In 2010, Singapore’s Advanced Digital Sciences Center (ADSC) followed its 2009 phase of initial setup by blossoming into a fully functioning, vibrant, and active research center.

A Dynamic Research and Educational Collaboration

University of Illinois faculty members participating in ADSC made over thirty trips to Singapore in 2010 in order to work on research projects, explore new collaborative opportunities, and teach short courses. ADSC Director Marianne Winslett credits ADSC’s rapid growth to the strong faculty engagement reflected by such frequent visits, explaining that “ADSC has been successful so far because Illinois faculty have recognized the opportunities that exist in Singapore and are spending considerable efforts to create research projects here.”

ADSC is now actively fulfilling its educational mission in Singapore. During 2010, Illinois faculty and staff presented three major courses to the Singaporean research community:

  • In January, Professors Kevin Chang and Jiawei Han led a course on Information Integration. Co-organized by ADSC and the Institute for Infocomm Research, the course focused on the basics of data mining as well as large-scale mining of the Web.
  • In June, University of Illinois faculty members, along with other leading researchers from industry and academia, presented a week-long course and symposium on high-performance computing. Professors Marc Snir, William Gropp, Josep Torrellas, and Laxmikant Kale presented key sections of the course.
  • In August, in conjunction with the Institute for High Performance Computing in Singapore, ADSC presented the Parallel@Illinois course on Multi-Core Processing, which had originally been presented a month earlier on the University of Illinois campus. The August presentation to A*STAR researchers was conducted in a multimedia format and led by Danny Dig, a researcher at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at Illinois. Several of the lectures were presented in the form of videos recorded during the original Illinois course, with faculty members videoconferencing in from Illinois for question and answer sessions.

ADSC capped off 2010 by hosting a major technical conference entitled “Information Technology for Smart Grid Systems” in December. Over eighty participants from academia and industry attended this inaugural smart grid event for ADSC. Dean Ilesanmi Adesida of the Illinois College of Engineering gave the opening welcome; attendees included Andreas Cangellaris, who is the Head of the Illinois Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Ravi Iyer, Interim Vice Chancellor for Research at Illinois. Several other Illinois faculty made presentations during the conference’s panel sessions.

December 2010 dinner

ADSC researchers and interns, including ADSC Director Marianne Winslett (center), Prof. Nikita Borisov (far left), and Prof. Narendra Ahuja (front left), attend the ADSC holiday dinner in Singapore on December 9, 2010.

New Faces at ADSC in 2010

In 2010, ADSC hired over twenty new research scientists, postdocs, and administrative staff, who joined the existing faculty and staff in launching the nine major research projects now underway.

ADSC proved to be very successful in attracting top-rate recent Ph.D. recipients to serve as on-the-ground project leads in Singapore. For instance, Bernard Ghanem, who recently received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, stated that he chose to start his postgraduate career at ADSC because it offered him “the chance to lead my own research group in developing top-of-the-line, cutting-edge techniques for solving real-world problems.” He noted that ADSC’s goal isn’t merely to generate publications, but truly “to think harder and more creatively in order to come up with ways that research can be used to impact society and the world.”

Kyle Rupnow, a newly minted ADSC Research Scientist and a recent graduate of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, added that ADSC stood out because it offers “the opportunity to collaborate within the academic community, and with other prominent research labs and industry in Singapore.” He said he expected that the unique ADSC environment would allow him “to perform a significant amount of high-quality research” in collaboration with “well-known researchers both from the University of Illinois and Singapore.”

Ghanem added that ADSC has the dynamic feel of a start-up company, despite being rooted in the established “research superpower” of the University of Illinois. “Since we haven’t reached critical mass yet and are still in the phase of honing in on the major projects we want to be working on for the next several years, creativity from the staff, researchers, students, and interns is a must,” he explained. “That’s what drives me personally: the chance to express my creativity. Some people do it with paint, music, or dance. I do it with a computer, software, and pretty cool mathematics.”

About ADSC

The Advanced Digital Sciences Center celebrated its opening in February 2009 and spent its first months laying the foundations of its complex international programs. Its offices and labs in Fusionopolis, a futuristic center for research and development located near the National University of Singapore and the Biopolis complex on the western side of the island of Singapore, soon teemed with activity.

ADSC started with a $50 million grant given by Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology, and Research (A*STAR) to the University of Illinois so that Illinois could establish a premier research institution for Illinois faculty in Singapore. In addition to its role as a center for innovative research, ADSC was designed to leverage Illinois expertise in engineering and computer science to bring state-of-the-art educational programs to Singapore. ADSC also serves as a conduit for commercialization of research done by ADSC-affiliated faculty and for University of Illinois faculty in general.

ADSC’s core funding is focused on two areas of research: interactive digital media and power grid (or “smart grid”) information technology. The interactive digital media research is oriented towards computer vision, face and object recognition, and new forms of web information retrieval. The smart grid research is focused on wireless networks and economic incentive systems for smart-meter-based pricing. Future research will look at hardware and software infrastructure for smart meter communications and power grid simulation.

While ADSC serves as the administrative center for the core A*STAR funding, it is also a networking hub that assists Illinois faculty in establishing collaborations in Singapore and submitting proposals to other Singaporean funding agencies. Funding from agencies and grants outside of the core agreement is key to the long-term success of ADSC, and already two faculty members have been awarded grants: Director Marianne Winslett has received funding from A*STAR for her work on differential privacy data mining in medical research, and Prof. Yih-Chun Hu has received a grant from the Centre for Strategic Infocomm Technologies (CSIT) for work on security for wireless communications.

Today, if you’re thinking about having lunch at the Bombay Grill restaurant in Champaign, Illinois and are hunched over your laptop trying to learn about the restaurant’s menu, prices, and reputation, it’ll take you a few minutes of effort to sift through search engine results looking for relevant information. As soon as a year from now, Kevin Chang‘s work could be making that task faster and far simpler for you. That’s the vision of his Augmented Reality Information Search Engine (ARISE) project’s efforts to seamlessly “mash up” the real world and the virtual world of the Internet, bridging the divide between the physical world around us and the Internet’s vast collection of information about that physical world.

The ARISE project is funded by the Advanced Digital Sciences Center (ADSC), a research center led by faculty from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and funded by Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research. Kevin Chang is an associate professor of computer science at the University of Illinois.

Chang observes that right now, our experiences of the physical world and the Internet are largely separate from each other. Suppose you are introduced to Professor Chang and want to learn more about his work. “You go home and sit down in front of your computer and open your browser. If you want to look for the Kevin Chang you just met today, you search for ‘Kevin Chang,’ and unfortunately this is a common name; you’ll find at least five different Kevin Changs just in computer science! So now you have to determine which pages are actually about the Kevin Chang you just met.”

Furthermore, your information needs may not be satisfied simply by finding one or two major sources of information on him, such as his official home page. Perhaps you’d also like to see the web pages of his former students, information on where he’s going to present talks, or copies of his publications posted in digital libraries. Such information could be scattered across many sites around the Web.

At heart, the problem is that in the real world you may know of a single entity, such as a particular restaurant called “Bombay Grill” or a particular person called “Kevin Chang,” but the information available on the Internet is not currently mapped to those real-world entities. Instead, search engines like Google force users to handle the Internet’s content in a page-by-page manner, potentially requiring users to visit large numbers of separate sites in order to gather enough information on the entity they want to learn about.

As Prof. Chang explains, “the real question is, we are living in the real world: how can you find information in the way you see the real world, without having to go through the laborious work of collecting and disambiguating knowledge? Basically, we’re dealing with reorganizing the whole Web!”

The main goal he wants to achieve with ARISE is a database of entities that we see in the real world, compiled from the huge collection of pages available on the Internet.

The first step will be an “entity search” process that reviews the millions of web pages that exist and determines which ones actually refer to, for example, Kevin Chang or the Bombay Grill — and not just any Kevin Chang or Bombay Grill, but particular Kevin Changs or Bombay Grills that are understood to be different entities despite having the same names. This process will start by seeking out directories, such as lists of faculty or listings of local restaurants. Such databases will be used as a starting point for anchoring the content on the web. Additional searching will then identify additional content that may be much more interesting — such as restaurant customer reviews — and apply ways to determine, with a certain level of confidence, whether a particular page actually contains a reference to the particular instance of Kevin Chang or Bombay Grill that is being sought.

Second, once the relevant information has been located, it must be integrated together in some way that makes it easy to review. The information may come from a wide variety of different websites, may be written in different ways, and may be talking only about certain aspects of the real-world entity of interest. The ARISE project is looking at ways to organize large amounts of material into a database that will serve as an “enabling layer,” grouping relevant material in useful ways. For example, restaurant information could, in effect, be organized as a table with columns for “price,” “menu,” “parking,” “user ratings,” and other interesting attributes of restaurants. Users could then choose which type of information is desired to view results that are specific to their needs.

“The amount of information that is available is overwhelming,” says Chang, “and it is not going to decrease; we are going to produce more and more. With the growth of technology we are taking more pictures, doing more recordings. So we really want to help users by making this information more organized.” He anticipates that the ARISE technology will be most useful when used with mobile devices by users who are “on the go,” leveraging the information available on the Internet to facilitate real-world experiences. For example, users could use the system to comparison-shop while standing in a bricks-and-mortar store, by checking product reviews or competitors’ prices.

The work has already been demonstrated in prototype form, and Chang expects that the first commercial applications will be available within one to three years.

The ARISE project at ADSC is co-led by Prof. Chang, who is the founder of Cazoodle Inc. as well as a faculty member at Illinois, and Dr. Hady W. Lauw, a Senior Research Engineer at Singapore’s Institute for Infocomm Research and Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Singapore Management University.

Chang, like all University of Illinois faculty participating in ADSC, has found that technical advances have made his collaboration with researchers in Singapore vastly easier and cheaper than it would have been just a few years ago. Prior to the launch of ARISE he made two physical visits to Singapore, giving him the opportunity to get to know researchers there and identify common interests. Since then, he’s worked successfully with his team members abroad by means of various free Voice over IP and screen-sharing options. He observes that “researchers have been liberated from reliance on telephones for communication!”

ADSC is kicking off a new A*STAR-funded project that will eliminate significant privacy risks that currently impede researchers’ ability to analyze biomedical data about individuals. Immense amounts of valuable data now exist that are unusable by the research community due to the lack of an effective method for concealing individuals’ identities. The new ADSC work will generate new publication schemes for the results of data analyses, thus making detailed summaries of health data available that can offer unprecedented insight into a vast range of medical conditions and provide useful input for urban planners, public health officials, and researchers.

The S$2 million project, which is entitled “Enabling Mining of Medical Records through Differential Privacy,” is led by ADSC Director Prof. Marianne Winslett. Her co-principal investigators include Prof. Xiaokui Xiao of Nanyang Technological University, Prof. Jiawei Han of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Dr. See Kiong Ng of the Institute for Infocomm Research, and Prof. Nikita Borisov of the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Illinois. The team also includes biomedical researchers Dr. E Shyong Tai from the National University of Singapore and Dr. Edison Liu from the Genome Institute of Singapore.

The widespread availability of biomedical data, ranging from reports of the locations of new cases of dengue fever to individuals’ genomic variations, appears to offer researchers a tremendous opportunity. Statistical analysis of such data can help researchers and public health officials better understand a disease and its transmission patterns, gain new insights into the human body, and develop new treatments and services that can improve the quality of life of millions of people.

Unfortunately, privacy concerns make it infeasible to provide researchers with unlimited access to biomedical information. Previous attempts to solve this problem have tried to anonymize data by removing personally identifiable information from medical records, but this does not provide sufficient protection. The main problem is that external knowledge can be used to re-identify individuals whose data appear in supposedly anonymized data sets. Many ideas for mitigating the problem have been proposed, but all of them have made the unrealistic assumption that adversaries had limited prior knowledge.

“In fact, this has been shown to be a fundamental barrier,” explains Winslett. “An anonymized database will either reveal private information, given certain external knowledge — or will be useless for answering some questions.”

To the extent that databases of patient information have already been made available, they have made many lifesaving discoveries possible. For example, a University of San Antonio study involving data collected from over 9,000 breast cancer patients showed that amplification of the HER-2 oncogene was a significant predictor of both overall survival and time to relapse in patients with breast cancer. This information subsequently led to the development of Herceptin (trastuzumab), a targeted therapy that is effective for many women with HER-2-positive breast cancer. Likewise, it was medical records research that led to the discovery that supplementing folic acid during pregnancy can prevent neural tube birth defects (NTDs), and population-based surveillance systems later showed that the number of NTDs decreased 31 percent after mandatory fortification of cereal grain food products. No one doubts that additional valuable findings would follow if a way to tackle the privacy limitations can be found, so that far more patient data can be made available to researchers.

To that end, medical studies funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the U.S. are required to make the data they collect, as well as summaries of analysis results, available to other researchers. Originally, the statistical summaries were freely available to other researchers via NIH’s dbGaP database (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gap), while access to the detailed patient records required researchers to undergo a rigorous and fairly arduous approval process with their Institutional Review Boards (IRBs). Privacy concerns subsequently led NIH to restrict dbGaP access, so that today many of the statistical summaries cannot be viewed without IRB approval. The need for IRB approval is a significant hurdle for researchers who want to access the summary statistics from old studies to help them plan their future work.

To find a practical solution, the ADSC team is using the recently developed concept of “differential privacy.” Differential privacy works by adding a small amount of noise to the results of statistical analyses of sensitive data sets. Under differential privacy, the contributions of any one individual’s data towards the outcome of an analysis are negligible; analysis results will be essentially identical regardless of whether a particular person’s data are included. This should not limit the usefulness of the results, since in a large and well-designed medical study, the history of a single individual should not have a significant impact on overall results. When analysis of a data set begins, its owners decide on a total “privacy budget” for the entire data set. Each published analysis result uses up a little bit of the privacy budget, and once the budget has been exhausted, no more results can be published, as they could open the possibility of at least one individual’s data having a non-negligible impact on overall results.

“Differential privacy offers us the tantalizing possibility of being able to do privacy-preserving data analysis that is both useful and secure,” says Winslett. “It’s such a new concept, but the implications are immense. Whoever comes up with a practical approach to differentially private access to biomedical data — which is what we aim to develop with this new project — will set off a free-for-all. It will open up so many new opportunities to revolutionize treatments and reduce health care costs.”

The new project is starting by analyzing privacy issues in the statistics released by Singapore’s Ministry of Health (MOH). Due to the potential for privacy breaches, MOH currently publishes detailed statistics only for highly dangerous infectious diseases, and only very sketchy information, such as the total numbers of male and female patients in Singapore, for other types of diseases. For instance, one report says that there was exactly one male patient aged 30-39 with relapsed tuberculosis in 2010. The team’s goal is to make it possible to publish detailed statistics for all diseases, but with strong privacy-preservation guarantees.

The project’s next step will be to investigate ways to re-enable open access to the summary information in dbGaP by making the summary tables differentially private. The researchers will also target other custodians and users of health-related statistics in Singapore. That work is projected to include applications in pharmacoeconomics and in analysis of hospital records to reveal the effectiveness of different treatments for a disease.

Winslett is quick to point out that several fundamental research challenges remain before differentially private analyses will be practical, but she is optimistic that ADSC has advantages that make it an ideal location for this research. In particular, Singapore is unique in its close cooperation among the government, the medical fraternity, and research institutes. This will give the ADSC researchers exceptionally good access to the parties who have a vested interest in broader dissemination of health data summaries. This concerted effort to bring together medical researchers, computer scientists, and medical records could one day enable Singapore to be a world leader in technologies for analyzing sensitive data.

The Advanced Digital Sciences Center (ADSC) is a research center in Singapore for University of Illinois faculty that is funded by Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) to do research in the areas of interactive digital media and power grid information technology. The new data mining grant is part of a growing portfolio of research funds awarded to ADSC outside of its core A*STAR funding.

Building on the work that won them an IEEE best paper nod in 2009, UI Coordinated Science Laboratory researchers Wen-mei Hwu and Deming Chen have captured another Best Paper award at the IEEE Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines (FCCM).

The researchers won for the paper, “Multilevel Granularity Parallelism Synthesis on FPGAs,” which they wrote in collaboration with Illinois PhD candidates Alex Papakonstantinou and John Stratton, postdoc research fellow Eric Liang of the Advanced Digital Science Center, Singapore, and researchers from UCLA.

FPGAs, or field-programmable gate arrays, are semiconductor devices that allow users to change the functionality of the chip. Previously, changing a chip required manufacturing a new batch, which can cost millions. An FPGA is a reprogrammable, generic chip, eliminating the need to build a new model in the event of a bug or change in intention.

According to Chen, FPGAs are specifically suitable for low to medium volume applications. Such examples include MRI machines, high-end image and audio processing, DNA assembly, encryption and compression, and network routing. FPGAs are also beneficial in industries where the technology changes at a fast pace.

The paper addressed challenges facing application developers, who have found FPGAs difficult to program. This work makes it easier to create applications that use FPGAs, especially when the applications run on GPUs.

“I think the high-level reason why this work was well received was because it addressed a very long standing problem,” said Hwu, who along with Chen is a member of Illinois’ Electrical and Computer Engineering faculty. “It is breaking a barrier for a large number of software developers.”

Hwu compared the process to a woman getting ready: She will choose a dress, shoes and hairstyle that complement the other. If one doesn’t work, most likely the other variables will change. The hardware has to be aware of all the variables subject to change and still be able to function efficiently. 

The researchers designed effective resource models and identified an efficient search algorithm to explore the multi-dimensional design space, according to Liang.

“There are many factors that affect performance and all these facets interact with each other,” said lead author Papakonstantinou.

The paper also stood out among its competitors in the conference because it not only introduced a significant improvement in ease of use, but also explored its use in high-performance computing.

The next phase of research will focus on further improving performance and applying the work to other programming models.

The Advanced Digital Sciences Center, Institute of High Performance Computing, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and A*STAR Computational Resource Centre worked together to host a month-long intensive course on High Performance Computing that concluded at the end of July.

2011 HPC class

July 2011 High-Performance Computing class attendees

The course, which was sponsored by IBM, Fujitsu, and SGI, provided a foundation for scientists and engineers wanting to incorporate high-performance computing into their work. Using lectures and hands-on experiences, University of Illinois professors, ADSC researchers, and visiting presenters taught attendees the fundamental characteristics of sequential, shared-memory, and distributed-memory computer architectures that affect run-time performance.

“For me, the most beneficial aspect of the course was hands-on learning in a cluster, with knowledgeable people nearby to guide you while doing it,” said Eason Kwaku, a Research Scientist II at the Data Storage Institute who attended the class. “This was a ‘homerun’ strategy. I learned much about hardware architecture relevant to parallel computing, which I did not know before, and I learned how to optimize serial codes, and use OpenMP, MPI, and a little CUDA-C, for parallel programming. It’s amazing that I was able to do all of this in four weeks.”

HPC class in session

An HPC course presentation

Participants learned how to parallelize and optimize their codes using popular high-performance computing paradigms, such as OpenMP, MPI, CUDA, and OpenMP + MPI. The attendees came away with the knowledge they need in order to visualize and optimize the performance of their codes, the ability to compare different approaches, and the tools necessary to develop a parallel program ideal for their environment.

“I write most of my own code doing simulations dealing with micromagnetics,” Kwaku said. “This information is very useful for me to more efficiently compute aspects of my programs.”

Illinois faculty teaching the course included Professor of Computational Science and Engineering Michael Heath and Professor of Computer Science William Gropp, along with Illinois Senior Research Scientist Volodymyr Kindratenko, Illinois researcher Mark Gates, and ADSC Research Scientist Kyle Rupnow.

“Illinois is a leader in parallel computing research, with major contributions ranging all the way from petascale supercomputers to parallel computing for mobile, client, and desktop systems,” Winslett said. “Illinois has also led the way in devising cutting-edge applications for these parallel environments, including highly accurate simulations of extremely complex physical systems. During the course, students had the opportunity to learn under some of the University of Illinois’s top computer science researchers in this area.”

The course was attended by scientists or engineers from NTU, the Agency for Science, Technology and Research of Singapore (A*STAR), the Institute of High Performance Computing, the Data Storage Institute, and the National University of Singapore, as well as several employees from local companies.

ADSC is a research facility located in Singapore that focuses on breakthrough innovations in the world of information technology. As a collaboration between the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and A*STAR, ADSC has been key in new developments in the areas of interactive digital media, adaptive cyber infrastructure, and information technology for the power grid.

The Advanced Digital Sciences Center (ADSC) and the Institute for InfoComm Research (I2R) held the first symposium on Interactive Digital Media on August 2. The goal of the conference was to develop an ongoing conversation among academia, industry, and government about the next generation of vision-based analysis. Topics included the latest algorithms and techniques for image and video processing and analysis.

Speakers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, ADSC, I2R, the National University of Singapore (NUS), and Nanyang Technological University (NTU) led the sessions, which covered video communication, image processing, and content analysis, as well as a panel discussion. The talks were complemented by poster presentations and live demos of technology currently being developed at ADSC and I2R.

poster session

Illinois faculty who spoke at the symposium included Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Minh Do, Associate Professor of Computer Science Yizhou Yu, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Narendra Ahuja, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Pierre Moulin, and Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Yi Ma.

Over 70 people attended the workshop, including visitors from NUS, NTU, ADSC, I2R, A*STAR’s Bioinformatics Institute, the Institute of Microelectronics, and the Institute of High Performance Computing, along with companies such as Lucasfilm Singapore and New Vision Imaging.

IDM symposium audience members

ADSC is a research facility located in Singapore that focuses on breakthrough innovations in the world of information technology. As a collaboration between the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), ADSC has been key in new developments in the areas of interactive digital media, adaptive cyber infrastructure, and information technology for the power grid.