a  goal  of monitoring, preventing, and recovering from natural and inflicted disasters. In particular, we propose to create a novel technology-enabled security framework, called Pervasively Secure Infrastructures (PSI), that will make use of such advanced technologies as smart sensors, wireless networks, mobile agents, data mining, and profile-based learning in an integrated, collaborative and distributed manner...