Research Overview of the Department of Computer Science

Prof NG Hwee Tou Vice Dean (Research), SOC

14 September 2015

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Main Research Clusters

AIComputational

Biology Database

MediaProg Lang & S/W Engineering

Systems & Networking

Analytics Healthcare

MDA-Funded Centers

Felicitous ComputingSustainability

Advanced Robotics Cloud Computing

Security

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University-level Centers

• Interactive and Digital Media Institute (IDMI) • Inter-disciplinary (computing, engineering, and social

sciences) research institute in interactive and digital media

• NRF-funded CREATE Centres• SMART (Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and

Technology)• E2S2 (Energy and Environmental Sustainability Solutions

for Megacities): NUS and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China

• NUS (Suzhou) Research Institute• 20,000 m2 building• Xu Guo Qin (director), Tan Tiow Seng (deputy director)

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Felicitous Computing Institute• Institute Mission:

to realize the original ideals of ubiquitous computing“The most profound technologies are those that disappear. ... [Computing will become] an integral, invisible part of people’s lives ... [where] the computers themselves ... vanish into the background.” [Mark Weiser, Scientific American, 1991]

• Activity Recognition research on machine learning,

music analysis, context awareness, activity inference

• Infrastructure for the Internet of Things

middleware for seamless plug-and-play discovery and connection of devices, using smartphones as intelligent gateways

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Advanced Robotics Center:Towards Human-Centered Collaborative Robotics

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NRF/MDA-Funded Centres

• China Singapore Institute of Digital Media (CSIDM)– Partner: Chinese Academy of Sciences, Institute of Automation (CASIA)– Goal: Human language technology to enable communication in multiple languages

• NUS-Tsinghua Extreme Search Center (NExT) – Partner: Tsinghua University, China– Goal: Solve challenges in indexing, integrating, fusing and searching for live data

generated by millions of sensors, online forums, blogs and mobile devices

• Centre of Social Media Innovations for Communities (COSMIC)– Partner: Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay, and Nanyang Technological

University, Singapore– Goal: Empower the next 100 million people through social media innovations that

improve the way they live, work and play

• Sensor-enhanced Social Media Center (SeSaMe)– Partner: Zhejiang University, China– Goal: To build social cyber-physical systems to help tackle societal problems related

to lifestyle and security

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Research @ CSIDM (http://www.csidm.sg/)

• Language mediation – Break the language barrier to enable communication between speakers of different languages

• Research focus:– Language translation systems

• Text translation• Speech recognition• Speech synthesis

– Language learning • Grammatical error correction• Pronunciation evaluation

– Multimedia-facilitated chat system

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Research @ NExT (http://next.comp.nus.edu.sg/)

• To acquire, aggregate and organize continuous streams of live and dynamic data to realize a smart environment

Distribution of topics in Orchard Road, Singapore

Integrate photos and check-in venues

Automated info organization

Active mobile social network

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Research @ COSMIC (http://cosmic.nus.edu.sg/)

• To empower people in the community through social media innovations that improve the way they live, work, and play

• Focus on healthcare, infrastructure, agriculture

Middle 3 Billion

Top 1.5

Billion

Bottom 2 Billion

MOP: Ready but not

well-served

TOP: Ready and

well-served

BOP: Not ready

• Develop tools and services for low resource settings that are • Scalable for widespread deployment• Workable with limited hardware• Useable by semi-literate people• Affordable to low-income people

Information gathering apps

Sense makingapps

Informationdispensing apps

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SeSaMe (Sensor-enhanced Social Media) Centre

Cyber World

Physical World

Social World

Social Cyber-Physical

Systems

Applications

IntelligenceInterface/Interaction

Foundations

Lifestyle Information-on-the-Go Security & AnalyticsVideo AnalyticsFitSense Social Gaming

Readpeer OneSpace

Aesthetic QR Codes

Interactive Augmented Reality freeWalker

Privacy Data Indexing and Analytics

Multimedia Processing

LocalizationArtificial

IntelligenceActive Sensing

Social Interaction Detection

CamTweetDynamic Path

prediction

Photo Recommendation

Tagged-MapReduce Generic Parallel

Inverted Index Saliency PiLoc

Vision: “To build social cyber-physical systems to help tackle societal problems related to lifestyle and security”

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NRF CRP Program: Cloud and Big Data

MapReduce+1. Benchmarking Hadoop performance factors (VLDB 2010).2. Llama: a column-based data warehouse on Hadoop

(SIGMOD 11)3. AQUA: a query optimizer for HIVE (ACM SOCC 2011,

TKDE 2011)

epiC1. Cayley-graph based index (VLDB 2011) and Indexing

(SIGMOD2010, VLDB2010)2. ES2: an elastic storage for OLAP and OLTP (ICDE 2011)3. E3: an elastic execution engine (J of Information Processing,

WISE2011)

LogBase1. Log store on the Cloud (VLDB2012)2. Adaptive query processing for log store (ongoing work)3. Transactions on log store (ongoing work)

Enhancement of existing systems

proposing new systems for

hybrid workload

new architecture for new

hardware/applications

2008-

2008-

2011-

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Energy and Environmental Sustainability Solutions for Megacities (E2S2)

CS-A: Waste management in megacities for sustainability and energy recovery

CS-B: Challenges of emerging contaminants on environmental sustainability in megacities

SP-1: Mission-oriented system model for megacity sustainability

SP-2: Distributed clouds: Peta-scale urban sensing and data management

Size

Complexity

CS-B

CS-A

SP-2

Test

Bed

ding

Test

Bed

ding

SP-1

Environment

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NRF ProjectTrustworthy Systems from Un-trusted Components

Vulnerability Discovery

Binary Hardening

Verification Data Protection

Agency Collaboration – DSTA, …

Industry Collaboration

ST, Symantec, NEC, …

Education - New courses, …

Research Outputs

Enhancing local capabilities

Lead PI:

PIs:

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Business Intelligence (NUS-IBM Centre for Business Analytics)

• To develop systems and capabilities to leverage the data, knowledge and information from businesses and organizations for intelligent decision making and competitive advantage

Technical AspectsQuantitative and Economic Aspects

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Artificial Intelligence Cluster

• Theory of Computing: Learning theory (learning in the limit); Recursion theory (what can/cannot be computed); Complexity theory (how costly); Automata theory.

• Uncertainty in AI: Robot planning and learning involving partially observable Markov decision process; Parallel Gaussian process regression for real time prediction with big data; Information gathering agents with active sensing.

• Spatio-Temporal Data Mining: Discovery of lag patterns (e.g., stock profile); Trajectory Analysis (e.g., hurricane path).

• Image & Text Mining: Document image binarization for text retrieval; Video text detection; Handwritten text recognition.

• Adaptive Decision Analytics: Context-sensitive decision support; Causal knowledge discovery; Surprise-triggered adaptation; Multimodal medical data fusion.

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Computational Biology ClusterOverview

• Members – Limsoon Wong– Wing-Kin Sung– Hon Wai Leong– David Hsu

• Research– ~30 papers annually– ~10 keynote and

other invited talks annually

• Education– 3-5 PhD students

graduate annually

• Service– Editorial board of

Biology Direct, Scientific Report, BMC Research Notes, JBCB, TCBB

– PC of all leading comp bio conferences

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Computational Biology ClusterRecent Notable Results

• Network-based analysis of transcriptomic & proteomic profiling data– High cross-batch reproducibility when sample size is small

• Protein-complex reconstruction from PPI networks– Cutting-edge results for three challenging scenarios

• Drug resistance in pathogens– Innovative host-pathogen protein-interaction prediction– Phylogeny-aware drug-resistance mutation inference

• 3D chromosome modeling– Guarantees recovering correct structure in noise-free case

• Discovery of disease-associated mutations– Decoded complex patterns of genomic rearrangement in

hepatocellular carcinoma

SINGA: A General Distributed Deep Learning Platform

Cluster size

Training time

Scalable

GeneralA: Feed-forward

B: Undirected C: Recurrent

RNN

CNNMLP

Auto-Encoders

RBM

DBNDBM

Extensible

Easy to use

Layer

Updater

TrainOneBatch

Start a job by configuring• NeuralNet• TrainOneBatch• Updater• ClusterTopology

Database Cluster

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Media Cluster

• Faculty: Michael Brown, Alan Cheng, Chua Tat Seng, Kan Min Yen, Mohan Kankanhalli, Leow Wee Kheng, Low Kok Lim, Ng Hwee Tou, Ng Teck Khim, Ooi Wei Tsang, Sim Khe Chai, Terence Sim, Tan Tiow Seng, Wang Ye, Yn Kang Kang, Zhao Shengdong, Roger Zimmermann

• Areas:Computer Graphics & Computational Geometry: GPU for computational geometry, computer animation

Computer Vision: computational photography, face recognition, medical imaging

Human Computer Interaction: digital sand animation on multitouch tabletop, interactive textual design and manipulation

Multimedia Systems & Retrieval: Media search, social media analytics, multi-sensor computing, multimedia security

Natural Language Processing: grammar checking, machine translation, semantic & discourse processing

Sound and Music Computing: music information retrieval, healthcare applications

Speech Processing: noise robust ASR, deep learning for ASR

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Programming Languages & Software Engineering Cluster

• Faculty: Chin Wei Ngan, Dong Jin Song, Martin Henz, Aquinas Hobor, Joxan Jaffar, Khoo Siau Cheng, Abhik Roychoudhury, David Rosenblum, Roland Yap

• Areas:Constraints (CP/CSP): MDD/FA/Grammar constraints, Heap Solvers, Higher Order Consistencies, Generating Geometry Questions, String Solvers for JavaScript

Program Analysis: Termination Analysis, Resource Analysis, Worst Case Execution Time, Symbolic Execution, Security Vulnerabilities in Android Apps

Software Engineering: Code Clones, Specification & Bug Signature Mining, Scalable Code Analysis, Quantifiying Uncertainity in Software Testing, Program Repair & Patching, Regression Testing, Debugging

Verification: Concurrency, Separation Logic, Verifiying Heap Programs/Data Structures/Heap Safety, Probabilistic Verification of Markov Chains and Markov Decision Processes, Timed Protocols/Systems, Model Checking

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Security Cluster

Abhik RoychoudhuryLiang Zhenkai

Roland Yap

Norman Hugh Anderson Chang Ee-chien

Prateek Saxena

Network Security, Applied Cryptography Grant from TDSI, MINDEF

Systems security, PL

Grant from T-labs, FSTD

System Security, Data ProtectionBest paper award ICECCS 14, Deployed past research to Google+ and Chrome.

System SecurityMany best paper awards ICECCS 14, FSE09, Usenix Security 07 Involved in Bitblaze

Binary Analysis,Testing, FuzzingBest paper awards – FSE09 Tool deployment – JsliceACM Distinguished Speaker

Programming Languages, Cyber-security Education

CS Department Security Cluster is currently leading several visible research activities including the NRF project “Trustworthy Systems from Un-trusted Components”, and the National Cyber-security Laboratory (NCL) for experimentation.

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Systems & Networking Cluster

• Mobile sensing, Internet of Things (Chan Mun Choon)• Algorithms for highly dynamic, unreliable and distributed

environments (Seth Gilbert)• Networks and distributed systems (Ben Leong)• Economics of the Internet, big data analytics and cloud

computing (Richard Ma)• Modeling program execution behavior (Soo Yuen Jien)• Unmanned drones (Colin Tan)• Multi-agent and real-time traffic simulation (Gary Tan)• Parallel and cloud computing (Teo Yong Meng)• Embedded computing, real-time systems (Tulika Mitra)• Approximate computing, GPU computing (Wong Weng Fai)• Efficient algorithms and bounds for dynamic network (Yu

Haifeng)

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Funding Sources

• Ministry of Education (funds basic research)– Faculty Level ~ $1.6M

• AcRF Tier 1 (FRC): < $180K

– University Level• Special Grants

– Start-up grant for new faculty: ~ $100K – $400K– Young Investigator Award: ~ $300K – $500K

– National Level• AcRF Tier 2 (ARC): $500K• AcRF Tier 3: $5 – 10M (Type A)

$10 – 25M (Type B)

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Funding Sources

• A*STAR (also runs research institutes)– Applied research (Started to support basic research

in recent years)– ~$100K – $1M

• Defence Organizations– Ministry of Defence– Defence Science & Technology Agency (DSTA)– DSO National Laboratories (DSO) – Oriented towards defence applications

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• NRF (National Research Foundation)– Competitive Research Program ~ $10M– Campus for Research Excellence And Technological

Enterprise (CREATE) • Typically > $20M

– Initiative to develop digital media industry(~$500M)• Administered by Media Development Authority (MDA)• Typical funding:

– ~ 5 years– ~ $10M

Funding Sources

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Working with Industry - Research

• Consulting

• Technology licensing

• Research contract

• Joint research labs / sponsored research

• Examples of industry sponsored research– Fuji Xerox– Google– Huawei– Intel– Microsoft

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Research Funding

• Annual new funding (S$ million)

AcRF A*STAR NRF Others* Total

FY2014 3.9 0.0 6.3 1.4 11.6

FY2013 2.2 0.6 0 1.7 4.5

FY2012 5.2 1 10.9 1.2 18.3

FY2011 3.6 1.7 1.3 3.9 10.5

FY2010 3.6 2.4 10 2.1 18.1

Note: *AOARD, DSO, Exploit Technologies, Fuji Xerox, Google, Huawei, Intel, Microsoft, ODPRT, SERI, SMART, Symantec

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Research Funding

• Annual expenditure (S$ million)

AcRF A*STAR NRF Others Total

FY2014 3.5 0.8 3.3 1.8 9.4

FY2013 3.5 1.3 4.1 1.8 10.7

FY2012 3.5 1 3.6 1.5 9.6

FY2011 3.2 0.9 2.7 1.1 7.9

FY2010 3.6 0.7 1.4 1.5 7.2

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Current incubatees:• 6ESTATES Pte Ltd• Accufind Technologies• Collappe• eBeeCare• Investing Note• JidoBox• Logtomation• OhMyEvent• Stylr

SOC Incubation Centre

Graduated companies:

• BestPeer• Cicada• Decision-Ware• Drive SG• FlickEvents• FriarTuck• mChron• MokoMomo• Mozat• PrivyLink• SGEye• Smoov• Social@Work• tenCube• Thothe• Tiny Whale• Visenze• …

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Innovation & Entrepreneurship

Mr Wu Wenxiang graduated from NUS School of Computing Class of 2007. His company, where he is one

of the co-founders, Zopim Technologies Pte Ltd, has been acquired by Zendesk, a cloud-

based customer service software solution provider, for US$29.8

million (S$37.3 million), as cited in various media reports.