ExPediTioNs iN CoMPuTiNg, the National Science Founda- tion’s two-year-old program encouraging bold experi- mentation in computer science research, wasn’t necessarily designed to showcase multidisciplinary projects. However, the seven winners of the $10-million, five-year grants are in the vanguard of research in which profound advances in computer science often involve fundamental advances in other disciplines.
“A question that always arises when you give a big award like this is, Would it have been better to have given it to individuals instead of a big award?” says Edmund M. Clarke, a professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University and a recipient of a 2009 Expeditions grant. The answer, Clarke says, is that natural and social sciences are increasingly intertwined with computer science, and “no one of us is a master of all this material.”
iLLUStration CoUrteSy of harVar D MiCrorobotiCS Laboratory
Jeannette M. Wing, assistant director of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate at the National Science Foundation, says Expeditions was designed in response to concerns from the computer science community that opportunities for expansive and visionary research has lagged in recent years. She says the program provides sufficient funding for a five-year period so the teams can focus on their research and not on writing grant proposals.
“It was really, really important for the CISE community, I felt,” Wing says. “The expectation was that there would be multiple investigators working together in some kind of collaboration. It did not have to be interdisciplinary—that wasn’t a requirement—but because we expected that a proposal would have multiple principal inves-
a concept drawing of a RoboBee, which belongs to an artificial colony of small-scale robotic bees, under development at harvard’s school of engineering and applied sciences.
tigators, we wanted the whole to be greater than the sum of the parts.”
The seven Expeditions projects— four were awarded in 2008 and three in 2009—bear out Wing’s vision, with 27 universities and partner research organizations represented. Some projects tackle challenges within computer science itself, others bridge multiple disciplines, but all address a daunting challenge that, like an adventurous expedition, can stimulate one’s imagination.
Combining Model Checking and Abstract Interpretation carnegie mellon university The Carnegie Mellon project illustrates the symbiosis between critical issues in
computer science and other disciplines. Clarke and his colleagues will take principles in model checking and abstract interpretation and apply them to discovering new approaches for treatments of pancreatic cancer and atrial fibrillation, and also to better assure reliability in large-scale embedded systems such as those controlling aircraft functions.
Model checking considers every possible system design state against a designer’s blueprint, and can warn of possible inconsistencies. Its granularity, however, limits the size of the systems it can analyze. Abstract interpretation, in contrast, develops an approximation of a system and preserves properties that need to be assessed. This makes it possible to analyze very large systems, but with less precision
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