ASPIRE—Advancing Sustainability through Powered Infrastructure for Roadway Electrification

CU Boulder will play a major role in a new center focused on developing infrastructure and systems that facilitate the widespread adoption of electric vehicles.

ASPIRE—Advancing Sustainability through Powered Infrastructure for Roadway Electrification will explore a diverse range of transportation questions, from electrified highways that energize vehicles to the placement of charging stations, data security and workforce development.

“We need to understand the factors that are impacting the development and adoption of this technology so that we’re solving the right problems,” said Qin (Christine) Lv, ASPIRE’s CU Boulder campus director and co-Principal Investigator of the Engineering Research Center.

nder research, ASPIRE will focus on transportation, adoption, power and data. When this proposal was first presented to Lv, she saw great potential for data analytics research and application.

“If you look at all these pieces, there are a lot of data—and data really can play a very important role in terms of connecting the different components together,” said Lv, who will lead the data research thrust within ASPIRE.

Data is important for electrifying transportation not only because it can help plan how much charge is available at which charging stations and when, but where they should be built, based on traffic data, consumer preferences and more.

“We’re looking at various kinds of scenarios where you can get data and leverage data to analyze the patterns, to optimize or plan and also to improve the performance of the system,” said Lv.

Data security is also important to protect charging infrastructures and individual vehicles from malicious attacks.

CU Boulder faculty from multiple departments within the College of Engineering and Applied Science are involved with ASPIRE.

Spectrum Initiative Institute Planning

The University of Colorado was awarded a planning grant for the National Spectrum Initiative Institute. The NSF SII will be a multi-year center that focuses on access to spectrum for wireless systems and science uses of that spectrum such as radio-astronomy adn earth observation. The SII-Center will serve as a focal point for sustained spectrum research in the most challenging areas that are expected to create advanced wireless technologies and systems that benefit society, of which 5G and future cellular networks are an example. The SII-Center is also expected to educate and develop an agile workforce needed to support industries of the future which will rely heavily on wireless technologies and will require new advanced and automated spectrum management techniques. NSF’s goal is to promote transformative use and management of the electromagnetic spectrum, with resulting profound benefits for science and engineering, industry, and other national interests.

During the planning process, faculty at CU will be working with the wireless, spectrum and science community to define a research agenda in spectrum coexistance, new radio and antenna devices and management frameworks to allow coexistance with science and space applications.

Sequoia paper is accepted to SoCC'20

Ali Tariq, Austin Pahl, Sharat Nimmagadda, Eric Rozner, and Siddharth Lanka recently had a paper accepted at the ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SoCC) 22020. The paper presents Sequioa, a new quality-of-service function scheduling and allocation framework that allows developers or administrators to easily define how serverless functions and applications should be deployed, capped, prioritized, or altered based on easily configured, flexible policies.

FluidMem paper is accepted to ICDCS'20

Blake Caldwell, Sepideh Goodarzy, Youngbin Im, Sangtae Ha, Richard Han, Eric Keller, and Eric Rozner recently had a paper accepted at the IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS) 2020. The paper, titled “FluidMem: Full, Flexible, and Fast Memory Disaggregation for the Cloud,” presents a new approach to memory disaggregation that leverages the user-fault mechanism in Linux to achieve full memory disaggregation in software.

Award-winning work at HotMobile'20

The CU Systems Lab recently attended HotMobile 2020. Professor Eric Rozner and his student, Shazal Irshad, won the Best Poster Award for their work “Rethinking Wireless Network Management Through Sensor-driven Contextual Analysis.” Shazal presented a paper on the same subject to a lively audience. Eric served on a Junior Faculty/Researcher Panel and also served as a Session Chair. Professor Christine Lv was TPC chair and helped organize the workshop.

Tam Vu Named Sloan Fellow

Assitant Professor Tam Vu was named a 2020 Sloan Fellow.

The Sloan Research Fellowships are awarded annually by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation since 1955 to “provide support and recognition to early-career scientists and scholars”. This program is one of the oldest of its kind in the United States (See more information on Wikipedia).

Paper accepted at USENIX Symp. on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI'20)

The paper “FileMR: Rethinking RDMA Networking for Scalable Persistent Memory” by Jian Yang (UC San Diego) Joseph Izraelevitz (CU Boulder) and Steven Swanson (UC San Diego) has been accepted to the USENIX Symp. on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI’20). The paper describes extensions to the RDMA network protocol for integration with persistent memory technologies.

Jason Zhang takes 2nd Place in CU's Three Minute Thesis

Jason Zhang, one of our CS PhD students in the finals presented his work on Building Bridges Between Groups and Reducing Polarization at the three minute thesis competition.

He did an excellent job and earned second place in the competition earning a $750 prize that he can apply towards his research. Jason is co-advised by Christine Liu and Chenhao Tan and works closely with Rick Han and Shivakant Mishra.

Paper accepted at ACM Intl. Conf. on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS'20)

The paper “Pronto: Easy and Fast Persistence for Volatile Data Structures” by Amirsaman Memaripour (UC San Diego) Joseph Izraelevitz (CU Boulder) and Steven Swanson (UC San Diego) has been accepted to the 2020 ACM Intl. Conf. on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS’20). The paper describes methods for migrating existing data structures to use persistent memory.

Paper accepted at USENIX Conf. on File and Storage Technologies (FAST'20)

The paper “An Empirical Guide to the Behavior and Use of Scalable Persistent Memory” by Jian Yang (UC San Diego), Juno Kim (UC San Diego), Morteza Hoseinzadeh (UC San Diego), Joseph Izraelevitz (CU Boulder) and Steve Swanson (UC San Diego) has been accepted to the 2020 USENIX Conf. on File and Storage Technologies (FAST’20). The paper describes practical guidelines for gaining optimal performance from Intel’s new Optane Persistent Memory.

CU Systems Lab attends MobiCom'19

The CU Systems Lab attended MobiCom 2019 in full force. Tam Vu’s paper “eBP: A Wearable System For Frequent and Comfortable Blood Pressure Monitoring From User’s Ear” won Best Paper Award! Tam and Eric Rozner were on the MobiCom 2020 TPC. Eric also participated in the N2Women dinner and as a judge in the poster/demo session.

Tam Vu wins MobiCom'19 Best Paper Award

Tam Vu’s paper “eBP: A Wearable System For Frequent and Comfortable Blood Pressure Monitoring From User’s Ear” won Best Paper Award! The abstract is pasted below:

Frequent blood pressure (BP) assessment is key to the diagnosis and treatment of many severe diseases, such as heart failure, kidney failure, hypertension, and hemodialysis. Current “gold-standard’’ BP measurement techniques require the complete blockage of blood flow, which causes discomfort and disruption to normal activity when the assessment is done repetitively and frequently. Unfortunately, patients with hypertension or hemodialysis often have to get their BP measured every 15 minutes for a duration of 4-5 hours or more. The discomfort of wearing a cumbersome and limited mobility device affects their normal activities. In this work, we propose a device called eBP to measure BP from inside the user’s ear aiming to minimize the measurement’s impact on users’ normal activities while maximizing its comfort level. eBP has 3 key components: (1) a light-based pulse sensor attached on an inflatable pipe that goes inside the ear, (2) a digital air pump with a fine controller, and (3) a BP estimation algorithm. In contrast to existing devices, eBP introduces a novel technique that eliminates the need to block the blood flow inside the ear, which alleviates the user’s discomfort. We prototyped eBP custom hardware and software and evaluated the system through a comparative study on 35 subjects. The study shows that eBP obtains the average error of 1.8 mmHg and -3.1 mmHg and a standard deviation error of 7.2 mmHg and 7.9 mmHg for systolic (high-pressure value) and diastolic (low-pressure value), respectively. These errors are around the acceptable margins regulated by the FDA’s AAMI protocol, which allows mean errors of up to 5 mmHg and a standard deviation of up to 8 mmHg.

Rozner awarded NSF funds for wireless/edge management

CU Systems Lab Assistant Professor Eric Rozner has received funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study wireless network management in edge computing ecosystems. The grant, titled “CNS Core: Small: Sensor-based Wireless Network Management via Edge Computing”, provides three years of support to study how sensor data can be used to more effectively and flexibly manage the wireless network. A second major thrust in the proposal studies how to analyze sensory data via deep learning techniques in a more efficient manner at the network edge.

Systems Lab Fall BBQ

The CU Systems Lab held their annual Fall BBQ to begin the semester. Burgers, brats, veggie burgers, and snacks were served. Thanks to the students who helped organize!

Intergroup contact paper accepted to CSCW 2019

A new paper “Intergroup Contact in the Wild: Characterizing Language Differences between Intergroup and Single-group Members in NBA-related Discussion Forums” by Jason Shuo Zhang, Chenhao Tan, and Qin Lv has been accepted to the The 22nd ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing.

The paper will be presented at CSCW 2019 which will be held on November 9th-13th in Austin, Texas.

Paper accepted to CSCW 2019

The paper “Hateful People or Hateful Bots? Detection and Characterization of Bots Spreading Religious Hatred in Arabic Social Media” by Nuha Albadi, Maram Kurdi and Shivakant Mishra has been accepted to the The 22nd ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing

The paper will be presented at the conference which will be held on November 9th-13th in Austin, Texas.

CU Systems Lab at MobiSys

CU Systems Lab faculty and students attended MobiSys 2019 in full force. We had conference papers, demos, and workshop proceedings in topics varying from drones, HCI, IoT, security, wireless, and more!

Austin Pahl wins Outstanding TA Award

CU Systems Lab graduate student Austin Pahl has won a prestigious Outstanding TA Award from the CS department. Congrats Austin!

Best Paper Award at MobiSys'19 for "This is your President Speaking"

The paper “This is Your President Speaking: Spoofing Alerts in 4G LTE Networks” by Gyuhong Lee, Jihoon Lee, Jinsung Lee, Youngbin Im, Max Hollingsworth, Eric Wustrow, Dirk Grunwald, and Sangtae Ha (University of Colorado Boulder) won the best paper award at MobiSys 2019.

Paper accepted at Int. Conf. on Machine Learning & Data Mining

The paper “A Streaming Analytics Language for Processing Cyber Data” by Eric Goodman and Dirk Grunwald has been accepted to the 2019 International Conference on Machine Learning and Data Mining. The paper describes a portion of the Ph.D. thesis work by Eric Goodman, who has another paper “Packet2Vec: Utilizing Word2Vec for Feature Extraction in Packet Data” at the same conference.

Lab BBQ Party

The lab had agreat BBQ to kick off the end of the semester and start of summer. As always, Colorado weather was unpredictable and a light rain fell at the end. Nonetheless, everyone had a great time.

This is your President Speaking accepted to MobiSys 2019

The paper “This is Your President Speaking: Spoofing Alerts in 4G LTE Networks” by Gyuhong Lee, Jihoon Lee, Jinsung Lee, Youngbin Im, Max Hollingsworth, Eric Wustrow, Dirk Grunwald, and Sangtae Ha (University of Colorado Boulder) was accepted to MobiSys 2019. The paper will be presented at the conference Tuesday-Thursday, June 18-20, 2019.

More information can be found at the MobiSys 2019 website.

This paper describes a security issue in commercial LTE networks. We’ve prepared a more detailed description description of the issue.

CASTLE over the air accepted at MobiSys 2019

The paper “CASTLE over the Air: Distributed Scheduling for Cellular Data Transmissions” by Jihoon Lee, Jinsung Lee, Youngbin Im, Sandesh Dhawaskar Sathyanarayana, and Parisa Rahimzadeh (University of Colorado Boulder); Xiaoxi Zhang (Carnegie Mellon University); Max Hollingsworth (University of Colorado Boulder); Carlee Joe-Wong (Carnegie Mellon University); Dirk Grunwald and Sangtae Ha (University of Colorado Boulder) was accepted to MobiSys 2019.

The paper will be presented at the conference Tuesday-Thursday, June 18-20, 2019.

More information can be found at the MobiSys 2019 website.

Dr. Nolen Scaife will join our group

Dr. Nolen Scaife joins our Computer Systems Group this fall.

He will be as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder with a joint appointment in the Technology, Cybersecurity, and Policy program.

Welcome Nolen!