Carnegie Mellon University Leads $10 Million National Science Foundation Initiative to Develop Modeling Tools for Disease and Complex Systems

PITTSBURGH, Aug. 19 /PRNewswire/ -- A multidisciplinary team led by Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist Edmund M. Clarke has received a five-year, $10 million grant from the National Science Foundation's Expeditions in Computing program to create revolutionary computational tools that will advance science on a broad array of fronts, from discovering new cancer treatments to designing safer aircraft.

The researchers will combine Model Checking and Abstract Interpretation, two methods that have been successful in finding errors in computer circuitry and software, and extend them so they can provide insights into models of complex systems, whether they are biological or electronic.

"Biological and embedded computer systems may be on opposite ends of the research spectrum, but they pose similar challenges for creating and analyzing computational models of their behavior," said Clarke, the FORE Systems University Professor of Computer Science and the 2007 winner of the Association for Computing Machinery's Turing Award, the computer science equivalent of the Nobel Prize. "Solutions to these problems at either end will enable new approaches to modeling across the spectrum that ultimately will improve health and safety. With this new initiative, I think we finally have achieved the critical mass of expertise and effort needed to crack these puzzles."

"Professor Clarke has truly assembled a dream team for this important new initiative," said Carnegie Mellon President Jared L. Cohon. "Computational modeling and simulation have become critical to discoveries in almost every scientific discipline, so finding new ways to build and explore these models will pay research dividends for years to come."

Model Checking and Abstract Interpretation are the result of more than 30 years of research. Model Checking is the most widely used technique for detecting and diagnosing errors in complex hardware and software designs. It considers every possible state of a hardware or software design and determines if it is consistent with the designer's specifications; it produces counterexamples when it uncovers inconsistencies. It is limited, however, by the size of the systems it can analyze.

In this new project, the researchers plan to take advantage of the strengths of both methods by tightly integrating the two into what they call MCAI 2.0.

"The death last year of our computer science colleague Randy Pausch, who had pancreatic cancer, made all of us at Carnegie Mellon appreciate the importance of improved models for this disease," Clarke said.

A growing number of embedded systems are being integrated into cars -- electronic stability control, anti-skid systems, hybrid powertrains, collision-avoidance systems -- though the ability to develop models of how these systems interact with each other is severely limited. Rance Cleaveland, a computer scientist at the University of Maryland, and Bruce Krogh, a Carnegie Mellon electrical and computer engineer, will focus on distributed automotive control and electronic stability control as they lead the development of models that can help manufacturers integrate these systems into automobiles.

Research will be coordinated through a new Institute for Model Discovery and Exploration of Complex Systems, which will be headquartered in Carnegie Mellon's newly constructed Gates Center for Computer Science.

Clarke emphasized that Carnegie Mellon will funnel the bulk of its project money to support graduate students, rather than faculty salaries. In addition to the NSF grant, the School of Computer Science and the Ray and Stephanie Lane Center for Computational Biology at Carnegie Mellon are providing supplemental support for the project.

SOURCE Carnegie Mellon University



CONTACT: Byron Spice of Carnegie Mellon, +1-412-268-9068,
bspice@cs.cmu.edu

Web site: http://www.cmu.edu/

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