The Science and Technologies for Phosphorus Sustainability (STEPS) Center is a convergence research hub for addressing the fundamental challenges associated with phosphorus sustainability. The vision of STEPS is to develop new scientific and technological solutions to regulating, recovering and reusing phosphorus that can readily be adopted by society through fundamental research conducted by a broad, highly interdisciplinary team. Key outcomes include new atomic-level knowledge of phosphorus interactions with engineered and natural materials, new understanding of phosphorus mobility at industrial, farm, and landscape scales, and prioritization of best management practices and strategies drawn from diverse stakeholder perspectives. Ultimately, STEPS will provide new scientific understanding, enabling new technologies, and transformative improvements in phosphorus sustainability.

One of the main barriers to progress in Machine-Learning (ML) for Electronic Design Automation (EDA) is the lack of data-sets. This project seeks to promote the sharing of proprietary data in collaborative databases by experimentally quantifying the privacy of distributed learning on an integrated circuit design application. This project will (1) set up a distributed database with an ML-EDA application, (2) show that deterministic privacy when granting access can be guaranteed by an approach called View-Verified Data Exchange, and (3) show that differential privacy in Federated Learning can be guaranteed by a model-poisoning defense.

Led by Nat Moorman, Ph.D., an associate professor in UNC-Chapel Hill������������������s Department of Microbiology and Immunology, the group of researchers seeks to create a broad spectrum of antiviral drugs that would be effective against entire families of viruses that cause epidemics and pandemics. These new drugs would treat infected individuals between the time a virus emerges until vaccination development to prevent health care systems from being overwhelmed and help maintain economic stability.

CARTA Full Membership

Real-time analytics is the leading edge of a smart data revolution, pushed by Internet advances in sensor hardware on one side, and AI/ML streaming acceleration on the other. We propose creation of a Center of Accelerated Real Time Analytics (CARTA) to explore the realm streaming applications of analytics. This center will be lead by University of Maryland, Baltimore County with partners from NCSU, Rutgers, and other affiliated universities. The proposed center will work with next generation hardware technologies, like the IBM Minsky with on board GPU accelerated processors and Flash RAM, a Smart Cyber Physical Sensor Systems to build Cognitive Analytics systems and Active storage devices for real time analytics. This will lead to the automated ingestion and simultaneous analytics of Big Datasets generated in various domains including Cyberspace, Healthcare, Internet of Things (IoT) and the Scientific arena, and the creation of self learning, self correcting ����������������smart��������������� systems. At the core of these technologies are the techniques of data wrangling that enable this end-to-end real-time data processing and the infrastructure of the next generation of high-performance analytics systems.

Membership in the Center for Real Time Analytics (CARTA), Full Member

CARTA full Membership

CARTA Full Membership

LAS DO1 Chirkova - 3.3 Computational Social Science

One of the greatest challenges in the rare disease domain is access to trusted, verified data. With advances in mapping the human genome, over 7000 rare diseases have been identified. However no integrated, comprehensive patient registries exist that reliably collect data on these patients and their conditions and would allow for queries such as outcomes and economic impact. This planning grant will concentrate on building a large data system that can be accessed by a large collaborative community of those in the rare disease space, including state and federal agencies, clinicians, investigators, patient advocacy groups, industry and SPOKE: South.