Academics

Institute for CyberScience announces seed funding award recipients

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The Penn State Institute for CyberScience (ICS) has announced the awardees of the 2016 ICS Seed Funding Initiative grants. The recipients of these grants will use funds from ICS to conduct new research projects involving advanced computing.

The seed grants will support projects in a wide range of disciplines. For instance, Keith Cheng of Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center will receive funding for his project titled “Establishing a Center of Excellence for Interdisciplinary Image Informatics and Visualization (CI3V).” This project will allow researchers from different fields to share knowledge about the study of images.

“Scientists, whether they study molecules, cells, organs, organisms, landscapes, oceans, the earth’s crust, weather patterns, or planets, need to analyze, visualize, and store images,” said Cheng.

The Center of Excellence will facilitate imaging research and help scientists across various disciplines find solutions to common imaging challenges.

ICS seed grants will also be used to tackle specific research problems, such as diagnosing and treating Parkinson’s disease. Xuemei Huang, a neurologist at Penn State Hershey, will use ICS funds to improve understanding of what causes the development or progression of Parkinson’s disease. Currently, biomarkers for Parkinson’s disease are scarce, making diagnosis difficult. But Huang’s team hopes to create an automatic diagnostic system that will help researchers identify and treat patients more effectively.

“The researchers will be employing statistical learning and optimization techniques to the identification of biomarkers for the disease,” said Tao Yao, a member of Huang’s team. “By using this new approach, the researchers expect the estimation accuracy and statistical performance to improve greatly.”

Some of the grant money will be used to defend internet users from new forms of cyberattacks. Many businesses gather data from users to personalize each user’s experience. However, the data-gathering process can be tampered with, hurting vendors and consumers. Peng Liu, a professor of information sciences and technology, is leading an effort to develop defenses against these kinds of attacks.

With this and other awards, ICS is advancing big data and intensive computation for both traditional and emerging fields.

The 2016 ICS seed grant recipients and their research projects are:

  • Keith Cheng: Establishing a Center of Excellence for Interdisciplinary Image Informatics and Visualization (CI3V)
  • Alexander Klippel: Immersive 3D/VR environment to Support Expert Decision Making for Climate Change Scenarios
  • Xuemei Huang: High-Dimensional Data Analysis for Parkinson’s Disease
  • Peng Liu: From Physical to Cyber: Escalating Protection for Internet of Me
  • Kateryna Makova: Big Data Integration, Statistical Analysis, and Computational Approaches to Benefit Biologists and Clinicians
  • Ashton Verdery: Field Testing Inverse Preferential Respondent-Driven Sampling

For those interested in applying for next year’s ICS Seed Funding Initiative, proposals will be due in late 2016. For more information, researchers should visit the ICS website at http://ics.psu.edu/ or email ICS at ics-seed-grants@ics.psu.edu.

Last Updated June 6, 2021