Links:
Office hours/calendar, Home page, CV:
(html,
pdf,
doc),
Short: bio,
Research interests,
Selected publications, Community service,
Photos,
Courses,
, A few words about UTEP,
freudenthal.net
Office Hours and Appointments
My "drop in" office hours are on Mondays and
Wednesdays 9:30-10:30.
Even if you want to meet with me during office hours, I encourage you
to schedule an appointment.
To schedule an appointment: please visit my online calendar. and
follow the directions below:
- Visit
http://meetwith.me/ericfreudenthal.
- Select your timezone (El Paso is in the Mountain timezone)
- Select an appropriate duration
- Academic advisement requires about 15 minutes
- Answering questions related to class generally requires 10-30 minutes.
- Select several times when we are both available. (next)
- Pleae provide the following information
- As they request: Name, topic, email
- Personal message field: I have a baby and sometimes need to
cancel. If you include your phone number, I'll try to phone you.
Research
I have active research efforts in both computer systems and STEM education.
Systems Research
After focusing on the strengthing of the systems offerings at UTEP, my
research group in robust autonomic systems has been re-established.
Several students are vigorously investigating effective and efficient
strategies for autonomic memory and bandwidth management in
resource-limited systems.
My technical researc focuses on the design of robust but simple
protocols that effectively respond to system dynamism.
Contributions include scalable coordination primitives for parallel
computers and techniques for implementing security, indexing,
load-balancing, and locality-aware redirection for coalitions of
self-managed autonomous (peer-to-peer) systems. I am
one of the creators of Coral-CDN, a locality
aware, scalable, and
self-managed content distribution network.
My current technical research efforts are examining
self-optimization in the context of persistent storage and memory
management. Recent results include a storage architecture that
significantly reduces the cost and energy consumption of small RAID
systems while also yielding performance increases. Early evaluation
of memory management system for Android’s Dalvik (J)VM he developed
with his students indicates a 10-20% reduction of application CPU time
and commensurate reductions of energy consumption.
Our
web
site is presently being rebuilt.
Education Research
I lead the iMPaCT-STEM educational research project
(http://impact-stem.org). This multi-disciplinary effort has
developed a family of learning activities that leverage graphical
programming to engage high school and college students in the
examination of principles underlying algebra, calculus, and Newtonian
mechanics.
With support from NSF, DHS, TI, and Microsoft, we are developing "iMPaCT"
(Media Propelled Computational Thinking) learning modules that
quickly (generally in less than an hour) introduce students to
programming and engage them in the exploration of computer graphics
and simulations of
kinematics. The intended learning outcomes include
- A holistic understanding of programming and its relationship to math, science, and engineering.
- Deepened conceptual understandings of the mathematical foundations of calculus, high school algebra, kinematics, and electrodynamics.
Most attendees in iMPaCT activities are highly engaged - independent of
gender, ethnicity, and intended academic major. These findings suggest that many more students could be attracted to study science and engineering
through problem solving activities that build conceptual
understandings underlying math and physics.
iMPaCT has spawned several sub-projects
- iMPaCT-CS0: an introduction to computing suitable for integration with an entering students program.
- iMPaCT-CS1: a first semester course in programming that begins
with graphical programming in Jython and transitions to Java that has
learning outcomes equivalent to a traditional Java-based CS-1 course.
- iMPaCT-STEM: A family of programming activities designed for
integration into otherwise unmodified math and science classes that
reinforce and contextualize those courses primary learning outcomes
while inadvertantly introducing all to the foundational ideas of programming.
Visit our web http://www.impact-stem.org.
Prior Efforts
CoralCDN -- autonomic content distribution
I collaborated with Michael Freedman and David Mazieres in
the development of CoralCDN, a
locality-sensitive self-organizing content dissemination network.
Coral's indices are stored in a hierarchy of interleaved
distributed hash tables that share the same name space.
Constituent hash tables represent nested ranges of network
locality constraints, and all nodes are members of a global hash table with no
locality constraints. A single Coral node
represents the same hash bucket in multiple hash tables, and searches
prefer to search tables with better network connectivity, and only
revert to tables with inferior connectivity when necessary.
Echoing characteristics of the Ultracomputer's combining
network, Coral dynamically replicates data near to
clients, thereby minimizing hot-spot congestion.
While Coral is not
robust to security challenges, it is expected to
to provide high performance even in the presence of
partial system failure.
More information on this project is available on the Coral home page.
Security Infrastructure for Decentralized Systems
I recently led an effort of the
NYU Parallel and Distributed Systems Group (PDSG) to investigate the security needs of
systems deployed into dynamic environments that span a large
number of administrative domains.
The deployment of and communication among dynamically deployed
software agents requires the
establishment of sustained authorizing trust relationships
between agents and systems that host them, and other agents
with whom they interact. Existing component-based frameworks (e.g.
J2EE and grid) do not
offer appropriate security guarantees for coalition systems
that span multiple mutually-distrustful administrative domains.
In order to address these challenges, we developed
a deployment substrate for mobile agents called
DisCo and a
decentralized role-based access control system called
dRBAC.
I am also investigating
quantified trust management, that includes
mechanisms for trust aggregation that may increase the
expressiveness and scalability of access control systems.
An extended summary of this work
is available online at http://rlab.cs.utep.edu/~freudent/pdsg.html.
Coordination for Shared Memory Systems
As a graduate student supervised by Allan Gottlieb, I investigated
support for scalable
inter-process coordination on shared-memory MIMD systems. My
contributions include detection and analysis of problems in
architectures that implmement hardware combining. I propose design
modifications that significantly mitigate these effects. I also
have contributed centralized algorithms that have
lower synchronization latency than those previously known (and
superior to commonly used alternatives).
Hot spot contention in
combining networks investigated in my research has analogues in other
networked systems. I anticipate that variants of the techniques I
propose to mitigate the impact of hot spot congestion on both hot spot
and non hot spot traffic can be generalized to other networked
systems.
A more complete summary of my dissertation
reseaerch is available online: http://rlab.cs.utep.edu/~freudent/thesisSummary.html.
Additional details are available in
Technical Report TR2003-849. This report and
my full dissertation can be downloaded from the NYU Computer Science Department
web site.
Image Recognition
I investigated automatic target recognition in imagery collected
using synthetic aperture radar, participating
in several research projects associated with DARPA's
MSTAR model-based vision research program and the AFRL's Model Based Vision Lab. I
collaborated with Lockheed-Martin, Veridian-Erim, Diamondback Vision,
and the University of Cincinatti on the MEP4 project that investigates
identification of partially occluded targets. I also collaborated with
Alphatech Corporation and SAIC to investigate the inherent
complexity of the SAR ATR problem. This project was awarded a second
phase STTR.
In collaboration with
Ben
Goldberg
and
Davi
Geiger,
I organized the
NYU Recognition Lab,
computational resource available for research in
computer vision as applied to automatic target recognition. The
equipment for this lab was purchased under a grant from
the AFOSR's DURIP program.
The DARPA-sponsored MSTAR effort engaged approximately one hundred
scientists at ten institutions in the construction of an experimental
model-based system to detect and identify targets in SAR (synthetic aperture
RADAR) imagery.
My research contributions included
algorithms for efficient registration
and object identification,
the development of a parallelized
hypothesis evaluation and refinement executive, and optimizing
template selection algorithms.
