Center for High Performance Scientific Computing (CHIPS-Comp)  A Beowulf-type cluster of 20 dual Alpha EV6 833, 750 and 667 MHz workstations with a Scalable Coherent Interface (SCI) network accelerates the progression of parallel programming tasks and exchange of information across the processors. This architecture allows for an extremely powerful supercomputing capability that may be used by researchers in diverse fields to process data at rates not achievable with conventional computing systems. The center can support research in materials science, nuclear physics, parallel computing, and can offer know-how as well as consulting services in material science and nuclear physics and access to computational methods development expertise. |
Soft Computing and Embedded Systems  This program of research is focused on two areas. The first involves the development of soft computing techniques and their applications to computer learning and pattern recognition. Specific research topics include classification and regression trees, fuzzy systems, global optimization algorithms, and fuzzy-neural computing. The second involves the development of an interactive, subroutine-threaded programming language for embedded systems. It also includes the study of issues related to the design of embedded systems including hardware/software co-design, microcontrollers, and FPGA synthesis using VHDL. |
Text, Image and Video Databases This research program focuses on a topics associated with motion analysis and object tracking, document image processing, pattern recognition and machine learning. More generally, issues under investigation include data mining in text, image and video databases as well as neural networks design and application. |
Information System Modeling, Management and Efficient Data Retrieval This research is focused at correlating the application level data-modeling requirements to the data-representation power of the database system architectures. Complex applications in engineering, financial, and biological systems are being studied with their systemic implementations using the relational, object-relational, object-oriented, and deductive database models. The challenge faced in efficient evaluation of complex content-based queries constitutes a significant component of this research. |
GIS Software Development for Optimization of Web Map Services This work is focused on Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology that enables the research team to collate and analyze information from diverse data sets very rapidly. This GIS integrating technology draws upon and extends existing techniques. Other areas of interest include Cartography, GeoComputation, and Economic Geography. |
Electronic Metastructure for Endangered Languages Data  Language data is central to the research of a large social sciences community - not only linguists, but also anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, and sociologists interested in the culture of indigenous peoples. Members of this research community are currently faced with two urgent situations: the number of languages in the world is rapidly diminishing while the number of initiatives to create digital archives of language data is rapidly multiplying. The latter might seem to be an unalloyed good in the face of the former, but there are two ways things may go wrong without adequate collaboration among archivists, linguists, and language engineers. First, a common standard for the digitization of linguistic data may never be agreed upon. And the resulting variation in archiving practices and language representation would seriously inhibit data access, searching, and cross-linguistic comparison. Second, standards may be implemented without guidance from the people who best know the range of structural possibilities in human language-descriptive linguists who have done fieldwork on poorly described languages.
If digital archives of language data and documentation are to offer the widest possible access and to provide information in a maximally useful form, consensus must be reached about certain aspects of archive infrastructure. As the largest linguistic organization in the world and the central electronic publication of the discipline, The LINGUIST List is organizing a collaborative project with a dual objective: (1) to preserve endangered languages data and documentation and (2) to aid in the development of infrastructure for linguistic archives. One outcome of the project will be a LINGUIST List digital archive housing data from 10 endangered languages. But the focus on infrastructure will produce other, equally important results. In the first place, The LINGUIST archive will function, not only as a repository, but also as a 'showroom of best practice.' The archive will offer endangered languages data marked up and catalogued according to community consensus about best practice; furthermore, the archive will disseminate reference material delineating best practice and software tools supporting it. Another outcome will be the establishment on the LINGUIST List site of a central metadata server for the discipline; this server will organize information on all the language-related resources residing at distributed sites, not just endangered languages information alone. Other infrastructure-related outcomes include (1) the involvement of the linguistics community in establishing best practice, (2) the widespread dissemination of the resulting recommendations, and (3) the hands-on training of a substantial core of linguists and language archivists in the implementation of the guidelines. Although the data collection efforts will focus initially on endangered languages, the metadata server, the recommendations for best practice, and the distribution of supporting software will have a significant impact on all empirical research in linguistics. The project will thus add value to many other language-related projects currently planned or underway. |
Language and Location: A Map Annotation Project Unlike objects such as vases or pieces of jewelry, languages move primarily when a group of people speaking them migrates and settles in a new area. Thus, information about language boundaries and language relationships can provide critical insights into the migrations, interactions, cultures, and genetics of populations. However, such insights can only be realized in a system that melds language information with information from the physical and social sciences. The most effective way to do this is through a Geographical Information System (GIS), which can flexibly organize a wide range of heterogeneous data, presenting the assembled information according to the topography of geographical regions. This allows language data to be integrated with geographical, political, demographic, zoological, botanical and archaeological data in ways which are immediately visually interpretable.
The LL-MAP project will build a database of linguistic information which is integrated into such a geographically-based system and is made freely available through Internet-based tools. These will allow users to generate customized maps showing the relationships between language and diverse kinds of non-linguistic data. They will also allow researchers to add annotations to map-oriented data, and to discuss the relationships the system manifests. In this way LL-MAP will encourage collaboration between linguists, historians, archaeologists, ethnographers and geneticists, as they explore the relationships between language and cultural adaptation and change. The integrated data approach embodied in LL-MAP will thus promote innovative research methods, and these in turn may lead to new insights into the prehistoric relationships among human populations. |
Dena'ina Archiving, Training, and Access This is a cooperative project between the Alaska Native Language Center at the University of Alaska and the LINGUIST List program at Eastern Michigan University to preserve Arctic Languages. This proposal creates the "DATA" (Dena'ina: Archiving, Digitization, and Access) project to digitize existing collections of Dena'ina documentation using the standards and software developed by The LINGUIST List as part of the E-Meld project. The E-Meld project had developed and implemented recommendations of digital best practice for linguistics data. Through E-Meld the DATA project will create long-lasting archival formats and standardize linguistic data digitization of Dena'ina. In addition, the proposal will train both Native and non-Native students in linguistic research practices, applied computational linguistics, and linguistic analysis for the future preservation and revitalization of Dena'ina. This project will not only facilitate the preservation of Dena'ina for community members, but also standardize the linguistics information so as to make it accessible and useful for scientific computational analyses. |
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