2023 Red Hat Collaboratory Research Incubation Awards Recipients

The Boston University (BU) Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering: Red Hat Collaboratory is excited to announce the 2023 recipients of the Red Hat Collaboratory Research Incubation Award! 

The Red Hat Collaboratory is an innovative partnership between Boston University and Red Hat aimed at advancing research in the areas of systems engineering, cloud computing, and open source technology. The Collaboratory brings together the academic research community and open source community to advance systems research at a scale that will have a broad impact on society.

Projects funded through the Red Hat Collaboratory Research Incubation Awards are open source and focus on problems of distributed, operating, security, or network systems whose solutions show promise for advancing their fields and impacting the tech industry. This year, almost $2.2 million was awarded to 19 different projects, in addition to continued funding for the multi-year project AI for Cloud Ops, led by Ayse Coskun, Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering, and director of the Center for Information Systems Engineering (CISE), which is housed at the Hariri Institute.

In the small category, ten collaborative projects were selected to receive one year of funding with the option to renew. These projects combine the academic expertise of university faculty with the industry knowledge of Red Hat engineers. Of these projects, four are renewals of projects awarded in 2022. In the speculative category, which are projects related to exploratory research or MOC Alliance projects designed to initiate a collaboration, nine projects were  awarded funding. Four of these awards will support projects with encouraging outcomes initially supported by the Collaboratory in 2022.

Read more about the newly funded projects below. More detailed information can be found here.

 

Small Projects

Improving Cybersecurity Operations Using Knowledge Graphs

David Starobinski (BU), David Sastre Medina (Red Hat), Zhenpen Shi (BU), Şevval Şimşek (BU) aim to improve the workflow and performance of security operations centers, including automating several of its tasks, by leveraging the vast amount of structured and unstructured real-world data available on threats, attacks, and mitigation.

Relational Memory Controller

Manos Athanassoulis (BU), Renato Mancuso (BU), Ulrich Drepper (Red Hat), Ahmed Sanaullah (Red Hat) aim to enable the integration of the Relational Memory Engine (RME), an FPGA-based, hardware-based data transformation engine, with a memory controller.

Toward On-The-Fly Reorganization of High-Order Data Objects

Renato Mancuso (BU), Manos Athanassoulis (BU), Ulrich Drepper (Red Hat), Ahmed Sanaullah (Red Hat) will investigate the design and development of on-the-fly data reorganization engines to make the benefits of RME available to a wider set of applications, such as image manipulation, machine, learning, and tensor analysis.

HySe: Hypervisor Security Through Component-Wise Fuzzing

Manuel Egele (BU), Muzammil Hussain (BU), and Bandan Das (Red Hat) will design, implement, and evaluate program analysis capabilities that allow the preemptive identification of bugs and vulnerabilities in hypervisor components that use interfaces identified as exposed to potential attackers.

Prototyping a Distributed, Asynchronous Workflow for Iterative Near-Term Ecological Forecasting

Michael Dietze (BU), Christopher Tate (Red Hat), Yannis Paschalidis (BU), Atefeh Hosseini (BU) will prototype an accessible community infrastructure to generate ecological forecasts at scale, focusing on the development of a cloud-native workflow that can handle an asynchronous, event-driven, distributed approach to execution.

Co-Ops: Collaborative Open-Source and Privacy-Preserving Training for Learning to Drive Anywhere

Eshed Ohn-Bar (BU), Adam Smith (BU), Erik Erlandson (Red Hat), Michael Clifford (Red Hat), Lance Galletti (Red Hat), Sanjay Arora (Red Hat) will develop a set of open source, Red Hat-integrated tools for efficiently and flexibility facilitating diverse and modular collaboration when training AI models for autonomous driving at scale, emphasizing privacy-preserving knowledge sharing.

Speculative Projects

Minimal Mobile Systems via Cloud-Based Adaptive Task Processing

Eshed Ohn-Bar (BU), Renato Mancuso (BU), Sanjay Arora (Red Hat), Bassel Mabsout (BU) will work to build an efficient cloud-robot distributed computing platform for automatic offloading of computationally intensive tasks to the cloud, improving performance and making low-cost, cloud-enabled robots accessible for a significantly larger set of users.

Privacy-Preserving, Automated Operational Data Sharing Telemetry Framework

Alan Liu (BU) will develop an open source automated tracing system to collect, process, and anonymize operational data, focusing on identifying and testing privacy preservation models.

Open Source Infrastructure for Secure Educational Data Management to Optimize Treatment and Identification of Students with Learning Disabilities

Hank Fien (BU), Eshed Ohn-Bar (BU), Ola Ozernov-Palchik (BU), Kasey Tenggren (BU) will develop a distributed infrastructure to process, store, analyze, and redistribute educational data that addresses privacy and security requirements for research on literacy-based disabilities.

Learned Cost-Models for Robust Tuning

Manos Athanassoulis (BU), Evimaria Terzi (BU), Harshal Chaudhari (Etsy) will work on tuning database performance in the presence of uncertain load.  Specifically RocksDB, but relevant for other distributed database implementations.

FHELib: Fully Homomorphic Encryption Hardware Library for Privacy-Preserving Computing

Ajay Joshi (BU), Shaun Ghosh (BU) will evaluate different schemes for FHE [Brakerski-Gentry-Vaikuntanathan (BGV), Brakerski/Fan-Vercauteren (B/FV),Cheon-Kim-Kim-Song (CKKS)] for use in an FHE hardware accelerator.

 

Project Renewals

Small Projects

DISL: A Dynamic Infrastructure Services Layer for Reconfigurable Hardware, Martin Herbordt (BU), Uli Drepper (Red Hat), Ahmed Sanaullah (Red Hat)

Practical Programming of FPGAs with Open Source Tools, Martin Herbordt (BU), Uli Drepper (Red Hat), Ahmed Sanaullah (Red Hat)

Towards High Performance and Energy Efficiency in Open-Source Stream Processing, Vasia Kalavri (BU), Jonathan Appavoo (BU), Sanjay Arora (Red Hat)

Creating a Global Secure Open-Source Research Platform to Better Understand Social Sustainability Using Data From a Real-Life Smart Village, Christos Cassandras (BU), Alexandra Machado (Red Hat), Jim Craig (Red Hat), Christopher Tate (Red Hat)

Speculative Projects

Serverless Streaming Graph Analytics, Vasia Kalavri (BU)

Enabling Intelligent In-Network Computing for Cloud Systems, Alan Liu (BU)

Symbiotes: A New Step in Linux’s Evolution, Jonathan Appavoo (BU)

Foundation in Open Source Education, Jonathan Appavoo (BU)

 


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