University of Toronto student Stratis Ioannidis received the second place prize in the graduate category at the recent annual ACM Awards Banquet for his work, “On the Distribution of Content Updates over a Mobile Social Network.” The ACM Student Research Competition (SRC), which is sponsored by Microsoft Research, enables students to share their research results and ideas with other students, judges, and conference attendees. Ioannidis was one of three graduate students who qualified for the SRC Grand Finals. “The main premise behind this work is that more and more people want to access online content on their cell phones,” Ioannidis says. “Modern devices, like Windows smartphones or the iPhone make this possible: users surf the Web, read news sites or blogs or learn about road traffic on their way to work.” Because of the large number of people accessing content on their cell phones there is a major opportunity to get information from other cell phone users. For example, someone nearby may have already downloaded the same piece of information another user wants, and downloading that information from a user, instead of the service provider, reduces the traffic load and costs of the service provider. Ioannidis says the challenge is for service providers to decide which devices should receive updates, which could be determined based on the number of contacts a user has. “The service provider needs to understand what the social network formed by mobile users–the ‘mobile social network’–looks like,” Ioannidis says. “This challenge intrigued me because it showed that social networks can affect, in very concrete way[s], a real-life application.”

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The National Science Foundation has awarded a $10 million grant to Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), the University of Pittsburgh, and six other institutions to develop computational techniques that could be used to save lives. CMU professor Christopher Langmead says the researchers will study extremely complex systems and identify the events that may result in mission-critical failures. The researchers will integrate the techniques of model checking and abstract interpretation, search for bugs in automobile and aerospace computer software, and examine the causes of pancreatic cancer and atrial fibrillation. Model checking explores all possible states of a system and looks for irregular or unusual conditions. However, sometimes too many states exist to find flaws, so abstract interpretation is used to simplify a system by grouping similar states together, says CMU professor and grant team leader Edmund M. Clarke, winner of ACM’s 2007 A. M. Turing Award. This type of analysis is particularly important in situations where software interacts with the real world, such as software that helps ensure the safety of vehicle brakes or the success of spacecraft launches, says project participant and University of Maryland professor Rance Cleaveland. The project also could help improve the diagnosis of some diseases because physicians could group cell proteins that perform similar functions to identify cancer cells that behave differently or stop growing. “Using a computational method, we hope to provide an answer to what’s happening at the very early stages,” says Langmead. Other schools involved in the effort include Cornell University, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, New York university, and the City University of New York.

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