NSF Grant

Research project aims to document and support the Yupik language

Shayla Brown — Fri, 21 Oct 2022 21:02:56 +0000

Research project aims to document and support the Yupik language Shayla Brown Fri, 10/21/2022 - 17:02

Sylvia Schreiner is on a mission to record and help maintain the Yupik language on St. Lawrence Island, and she has the support of a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER grant to do it.

Sylvia Schreiner. Photo provided

Schreiner, an assistant professor in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, works on language documentation, which is making a record of the different grammatical structures of a language. The Faculty Early Career Development Award supports early-career faculty who can serve as academic role models, according to NSF.

“The project on Yupik started when my colleague, Lane Schwartz, a computational linguist and computer scientist came to me,” she explained. “He spent years in this village as a child and knew the language was under threat. He asked if I wanted to try and get something going on this.”

The project, Documenting temporal contrasts in an endangered language via community linguistics, is part of a wider collaborative effort to support the language.

Schreiner and Schwartz, a computational linguist and computer scientist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, are also principal investigators on a pair of collaborative Documenting Endangered Languages NSF grants.

The St. Lawrence Island villages Gambell and Savoonga (Sivuquq and Sivungaq, respectively, in Yupik) are the main location of the Yupik language. Yupik is also present in the Chukotka Peninsula in Russia.

“I wanted to offer what I can to this community that welcomed me as a child,” said Schwartz, who lived in the Gambell village.

The name of the language when spoken natively is Akuzipik. When translated, “Akuzi” means speech. However, both Yupik and Akuzipik end in “pik,” which means authentic in the language.

Schreiner said the grant has two sides to it: research and education.

“The research portion is working on parts of language that tell us about when something happens. The tenses in different languages show up in very different ways,” said Schreiner. “The educational part is to be able to train others in the community to do this kind of documentation and revitalization work to make it more organic from the community.”

There are roughly 1,400 people on the Alaskan island, about 700 in each village, and speaking Yupik is somewhat generational, which is in part why it’s in danger. “The language has been declining in use over time, especially among the younger people,” said Schwartz.

Sylvia Schreiner. Photo provided

Schreiner and her team are also working to digitize the legacy and archived materials that are available to them. One of her research assistants, Mason PhD student Ben Hunt, taught himself code and is in the process of building an online dictionary for Yupik.

“When I suggested this tool, Lane said, ‘Well, why don't you build it?’” said Hunt, who had minimal experience with web development. “I started learning to code web apps from a variety of online sources mostly starting from scratch, but I ended up getting pretty comfortable with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Python, and other scripting languages.”

These tools will allow the people of this community to authentically maintain their language from within. “In an ideal world, [Sylvia and my] roles would disappear because we wouldn’t be needed anymore,” said Schwartz.

“If you’re going to have a language survive, it can’t be dependent on people from the outside. It has to come organically from the communities and grow from inside. These kinds of things have to come from a grassroots movement,” said Schreiner.

“If it dies with the older folks who still speak it, there it goes. This is their language and they can let it die if they want to, but they don’t.”

In addition to her research, Schreiner runs the Language Documentation Lab and teaches several linguistics courses at Mason.

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Inquiring Minds

Khaled Khasawneh receives NSF Awards in collaboration with University of California

Rena Malai — Mon, 15 Aug 2022 19:23:16 +0000

Khaled Khasawneh receives NSF Awards in collaboration with University of California Rena Malai Mon, 08/15/2022 - 15:23

In This Story

Khaled Khasawneh

Khaled N. Khasawneh, assistant professor in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the director of the Computer Architecture, Machine Learning, and Security (CAMLsec) Lab, has been awarded two NSF grants. These grants are in collaboration with University of California (UC) Davis and UC Riverside, and total $2.4M.

“These are timely awards to allow my group to continue pursuing cutting edge research in machine learning security, cloud security, and hardware security fields,” says Khasawneh. “Special thanks to NSF for their funding. I appreciate the efforts of my collaborators, the endless support from our department, and the efforts of the talented students in my group.”

Award 1: Collaborative Research: SaTC: CORE: Medium: Targeted Microarchitectural Attacks and Defenses in Cloud Infrastructure

Cloud computing paradigms have emerged as a major facility to store and process massive amounts of data produced by various business units, public organizations, Internet-of-Things, and cyber-physical systems. The cloud scheduler is the component responsible for deciding which computer a cloud application should run. The current design of cloud schedulers only focuses on meeting the performance requirements of submitted applications without security considerations.

This project, in collaboration with professor Houman Homayoun’s lLab at UC Davis, examines how cloud schedulers can be exploited by attackers to facilitate targeted micro-architectural attacks in cloud environments. The project also explores novel approaches to defend against targeted micro-architectural attacks in the cloud.

Award 2: Collaborative Research: SHF: Medium: Approximate Computing for Machine Learning Security: Foundations and Accelerator Design

Advances in Deep Neural Networks (DNN) have enabled a wide range of promising applications. However, DNNs are vulnerable to Adversarial Machine Learning attacks, with potentially dangerous outcomes, such as mistaking a stop sign for a speed limit sign.

This project, in collaboration with professors Nael Abu-Ghazaleh and Samet Oymak at UC Riverside, will explore the use of approximate computing to improve the robustness of DNNs against adversarial attacks. Approximate computing is a design paradigm that trades results precision for simpler hardware.

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Busting crimes and saving lives: Mason’s multidisciplinary research in action

Mariam Aburdeineh — Wed, 28 Apr 2021 19:09:36 +0000

Busting crimes and saving lives: Mason’s multidisciplinary research in action Mariam Aburdeineh Wed, 04/28/2021 - 15:09

In This Story

Louise I. Shelley

Louise Shelley, director of Mason's Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center (TraCCC). Photo by ��AV

Illegal goods can have deadly consequences. Whether it’s a counterfeit face mask that doesn’t provide a frontline worker adequate protection from COVID-19, or a counterfeit pill laced with fentanyl (a synthetic painkiller 50-100 times more potent than morphine), millions of lives can be at risk.

A multidisciplinary team of researchers and students at ��AV is working to stop such criminal activity. Thanks to a nearly $650,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF)—and a $16,000 grant supplement awarded to two undergraduates on the team—they will be investigating how to disrupt illicit supply chains, influence policy, and ultimately save lives.

“We’re dealing with problems that challenge the health of the American population in serious ways,” said Schar School professor Louise Shelley, who is spearheading the five-year project with Professor Edward Huang. “We need advanced data analytics to break these problems where the trade is on such a massive scale.”

Counterfeit personal protective equipment is part of the reason governments around the world have struggled to control the pandemic, Shelley said, adding that more than 38 million counterfeit masks have been confiscated in the United States. Huang said most deaths from opioids are related to fentanyl and online opioid sales. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, accidental drug overdoses kill significantly more people than COVID-19 among those ages 25-44.

“We want to find artificial intelligence tools and data analytics tools to figure out how can we address these problems,” said Huang, an expert on supply chain network design in the Volgenau School of Engineering. “How can we prevent them from entering our markets so we can protect our citizens?”

Answering those questions takes investigative work to research social networks, money-flow relationships, how goods are shipped, and other aspects. Mason’s team is analyzing these findings, with additional data and collaboration from government and businesses, to understand and model the illicit supply chain networks.

Their research will move solutions forward, as they figure out how to effectively disrupt the illegal activity.

Juliette Reyes

In March, Shelley testified before Congress on their findings on their first joint NSF project, which Huang said could help determine what kinds of policies to implement to deter the crimes.

“This project is so important and will advance our national ability to counter malicious activity in the cyberworld,” said junior cybersecurity engineering major Ahna Mohiuddin, who will support the project with data collection and analysis. “It means a lot to me to contribute.”

“What the research opportunity struck for me was how it deals hands-on with the dark web, counterterrorist groups and looking into illicit networking when it comes to medicine,” said Juliette Reyes, a freshman studying government and international politics and conflict analysis and resolution. “We hear a lot about abstract ideas of counterfeit drugs, and the FDA having these problems, so I’m interested in understanding the inner-workings of these networks.”

In addition to helping solve global problems, the two undergraduates who are starting on the project this summer, and post-doctoral researcher Layla Hashemi, will be at the forefront of their fields in no time, Shelley said, as they embark on a new field of interdisciplinary research NSF has never done before.

“Mason is an absolute pioneer in this area,” Shelley said, adding that it’s one of the only institutions doing this kind of integrative thinking on illicit supply chains.

Ahna Mohiuddin. Photo provided.

The project would be impossible, Huang and Shelley agreed, without diverse expertise from across the university coming together, and the collaboration of outside partners, such as government and businesses.

“Without a whole of society approach, you can’t understand how these supply chains work because everybody sees a piece of the puzzle and nobody sees the whole,” Shelley said.

“[Our project] shows how the most advanced data analytics can be advantageous to the problems that threaten society,” she said. “Some of the great advances in science are made when you put theory, practice and experimentation together—that’s what we’re doing here.”