RESEARCH AND SCHOLARSHIP
At the Center of Excellence in Enterprise Technology (CEET), we believe discovery starts when we explore immersive technologies and leverage that knowledge to solve challenges here at Villanova, in our communities and on an enterprise-level around the world.
RESEARCH TECHNOLOGY
Villanova’s CAVE Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE) is an immersive, interactive experience with 3D virtual reality worlds, 3D big-data displays and 3D models of real-world locations and objects, bringing course material to life in new and exciting ways. Funded by a $1.67 million National Science Foundation grant and managed by CEET, the CAVE opened in October 2014 and is located Falvey Memorial Hall. In addition to serving as a teaching and learning space, it is used to support faculty research projects across disciplines, as well as to collaborate with academic and industry researchers from around the world.
Funded by a $300,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant, Center Director Frank Klassner, PhD, is leading a group of interdisciplinary researchers from across the College and from the College of Engineering to develop high-tech sandboxes providing hands-on learning for students.
The technology is based on projecting a colorful augmented reality display onto sand in a real sandbox, and it was created by a researcher at University of California, Davis in 2012. The box was originally used in public exhibits for science education but has since been adopted by universities and research centers around the world. It allows users to evaluate hydrological processes through the shifting of the sand. Dr. Klassner says the team hopes to install four or five boxes across labs on campus and hopes the upgraded software could eventually be licensed and used by other institutions.
CURRENT RESEARCH PROJECTS
OCCAM is an ongoing Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)-funded project for Vencore Labs with Vijay Gehlot, PhD. The proposed research will make use of Colored Petri Nets models of the system architecture to analyze vulnerabilities. A semi-automated approach for creating a credit profile number (CPN) from the description of the system components is proposed. The generated CPN model will be instrumented with data collection monitors. The generated data will be analyzed against defined vulnerability metrics to assess and mitigate the attack surface of the underlying system.
An ongoing National Science Funded-funded collaboration to integrate immersive video and robotic telepresence with virtual reality CAVE technology, managed by Frank Klassner, PhD, along with Edmond Dougherty ’69 COE, ’86 MS, Director, Engineering Entrepreneurship and Library liaison Darren Poley. The project has the goal of supporting interdisciplinary research projects in science, arts, engineering, business, and nursing areas through the visualization capabilities of CAVE technology.
This ongoing project is directed by Vijay Gehlot, PhD, Computing Sciences, in collaboration with Villanova's Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, designed to aid Comcast's efforts in effecting a smooth transition from IPv4 network protocols to IPv6 protocols by recommending and developing, wherever needed, new software tools and techniques to measure, analyze and report on network performance.
This ongoing project for the Vatican Internet Office, managed by Frank Klassner, PhD, and the department of Communication, developed a series of virtual reality presentations of the major basilicas and Sacred Places of Rome for the Vatican's and is currently developing material for virtual reality presentations of the Vatican Radio's Marconi Museum, the Redemptoris Mater papal chapel, and other sites at the Vatican.
Recent Faculty Publications
V. Gehlot, E. B. Sloane, D. King, J. Schaffer, M. Kirk, E. Miller, N. Wickramasinghe. "COVID-19 and Beyond: Taming the Virtual Healthcare Tiger with Colored Petri Nets based Modeling and Simulation." Proc. of 55th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS’55), pp. 3773-3782, Jan 2022.
V. Gehlot, “A Tutorial Introduction to Colored Petri Nets Framework for Model-Driven System Design and Engineering,” Proceedings of ANNSIM’21, Fairfax, VA, USA. July 19-22, 2021.E. Nwafor, C. Kolimago, R. Vaughn. "Covid Vaccine Sentiment Analysis by Geographic Regions." IEEE BigData Workshop on Big Data Analytics for COVID-19 (IEEE BDA COVID-2021). Dec 15-18, 2021, Orlando, FL, USA (Virtual).
V. Gehlot, J. Robinson, M. Tanwar, E. B. Sloane, N. Wickramasinghe. "Toolkit for Healthcare Professionals: A Colored Petri Nets Based Approach for Modeling and Simulation of Healthcare Workflows." Proceedings of the 2021 Winter Simulation Conference (WSC), IEEE, pp. 1-12, December 2021.
E. Nwafor, S. Su. Detecting Network Traffic Intrusions on Memory Constrained Embedded Systems. 2021 Virtual IEEE International Symposium on Technologies for Homeland Security. Nov 8-9, 2021.
H. M. Rando, S. M. Boca, L. D. McGown, D. S. Himmelstein, M. P. Robson, V. Rubinetti, R. Velazquez, C. S. Greene, A. Gitter. "An Open-Publishing Response to the COVID-19 Infodemic." Proceedings of the Workshop on Digital Infrastructure for Scholarly Content Objects (DISCO 2021), Sep 30, 2021 (Virtual).
M. Robson, E. Nwafor, "Dynamic Load-Sharing for Memory Constrained Devices: A Survey," Proceedings of IEEE World Forum on Internet of Things, Jun 14-Jul 31, 2021, New Orleans, LA, USA.
V. Gehlot. "A Tutorial Introduction to Colored Petri Nets Framework for Model-Driven System Design and Engineering." Proc. of 2021 Annual Simulation Conference (ANNSIM'21), Society for Modeling & Simulation Intn’l, pp. 1-12, Jul 2021.
M. Robson, E. Nwafor, “Dynamic Load-Sharing for Memory Constrained Devices,” Proceedings of IEEE World Forum on Internet of Things, New Orleans, LA, USA. June 14-July 31, 2021.
E. B. Sloane, V. Gehlot, N. Wickramasinghe, and R. Silva, “Using Community Care Coordination Networks to Minimize Hospitalization of COVID-19 Patients,” IEEE SoutheastCon2021, Mar 2021, p.1-4.
N. Wickramasinghe, V. Gehlot, E Sloane, P. Smart, and J. Schaffer, “A Precision Post-Operative Wellness Monitoring Solution,” Proc. 53rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-53), pp. 3720-3728, January 2020.