Centers and Institutes

Selected List of Research Centers and Institutes I am or Have Been Associated With

CCICADA (Command, Control, and Interoperability Center for Advanced Data Analysis)

CCICADA was created in 2009 as a US Department of Homeland Security University Center of Excellence (COE), winning a national competition. CCICADA received an 8-year award as a COE and now continues as an “emeritus” COE, an active part of the COE network but without a specific grant. Its mission is to provide powerful analytical tools for protection against natural and man-made threats. CCICADA has collaborated with numerous university and private sector partners; over the years it has had 16 formally-affiliated partner universities and companies, and numerous other university and company partners as well as federal, state, and local government agency partners; the formally-affiliated partners received part of CCICADA’s funding during its 8-year COE award and continue to be available to participate in center projects. (In addition to Rutgers, CCICADA’s formal university partners include Carnegie Mellon University, City College of New York, Howard University, Morgan State University, Princeton University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Texas Southern University, Tuskegee University, University of Massachusetts-Lowell, University of Southern California, and University of Illinois Urbana/Champaign. The non-university partners are Applied Communication Sciences, AT&T Labs, Nokia Bell Labs, Regal Decision Systems, and TerraGo Technologies.) CCICADA applies multidisciplinary methods of data extraction, analysis, modeling, and simulation to support information-driven decision-making solutions to problems of federal, state, and local partners and the private sector. Key areas of research in recent years have included soft targets and crowded places such as stadiums and event venues; transportation facilities; the maritime domain; supply chains; natural disasters; climate change as a homeland security issue; the applications and risks of artificial intelligence; and fundamental theoretical tools of data science, natural language processing, and optimization. The areas of research and application continue to change rapidly in response to current developments and my work through this center is described in my research section of this website. I was founding Director of CCICADA and have been Director ever since.

DIMACS (Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science)

DIMACS was founded as an NSF “science and technology center” (STC) in 1988. There were over 800 applications for STCs in all fields of science, over 300 final proposals, and 11 winners. The 1989 NSF grant that established the center was at the time the largest grant that Rutgers had ever gotten. DIMACS, led by Rutgers University, was founded as a consortium of Rutgers and Princeton Universities, Bell Labs, and Bellcore, in partnership with the NJ Commission on Science and Technology. It expanded its affiliated partners to include industrial affiliates AT&T Labs-Research, IBM Research, Microsoft Research, NEC Laboratories America, Nokia Bell Labs, and Perspecta Labs, and academic affiliates at Columbia, Georgia Tech, RPI, and Stevens Institute of Technology. Internal partners at Rutgers are the Departments of Computer Science, Mathematics, Statistics, and Electrical and Computer Engineering, as well as the Rutgers Center for Operations Research (Rutgers) and the Cancer Institute of NJ). The center also has some 350 member researchers mostly from the various affiliated partners. DIMACS facilitates research, education, and outreach in discrete mathematics, computer science theory, algorithms, mathematical and statistical methods, and their applications. Its multi-year special focus programs address research themes that require topical expertise in these areas, have potential for societal impact, and are poised for advance. Its education programs include materials development for high school and college classrooms, an extensive summer undergraduate research program, and teacher training programs. I was involved in the original NSF proposal that led to the creation of DIMACS, served as Acting Director in 1991 and again in 1992-93 and then as Director from January 1996 to August 2011, and led the transition to post-STC support. I served again as interim director from November 2018 to December 2019 and am currently Director Emeritus and Senior Advisor.

DyDAn (Center for Dynamic Data Analysis)

DyDAn) was created as a Department of Homeland Security University Center of Excellence (COE) in 2006 under my leadership. In turn, both were preceded through my serving as leader of the Rutgers University Homeland Security Research Initiative that was founded shortly after 9-11 and of the NJ Universities Homeland Security Research Consortium. DyDAn was one of four DHS COEs affiliated with the Institute for for Discrete Science at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, with DyDAn playing the lead role among these four centers. DyDAn’s work laid the groundwork for the larger DHS center, CCICADA, which replaced it in 2009. The work with DyDAn introduced me to a number of key research topics that were continued in CCICADA. One topic was port security (where we worked on container inspection with CBP and collaborated with Civil Engineering at Rutgers to create the Laboratory for Port Security under the leadership of Tayfur Altiok). Another was emergency management, where we got involved with an exercise, TOPOFF, which featured a major bioterrorism event. Bioterrorism became a major theme, connected too to the DIMACS 10-year program in computational and mathematical epidemiology. A third topic involved data analysis in a project called “CompStat” to help with force deployment in counter-terrorism and the fight against crime. “CompStat” was developed in conjunction with the police department at the Port Authority of New York/New Jersey bus terminal in New York City and was precursor to a long partnership with the Port Authority extending to today. Major collaborations with the NJ Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness began through DyDAn, with me serving on various advisory committees organized by OHSP. DyDAn also allowed me to build on key DIMACS educational programs such as the Reconnect workshops aimed at introducing college faculty to current research that they could in turn utilize in their classrooms.

SENTRY (Soft Target Engineering to Neutralize the Threat Reality)

In 2021, three “emeritus” DHS centers of excellence (COEs), from Northeastern (ALERT), University of Southern California (CREATE), and Rutgers (CCICADA), won a new DHS COE called SENTRY aimed at protecting soft targets and crowded places such as stadiums, schools, and religious institutions. I have served as the Rutgers PI for SENTRY and also on the SENTRY leadership team. Key research projects I have been involved in through SENTRY, led by Jie Gong and Peter Jin, involved the building of digital twins for key facilities such as transit stations and stadiums and the analysis of the impact of architectural changes on crowd movement, evacuation, and security. I also played a leadership role in SENTRY’s case studies in surface transit and stadiums.  Through SENTRY, the CCICADA Center’s homeland security work on stadium and event venue security has expanded through relationships with new venues, e.g., Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Houston Texans, Six Flags Great Adventure, Sea Isle City Polar Plunge, New England Patriots, Houston Rodeo. SENTRY has also expanded on CCICADA’s support of Rutgers Office of Emergency Management through development of a digital twin for the Rutgers football stadium, to help develop evacuation models. SENTRY also adopted some of the CCICADA educational program, including its Reconnect and Modules programs.

RUTCOR (Rutgers Center for Operations Research)

RUTCOR was established in 1982 to coordinate the Operations Research activities which had been going on in many parts of the university and to act as a focal point for the development of Operations Research in the state of New Jersey. In addition to running the doctoral program in O.R., RUTCOR has sponsored interdisciplinary research projects, facilitated research contacts between university and industry, run conferences on current areas of interest in O.R., sponsored colloquia, put out several international scientific journals and an international technical report series, and hosted distinguished long and short-term visiting scholars from around the world. I served as the first Director of RUTCOR for a year until the university could hire a Director. I remain a Fellow of RUTCOR. In earlier years, I was very much involved with RUTCOR: many of my PhD students were O.R. students; I collaborated on a series of large AFOSR grants for RUTCOR activities; I co-ran the regular RUTCOR Advanced Research Institutes on Discrete Applied Mathematics (ARIDAM) seven times. RUTCOR faculty and students have played an important role in some of the most successful homeland security research projects I have carried out through DyDAn and CCICADA.

CINJ (Cancer Institute of New Jersey)

Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey, first called “The Cancer Institute of New Jersey,” was born in 1993. It is the state’s only National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center. When I was directing DIMACS in 2008, Guna Rajagopal, Executive Director of Bioinformatics of CINJ, saw the potential value for biomedical informatics of the strong group of theoreticians at DIMACS who had been involved in such special focus programs as mathematical support for molecular biology and computational and mathematical epidemiology, and development of strong tools of bioinformatics. He arranged for me to become a CINJ member (which I remain today) and CINJ to become a DIMACS partner. At the time, CINJ was still part of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of NJ, but the partnership continued after the merger between UMDNJ and Rutgers. Together, the two centers have run workshops on topics such as electronic medical records and medical performance. CINJ has regularly provided research challenges and mentors to the DIMACS REU program.

TRIPODS: (DATA-INSPIRE) (Institute on DATA Science for INtelligent Systems and People that Integrates Research and Education)

TRIPODS (Transdisciplinary Research in Principles of Data Science) is an NSF program that connects the fields of mathematics, statistics, electrical engineering, and theoretical computer science to build the core mathematical and statistical foundations for data science. I won a 3-year TRIPODS Institute, DATA-INSPIRE, in 2019, and led it until the end of its NSF grant in 2023, and involved Rutgers Departments of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science. DATA-INSPIRE was premised on the belief that advances in data science principles are needed to impact the emerging paradigm of intelligent machines and their convergence with human society. This foundational understanding is needed to further improve the performance and better explain the operation of such machines so they can accomplish diverse, real-world tasks and interact effectively with people. To realize these advances, a new integration of mathematical, inferential, and algorithmic expertise will be required. Thus, DATA-INSPIRE aimed to bring together mathematicians, statisticians, computer scientists to catalyze a new foundational data-science community focused on the development of intelligent, interactive machines. The vision was that DATA-INSPIRE would be the Institute in the nation’s TRIPODS network engaged in fundamental transdisciplinary data science research, education and workforce development related to the operation of intelligent machines and their interaction with people. DATA-INSPIRE created three transdisciplinary research groups. Among other activities were workshops, an REU program, a “Boot Camp” for advanced undergraduates and graduate students exposing them to the main themes of the Institute, and the development of transdisciplinary special topics courses. I was most involved in the research group that studied the application of combinatorial reasoning to tackle important/challenging problems in intelligent systems, making substantial headways on the topics of multi-robot path and motion planning and ways to rearrange multiple objects, a task that arises in many domains, such as product assembly, logistics, or home automation, especially for self-assisted living. In the first few years of the project, I was especially interested in applying tools of the project to issues of COVID-19, e.g., through use of intelligent machines in contact tracing, sanitization and disinfecting, testing, and even in assessing mental health. This also coincided with my leadership of a university-wide initiative called “AI and Pandemics” that explored how AI might help in the COVID pandemic, how it might help prevent, predict, and mitigate future pandemics, and what ethical issues arise from the application of AI to pandemics. By fostering highly successful  transdisciplinary collaborations, DATA-INSPIRE developed the institutional capacity to have a continuing impact after its NSF funding ran out.