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Take one
Wallapak Tavanapong's first attempt at securing national grant funding
resulted in a five-year NSF Career Award.
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The date is embedded in Wallapak Tavanapong's memory.
"July 22, 2000," she remembers.
It was on that date that the assistant professor of computer science wrote
a national-level grant proposal. Six months later, the National Science
Foundation (NSF) informed her that she was the recipient of a $250,000
NSF CAREER Award, just a little more than a year into her first teaching
job.
"This was the first time I had written a grant, especially one of
this magnitude," she said. "I was fortunate that I got a lot
of support and advice from the computer science faculty."
Tavanapong's research will develop an integrated research and education
program that investigates various effective and efficient strategies for
caching information on such distributed systems as the World Wide Web.
She hopes to reduce service delays and wide-area-network bandwidth consumption.
The research will focus on:
* Gaining an understanding of important and unexplored characteristics
of Web usage that place a heavy demand on networking and server resources;
* Developing accurate performance models of these characteristics to measure
the effectiveness of existing and newly developed caching strategies;
* Designing novel load-balancing techniques that best utilize the aggregated
capabilities of distributed systems including cache servers and client
machines; and,
* Developing effective strategies for caching video and audio files. After
submitting her original NSF proposal, Tavanapong and her team of graduate
students (Srikanth Krishnamohan, Minh Tran and Junyu Zhou) came up with
a new idea for caching video and audio.
"This approach enables the caching system to scale beyond the capabilities
of the participating cache servers while mitigating the effect that caching
videos or audio files can reduce the cache hit rate for Web pages,"
she writes in her NSF proposal.
Tavanapong says this technique is better than the technology utilized
by Napster for audio on the Web. She estimates that the new technology
can reduce the download time for video on the Internet by 40 to 50 percent.
"We think that this technology can provide a better and cheaper service
to both the user and the provider," she said. "This research
will have an impact on the evolution of the Web and could lead to a development
of a better distributed information-sharing paradigm other than the Web."
The research Tavanapong and her team are working on will also have an
impact in the classroom. Recipients of NSF CAREER Awards must also have
an educational component. She hopes to use her research to motivate and
retain potential students for the graduate program.
"I want to include my research in my coursework," she said,
"and motivate the students to include research while they are at
Iowa State.
"Hopefully it show them that applied research is another option instead
of automatically joining industry when they graduate."
Around LAS
March 26 to April 1, 2001
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