Congratulations, Dr. Mohammad Almalag!

Mohammad successfully defended his PhD dissertation, "TDMA Slot Reservation in Cluster-Based VANETs", under the supervision of Dr. Michele C. Weigle on April 3, 2013.

Mohammad was a top-ranked student in the field of computer science at the Computer and Information Systems College. He received his Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science from King Saud University in 2000. In Spring 2001, he joined the Department of Computer Science and Information System at Imam University as a teacher. In Fall 2002, Mohammad joined the master’s program in the Department of Computer Science at Ball State University. He received his Master’s Degree in Computer Science in Fall 2004.

Mohammad joined the PhD program in the Department of Computer Science at Old Dominion University in Fall 2005. In 2008, he started his research under the supervision of Dr. Michele C. Weigle. Mohammad had been active in the areas of wireless networks, sensor networks, vehicular networks, MAC layer protocols, and networks simulation. With interest in MAC layer protocols and vehicular networks, Mohammad’s PhD focus, including his dissertation, was on developing a new MAC protocol for vehicular ad-hoc networks. Specifically, his focus was on improving the non-safety application share of the bandwidth.

Mohammad's defense slides are below:

TDMA Slot Reservation in Cluster-Based VANETs

NSF BioCom2 Workshop

On November 8-9, 2012, I attended the NSF Workshop on Biological Computations and Communications (BioCom2) in Boston.  The workshop was focused on bringing in researchers from different areas (computer science, bioengineering, physics) to discuss recent work and issues in computation and communication in the bio-nano world. There were several great talks, mostly focusing on communications issues in biological networks.

(I was nervous about traveling to Boston in November, and sure enough, it snowed.)

I presented work that PhD student Shahram Mohrehkesh and I are investigating on nanosensor networks (slides are below).  We are just beginning our study, so much of the talk covers previous work done by Georgia Tech in their GRANET project (Jornet and Akyildiz).


Communications and Energy-Harvesting in Nanosensor Networks from Michele Weigle

Here's a snippet of the write-up we submitted to the workshop:

Nanosensor Networks: The development of nanoscale sensor networks, or nanosensor networks, has been inspired by biological nanoscale networks. These nanosensor networks could be used detect chemical compounds in concentrations as low as one part per billion or the presence of different infectious agents such as viruses or harmful bacteria. These networks are composed of thousands of nanoscale nodes. Communication among these nodes and with the external world is an exciting new topic in networking. So far, two methods of communication have been proposed for these nanosensors: molecular communication and electromagnetic communication. Because of the limitations in molecular communication, mainly its low speed, our focus is on electromagnetic communication.

Communications and Energy-Harvesting: Pulse-based communications in the Terahertz band has been proposed as the communications method for these nanosensors [1]. Because of this, new medium access protocols must be developed as existing ones for carrier-sensing based systems are not applicable. One advantage to using short pulses for communication in a high bandwidth channel is that the probability of collision of the pulses is very small.

One challenging issue is that these nodes will have relatively small power supplies (and computation engines) due to their nanoscale. It has been estimated that the maximum capacity of a nano battery would be on the order of 800 pJ and that the transmission of a single short pulse will expend 1 pJ of energy [2]. If we map a pulse to a single bit, then a nanosensor can send at most an 800-bit packet before needing to harvest energy. Using vibration for energy-harvesting, this could take on the order of seconds (50 sec from vibrations from an A/C vent) to minutes (42 min from human heartbeat) [2].

Because of the long duration of energy-harvesting, multi-hop communication becomes an issue. For a nanosensor to successfully deliver a packet to a data sink, at least some neighboring nodes must be awake and have sufficient power to receive the message and forward it. If there are no awake neighbors, then the packet may need to be retransmitted later, wasting precious energy and reducing the quality of service in terms of delay and throughput. So, energy harvesting-aware protocols for communication among nanosensors are required. In addition, the stochastic behavior of the energy-harvesting sources should be taken into account, as some sources such as thermoelectric or RF may not be available all the time.

We are interested in developing intelligent, energy-harvesting aware scheduling strategies for communications between nanosensors. To do this, we are modeling the energy usage of communicating nanosensors. We are also building upon previous research to develop efficient pulse-based encoding schemes that can use silence as well as pulses for communication, thus saving energy. On top of this, we will develop a medium access protocol using repetition and retransmission for data delivery with an acceptable rate of reliability.

References
[1] I. Akyildiz, J. M. Jornet, Electromagnetic wireless nanosensor networks, Nano Communications Networks, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 3-19, March 2010.
[2] J. M. Jornet and I. Akyildiz. Joint Energy Harvesting and Communication Analysis for Perpetual Wireless NanoSensor Networks in the Terahertz Band, IEEE Trans. Nanotechnol., vol. 11, pp. 570-580, May 2012.

Congratulations, Dr. Samy El-Tawab!

Samy successfully defended his PhD dissertation, “FRIEND: A Cyber-Physical System for Traffic Flow Related Information Aggregation and Dissemination”, under the supervision of Dr. Stephan Olariu on July 27th, 2012.

Samy received his Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science with honors from Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University in 2002. In 2006, he received the Master Degree in Computer Science from Alexandria University. Samy Master’s thesis, “Redundant Traffic Encoding in VoIP Systems”, was focused on enhancing the quality of voice and solving the problems of delay, packet-loss or jitter.

Samy joined the PhD program in the Department of Computer Science at Old Dominion University in fall 2006. In spring 2009, Samy got a prize for excellence in scholarship at The College of William and Mary’s 8th annual graduate research symposium, Williamsburg, Virginia, USA. In 2010, he received the outstanding teaching assistant award given by College of Science for his excellent teaching and continuing good work in the spring 2010 semester.

Samy’s research interests include a wide variety of interesting vehicular networks related topics such as incident detection, efficient data dissemination, security, privacy, and cloud computing. His research work and ideas were well received by the VANET research community, with publications in various journals, conferences and workshops.

Samy’s defense slides are below:

The Thirteenth International Symposium on a World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks (WoWMoM 2012)

On Sunday June 24^th, 2012; Mohamed Almalag and I started our trip to the 13^th IEEE International Symposium on a World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks, WoWMoM 2012, which took place this year in San Francisco, California, USA. On Monday, June 25^th, 2012, we presented our papers “FRIEND: A Cyber-physical System for Traffic Flow Related Information aggrEgatioN and Dissemination” and “TDMA Cluster-based MAC for VANETs (TC-MAC)” in the VTP workshop (VANETs from Theory to practice).

Samy El-Tawab presenting his paper : FRIEND: A Cyber-physical System for Traffic Flow Related Information aggrEgatioN and Dissemination

Mohammad Almalag presenting his paper: TDMA Cluster-based MAC for VANETs (TC-MAC)

The VTP workshop started with a keynote speaker Dr. Marco Fiore who gave a great presentation title “Back to basics: road traffic in vehicular networking”. Dr. Fiore talked about the importance of mobility in vehicular networking. Dr. Fiore gave a short history of how vehicular mobility is modeled going through three components: the road topology and infrastructure information, then vehicular mobility model and ending with traffic flow model.

Dr. Fiore discussed road topology from early work of regular grid (as known as Manhattan layout) and manually defined layout to increasing the layout realism. When talking about the second component which is the vehicular mobility model, he described the macroscopic model, the mesoscopic model and microscopic model. When talking about the microscopic model in vehicular mobility, he explained the different classifications: the traffic stream, the stochastic, car following and the flows-interactions giving some examples on each one of it. Dr. Fiore, then talked about the vehicular mobility simulation tools with each one features and problems.

When talking about the third component "traffic flow models", he mentioned that these aspects are neglected by the vast majority of the networking community and it is very important to study the impact of it. Dr. Fiore closed his talk with a look into the future of vehicular networking such as "a unified test dataset", " a realistic / dedicated RF signal propagation " and " an improved vehicular mobility representation ". After couple of questions asked by the audience, the presenters started.

FRIEND: A Cyber-Physical System for Traffic Flow Related Information aggrEgatioN and Dissemination

TDMA Cluster-based MAC for VANETs (TC-MAC)

At the end of the workshop, we took a picture with other presenters. For more info about the VTP 2012 workshop program please visit: VTP 2012 workshop website.

On the 26th to 28th of June, 2012; we attended the main WoWMoM conference sessions. It was a great experience, and we were introduced to high quality research through the presentations. On the 26 June, Professor Ruzena Bajcsy from University of California, Berkeley, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) gave a keynote titled "Monitoring and Coaching Elderly People to Exercise at Home" and on the 27 of June, Dr. Ravi Jain from Google, Inc gave a keynote title "Mobile Advertising, Data and Networks ". Dr. Jain who is the director for mobile search advertising at Google, Mountain View, California was asked couple of questions concerning the security and privacy of the mobile users. For more info about the WoWMoM 2012 conference technical program please visit : WoWMoM 2012 technical program website.

ODU Team Ranks 2nd in Nokia Challenge - Task 3

As described in a previous post, a team from the iNetS group at ODU participated in the Nokia Mobile Data Challenge 2012.  During the workshop, the committee selected award winners for each of the challenge tasks.  Our team ranked 2nd in the Dedicated Task 3: Demographic Prediction category (full list of award winners). Congrats!

Nokia Mobile Data Challenge 2012

A team from ODU Computer Science successfully completed the Nokia Mobile Data Challenge.  Results will be presented at a workshop organized in connection with Pervasive 2012 in Newcastle, UK, June 18-19.  Team members were PhD. student Shahram Mohrehkesh and faculty members Dr. Shuiwang Ji, Dr. Tamer Nadeem and Dr. Michele Weigle.

The challenge participants competed in solving data mining problems of big data in the mobile computing domain. There were 108 submissions in two tracks: 59 to the Dedicated Track and 49 to the Open Track. In the open challenge, participants were trying to find new knowledge and insight from the dataset. In the Dedicated Track, three tasks were proposed for participation: finding semantic location (home, office, etc.) of user presence, prediction of next location, and prediction of users' demographic information.  The ODU team participated in the Dedicated Track, where only 16% of submissions were accepted for oral presentation. The ODU team's task was to predict users' demographic information from their mobile phone usage. Teams with the highest prediction accuracy were selected to present their results.  See the team's poster for more details.

The Challenge dataset was released in early January 2012, and teams had four months to analyze this big data. For the dedicated task, the dataset contained a 10-month log of mobile usage for 80 users. For each user, acceleration, application, Bluetooth, calendar, call log, GSM, media, media play, system, and WirelessLAN were logged. Details about the dataset and collection process can be found here. Pre-processing of the data and extraction of features was the main part of the team's activity; it took more than 70% of the ODU team's time. I, personally, learned much from this challenge. The main thing for me was the experience of mining on big data.   

NSF-Sponsored ALERT Project Wins Best Paper Award at the Virginia Academy of Science Annual Meeting

Syed R. Rizvi won the the Best Student Paper Award for the NSF-sponsored research project ALERT in the Computer Science track of 90th Annual Meeting of Virginia Academy of Science (VAS) held at Norfolk State University (NSU) on May 24, 2012. Selection of awardees at Annual Meeting of VAS is based on the originality and scientific merit of the research, the quality of the oral presentation and submitted abstract, and responses to questions. Syed's presentation was titled "ALERT: An Architecture for the Emergency Retasking of Wireless Sensor Networks."

The Virginia Academy of Science is the fifth largest state, region, or city academy of science in the U.S. It was founded in 1923 to promote the civic, academic, agricultural, industrial, and commercial welfare of the people of Virginia. The 90th Annual Meeting of VAS held at NSU provided a unique opportunity for students, faculty, and professionals to learn about and gain experience in the important fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Founded in 1935, NSU is a public, urban, comprehensive University offering programs at the undergraduate and graduate levels. ALERT is an NSF-funded research project under the supervision of Michele C. Weigle and Stephan Olariu. For more information, please visit: Intelligent Networking and Systems (iNetS) Research Group in the Department of Computer Science at Old Dominion University. Below is the abstract of Syed's VAS 2012 presentation on the NSF-sponsored ALERT:

"When an emergency or disaster strikes, first responders work as part of a complex emergency management network that calls upon many functions, resources, and capabilities. The objective of our research is to design a real-time information system to improve emergency-response functions by bringing together information to respond to a terrorist attack, natural disaster or other small or large-scale emergency. We call this system ALERT: An Architecture for the Emergency Retasking of Wireless Sensor Networks. The novel contribution of this research to the emergency response strategies is the seamless integration of various wireless sensor networks by retasking them with explicit missions involving a dynamically changing situation. Preliminary results have shown that retasking sensor networks for emergency response is a promising new paradigm that can not only promote a wider adoption of sensor network systems in support of guarding our national infrastructure and public safety, but can also provide invaluable help with disaster management and search-and-rescue operations."