NCSA Director's Seminar Series Speakers

Upcoming Speakers

Speaker: Ben Schneiderman
Affiliation: University of Maryland-College Park
Talk Title: The Thrill of Discovery: Information Visualization for High-Dimensional Spaces
Talk Date: April 18, 2007
Talk Location: NCSA 1040
Talk Time: 11:00 am - 12:30 pm
Personal Page: http://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben/
Abstract: Interactive information visualization provide researchers with remarkable tools for discovery. By combining powerful data mining methods with user-controlled interfaces, users are beginning to benefit from these potent telescopes for high-dimensional spaces. They can begin with an overview, zoom in on areas of interest, filter out unwanted items, and then click for details-on-demand. With careful design and efficient algorithms, the dynamic queries approach to data exploration can provide 100msec updates even for million-record databases.

This talk will start by reviewing the growing commercial success stories such as www.spotfire.com, www.smartmoney.com/marketmap and www.hivegroup.com. Then it will cover recent research progress for visual exploration of large time series data applied to financial, Ebay auction, and genomic data (www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/timesearcher).

Our next step was to combine these key ideas to produce the Hierarchical Clustering Explorer 3.0 that now includes the rank-by-feature framework (www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/hce). By judiciously choosing from appropriate ranking criteria for low-dimensional axis-parallel projections, users can locate desired features of higher dimensional spaces. Demonstrations will be shown.

Past Speakers

Speaker: Steven Gottlieb
Affiliation: Department of Physics, Indiana University
Title: Lattice QCD: A Petascale Challenge
Date: December 4, 2006
Abstract: Lattice QCD is a formulation of a quantum field theory describing Nature's strong force on a grid of space-time points. This talk will describe the current state of calculations, future goals, and why lattice QCD is a petascale computational challenge. Performance and bottlenecks on current codes will also be addressed.

Speaker: Pedro Leon
Affiliation: Director of CENAT, CONARE and University of Costa Rica
Title: Advanced Computing in Remote Sensing for the Environment
Date: October 9, 2006
Abstract: The expansion of the human population and the spread of technology are clearly having an impact on the Earth's atmosphere, on the ozone layer and on the increasing levels of greenhouse gases. Global Earth observations of the surface using remote sensing tools have become important sources of information for decision makers in many fields, such as forestry, urban planning, disaster risk assessment, and management and protection of terrestrial and marine ecosystems.

The Center for High Technologies (CENAT) was created by the Council of Rectors of the four public universities: UCR, UNA, ITCR and EUNED. It is developing advanced techniques in computer science to intersect with the nanotechnology lab LANOTEC and the remote sensing program (PRIAS). In collaboration with NASA, PRIAS has completed two whole-country data-gathering missions in which aerial observations were taken at 50,000 feet and 25,000 feet with optical and digital cameras and hyperspectral and thermal sensors. During the last mission the LIDAR active sensor was also used to analyze selected regions of the country with a high-resolution topographic sensor that can measure the forest canopy height, as well as a miniaturized mass spectrometer AVEMS around volcanic peaks. Software to automate the process of image ortho-rectification is under construction, to deal with a large database of 6,000 RPC-30 color photographs digitized into a 3 terabyte database.

CENAT and the International Center for Remote Sensing of Environment are co-sponsoring the 32nd International Symposium on Remote Sensing of Environment (June 25-29, 2007; http://www.symposia.org/), which will include several workshops with the analytical tools required by the different sensors.

Speaker: Matthew Arrott
Affiliation: E-Sciences Program Manager, University of California at San Diego
Title: ORION's Cyberinfrastructure Conceptual Architecture
Date: May 26, 2006
Abstract: In order to provide the U.S. ocean sciences research community with access to the basic infrastructure required to make sustained, long-term and adaptive measurements in the oceans, the National Science Foundation's (NSF's) Ocean Sciences Division has developed the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI). The infrastructure provided to research scientists through the OOI will include the cables, buoys, deployment platforms, moorings and junction boxes, required for power and two-way data communication to a wide variety of sensors at the sea surface, in the water column, and at or beneath the seafloor. The initiative also includes components such as unified project management, data dissemination and archiving, and education and outreach activities essential to the long-term success of ocean observatory science.

A significant component of the OOI is the cyberinfrastructure (CI). It will provide the common operating infrastructure connecting and coordinating the operations of the three OOI observatories with the scientific and educational pursuits of the oceanographic research communities. The goal is to facilitate direct and immediate interaction with the ocean. The CI must address the issues of observatory resource management, mission command and control, data management and distribution and the meaningful collaboration across a wide range of disciplines. The long-term objective is to couple the observation, modeling and mission control systems. This connected system will provide scientists the capability to observe and respond to conditions in the ocean.

The presentation will review the current understanding of the conceptual architecture for the CI as well as possible candidate approaches and technologies.

Speaker: Larry Smarr
Affiliation: California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology
Title: High-Performance Collaboration: The Jump to Light Speed
Date: May 4, 2006
Abstract: NCSA has been a leader in new modes of networked collaboration for more than 15 years. The 1989 "Science by Satellite" demonstration at an international computer visualization conference painted a vision of distance being eliminated by network and computing technology. That vision is finally nearing reality. With the emergence of dedicated 10-gigabit-per-second optical backplanes on a planetary scale, the notion of shared telepresence is becoming achievable. Smarr will review highlights of NCSA's pioneering work. He will then describe some recent experiments at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology.

Speaker: Ed Seidel
Affiliation: Director of the Center for Computation & Technology at Louisiana State University and the Floating Point Systems Professor in LSU's Departments of Physics & Astronomy and Computer Science
Title: Dynamic Applications on Grids (~25 MB PDF)
Date: April 18, 2006
Abstract: Grids, which increasingly integrate computing resources, data archives, networks, and sensors, have the potential to fundamentally change the way science and engineering are done. I will discuss a number of tools under development to enable innovative applications to exploit this environment, including simulations of colliding black holes, coastal modeling, and petroleum engineering. Such applications are not only aware of their needs, but also of the resources available to them on Grids. They will be able to adapt themselves automatically to respond to their changing needs, to spawn off tasks on other resources, and to adapt to the changing characteristics of the Grid including machine and network loads and availability. I will discuss a number of innovative scenarios for computing on the Grid enabled by such technologies, and demonstrate how close these are to being a reality.

Speaker: John Unsworth
Affiliation: Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Title: Cyberinfrastructure for Humanities and Social Science
Date: February 21, 2006
Bio: Unsworth chairs a national commission on cyberinfrastructure for the humanities and social sciences organized by the American Council of Learned Societies and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In this talk, Unsworth will discuss the recommendations of the report, the timetable for a release of the final version, and its implications for NCSA and the computer science and engineering community.