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Command, Control and Interoperability Center for Advanced Data Analysis (CCICADA)

As the fall 2010 semester began, six CCICADA graduate students returned to Rutgers with new-found perspectives gained from summer internship experiences.  Ed Chien, Robert DeMarco, and Emilie Hogan (graduate students in Mathematics), Scott Kulp and Brian Thompson (graduate students in Computer Science) and Matthew Oster (graduate student in Operations Research) are all supported on fellowships sponsored by the DHS Career Development Program. This program requires that each student spend at least one summer doing an internship relevant to homeland security. Although three of the students had already fulfilled this requirement, all six set out for new adventures this summer.  Chien and DeMarco headed to Los Alamos National Laboratory, Oster was nearby at Sandia National Laboratory, Thompson did his second stint at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Hogan paid an extended visit to Pacific Northwest National Laboratory furthering research begun during two previous internships, and Kulp worked at a Department of Defense facility for a third year in a row.

During these internships each student worked one-on-one with a dedicated research mentor and gained an appreciation for how abstract ideas from their research can be brought to bear in practical and important settings.  Kulp applied his work in computational physics to model iris deformation for improved biometric capabilities. Hogan used her knowledge of combinatorics to address problems in building ontologies for structuring and representing information. Ed Chien used ideas from stochastic processes to explore methods for intercepting potentially hazardous smuggled materials.

Brian Thompson’s research explores anomalous communication patterns. Shown above is (A) communication activity in a Bluetooth network for one day; (B) communications colored by “recency”; (C) a subset of communications that collectively appeared more recently than would be expected by random chance and are therefore deemed “anomalous”.

Three of the students studied large, dynamic graphs that can be used to represent such things as connections in social networks, financial transactions, communication patterns, and disease spread.  These types of graphs are important tools for representing complex information and relationships and are major areas of emphasis in CCICADA research. Thompson’s work (see figure) looked at detecting anomalous patterns in communication networks. Oster looked for efficient methods to update previously computed information about a graph as it changes through time. DeMarco sought to determine whether certain random graphs can reliably represent the features in observed real graphs, thus providing a rich set of test instances on which to study phenomena of interest such as  propagation of disease.

While their technical work touched many different applications using a variety of different skill sets, students’ impressions following their summer experiences reflect a similar theme on the importance of reaching across boundaries – boundaries between abstract and applied, between disciplines, and between institutions. The students offered these comments upon their return (students’ names removed to ensure privacy):

“Working at a national lab is so different from working at a university. Research efforts are much more collaborative and interdisciplinary.”

“I learned, yet again, that the stereotyped dichotomy between interesting mathematics and important mathematics is a false one.  In the project I worked on, and in many others I learned about this summer, I found both.”

“A national lab has the research-driven feel of academia, but the focus is not on publishing papers. Rather, it is on working together to tackle the biggest challenges of today’s world, and they have the resources and minds to make it happen.”

 “It showed me that I could use my background to work in seemingly unrelated fields to develop solutions that none of the experts in those areas have ever even considered before.”

“It reinforced in my mind the need for practical approaches to theoretically difficult problems.”

Emilie Hogan at work at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

So far, most of the internships have led to year-round collaborations and several visits back-and-forth.  Since the end of the summer, several of the mentors have already visited Rutgers.  One mentor offered this comment, “What began as an opportunity for our intern to learn from us has grown into a full-blown collaboration involving new research results. It's a terrific opportunity for us at the National Laboratories to get direct assistance in our technical areas from very talented, motivated, and energetic people.”

As several of these students are now entering the final year of their fellowship, Rutgers was just awarded its third Career Development Grant from DHS and will begin recruiting three new students to receive fellowships and sustain the CCICADian summer migration.