| NSF funds Engineering Research
Centers (ERCs) to produce next-generation technologies that will impact
society today and tomorrow, but also with a primary goal of developing
a new generation of professionals who will maintain and advance America’s
leadership in engineering research and practice long into the future.
National recognition of an individual ERC outreach participant is also
a ringing endorsement of the program.
So it was a notable event
when University of Massachusetts (UMass) junior Michael Krainin won an
Honorable Mention in the national Computing Research Association’s (CRA)
Outstanding Undergraduate Award competition for 2008. Krainan was
nominated for undergraduate research he conducted through the Center for
Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere (CASA), an ERC based at
UMass.
While focusing on distributed
negotiation as a resource allocation mechanism in radar sensing networks,
where each radar can focus its scanning on certain regions of the atmosphere.
Krainin designed and programmed distributed negotiation algorithms and
incorporated them into CASA’s radar testbed in Oklahoma. The new
negotiation protocol is used when the testbed is run with the distributed
version of the center’s Meteorological Command & Control (MC&C)
software. The centralized MC&C used until now cannot support
more than 10 radars, so the distributed version is essential for the expanded
networks that CASA plans.
This work grew out of Krainin’s
project as a student in CASA’s summer Research Experience for Undergraduates
(REU) program – an intensive, 9-week outreach program for a select group
of undergraduates. Krainin’s research was supervised by UMass Computer
Science Professor Victor Lesser. Further experiments with the new protocol
will be conducted in Spring 2009. |
