In line with its mission to promote high scientific and economic impact of cutting-edge technologies, ADSC collaborated with NVIDIA to help co-organize the GPU Technology Workshop (GTW) South East Asia 2014, which took place in Singapore on July 10. GTW continues the tradition of delivering great content for domain scientists, researchers, industry professionals and developers in Southeast Asia, building onto its big sister, the GPU Technology Conference, which gathers hundreds of GPU computing experts each year.

“Co-organizing NVIDIA’s largest GPU computing event in Southeast Asia developed naturally after a very positive collaboration with them. We welcomed the opportunity of organizing such an event, as it represents an integral part of our core philosophy,” ADSC Director Doug Jones said.

NCSA’s Cristina Beldica speaks at the GPU Technology Workshop (GTW) South East Asia 2014 on July 10.

The conference featured a line-up of local and international keynote speakers, four parallel sessions, a dozen cutting-edge technology demos and an exhibition floor showcasing the latest hardware and software applications, representing the context for both beginners and aficionados of the GPU technologies to interact.

The agenda was balanced between morning plenary keynotes featuring Marc Hamilton, vice president of Solution Architecture and Engineering at NVIDIA and John Taylor, director of eResearch and Computational and Simulation Sciences at CSIRO, as well as afternoon sessions covering topics such as high-performance computing and big data, graphics virtualization and VDI, finance and professional visualization and design. One of the afternoon highlights was a keynote address by Cristina Beldica, associate director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.

Additionally, ADSC co-organized a joint seminar on July 9 with A*STAR Computational Resource Centre featuring Beldica to explore NCSA’s Blue Waters, a Petascale machine, and the fastest supercomputer on the University of Illinois campus and the challenges of scaling applications on tens of thousands of nodes. A similar presentation featuring A*STAR Computational Centre facilities was presented by Dr. Marek Michalewicz, including a guided tour of their machines.

ADSC collaborated with NVIDIA to co-organize the GPU Technology Workshop (GTW) South East Asia 2014 in Singapore on July 10.

Post GTW, on July 11, Gabriel Noaje, senior research engineer at ADSC in the Next Generation Compilers and Architectures for Compute Acceleration project team, held a CUDA and OpenACC hands-on workshop in collaboration with NVIDIA. He provided an overview of the three main vectors to leverage the computing power of Graphic Processing Unit (GPU): CUDA programming language, accelerated libraries, and OpenACC directives driven programming. The last session introduced the new Tegra K1 fully programmable embedded chip, and provided hands-on experience using Jetson K1 board, which is already used internally at ADSC for different projects in the fields of social robotics and speech recognition.

ADSC’s goals include contributing to the forward-thinking research climate in Singapore by working with industry partners to further develop ADSC’s research. To continue that, ADSC collaborations with NVIDIA began in November 2011 when a non-disclosure agreement was signed giving ADSC researchers access to confidential information on both hardware and software allowing them to stay on the leading edge of technology breakthrough.

In 2013, NVIDIA and ADSC furthered their collaboration by putting in place the Singapore GPU Users Group. The group is an informal special interest group founded to bring together GPU users from all fields and experience levels in Singapore to learn and share their ideas and creations through informal meetings. The group has regular bi-monthly meet-ups in Fusionopolis organized by ADSC’s Gabriel Noaje and Oxana Plis of NVIDIA. Application developers, researchers, academia, industry and all adopters of GPU computing are welcome to join to share best practices, get feedback on projects and socialize with colleagues and peers across industries.

Posting selfies to Instagram and Facebook has been popular among teens and young adults for many years now, but ADSC researchers are now upping the selfie-game with their development of an app that allows people to take a short video clip and alter the background using pre-designed animated templates to create a Hollywood style mini-movie in seconds.

The app, SnapClip, was developed by an external partner Basilo Labs, incorporates algorithms developed at ADSC into its core modules. This allows users to do this photo and video editing quickly and in real time.

ADSC researchers Jiangbo Lu and Peter Niu developed the Intelligent Scribbles algorithm after previous research resulted in an efficient interactive image segmentation algorithm. Lu and Niu tweaked the already-developed algorithm into a mobile-friendly version that could achieve real-time performance with satisfying results. This allows users with Intelligent Scribbles software to edit images or videos more quickly within the app, rather than doing it in the cloud.

Intelligent Scribbles brings “object selection,” a desktop experience typically using a mouse with a software such as Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft’s Grabcut, to mobile devices using fingertips. When a user scribbles carelessly over the object intended for editing or applying various effects, the algorithm intelligently and instantly determines the user’s intention and does the selection job correctly.

“Such a functionality in achieving instant and accurate response in particular, is very uncommon for mobile platforms,” Lu said. “Turning an image of many individual pixels into semantically meaningful parts or objects enables a range of interesting editing possibilities, such as depth-of-field rendering, colorization/recolorization, cut and composition.”

According to Niu, the project developed from the idea that with the rising usage of smartphones, people are tending to use cell phones as the one-stop tool of taking, editing and sharing photos and videos.

“There are many mobile apps with the capability of photo and video editing, but they could only handle easy tasks such as color filtering, exposure and blurring, because of the limitations of computational power,” Niu said.

According to Niu, Intelligent Scribbles is unique to other photo and video editing apps, as it is more accurate and efficient. In addition, in order to make the app real-time on a mobile platform, they implemented the algorithm with mobile graphic processing unit (GPU). They’re finding that it’s possible to implement some complex tasks such as image layering and image completion on the mobile platform based on their unique algorithm and GPU implementation, which are areas where other apps don’t measure up.

“Before Intelligent Scribbles, generally layering a photo into different objects is only be done on PC with softwares like Adobe Photoshop,” Niu said. “Intelligent Scribbles enabled the mobile developer to achieve the image segmentation in their app in a very light and intuitive manner.”

SnapClip, the first app to use the Intelligent Scribbles software, comes with pre-designed animated templates that range from snowy nature scenes to horror scenes with poltergeists to middle-earth or a candy mountain. Users can take video clips up to 12 seconds, add freeze frames, include music from their own library and add text, titles and credits when creating their videos.

“The effect is that people can create a short video that often feels like a movie trailer with users themselves inside,” Niu said.

In addition to catering to consumers, the app is also designed as a marketing tool for brands. For example, with the World Cup currently airing on television, SnapClip has created World Cup effects, so users can upload videos with their team’s flag and colors.

The Intelligent Scribbles technology was licensed this past April by Exploit Technologies Pte Ltd (ETPL), the technology transfer arm of the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) in Singapore. The app is available on iTunes and is designed for both the iPhone and iPad.

Lu and Niu are a part of a larger research and technology transfer project at ADSC, Magic Touch, which has a portfolio of advanced image/video manipulation technologies that provide easy ways to add effects to photos and videos via smart phones. The ADSC team has created novel ways to convert still photos into moving images, create a condensed image from a video clip where part of the photo remains still while other selected parts of the image continue to move, as well as selecting and cutting parts of images from photos on mobile phones. Moving forward, the team will be working on fast and reliable video object selection and editing on mobile devices with as least as possible user’s intervention.

“We feel this technology has pushed the boundary of what people could do using the smartphones, and we’ll further explore along the direction to broaden the spectrum of human life,” Niu said.

SnapClip, the first app to use the Intelligent Scribbles software, allows users to do photo and video editing quickly and in real time.

Professor William H. Sanders is ECE ILLINOIS’ new department head, Engineering at Illinois Dean Andreas C. Cangellaris announced Thursday. His appointment is effective August 16, 2014.

William H. Sanders

“I know from experience what a challenging and gratifying job it is to be head of the ECE Department, and I know that Bill will do it well,” said Cangellaris. “Bill’s strong vision and work ethic will be a great asset to the department. I look forward to working with him to take ECE to the next level.”

Sanders has served as the department’s interim head since July 2013, when Cangellaris, the former department head, became dean.

“It’s an incredibly exciting time, as we prepare to move into our new building and continue educating some of the very brightest students of their generation,” Sanders said. “I am honored to lead this department, and I am grateful to have the opportunity to do so.”

Sanders, a Donald Biggar Willett Professor of Engineering, previously served as the director of the university’s Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL), a premier, multidisciplinary research lab focused on information technology at the crossroads of computing, control, and communications.

Sanders came to Illinois in 1994 as an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and researcher in CSL. He earned the title of professor in 1998. His research is focused on dependability and security metrics and evaluation, architecting reliable and secure systems, and computer system modeling and analysis.

In 2004, he became the inaugural director of the Information Trust Institute (ITI), which provides national leadership combining research and education with industrial outreach in trustworthy and secure information systems. He is also the principal investigator of the NSF/DOE/DHS Trustworthy Cyber Infrastructure for the Power Grid (TCIPG) Center, which is at the forefront of national efforts to make the U.S. power grid smart and resilient. He was also the co-founder of and has been the associate director of the Advanced Digital Sciences Center, Illinois’s research center in Singapore, since its inception in 2009.

Sanders is co-developer of three tools for assessing the performance of systems represented as stochastic activity networks: MetaSAN, UltraSAN, and Möbius. He is also a co-developer of the Loki distributed system fault injector and the AQuA/ITUA middlewares for providing dependability/security to distributed and networked applications, and the NP-View tool for assessing the security of networked systems.

Sanders holds a PhD in computer science and engineering; an MSE in computer, information, and control engineering; and a BSE in computer engineering, all from the University of Michigan. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

Editor’s note: media inquiries should be directed to Brad Petersen, Director of Communications, at bradp

The Illinois at Singapore Pte. Ltd. Board of Directors have announced the election of Dr. Phyllis Wise as board chair, effective immediately. Members of the board elected Wise, who is succeeding University of Illinois Associate Provost and Dean of the Graduate College Debasish Dutta as the chairperson. Wise is the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign chancellor.

Wise was appointed to the board in May 2012 and has been involved in setting the strategic directions of the Illinois Pte during her directorship. She traveled to Singapore in April 2013 with other board members to visit the Advanced Digital Sciences Center and participate in senior leadership meetings with several Singapore partners, including the Agency for Science, Technology and Research, the Illinois Pte research program’s primary sponsor. ADSC is a research center led by faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and guided by Illinois at Singapore Pte, an affiliate of the University of Illinois.

The Illinois Pte board shared the following statement upon Wise’s election: “Dr. Wise’s campus leadership combined with her keen acumen for understanding opportunities in Southeast Asia and the greater Asia region will be a meaningful asset for the Pte’s and university’s international footprint.”

Two ADSC faculty members, Deming Chen and Ravishankar Iyer, have been awarded IBM Corporation Faculty Awards for their contributions in their field of research.

The Faculty Awards are granted annually and are awarded to help foster collaboration between researchers at leading universities worldwide, as well as with researchers in IBM research, development and services organizations. The intent is to stimulate growth in disciplines and geographies that are strategic to IBM’s work.

Deming Chen

Chen was awarded $40,000 for his contributions to the areas high performance computing, synthesis, architecture and design space exploration. Since January 2013, Chen has published 18 conference papers in top conferences and two journal papers, including one submission that received a Best Paper Award on improving polyhedral code generation for high-level synthesis. In total, he has published more than 100 refereed journal and conference papers in the areas of FPGA, EDA, GPU, nanotechnology and heterogeneous computing. In addition to being a part of the Circuits research group at CSL, Chen is an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, an affiliate associate professor of computer science and a seconded faculty member for the Illinois Advanced Digital Sciences Center.

Ravi Iyer

Iyer, a George and Ann Fisher Distinguished Professor of Engineering, was awarded $20,000 for his work in the areas of trustworthy computing, including reliable system design, measurement and validation, as well as reliable and safe biomedical monitoring. Iyer has received the IBM Faculty Award five previous times, in addition to previously serving as the director of CSL and the interim vice chancellor of research. He is an ACM, IEEE and AAAS fellow, AIAA Associate Fellow and a distinguished visitor of the IEEE Computer Society. Iyer is a co-associate director of ADSC and contributes to the Smart Grid research happening in Singapore. His other research interests include computer security, privacy and information trust, in addition to fault tolerance, networking and distributed computing, system modeling and measurement.

Continuing the working relationship between Singapore and the University of Illinois, the Advanced Digital Sciences Center (ADSC) has extended its agreement with Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), to provide an additional three years of funding to the research center.

The agreement extends ADSC’s research program from five years to eight years, with a new maturity date of April 2017, as well as provides additional funding to maintain the research facility at its current capacity, with over 90 staff, researchers and Illinois faculty members.

“ADSC has already established itself as a center that does IT research at a level that can set the world agenda in a few key areas it selects. By integrating this achievement with attention to new technologies and applications, ADSC has high potential for contributing to Singapore’s national priorities and economic development,” ADSC Director Doug Jones said.

The extension adapts ADSC’s research focus to “Human-centered Cyber-physical Systems” (HCCS). This new area of research will focus on developing systems which enable humans to interact with the digital world in a manner that is as seamless and natural as the use of any of the human senses, through use of data analytics, data visualization and cyber security. ADSC has already begun four projects that are new or extensions of HSSP projects and have three more in the works that will focus on the HCCS areas of research.

“The funding extension for ADSC clearly reflects the continuous excellence that ADSC, CSL, ITI and Illinois researchers bring in to the research community in Singapore and beyond,” CSL Acting Director Klara Nahrstedt said. “The research results of the Human Sixth Sense Project, encompassing research topics of video analytics, depth-based imaging, human recognition, understanding and interaction, have had major impacts on CSL and Illinois. For example, due to the Human Sixth Sense Project and the new HCCS research, ADSC faculty are now very well positioned to contribute in major way to the Big Data research within the Grainger College of Engineering Initiative.”

ADSC’s vision of human-centered cyber-physical systems has the goal of enabling human awareness and control of the state of the cyber-physical world, through scalable, trustworthy, real-time data analytics over multiple modalities of sensed data.

“Rapid advances in communications and computing technology, driven by massive commercial investment, now grant humans almost ubiquitous access to all information at anytime from anywhere,” Jones said. “Billions of dollars are being invested into mining these enormous amounts of data for commercial advantage or to detect fraud, cyber-crime or terrorists. ADSC and A*STAR must identify and target a distinctive research direction of tremendous longer-term promise and extraordinary future impact in which we can lead the world and provide outsize benefits to Singapore and its citizens, which we feel will be accomplished through the work being done in our HSSP and HCCS research projects.”

Additionally, a focus over the next three years will be collaborations with fellow A*STAR-funded organizations, such as the Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), and also with Nanyang Technological University (NTU), National University of Singapore (NUS) and Singapore-based companies.

Over the past five years, ADSC has not only collaborated with neighboring research centers, but has also received 10 best paper awards, awards in seven competitions, eight technical disclosures, two provisional patent applications, one trade secret, six IP licenses, 19 copyrights corresponding to a new technology and has helped with six new startups in Singapore. ADSC employs 13 Illinois faculty members, as well as over 80 researchers, postdocs, interns and staff members.

“We are proud to have ADSC working in Singapore because it provides a unique opportunity to explore new dimensions in CSL research, including common and different characteristics of Human-centered Cyber-physical Systems that we see in Illinois and Singapore. The research results are therefore stronger with wider impact on the overall research community,” Nahrstedt said.