Projects

I'm working on DSU's Computer Game Design degree and courses, primarily with Jeff Howard and Glenn Berman

I'm working with DSU's Dr. Krebsbach, and SDSU's Judy Vondruska and George Hamer on the vDUSEL project. See http://vdusel.dsu.edu

I'm working on a project to apply ontologies to education, specifically physics education and to work on mapping information between one ontology and another. The focus of my interest right now is CL (Common Logic) which has recently been standardized (ISO) and provides a rich framework for defining ontologies.

I'm working with University of Massachusetts-Lowell's Dr. Xinwen Fu on a variety of projects related to security and privacy. These involve the performance of anonymous communications systems and ways of enabling traceback in such systems as well as examining ways to determine users' locations using their wireless communications.

(I am no longer working on this project.) I'm part of the SDeHC effort, with Dorine Bennett, Dan Friedrich, Joyce Havlik, working to facilitate the development of eHealth initiatives in SD, especially electronic exchange of information. This is a followup to the SDEHRA project I worked on with (mostly) the same group.

(finished) I've been part of a task force on building a research culture at DSU -- this has resulted in both student and faculty research initiatives for the coming year.

OpenProblems (formerly called CoCOA - Cooperative Computer-based Open Assessment)

This project hasn't gotten as far as I would like, but it has evolved somewhat. I'm calling it "OpenProblems" now and tying it into the work on ontologies I've done for KDOT. In particular, I'm planning to use ontologies to organize the open problems that comprise the collection. I'm also specifically targeting problems for the CSC314 Assembly language class
As part of this, I'm building some quizzing software that generates problems related to bases (hexadecimal and binary, in particular) to support the CSC314 course. This is also serving as an experiment in using the scheme programming language and continuations for web development.
(webpages are no longer accessible)

DUAL - Design Using Alternative Languages

(out of date) DUSEL - Coordinator for (a small part of the) Outreach & Education for Homestake Mine DUSEL effort

see http://skg.dsunix.net/mywiki/DeepScience for a wiki page with some documents, information, and links
In particular, I'm part of an effort based at Dakota State, but including collaborators from SDSU(Judy) and BHSU (Dan Durben) which is studying the information infrastructure needed to make education and outreach efforts both effective and easy (Other participants include Stephen Krebsbach, Xinwen Fu, Omar El-Gayar, ...)

(finished) KDOT (two project)

Work on a Web-based Learning Management System
- This project is almost wrapped up. It involved a number of steps. First was assisting KDOT as they migrated to a learning management system (LMS) called PATHLORE. A significant part of that effort was data preparation for migrating data from a wide variety of proprietary sources into the single, standard LMS formats. Second, working with JoAnn Browning (University of Kansas Dept of Civil Engineering), we surveyed a large number of state DOTs to gather information about how they are integrating computers into their training programs. Finally, I am working with Scott Swanson, and a number of KDOT trainers on migrating a course Legal Issues for Supervisors from an entirely "live", instructor-led format, into a blended format where some of the material is presented using online tools.
- This project has wrapped up.
Work on a Taxonomy for Transportation
- This work was inspired by Ben Nelson of the Computer Bureau of KDOT
- It has migrated to an Ontology for Transportation rather than strictly a taxonomy
  - the goal is to explore what needs to be done to capture semantic information which can support the interchange of data among a variety of heterogeneous sources (data may be structured database entries, semi-structured data, or even unstructured documents of all sorts)
  - a crucial step has been trying to clearly identify stories (use cases) of how such data from multiple sources can be used to resolve a problem or answer a questions which otherwise would be difficult or impossible to answer. This has been particularly challenging -- since the essence of the question is -- "What would you be doing if you could integrate information from diverse sources?" Since, at present, such integration requires prohibitive human intervention, it is almost never done, and KDOT's knowledge workers creatively find ways to deal with problems which would otherwise require information which just isn't available.
  - this work is done using the Protege tool and the OWL (Web Ontology Language) for modeling purposes

IALab

Work w/ Dr. Xinwen Fu (camoflage/anonymity)

Work on Network Security Ontology (similar to KDOT ontology project) -- focused on using semantic information to merge diverse information resources to help identify false-positives in network security monitoring tools.

Quantum Algorithms