HPC In the News
Big Data Needs Big Funding: NSF's Jahanian Makes the Case
Farnam Jahanian, out-going U.S. National Science Foundation assistant director for the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate, recently discussed the ways society will come to rely on a massive surge of new data that will require significant investments in cyber infrastructure to maintain. Speaking at the 2014 Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment conference in Atlanta earlier this month, Jahanian shared an anecdote about a visit to the U.S. Department of Agriculture to highlight how widespread the U.S.'s future reliance on mass data is likely to be. "You'd be surprised how many times data was mentioned: data integration, data management, data curation, computer simulation, and modeling," Jahanian said. To read further, please visit http://www.hpcwire.com/2014/07/23/big-data-needs-big-funding-nsfs-jahanian-makes-case/.
Rice University Receives $1.1M Grant from NSF
A $1.1 million National Science Foundation grant to two Rice University computer science groups will allow them to build cloud-computing tools to help analyze evolutionary patterns. With the three-year grant, Christopher Jermaine and Luay Nakhleh, both associate professors of computer science, will develop parallel-processing tools that track the evolution of genes and genomes across species. Even those who have access to mainframes may find it easier to go to the cloud. The programs will be able to run parallel analyses on thousands of computers, with results that may not only be faster but may also make it possible to trace genes at scales that were not practical before. The Rice team expects its new open-source algorithms will bring sophisticated computing techniques to researchers who have limited access to supercomputing resources but can easily rent “cloud-computing” time from the likes of Amazon or Microsoft. To read further, please visit http://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/rice-university-receives-1-1m-grant-nsf/.
MIT’s Leiserson to Receive Ken Kennedy Award for Advances in Parallel Computing
Charles E. Leiserson of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) will receive the 2014 ACM-IEEE Computer Society Ken Kennedy Award for his influence on parallel computing systems and their adoption into mainstream use through scholarly research and development. He was also cited for his mentoring of computer science leaders and students. Leiserson introduced the notion of cache-oblivious algorithms, which can exploit the memory hierarchy near optimally despite having no tuning parameters for cache size or cache-line length. He also developed the Cilk multithreaded programming technology, and led the development of several Cilk-based parallel chess-playing programs, winning numerous prizes in international competition. The award will be presented at SC14 on Tuesday, November 18, in New Orleans. To read further, please visit http://www.computer.org/portal/web/pressroom/IEEE-CS-and-ACM-Recognize-Charles-Leiserson-for-Advances-in-Parallel-Computing-Systems.
Paul Messina Named Argonne Distinguished Fellow
High-performance computing pioneer Paul Messina has been named an Argonne National Laboratory Distinguished Fellow, the laboratory’s highest scientific and engineering rank. Comparable in stature to an endowed chair at a top-ranked university, the Argonne Distinguished Fellow title rank recognizes sustained outstanding scientific and engineering research and can also be associated with outstanding technical leadership of major, complex, high-priority projects. Paul, an applied mathematician and computer scientist, first joined Argonne’s Applied Mathematics Division in 1973 to manage the Argonne Subroutine Library and to found and lead the User Services Group. In 1982, he served as founding director of Argonne’s Mathematics and Computer Science Division, a position he held until 1987. To read further, please visit http://www.alcf.anl.gov/articles/paul-messina-named-argonne-distinguished-fellow.
2014 Annual HPCwire Readers’ Choice Awards
Each year the HPCwire Readers’ Choice Awards are determined by our readers across the HPC community, to recognize the most outstanding individuals and organizations in the industry. The nomination period is over, and many great entries have been submitted. Voting for the HPCwire Readers’ Choice Awards has begun and will run through the month of September. The announcement and final presentation of these prestigious and highly anticipated awards will take place live during SC ’14 in New Orleans, Louisiana. For complete information, please visit http://www.hpcwire.com/2014-hpcwire-readers-choice-awards/. .
SC14 News"
Broader Engagement with HPC Matters; Become an SC14-BE Mentor
The Supercomputing Conference Broader Engagement program (SC-BE) increases conference participation by individuals who are traditionally underrepresented in the high-performance computing (HPC) arena, including women, minorities and people with disabilities.
In a report by Timothy A. Mann and Valerie E. Taylor (Texas A&M) titled “Analysis of the Impact of the Broader Engagement Program on the SC Conference,” the authors explain how the BE experience increases the likelihood that scholars’ submissions (technical program papers, posters, etc.) will be reviewed favorably and they are more likely to participate in conference activities and committees. Ultimately, success in the technical conference arena improves BE scholars’ confidence as they advance in HPC careers. This is good news for HPC industry employers who struggle to build and sustain a diverse workforce. For more information, please visit http://www.hpcwire.com/2014/09/02/broader-engagement-hpc-matters-become-sc14-mentor/.
HPC Call for Participation
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9th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON LANGUAGE AND AUTOMATA THEORY AND APPLICATIONS (LATA 2015) – 3td Call for Papers
March 2-6, 2015 - Nice, France
Paper Submission Deadline – October 10, 2014
LATA is a conference series on theoretical computer science and its applications. Following the tradition of the diverse PhD training events in the field developed at Rovira i Virgili University in Tarragona since 2002, LATA 2015 will reserve significant room for young scholars at the beginning of their career. It will aim at attracting contributions from classical theory fields as well as application areas. LATA 2015 will consist of: invited talks, invited tutorials, peer-reviewed contributions For more information, please visit http://grammars.grlmc.com/lata2015/.
Call for Proposals Issued for PRACE Project Access
Submission Deadline – October 22, 2014
This Call for Proposals targets large-scale, computationally intensive projects that would not be possible or productive without access to PRACE resources. Applications for Project Access must use codes that have been previously tested and that demonstrate high scalability and optimisation to multi-core architectures or that demonstrate a requirement for ensemble simulations that need a very large amount of CPU overall. For additional information, please visit http://www.prace-ri.eu/.
CALL FOR PAPERS, TUTORIALS, PANELS: DATA ANALYTICS 2015, The Fourth International Conference on Data Analytics
July 19 - 24, 2015 - Nice, France
Submission Deadline – February 27, 2015
Processing of terabytes to petabytes of data, or incorporating non-structural data and multi-structured data sources and types require advanced analytics and data science mechanisms for both raw and partially processed information. Despite considerable advancements on high performance, large storage, and high computation power, there are challenges in identifying, clustering, classifying, and interpreting of a large spectrum of information. DATA ANALYTICS 2015 continues the inaugural event on fundamentals in supporting data analytics, special mechanisms and features of applying principles of data analytics, application-oriented analytics, and target-area analytics. For more information, please visit http://www.iaria.org/conferences2015/CfPDATAANALYTICS15.html.
Upcoming Workshops, Conferences and Webinars
4th International Workshop on Climate Informatics
September 25-26, 2014 - Boulder, Colorado
The amount of observational and model-simulated data within the climate sciences has grown at an accelerating rate since the early 1980s. The increasing amount of available data creates many opportunities for researchers in machine learning and statistics to partner with climate scientists in the development of new methods for interdisciplinary knowledge discovery. Climate informatics broadly refers to any research combining climate science with approaches from statistics, machine learning and data mining. The Climate Informatics workshop series, now in its third year, seeks to bring together researchers from all of these areas. We aim to stimulate the discussion of new ideas, foster new collaborations, grow the climate informatics community, and thus accelerate discovery across disciplinary boundaries. The format of the workshop seeks to overcome cross-disciplinary language barriers and to emphasize communication between participants by featuring tutorials, invited talks, panel discussions, posters and breakout sessions. For more information, please visit https://www2.image.ucar.edu/event/ci2014.
Workflows for Data Science Center of Excellence (WorDS) Scalable Bioinformatics Boot Camp
October 2-3, 2014 - San Diego Supercomputer Center, La Jolla, California
In the Big Data era, this boot camp will explain how you can turn your bioinformatics applications into scalable workflows by analyzing available options, techniques and tools. Learn about distributed platforms and systems, Cloud and Big Data, scalable workflow tools, making your science reproducible and gain hands-on- experience with bioKepler tools to build scalable bioinformatics workflows. Who should attend? Graduate students and researchers who are responsible for building bioinformatics and computational biology workflows, evaluating workflow systems as a means to conduct reproducible research, and curious to learn more about what workflows help with are welcome to attend. For registration and details, please visit http://words.sdsc.edu/events.
IEEE BigData 2014
October 27-30, 2014 - Washington DC
In recent years, The Program Committees of the 2014 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (IEEE BigData 2014) invite proposals for Workshops. Selected workshops will hold a central position within the larger conference, which will bring together top academic and industrial researchers from all over the world to exchange cutting edge research ideas in Big Data research, development and practice. Within these fields, workshops at BigData form crucial focal points for emerging communities and forums for the examination of new ideas. The IEEE Big Data conference is emerging as the premier venues for publications on "big data" in all its various aspects. In IEEE Big Data 2013 (http://www.ischool.drexel.edu/bigdata/bigdata2013/index.htm), it received 259 paper submissions for the main conference and 32 paper submissions for the industry and government program. Of those, 44 regular papers and 53 short papers were accepted, which translates into a selectivity that is on-par with top tier conferences. Also, there were 14 workshops associated with IEEE Big Data 2013 covering various important topics related to various aspects of Big Data research, development and applications. For more information, please visit http://cci.drexel.edu/bigdata/bigdata2014/callforworkshop.htm.
SC'14
November 16 – 21, 2014 - New Orleans, LA
HPC is helping to solve our hardest problems in the world. For more than two decades, the SC Conference has been the place to build and share the innovations that are making life-changing discoveries possible. Register and join the community in November to share our collective accomplishments and to engage in these important conversations. Register by October 15, 2014 at http://sc14.supercomputing.org/register. To read further, please visit http://sc14.supercomputing.org/.
Research News From Around the World
LLNL Supercomputers Being Used to Simulate Napa Earthquake
Lawrence Livermore seismologist Artie Rodgers is tapping into LLNL’s supercomputers to simulate the detailed ground motion of last month’s magnitude 6.0 south Napa earthquake. The Napa tremor is the largest to hit the Bay Area since the magnitude 6.9 Loma Prieta event in 1989. Using descriptions of the earthquake source from Professor Douglas Dreger of the University of California Berkeley Seismological Laboratory, Rodgers is determining how the details of the rupture process and 3D geologic structure, including the surface topography, may have impacted the ground motion. The earthquake ruptures from its epicenter south to north, directing energy toward Napa. To read further, please visit https://www.llnl.gov/news/newsreleases/2014/Sep/NR-14-09-03.html#.VBbgukg2SnA.
UC Irvine Team Studying Crowdprogramming
Campus Technology
An $800,000 award will enable two University of California, Irvine researchers to continue to explore crowdprogramming. The concept seeks to tap into a mass of people to provide input, generate ideas, or solve problems for software development. Adriaan van der Hoek and Thomas LaToza want to determine what aspects of software creation could be crowdsourced. They say the challenge in software development is "it is inherently non-uniform, steeped with dependencies, difficult to describe in terms of the functionality desired, and can be implemented in any number of ways." The researchers note people do not always know what they want at the beginning of a project, which means the workflow cannot be determined in advance. To read further, please visit http://campustechnology.com/articles/2014/07/24/uc-irvine-team-studying-crowdprogramming.aspx.
Educator News and Opportunities
| Computer science: It's where the jobs are, but schools don't teach it
By Dan Lewis
Special to the Mercury News Fifty-six percent of California public high schools don't offer a single course in computer science or programming. Why should you care? The Bureau of Labor Statistics says 1.4 million new jobs in computing will be created this decade. That's more than all the new jobs in all other science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields combined. Yet only about 400,000 students are expected to earn bachelor's degrees in computing during the same period. There won't be enough graduates to fill these jobs. By contrast, in engineering, life sciences, physical sciences and mathematics, the number of college graduates will exceed the number of jobs. There's a lot of talk within K-12 about the importance of STEM. But when it comes to curricula, computer science doesn't count toward California high school graduation requirements or toward the admission requirements in math or science for admission to the University of California. Computer science only counts as a free elective. To read further, please visit http://www.mercurynews.com/opinion/ci_26510658/computer-science-its-where-jobs-are-but-schools. | |
Using Technology To Support At-Risk Students
The Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education (SCOPE) today released research recommendations entitled: Using Technology to Support At-Risk Students’ Learning. The report found three important variables for success with at-risk students who are learning new skills.
- Interactive learning;
- Use of technology to explore and create rather than to “drill and kill”; and,
- The right blend of teachers and technology
The report makes the following recommendations:
1. Technology access policies should aim for one-to-one computer access.
2. Technology access policies should ensure that speedy internet connections are available to prevent user issues when implementing digital learning.
3. When procuring materials and technology, consider that at-risk students benefit most from technology that is designed to promote high levels of interactivity and engagement with data and information in multiple forms.
4. Curriculum and instructional plans should enable students to use technology to create content as well as to learn material.
5. Policymakers and educators should plan for blended learning environments, characterized by significant levels of teacher support and opportunities for interactions among students, as companions to technology use.
To read further and for more information, please visit https://edpolicy.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/scope-pub-using-technology-report.pdf.
If You Want to Be Rich and Powerful, Majoring in STEM Is a Good Place to Start
Quartz
Early education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is important not just because it builds the foundation for success in those fields, but for almost all aspects of modern life, writes Jonathan Wai, a researcher at the Duke University Talent Identification Program and Case Western Reserve University. He says education in mathematics in particular builds some of the key competencies--pattern recognition, abstract reasoning, and problem solving--necessary for success. Wai points to numerous billionaires including Carlos Slim and Steve Schwartzman, who credit their accumulated wealth to their facility with numbers. Wai's own research has found that nearly a quarter of the attendees of the annual gathering of the world's monied elite in Davos, Switzerland, have backgrounds in STEM fields, a number that jumps to almost 30 percent of the billionaires in attendance. To read further, please visit http://qz.com/240820/if-you-want-to-be-rich-and-powerful-majoring-in-stem-is-a-good-place-to-start/.
University of Iowa Looks to Start High School STEM Academy
The University of Iowa may soon be home to a new academy serving high school students who excel in math and science. The academy would serve as an expansion of the Belin-Blank Center, which educates gifted, primary and secondary-aged students from Iowa and throughout the world, by offering an intensive two-year program focused on STEM aimed at high school juniors and seniors. Although participating students would follow programs designed specifically for academy students, completed coursework would generate college credit as undergraduate students. To read further, please visit http://www.press-citizen.com/story/news/education/university-of-iowa/2014/09/09/ui-center-looks-start-high-school-stem-academy/15329805/.
Student Engagement and Opportunities
Meet Black Girls Code, The 2014 TechCrunch Include Grant Recipient
TechCrunch is excited to announce Black Girls Code as the recipient of the first TechCrunch Include Grant of $50,000. The mission of Black Girls Code aligns perfectly with the founding goals of the Include Grant by aiming to increase participation of women and girls of color in technology and computer science by facilitating early involvement in the field, moving them from being consumers of technology to creators of it. Through a series of after-school workshops and summer camps that leverage computer science with other disciplines, such as art, media, business and engineering, Black Girls Code drives engagement around girls’ existing interests.mOver 145 organizations from our own backyard of San Francisco to cities around the world applied to the program. These groups work across every demographic, including technical training and education, hosted hackathons and meetups. They build communities of founders and provide seed money. All of them advocate to make tech a more inclusive place. To read further, please visit http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/09/meet-black-girls-code-the-2014-techcrunch-include-grant-recipient/.
Webucator Announces High School STEM Program
Online courses offered free of charge to high school students. Technology is progressing at lightning speeds; from the phone in your pocket to the tools building our automobiles. As a technology professional, I can attest to the importance of learning and acquiring technical skills and knowledge. Today, more than ever before, organizations and companies around the globe are seeking intelligent and highly competent technology professionals. Technology is, and will continue to be, a driving factor in the success of our business and our economy. Webucator has developed a wide selection of self-paced technology courses, including courses on web development (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc.), Microsoft Office, and more. Effective immediately we are giving these courses away to US high school students. To see a list of available courses and to register, please visit http://www.webucator.com/blog/2014/09/webucator-announces-new-student-stem-program/.
Calling Kids of All Ages: US Patent and Trademark Office Launches Web Page Encouraging Invention and Science and Tech in School
Did you know that only one U.S. president earned a patent? Do you know which one? Have you ever wondered where the famous expression “The Real McCoy” comes from? The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) launched a newly redesigned section of its website for kids, but not kids alone! Parents, teachers, and teens will find lots of resources as well as hands-on activities for anyone from preschool to high school. The website encourages students of all ages to engage making, inventing, and discovering the importance of intellectual property. The site also exposes future inventors and entrepreneurs to the inventive thinking process. For more information please visit http://www.uspto.gov/about/offices/ous/education/.
NIST Global City Challenge Kick-Off
Kick Off Event - September 29-30, 2014
Registration Deadline - September 22, Gaithersburg, Maryland
As a follow-on to the Smart America Challenge, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), in partnership with US Ignite, is launching the Global City Teams Challenge to advance the deployment of Internet of Things technologies within a smart city or community. NIST hopes that the Challenge will encourage collaboration and the development of standards so that communities can benefit from the experience of others to improve efficiency and lower costs. For more information, please visit http://www.nist.gov/cps/sagc.cfm.
Five Miss America Contestants Will Win STEM Scholarships
Typically on the boardwalk of Atlantic City there is a lot of glamour and beauty during the Miss America pageant, but what gets overlooked is the contestants and the brains behind their beauty. In a world where women are constantly objectified for their image, it is important at the apex of that philosophy to see woman being praised for intelligence. The 53 contestants come from all over the country and U.S. territories like Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. The Miss America Foundation is the world’s largest provider of assistance to young women totaling more than 45 million dollar in scholarships each year. The STEM scholarship is for science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Numerous corporations and activist groups such as MomsEveryday are STEM scholarship sponsors To read further, please visit http://dailydigestnews.com/2014/09/5-miss-america-contests-will-win-stem-scholarship-sponsored-by-momseveryday/.
The Lighter Side
Hitchhiking Robot Embarks on Cross-Country Trek From Halifax to Victoria
Canadian Press
Researchers at Canada's Ryerson and McMaster universities have developed Hitchbot, a social-media-savvy robot that is hitchhiking its way from Halifax to Victoria. The talking robot is an interdisciplinary research project aimed at studying the changing relationship between people and technology. "Our society depends more and more on robots and we need to know more about our relationship to that kind of technology," says Ryerson professor Frauke Zeller. Hitchbot consists of spare parts usually found in a basement or hardware store. Despite its simple design, Hitchbot uses voice-recognition technology to reference Wikipedia and it is programmed to document its trip through social media using onboard Global-Positioning Systems. "Hitchbot really sits right in the middle of those interesting discussions about what are our future relationships with robots and what kind of cultural mood are we engaged in currently in terms of our sense of adventure and our wariness or not of strangers," says McMaster professor David Smith. To read further, please visit http://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/hitchhiking-robot-embarks-on-cross-country-trek-from-halifax-to-victoria-1.1933367.
Artificial Intelligence Identifies the Musical Progression of the Beatles
Lawrence Technological University
Lawrence Technological University (LTU) researchers have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm that can analyze and compare musical styles, enabling studies into the musical progression of bands such as the Beatles, Queen, and U2. The algorithm works by first converting each song to a spectrogram, or a video representation of the audio content. The images are analyzed by algorithms that turn each music spectrogram into a set of nearly 3,000 numeric descriptors reflecting visual aspects such as texture, shapes, and the statistical distribution of the pixels. Pattern recognition and statistical methods are then used to detect and quantify the similarities between different pieces of music. The LTU study analyzed 11 songs from each of the 13 Beatles studio albums and quantified the similarities between each song and the others in the study. The results for the individual songs were then used to compare the similarities between the albums. To read further, please visit http://www.ltu.edu/news/?_from=/news/press/index.asp&_opt=detail&_cid=782d5ada-5646-4b22-9625-2dec8b0e27ec
