Building Community Food Security: Lessons Learned from Community Food Projects, 1999-2003

This first of its kind research project was conducted by Dr. Kami Pothukuchi with support from Jeanette Abi-Nader of the CFSC Evaluation Program. Building Community Food Security research is based on analysis of CFP project narrative reports from 1999-2003, CFP focus groups, and relevant literature. It outlines a summary of activities for which these projects engaged and include characteristics of successful community food security projects, factors for success, challenges CFP grantees faced, and, lessons learned

What's Cooking in Your Food System? A Guide to Community Food Assessment

Learn about Community Food Assessments, a creative way to highlight food-related resources and needs, promote collaboration and community participation, and create lasting change. This Guide includes case studies of nine Community Food Assessments; tips for planning and organizing an assessment; guidance on research methods and strategies for promoting community participation; and ideas for translating an assessment into action for change

Hortaliza: A Youth Nutrition Garden in Southwest Detroit

This paper documents a youth garden that was developed in 2000 through a university-community partnership in a low-income, predominantly Latino neighborhood in southwest Detroit. It involved four community-based organizations and several residents -- youth among them -- from the neighborhood, in garden planning, set-up, and management. Kids grew vegetables of different kinds to take home and ate healthy snacks at the garden. They learned about the importance of vegetables and fruits to healthy diets, the nutritional value of particular vegetables, and how to grow vegetables. At the end of the season, we documented increased interest among kids in eating fruits and vegetables, kids making new friends, an appreciation for working with neighborhood adults and improvement of neighborhood appearance. Kids also showed increased knowledge about nutrition, plant ecology, and gardening and indicated interest in participating in the garden the following year. Although the garden lot was sold two years later, this documentation of benefits is helping inform advocacy of youth gardens with local public agencies and community based nonprofits

Intelligent systems for efficiency and security

As computing becomes ubiquitous and personalized, resources like energy, storage and time are becoming increasingly scarce and, at the same time, computing systems must deliver in multiple dimensions, such as high performance, quality of service, reliability, security and low power. Building such computers is hard, particularly when the operating environment is becoming more dynamic, and systems are becoming heterogeneous and distributed. Unfortunately, computers today manage resources with many ad hoc heuristics that are suboptimal, unsafe, and cannot be composed across the computer’s subsystems. Continuing this approach has severe consequences: underperforming systems, resource waste, information loss, and even life endangerment. This dissertation research develops computing systems which, through intelligent adaptation, deliver efficiency along multiple dimensions. The key idea is to manage computers with principled methods from formal control. It is with these methods that the multiple subsystems of a computer sense their environment and configure themselves to meet system-wide goals. To achieve the goal of intelligent systems, this dissertation makes a series of contributions, each building on the previous. First, it introduces the use of formal MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) control for processors, to simultaneously optimize many goals like performance, power, and temperature. Second, it develops the Yukta control system, which uses coordinated formal controllers in different layers of the stack (hardware and operating system). Third, it uses robust control to develop a fast, globally coordinated and decentralized control framework called Tangram, for heterogeneous computers. Finally, it presents Maya, a defense against power side-channel attacks that uses formal control to reshape the power dissipated by a computer, confusing the attacker. The ideas in the dissertation have been demonstrated successfully with several prototypes, including one built along with AMD (Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.) engineers. These designs significantly outperformed the state of the art. The research in this dissertation brought formal control closer to computer architecture and has been well-received in both domains. It has the first application of full-fledged MIMO control for processors, the first use of robust control in computer systems, and the first application of formal control for side-channel defense. It makes a significant stride towards intelligent systems that are efficient, secure and reliable

Sustainable Food Systems: Perspectives on Transportation Policy

Global agri-food and transportation systems have dramatically expanded food production and distribution worldwide. This integration, however, also adversely affects human health. The negative effects arise from unequal access to healthy food, unequal access to transportation for agri-food workers, increasing geospatial and economic concentration in the agri-food industry, and an emerging competition between food and fuel. Because the health of individuals is inextricably tied to the health of communities, regions, and ecological systems, health and transportation professionals need to act to both mitigate current disparities and enhance the future viability and sustainability of these systems. This paper offers numerous, specific recommendations for improving health through transportation policy and programs as they relate to agri-food systems

The Dark Side of the All-American Meal

Book Review: Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, Eric Schlosser, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. Available only in hardcover: $25.00.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/60278/1/KamiReview.pd

Building Sustainable, Just Food Systems in Detroit: Reflections from SEED Wayne, a Campus-Community Collaborative

This article describes a campus-community collaborative, SEED Wayne, which was developed to build sustainable food systems on Wayne State University’s campus and in Detroit neighborhoods. The discussion traces the nature of SEED Wayne’s partnerships and reflects on the program’s past three years of existence, including experiences within the university, practical challenges associated with defining sustainability uniformly across diverse campus and community activities, gaining consistent student involvement, and the mutual benefits of the university-community partnership

The Detroit Food System Report 2009-2010

Assesses the state of the city’s food system, including activities in production, distribution, consumption, waste generation and composting, nutrition and food assistance program participation and innovative food system programs

Code generation of array constructs for distributed memory systems

Programming for high-performance systems to fully utilize the potential of the computing system is a complex problem. This is particularly evident when programming distributed memory clusters containing multiple NUMA chips and GPUs on each node since it would require a complex combination of MPI, OpenMP, CUDA, OpenCL, etc to achieve high performance even for sequentially simplistic codes. Programs requiring high performance are usually painstakingly written by hand in C/C++ or Fortran using MPI+X to target these machines. This work presents a multi-layer code generation framework Vaani that takes a very high-level representation of computations and generates C+MPI code by transforming the input through a series of intermediate representations. The very high-level nature of the language greatly facilitates programming parallel systems. Additionally, the use of multiple representations provide a flexible and transparent venue for the user to interact and customize the transformation process to generate code suitable to the user and the target machine. Experimental evaluation shows that the current implementation of Vaani generates code that is competitive with handwritten codes and hand-optimized libraries