Eric Freudenthal

Associate Professor
University of Texas at El Paso
Computer Science Department
Office: Room 202a, Lab: Room 320, Computer Science building
(at the top of Hawthorne Street, #60 on the campus map)

shared fax:	915/747-5030
tethered:	915/747-6954
	efreudenthal @ utep.edu
wireless:	915/317-6246

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

I am generally available immediately after class on Mondays and Wednesdays at 2:50PM. Please catch me right away or make an appontment if you want to meet me as that I won't wait after 3PM if nobody's here.

If this time is not convenient, please request an appointment. Public information about my schedule is published online with timebridge: http://meetwith.me/ericfreudenthal. If you wish to make an appointment, be sure to

Select your timezone (default is Pacific), and
Request a reasonable duration (generally advising requires 15 minutes).

Research

My primary present research focus is the strengthening of foundational math courses through the holistic integration of programming.

With support from NSF, I led the development of introductory "iMPaCT" (Media Propelled Computational Thinking) courses that engages students in low-level graphical programming and simulations of kinematics in a manner that strengthens math understandings and improves academic success in pre-calc and calculus courses. iMPaCT’s learning outcomes include most of the skills taught in a conventional first semester programming course. Evaluation indicates that most attendees are highly engaged - independent of gender, ethnicity, and intended academic major - and 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. Visit the iMPaCT web site for more information on these efforts.

Prior to joining UTEP's Computer Science faculty in 2004, I was an Associate Research Scientist at New York University's Courant Institute.

My contributions to computer science research include efficient techniques for implementing secure distributed systems, coordinating parallel computations, scalably distributing online web content, and recognizing objects in SAR imagery.

A summary of my research appears below. A more formal research statement written in Spring 2004 (in Acrobat format) is also available.

New Efforts (updated Summer 07)

Toothless - Ryan Spring (A PhD candidate) is investigating techniques useful for constructing a cooperative read-only filesystem that we anticipate will provide better performance for common workloads than local disks. Toothless was motivated by our desire to minimize the administrative overhead to provide high performance services on ReCoN (see below). Like Google's GFS, Toothless will achieve high performance through the tasteful selection of relevant filesystem semantics. No homepage yet, but Ryan's working on it.
Modular Network Protocol Stacks
In collaboration with Nancy Griffeth at Lehman/CUNY, I am investigating techniques to enable the implementation, performance evaluation, and formal verification of a netowrk protocol from a single specification.
Addressing the challenge of teaching systems skills to students who learn Computer Science in Java (curriculum reform) Students who learn CS in Java are frequently not familiar with memory management, pointer manipulation, and runtime support, and thus are under-prepared for serious systems development work. This reformed 4^th semester course simultaneously teaches C and assembly language and thus also exposes the students to runtime support for high level languages and prepares them to develop device drivers, operating systems, and embedded systems. (homepage coming soon)

Ongoing Efforts

Fern - An updatable authenticated dictionary for autonomic systems
Authenticated dictionaries are useful for disseminating authorization and other security-relevant documents in distributed environments. Fern provides the strong integrity properties of others' authenticated dictionaries in a manner that permits efficient dissemionation of updates upon autonomic content distribution networks such as CoralCDN. (read more)
ReCoN : A Reconfigurable Computing & Network Lab
This CRI-funded lab utilizes virtualization to permit students to safely experiment with system configuraton and non-trivial network configuration. (both a research effort and curriculum development; homepage coming soon)
Computational CS-Zero: A computational introduction to programming, mathematical modeling, and elementary mechanics for students considering careers in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics.

Prior Efforts

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.

DiSPAC -- Making the Internet Safe for Grandma
I have been investigating techniques that can reduce the extreme vulnerability of systems maintained by naive users to the ever-growing threat of malware. This project, tentatively named DiSPAC (Distributed Security Permissions for Alien Code), provides mechanisms that enable naive users to define sandbox execution policies that rely on trusted third parties (functioning as utilities) to determine program characteristics. A web site describing this effort is under construction: http://rlab.cs.utep.edu/dispac.

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.