Update from the Director

It is my pleasure to let you know that we are making good progress in achieving our goals for Phase II of our NSF Center for Cloud and Autonomic Computing that was funded by NSF for five years (August 2016 to July 2021).

Now that our Phase II proposal to extend our NSF/ICRC Center for Cloud and Autonomic Computing (CAC) for The CAC mission is to conduct near-term research projects to advance the knowledge of how to design cloud and autonomic computing systems that are capable of self-healing, self-protecting, and self-optimizing themselves with little involvement of users or system administrators. These systems are sometimes referred to as Self-* systems, where * is a placeholder for a specific objective or attribute to be managed at runtime such as performance, security, fault, availability, energy, etc. Unlike past research that attempted to manage these attributes in isolation, the CAC research approach is a paradigm shift that addresses all these properties in a holistic approach. In Phase II of our NSF Industry/University Cooperative Research Center for Cloud and Autonomic Computing , our goal is to continue to advance the design and deployment of Self-* systems and applications that will overcome the current security and management challenges of IT and Cloud infrastructures. Autonomic computing provides the methodology to continuously monitor, analyze, and manage the systems, applications, and cyber resources so they can meet their requirements whenever abnormal event is observed or detected.

We are also pleased to announce that we received funding for the following three projects:

1) Resilient Dynamic Data Driven Applications Systems as a Service (rDaaS). The project is funded by US Air Force of Scientific Research (AFOSR) for the period between June 2018 and June 2022. In this project, we will design an approach that will assist commanders and DDDAS developers to access rDaaS from anywhere and using any device (mobile or stationary) with Internet connectivity to quickly develop resilient and trustworthy DDDAS-based battle management applications. The rDaaS ensures resilient services by obfuscating their cloud execution environments using Software Behavior Encryption (SBE) and Moving Target Defense (MTD) techniques. The rDaaS infrastructure supports the two critical capabilities (Agility and Resiliency) that were identified as the main challenges facing the Air Force in the next 30 years. Further Details

2) Resilient Application as a Service (RAaaS). The project is funded by National Institute of Standards (NIST) for the period between September 2018 and September 2020. In this project, we aim to explore how to use Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Autonomic Computing to further advance this research project in collaboration with the NIST Information Technology Laboratory/Advanced Network Technologies Division (ITL/ANTD) so we can offer resilient and adaptive applications as cloud services by leveraging the SOA paradigm. Further Details

3) FCTaaS: Federated Cybersecurity Testbed as a Service. This project is funded by NSF for the period between January 1 2019 and December 2020. The main goal of this project is to explore innovative techniques to allow seamlessly composition of a federated testbed that consists of several heterogeneous testbeds include virtual cybersecurity testbeds, IoT testbeds and cyber-physical testbeds. There are currently many isolated cybersecurity and cyber-physically testbeds but currently there are no methodologies and tools to automatically build a federated testbed (a testbed of heterogeneous testbeds). The availability of such a federated testbed that can be ubiquitously accessed as a cloud service to address important research issues related to future cyberspace applications and services. Further Details

For further information, please see project summaries.