The National Science Foundation has awarded a grant of almost $1.6 million to a team of cybersecurity experts from the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) and the University of Illinois’ National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and Trustworthy Cyber Infrastructure for the Power Grid (TCIPG) project. The three-year effort will focus on improving the security of critical infrastructure such as electrical grids and other utilities, with research related to ADSC’s Integrative Security Assessment of Smart Grid Cyber Infrastructure project .

These industrial control systems (ICS) face different security challenges compared to general-purpose computing environments. In the past, ICS systems were generally isolated—they could rely on their lack of Internet connectivity to protect them from most security threats. However, now companies want to take advantage of the benefits of connectivity to do things more quickly, more cheaply, and to perform real-time analysis to make their processes more effective and efficient. With those benefits comes new vulnerability to a broad range of potential attackers.

This project—led by principal investigators Ravi Iyer of TCIPG and co-associate director at ADSC, Adam Slagell of NCSA, Robin Sommer of ICSI—will develop new approaches to monitoring network traffic in order to detect sophisticated semantic attacks, which can drive an ICS process into an unsafe state without exhibiting any obvious protocol-level red flags. For example, Iyer and Slagell, working with researchers Zbigniew Kalbarczyk and Hui Lin, recently demonstrated that a few small changes can destabilize a power grid and cause outages without setting off traditional intrusion detection engines because each command by itself is valid and appropriate. “Detecting this type of attack requires semantic understanding of the greater network to understand the true impact of these innocuous looking commands,” says Iyer.

“Other intrusion detection systems are signature based—you have to know about an attack to detect it. But almost every attack in the power grid community is zero day, meaning it hasn’t been seen before,” explains Slagell, senior research scientist and chief information security officer at NCSA.

The first thrust of the project is to study ICS network activity in order to develop a deep understanding of operational semantics in terms of actors, workloads, dependencies, and state changes over time.

Next the project will develop domain-specific behavior models that abstract from low-level protocol activity to their semantic meaning according to the current state of the processes under control. The goal is to integrate these models into operationally viable, real-time network monitoring that reports unexpected deviations as indicators of attacks or malfunction.

In the project’s “transition to practice” phase, the results of the research will be translated into deployment-ready technology by integrating it into Bro, a widely deployed open-source network monitoring platform maintained by ICSI and NCSA with support from the National Science Foundation. Bro’s users today include major universities, research labs, supercomputing centers, open-science communities, government institutions, and Fortune10 companies. See www.bro.org for more information.

ADSC researchers were awarded the best paper award at the first IEEE International Workshop on Computer Vision in Sports (CVSports), which was held in conjunction with the IEEE Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) conference, in June.

Using over 800 American football play clips, including test video from the University of Illinois football team, ADSC researchers proposed a novel framework where they are able to automatically identify the line of scrimmage, the formation of the offensive team for that play and the formation frame, which is the time instant right before the ball is snapped and the play is started, in a football video.

The goal of this research is to automatically recognize and label offensive team formation that occur at the beginning of an American Football play.

Led by Illinois professor Narendra Ahuja, the research was conducted by ADSC researchers Indriyati Atmosukarto and Shaunak Ahuja, Adjunct Senior Research Scientist Bernard Ghanem and former ADSC intern Karthik Muthuswamy.

Their proposed method is 95 percent accurate in detecting the formation frame, 98 percent accurate in detecting the line of scrimmage and up to 67 percent accurate in classifying the offensive team’s formation.

In its inaugural workshop, CVSports aims to bring together practitioners and researchers from different disciplines to share ideas and methods on current and future use of computer vision in sports, as computer vision has begun to play an important role in sports, such as real-time enhanced viewing, better understanding of sports injuries and automatic annotation of video footage.

“It is the ideal venue for our work as it focused on the new ways computer algorithms and methods are applied to sports,” Atmosukarto said.

While automatic action analysis is commonplace in areas such as security surveillance and military applications, most sports teams use manual annotation when analyzing sports videos. This process is extremely time consuming and the repetitive nature of the annotation often leads to errors.

Automatically detecting the line of scrimmage or an offensive formation is difficult for a computer due to similar appearances in players or formations, as well as players not being visible in portions of play clips. However, the ability to detect these two formations is a fundamental building block to any future work on action recognition and sports play understanding.

ADSC researchers look forward to using this automatic formation classification framework to enhance their sports video analysis prototype, AutoScout, to automatically identify personnel and to better understand plays and the strategic playbook inference of a team.

“The framework we’ve developed here is yet another building block of AutoScout for automatic analysis of American football videos, as well as videos of other sports in the future,” Atmosukarto said.

William H. Sanders, a Donald Biggar Willett Professor of Engineering, has been named interim head of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He begins his appointment effective immediately.

William H. Sanders

Since 2008, Sanders has served as 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, as well as being ADSC Associate Director. CSL’s annual research expenditures have nearly doubled during his tenure, reaching more than $37 million last fiscal year.

“Bill is a distinguished researcher and leader and I am excited that he has agreed to serve as the interim head of ECE,” said Andreas Cangellaris, dean of Engineering at Illinois. “Under his leadership, CSL expanded and diversified its interdisciplinary research mission, and reaffirmed its claim as a global leader in groundbreaking research of broad societal relevance and impact.”

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 evaluation, fault-tolerant computing, reliable and secure distributed systems, and computer networks and protocols.

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. In ITI, he is also the principal investigator of two research centers, the NSF/DOE/DHS Trustworthy Cyber Infrastructure for the Power Grid (TCIP) Center. To date, the TCIP project has received more than $26 million in funding.

In 2010, Sanders was appointed to the Smart Grid Advisory Committee of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a federal agency that oversees measurement infrastructure. He also serves on the Department of Homeland Security’s steering committee to develop a roadmap for securing control systems in the nuclear sector and is a member of the Cyber Security Research Alliance (CSRA) advisory board.

He has published more than 200 technical papers and 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.

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).

The average office building in the U.S. spends nearly 29 percent of its operating budget on utilities, according to MGE Energy in Wisconsin. On top of that, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that as much as 30 percent of consumed energy is being wasted due to factors such as idle computers, heating or cooling empty rooms or leaving lights on.

The researchers at ADSC, in collaboration with Korea Electronics Technology Institute (KETI) have created a living lab in ADSC’s Singapore offices to track how efficiently typical office spaces use electricity. Their goal is to develop a method of mining and quantifying potential energy cutbacks in buildings, by utilizing extensive sensor information, as part of their effort to develop a smart office.

ADSC researcher Varun Krishna installs a power meter at a workspace in the ADSC offices to monitor its total energy consumption.

“In ADSC’s office, we consistently observe that 20 to 30 percent of overall electricity consumption is spent during unoccupied or minimally occupied periods of a day, which typically occurs in most office buildings,” said Deokwoo Jung, an ADSC researcher leading the project. “Such energy consumptions can be often a great source for energy cutback across buildings, but harvesting such cutback without compromising occupants’ comfort or work productivity is a challenging problem.”

KETI provided funding for the project, as well as a wireless sensor hardware platform, while ADSC is designing and implementing the algorithms and software to process and analyze the sensor data.

Ninety power meters have been installed in the office to measure individual plug load power consumption. In addition, five multi-purpose ambient sensors were installed to measure temperature, humidity and luminous intensity, as well as five carbon dioxide sensors, nine passive infrared (PIR) sensors for motion detection and 38 current transducers (CT) to measure electricity consumption of plug load and light load branches in the main switch board.

“The real-time streaming sensor data allows us to quickly find energy cutback opportunities by tracking high dimensional correlation between occupants’ activity pattern, environment factors and real time energy consumption,” Jung said. “At the current stage, we are developing integrative models and computational framework to find such correlation that can be used to provide real-time feedback to users about their energy usage behavior.”

Jung has developed a framework and system that analyzes sensor data and estimates how much and where occupants may waste or can save electricity given their preference settings, such as room temperature or lighting intensity. The goal is to provide actionable feedback for occupants to reduce their consumption where possible.

Ninety power meters have been installed at the workspaces of ADSC employees to track their energy usage. In addition, other devices such as ambient sensors and carbon dioxide sensors monitor the office as well.

“For example, our system can alert the last person who leaves the office to turn off lights,” Jung said.

They also hope that these frameworks help individual consumers or building facility managers to efficiently schedule their optimal energy use for real-time pricing, called demand response.

“Many field tests and pilot programs have shown that consumers are reluctant to participate in demand response programs because these programs are intrusive and are operated with little consideration for their individual preferences,” Jung said.

ADSC is hoping to change that mindset by using two types of implementations, called real time feedback (RTF) and automatic demand response (ADR). RTF is a strategy that provides consumers with real-time feedback of their energy consumption and price information, expecting them to actively manage their appliances’ consumption. ADR automatically manages energy consumption using intelligent decision support to remove the need for consumers to be burdened with energy management.

“Despite the existence of rich theoretical models and algorithms, the lack of research platforms enabling empirical study for demand response has been consistently pointed out as a major bottleneck in research,” Jung said. “We have developed an office-scale living lab as a research platform for demand response with the ability to interpret individual or groups of occupants’ energy consumption in the context of their activities. Such context awareness would allow us to design more intuitive real time feedback and less intrusive automatic demand response for electricity consumers.”

Jung plans to wrap up the data gathering and analytics in July and will have preliminary results then. In addition, employees will be able to monitor their own energy consumption and see how it compares to the consumption of others in the office.

In the future, ADSC researchers plan to develop system and frameworks for user-friendly ADR and RTF and demonstrate them through ADSC’s living lab.

Andreas C. Cangellaris, the head of the department of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has been chosen to be the next dean of the College of Engineering.

Cangellaris will be interim dean designate until the U. of I. Board of Trustees meets July 24 in Chicago. Pending approval by the board, Cangellaris will then serve as interim dean before becoming dean when the academic year begins on Aug. 16.

Andreas C. Cangellaris

“Andreas Cangellaris has shown exemplary leadership as head of his department, in addition to exceptional achievements in education and research,” said Ilesanmi Adesida, the vice chancellor for academic affairs and provost of the Urbana campus. “I am confident that the vision and drive that he will bring as dean will enhance the interdisciplinary scholarship and innovation that characterize the College of Engineering.” Adesida was the dean of the College of Engineering from 2005 to 2012.

Cangellaris is broadly recognized for his research in applied and computational electromagnetics and its applications to the signal integrity of integrated electronic circuits and systems. His research has produced several design methods and computer tools that are used widely in the microelectronics industry. He has written or co-written more than 250 papers. He is affiliated with the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology and with the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the U. of I.

Cangellaris earned his doctorate in electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley in 1985. He joined the faculty at the U. of I. in 1997. He is the M.E. Van Valkenburg Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, and he has served as the head of the department since 2008. He was an Associate Provost Fellow on the Urbana campus from 2006 to 2008, a role in which he oversaw the review and revision of guidelines for recruitment, promotion and tenure; worked on campuswide interdisciplinary initiatives; and broadened campus outreach activities.

Cangellaris is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He has received a Humboldt Foundation Research Award and the U.S. Army Research Laboratory Director’s Coin.

Contact: Andreas C. Cangellaris, College of Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 217-244-0833.

If you have any questions about the College of Engineering, or other story ideas, contact Rick Kubetz, editor, Engineering Communications Office, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, (217) 244-7716.

ADSC researchers Zhenjie Zhang, Richard Ma, Yin (David) Yang and former ADSC intern Jianbing Ding received the Best Paper Award at the 2013 IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering (IC2E) in March.

Their paper, “ABACUS: An Auction-Based Approach to Cloud Service Differentiation,” describes a new, auction-based resource allocation scheme on the cloud platform. Most existing cloud systems don’t recognize users with different preferences or jobs of different natures. This doesn’t permit the cloud system to provide service differentiation, which allows a company to pay more in order to get better service, such as more space, faster connections or fewer delays. The lack of service differentiation leads to an inefficient allocation of cloud resources.

This figure, MapReduce, explains the architecture of Abacus where virtual machines “map” and “reduce” tasks, which are then auctioned off. Users bid on resources, which are then assigned to jobs.

Abacus is a generic resource management framework that interacts with users to allow them to specify their priorities and job characteristics. Based on this information, Abacus is able to allocate and schedule resources most efficiently.

“A main feature of Abacus is service differentiation, which means that different jobs receive different quality of service, based on the amount of money the owners of the jobs pay to the cloud platform,” Yang said. “Through a carefully designed auction mechanism, Abacus ensures that every job owner’s best bidding strategy is to simply tell their true valuation of the job, thus eliminating the need to play price games.”

To determine pricing of cloud resources, Abacus uses an auction, where users bid more to get more resources, and consequently, better service. Yang added that the auction mechanism ensures nice properties for users, such as monotonicity, which is when a user pays more, they always receive better service, and truth-telling, which is where a user bids on what they can afford, without studying what other users are bidding.

“In a poorly designed auction, each user needs to monitor what others bid and respond accordingly and the price often fluctuates a lot,” Yang said. “Abacus ensures that a user only needs to bid according to her own budget and the price is relatively stable over time.”

As cloud computing is a newly emerging area in the use and delivery of information technology, IC2E is a new conference that seeks to be a forum for researchers and practitioners who are involved in the development of cloud infrastructure and applications.

“Since IC2E is IEEE’s flagship conference on cloud computing, winning the best paper award allows us to enjoy high visibility, which will hopefully lead to many citations to our paper and recognition of the authors, as well as ADSC,” Yang said.

ADSC’s research on cloud computing is in its infancy, with researchers coming from different areas across ADSC. Zhang and Yang bring the perspective of a data management researcher, while Ma contributed from a networking angle. Zhang and Yang gathered initial ideas on how to create an auction mechanism from their previous work on location-based advertising and Ma, who is a game theory background, refined the ideas.

In addition to the award, the researchers will also be submitting an extended version of their paper to a special issue of the IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing.