Researching the cloud and beyond

During high school in the mid-1990s, I attended an electronics summer camp in Bangalore, India, and learned how to build a circuit board that sounded like a musical instrument, so I was able to play different musical notes with different frequencies. That camp got me excited about building circuits and playing with electronic components, and I chose to study electrical and electronics engineering in college.

When I was in engineering, I used to team up with my friends and build computers by assembling components and experimenting with operating systems such as Linux and Windows. In addition to playing video games on the computer, I also pursued opportunities to learn computer programming at a computer training center near my house. I also was very excited by the internet and imagined how video delivery for videoconferencing and video streaming could be possible. Video-based applications on the internet were not yet a reality then, but the possibility was fascinating.

During my final year of engineering, I got an internship in the electrical communication engineering department at the Indian Institute of Science, a premier research institute in India. I worked on projects involving building optical telecommunication systems. After I got my engineering degree, I worked for Samsung on their systems and networking products.

Once I came to the Ohio State University to pursue my master of science degree, I was fortunate to work for the Chief Research Engineer, Dr. Bob Dixon, who used to organize the world’s largest videoconferences called “Megaconferences.” I noticed that videoconferencing quality in the early 2000s was very unpredictable with repeated disconnections, frame freezing and audio/video lip sync issues. It was a perfect opportunity for me to pursue my passion to work on software engineering to create network technologies for video delivery over the Internet. I developed an open-source tool called H.323 Beacon to troubleshoot videoconferencing sessions, which was downloaded 45,000 times and was promoted by industry leaders as a useful tool.

Soon after my master’s, I got a systems developer/engineer job that involved a joint appointment with the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC), a statewide network and high-performance computer resource and Internet2-backbone network connecting universities across the U.S. I was tasked to develop network troubleshooting tools to help applications for large data transfers to supercomputers, ways to improve the quality of service for high-performance computing and securing related networks against cyberattacks. I continued to work full-time at OSC and pursued my PhD work on building models that help orchestrate large-scale multi-point videoconferencing systems. (I envisioned systems like Zoom back in the mid-2000s and published works in this field.) I also developed algorithms for network measurement infrastructures to troubleshoot bottlenecks and help users to have visibility of problems that arise when watching video or downloading files. My PhD work soon led to many research grants from the Department of Energy and National Science Foundation because the problems I was tackling had important and difficult challenges and aligned with these agencies’ funding priorities. Notably, I developed network measurement and monitoring technologies that were commercialized as “Narada Metrics” through SBIR/STTR-funded small business innovation projects.

When I came to the University of Missouri in 2013, my research focus was to make cloud computing be used as a utility such as water or electricity in application domains such as health care, public safety, bioinformatics, neuroscience, advanced manufacturing and special education. I started the Virtualization, Multimedia and Networking (VIMAN, which in Sanskrit means aircraft — a vehicle to discover magical clouds) Lab, and we solved research questions that make it easy for a nonexpert to use cloud computing technologies without thinking too much. Our work was in line with the saying by Alfred North Whitehead: “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.”

In recent years, artificial intelligence and cloud computing technologies have converged, and so my research questions have evolved around problems related to creating techniques for knowledge discovery in the form of conversational recommenders that can essentially help in building chatbots similar to Alexa, Siri and ChatGPT. Our lab developed the Vidura chatbot (named after a wise advisor to an emperor of India) that uses artificial intelligence and cloud computing technologies to provide recommendations for decision makers who are overwhelmed with analyzing large, distributed data sets or need to run computation-intensive applications. We are working on the Vidura chatbot to help health care researchers conduct automated literature surveys, bioinformatics researchers setup multicloud data processing pipelines securely and cost-effectively, agricultural researchers use tools and datasets relevant to smart farming, and also teach skills related to social competence and cybersecurity for youth with autism. Our ongoing work is in line with the Mahatma Vidura saying, “Decision maker who understands quickly, pursues valuable objects with patient judgment, wastes not breathe on unproductive affairs and possesses foremost mark of wisdom truly.”

I believe that working on projects that one feels passionate about is important and finding research problems that are purposeful and compassionate leads to impactful outcomes. Below are a few tips that I feel can help an early career faculty member become successful in pursuing external grants and build strong collaborations with other colleagues and application communities who will benefit from the research outcomes:

• Write scholarly research papers in top journals and conference venues and leverage the results as preliminary work in proposals.
• Integrate research and education. Develop courses that are in the area of your research and create hands-on lab exercises and student projects to help recruit students from your class to your lab. These efforts help pursue funding opportunities that support the development of research-inspired learning modules and research training of students.
• Know your sponsor’s programs and program managers who align with your research strengths, and always be sure to carefully read the funding solicitation requirements.
• Serve on panels as a reviewer of funding proposals in federal agencies where you are applying for grants. This will help in getting a better perspective on the other side of grant writing in terms of what makes a proposal succeed or fail in panels.
• Believe that a good proposal with innovative ideas will be funded eventually. Be persistent in improving the ideas and pursuing resubmissions if such a proposal is declined for funding initially.

The Mizzou CERI Center focuses on performing cutting-edge, multidisciplinary research to leverage cyber innovations (such as cloud computing, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data analytics, virtual reality/augmented reality and the Internet of Things) for the benefit of data-intensive and computation-intensive scientific applications (in areas such as bioinformatics, neuroscience, public safety, special education, agriculture, manufacturing, transportation and finance). Over 30 faculty from different units across MU are involved with the center, and collectively our work in the center falls under areas that include cyber vision, cybersecurity, cyber intelligence, and cyber infrastructure.

We also promote cyber curriculum development and organize workshops and camps for broader understanding and workforce development related to cyber technologies benefitting middle and high school students, undergraduate and graduate students, information technology professionals, and also small business employees.

Mizzou has a great culture of multidisciplinary research, and it is easy to find collaborators in multiple disciplines willing to pursue multidisciplinary projects. Solving the grand challenges that we are facing in our society these days (in health care, manufacturing, agriculture, etc.) requires researchers in many disciplines working with computer scientists and engineers to handle big data analysis and securely use large computation resources.

At Mizzou CERI, we have established relationships and built collaborative teams to lead initiatives for solving bold multidisciplinary problems in application areas that benefit from cyber technologies. The teams we have working in Mizzou CERI include researchers from units across Mizzou, other UM System campuses, other U.S. universities and also universities around the world. Together, we are pursuing work on major funding proposals, joint publications, conference and workshop organization, and student training in interdisciplinary projects.

In addition to research and education projects, we also have established shared cyber infrastructure covering high-performance computing and networking systems, immersive CAVE for virtual reality, cyber range for learning cybersecurity skills, etc., by engaging industry and government partners.

Through all these efforts, we can advance both the cyber areas as well as the domain science areas and create new fields of knowledge such as secure multicloud bioinformatics, neuroscience software and cyber automation, social virtual reality applications and security, and autonomous material discovery.

At the Mizzou Cybersecurity Center, we are performing research on important cybersecurity problems that we are all facing today related to phishing, ransomware, health care data privacy, cryptojacking, insurance fraud, etc.

The research areas of focus of our center faculty include cloud security (blockchain for threat intelligence sharing and moving target defense), formal methods in security and privacy (threat modeling to minimize risks and impact of cyberattacks), health care data security (improving how protected data can be stored, analyzed and shared efficiently in cloud systems, and securing human genome analysis), fintech security (fraud analytics for insurance claim processing), and cyber physical system security (securing drone swarms that are used in mission-critical applications such as national security, public safety and smart farming).

I once read a book called “The Human Operating System,” and it had a part that described how the highest mood levels we can experience is being creative and grateful. Pursuing research truly makes us feel creative and grateful, and so I tell the students that “research makes you happy!”

I encourage them to gain a variety of skills (including technical skills, communication skills and being a good team player) and use those skills in their research projects. So, if they take a course such as time series statistics, I ask them to use their learning in their latest research project to grow the knowledge from that course for the long term. I help them to work in teams and seek out experts to collaborate with within MU and/or outside so that they can build a network of collaborators and gain from multiple perspectives.

I encourage them to write a formal proposal with well-defined objectives, milestones and success measures before they start a research project. I provide support for them to use state-of-the-art research tools for collecting data in their publications. Also, I support their trips to attend top conferences in the field and listen to experts and obtain feedback from peers on their ongoing research projects. Lastly, I ask to them read at least 10 good papers deeply related to their research every semester.

Cyber work is cross-cutting in terms of benefitting multiple fields, and so there is a tremendous opportunity to help others in non-computer science fields to deal with large amounts of data or big computational problems securely and cost-effectively. Also, there is a large skill gap amongst the younger generation in industry, academia and government jobs relating to cyber areas related to data science, cybersecurity and virtual reality. Cyber work, compared to work in other fields like civil engineering or mechanical engineering, is relatively young, and so there is a lot of scope for the younger generation to create high-impact advances for improving the quality of life and fostering economic prosperity in our society.