XSDEDE Happenings
New Details About XSEDE12 Conference
XSEDE seeks high-quality papers on science, education, outreach, and training
A new conference from XSEDE is coming! This conference will support and enhance the world of advanced digital resources and services. Scientists, engineers, social scientists, and humanities experts at colleges, universities, and research centers around the world use those resources and services to make us all healthier, safer and better informed. XSEDE, the eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment, is the largest collection of distributed cyberinfrastructure for open scientific research in the United States. As the inaugural conference of XSEDE, XSEDE12 is a forum for the presentation of high-quality technical papers, posters, panels, and Birds of a Feather sessions that will facilitate communication among scientists and students who use XSEDE and other cyberinfrastructure resources. For more information, key dates and submission deadlines, please visit https://www.xsede.org/xsede12-call-for-participation
Call for Presentations - Extreme Scaling Workshop from Blue Waters and XSEDE
July 15-16, 2012 - Chicago, Illinois
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications' Blue Waters and eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) projects are hosting the sixth in a series of Extreme Scaling workshops. The workshop will address algorithmic and applications challenges and solutions in large-scale computing systems with limited memory and I/O bandwith. The presentations and discussion are intended to assist the computational science and engineering community in making effective use of petascale through extreme-scale systems across the spectrum from local campus-scale to national systems. For more information and submission guidelines, please visit https://www.xsede.org/web/xscale.
XSEDE Student Engagement Program Seeks Undergraduate Students for Summer Internship Opportunities
The XSEDE Student Engagement Program is seeking undergraduate and graduate students for a 10-week project experience for this summer. Working with XSEDE researchers and staff, students will make meaningful contributions to research, development and systems projects that benefit the national scientific and computational community. In exchange, students will be provided with travel support for project orientation and to attend the XSEDE’12 conference in Chicago, IL in July, and a small stipend. Available projects are listed at https://www.xsede.org/student-engagement-projects. To apply, complete the form online at https://www.xsede.org/student-intern-form and email your current resume and current academic transcripts to outreach-stueng@xsede.org. Your application will not be considered until all material has been received. Questions can be sent to outreach-stueng@xsede.org.
Upcoming Conferences and Workshops
7th Annual Computer Science for High School Teachers Summer Workshop
August 1-3, 2012 – Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
The School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University is running their 7th annual CS4HS summer workshop. The workshop includes activities that help high school teachers understand the breadth of computer science beyond Java programming. We provide hands-on activities that teachers can use in their classrooms to show their students how to use computational thinking principles to solve problems, explore the use of robots and other software to solve real-world problems, and learn more about the various fields of study within computer science including machine learning and human computer interaction. Teachers will visit the local Google office in Pittsburgh to speak with Google engineers about how to help prepare their students for jobs in the computing industry, and there will be an open forum to discuss ways to improve the perception and relevance of computing in K-12. For more information and to register, please visit http://www.cs.cmu.edu/cs4hs/summer12
BMEI'12-CISP'12 – Call for Papers
October 16-18, 2012 - Chongqing, China
Submission Deadline – March 30, 2012
BMEI'12-CISP'12 is a premier international forum for scientists and researchers to present the state of the art of multimedia, signal processing, biomedical engineering and informatics. To promote international participation of researchers from outside the country/region where the conference is held (i.e., China’s mainland), researchers outside of China’s mainland are encouraged to propose invited sessions. The first author of each paper in an invited session must not be affiliated with an organization in China’s mainland. All papers in the invited sessions can be marked as "Invited Paper". The organizer(s) for each invited session with at least 6 registered papers will (jointly) enjoy an honorarium of US*D 400. Invited session organizers will solicit submissions, conduct reviews and recommend accept/reject decisions on the submitted papers. Invited session organizers will be able to set their own submission and review schedules, as long as a list of recommended papers is determined by 10 August 2012. Each invited session proposal should include: (1) the name, bio, and contact information of each organizer of the invited session; (2) the title and a short synopsis of the invited session. Please send your proposal to cisp-bmei@cqupt.edu.cn For more information, please visit http://cisp-bmei.cqupt.edu.cn/.
Research Features Across the XSEDE Partnership
SDSC Research Analysis of Egypt and Libya’s Internet Censorships Could Lead to Early Warning Systems
On a January evening in 2011, Egypt – with a population of 80 million, including 23 million Internet users – vanished from cyberspace after its government ordered an Internet blackout amidst anti-government protests that led to the ouster of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. The following month, the Libyan government, also under siege, imposed an Internet “curfew” before completely cutting off access for almost four days. To help explain how these governments disrupted the Internet, a team of scientists led by the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) at the University of California, San Diego conducted an analysis based largely on the drop in a specific subset of observable Internet traffic that is a residual product of malware. Many types of malicious software or network activity generate unsolicited traffic in attempting to compromise or infect vulnerable machines. "This ubiquitous traffic "pollution" is commonly referred to as Internet background radiation (IBR) and is observable on most globally reachable Internet links. To read further, please visit http://www.sdsc.edu/News%20Items/PR030712_caida.html
‘Big Data' Emerges as Key Theme at South by Southwest Interactive
Several panels and speakers at this year's South By Southwest Interactive festival discussed the growing ability to use data-mining techniques to analyze big data to shape political campaigns, advertising, and education. For example, panelist and Microsoft researcher Jaron Lannier says companies that rely on selling information about their users' behavior to advertisers should find a way to compensate people for their posts. A panel on education discussed the potential ability of Twitter and Facebook to better connect with students and detect signs that that students might be struggling with certain subjects. "We need to be looking at engagement in this new spectrum, and we haven't," says South Dakota State University social-media researcher Greg Heiberger. Some panels examined the role of big data in the latest presidential campaigns. Although recent presidential campaigns have focused on demographic subgroups, future campaigns may design their messages even more narrowly. "They’re actually going to try targeting groups of individuals so that political campaigns become about data mining" rather than any kind of broad policy message, says University of Texas at Dallas professor David Parry. To read further, please visit http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/big-data-emerges-as-key-theme-at-south-by-southwest-interactive/35781.
Pi Day: How the 'Irrational' Number Pushed the Limits of Computing
The challenge of determining the value of Pi has helped push the envelope of computing. "It has played a role in computer programming and memory allocation and has led to ingenious algorithms that allow you to calculate this with high precision," says mathematician Daniel W. Lozier, retired head of the mathematical software group in the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology's Applied and Computational Mathematics Division. "It's a way of pushing computing machinery to its limits." Memory is crucial in executing calculations, as are techniques for calculating efficiently, given the large strings of numbers involved. The calculation of Pi to longer and longer number strings has improved along with the advancement of computers, and the current record-holder is Japan's T2K Supercomputer, which calculated the value to 2.6 trillion digits in about 73 hours and 36 minutes. That marks a considerable upgrade from the ENIAC computer's 1949 estimation of Pi to 2,037 digits, which took 70 hours. Ten years later an IBM 704 was able to calculate Pi to 16,157 places in four hours and 20 minutes. "Pi serves as a test case for mathematical studies in the area of number theory," Lozier notes. To read further, please visit http://gcn.com/articles/2012/03/14/pi-day-value-pushing-boundaries-of-computing.aspx.
Student Engagement and Opportunities
Undergraduate Internship Opportunities at Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory and Stanford University
Submission Deadline – March 29, 2012
The team of NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) mission invites current undergraduates to apply for a summer intern position at Stanford University and Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory (LSMAL) for a 10-week period during the summer of 2012. A limited number of positions (4) are available for highly motivated students interested in solar and space physics. Students will work with both Stanford and LMSAL research teams on engineering and science projects related to the IRIS mission IRIS Mission). Projects may include instrument hardware preparation, data analysis, or research relating to the Sun-Earth system. For more information, please visit http://solar-center.stanford.edu/IRIS/SummerProgram
21 Colleges Win Grants to Study What Helps Minority Ph.D. Students in Sciences Succeed
The Council of Graduate Students is awarding $30,000 grants to 21 U.S. universities to participate in an investigation of minority graduate students' experiences in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields to reach a better understanding about contributing factors to the students' completion or non-completion of their doctoral degrees. The project seeks to quantify the completion and attrition rates of minorities at the participating institutions, determine whether the rates vary by field of study, gender, race, and ethnicity, and whether the rates have changed over time. Since 2000, minority students' shares of STEM field doctorates have made only modest gains, while experts say many qualified minority students are opting not to pursue STEM doctorates. The U.S. National Science Foundation's Jessie A. DeAro hopes the project will yield insight on this trend's underlying reasons and what interventions should be followed. "We're trying to get at the factors that negatively impact student outcomes to mitigate or remove them," she says. "We also want to identify the positive factors and share those with others so that the impact can be multiplied." For more information and to read further, please visit http://chronicle.com/article/21-Colleges-to-Study-What/131174/.
Last but Not Least – Items of Interest
CC Launches NITRD Symposium Website
The Computing Community Consortium recently announced the launch of a Web site that makes available a large corpus of materials from a symposium held Feb. 16 that covered 20 years of coordinated federal investment in networking and information technology (IT) research and development (R&D) via the Networking Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program. The initiative enables a framework and mechanisms for coordination across 15 U.S. agencies so that they can meet the multidisciplinary, multitechnology, and multisector challenges of modern R&D. To read further, please visit http://www.cccblog.org/2012/03/14/ccc-launches-nitrd-symposium-websitevideos-slides-written-summaries-of-talks-all-available/.
Software Automatically Transforms Movie Clips Into Comic Strips
Hefei University of Technology researchers have developed Movie2Comics, software that can automatically transform movie scenes into comic strips, without the need for human intervention. "Professionals can directly use the software to generate comics (or integrate their interaction to achieve more impressive results); hobbyists may have interests to try it to see what will be generated from different movie clips," says Hefei professor Meng Wang. Although previous programs have been developed to help cartoonists convert movies into comics, Wang says Movie2Comics is the first fully automated approach. The program features an automatic script-face mapping algorithm that identifies the speaking character in scenes with multiple characters, automatic generation of comic panels of different sizes, positioning word balloons, and rendering movie frames in a cartoon style. The researchers used the program to transform 15 movie clips into comic strips with 85 percent accuracy, which the researchers hope to improve. Although the method can perform all of the steps automatically, the researchers found that some human effort could lead to better results. To read further, please visit http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-03-software-automatically-movie-comic.html.
Microsoft Builds a Browser for Your Past
Microsoft scientist Eric Horvitz has created Lifebrowser, artificial intelligence-based software that processes photos, emails, Web browsing history, calendar events, and other documents stored on a user's computer to identify landmark events. The program's timeline interface can explore, search, and discover the landmarks as a kind of memory aid. "The motivation behind Lifebrowser is that we have too much stuff going on in our personal digital spheres," Horvitz says. "We were interested in making local machines private data-mining centers [that are] very smart about you and your memory so that you can better navigate through that great amount of content." Lifebrowser uses several machine-learning techniques to analyze personal data and determine what is important to the user. Lifebrowser and programs like it also could be used to personalize other software and Web services, notes Stanford University researcher Sudneendra Hangal, who has developed a program called Muse that enables people to analyze their email archives. Hangal says that approach would be very different from the kind of data mining-based personalization most common today, in which companies tailor content based upon the personal data available to them. To read further, please visit http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/39917/.
