OPK: Laboratory

O. Patrick Kreidl: Laboratory

Members

Richard Al-Bayaty (2012-present)

Patrick Caldwell (2012-present)

Christopher Kellar (2012-present)

Alumni

Nicholas Baker (2012): Adtech Digital

Mordecai Huber (2012): Georgia Institute of Technology

Herschel Parmar (2012): University of Central Florida

Collaborators

BAE Systems, Technology Solutions

Prism Informatix

UNF's Environmental Engineering & Computing Lab (led by Professor Brown)

UNF's Geo-Mechanics and Geo-Imaging Lab (led by Professor Hudyma)

UNF's Structural Testing Lab (led by Professor El-Safty)

Welcome to the UNF Signal Processing & Network Science Laboratory (also called the "SPaNS Lab"), Professor Patrick Kreidl's research group. We mostly study signal processing topics related to decision-making over networks; for instance questions like:

In a social network, how much should one trust a friend before accepting introductions from that friend to his/her other friends? similarly, how much should one trust two different groups of friends before introducing them to one another?
In a sensor network, how can each node communicate/coordinate only with its nearest neighbors yet still answer a query about the global state of the environment? what is the nature and minimum volume of these nearest-neighbor interactions?
In a computer network, how can the security administrator classify whether a detected intruder is a strategic insider or just a lucky hacker? can the security benefit of extended observation time ever outweigh that of immediate expulsion?

Answering these types of questions involves the direct application of mathematical methods in signal processing, communications, control, networking, optimization and statistics. Supporting experimental studies are primarily simulation-based or computationally oriented, involving programming in Perl, Java, C and Matlab/Octave.

Current projects involve several cross-discipline application areas, including (i) network security, data analytics and e-commerce problems in computer science as well as (ii) geotechnical imaging, groundwater hydrology and structural health monitoring problems in civil engineering.

Mission Statement. The lab's research mission is to evolve the established signal processing discipline to address the rich and diverse problem space arising from our modern networked world. The organized study of this problem space has been coined network science, defined by the National Research Council as "the study of network representations of physical, biological and social phenomena leading to predictive models of these phenomena." Our hypothesis is that signal processing methods (particularly those that intersect with the mathematical fields of computation, operations research and statistics) offer a solid foundation for examining the interconnections among multiple types of networks (e.g., physical or engineered networks, information networks, social networks) and for discovering common principles, models, algorithms and tools that govern their behaviors. Housed in UNF's School of Engineering, equally important is the lab's educational mission, namely to foster the professional development and intellectual agility of our talented students so that they may enjoy long-term success within a rapidly changing information technology marketplace and contribute to the welfare of our region, state, nation and world.