XSEDE Happenings
Lack of Minority Representation in Science and Engineering Endangering US Economic Health: Rice University’s Tapia Speaks at XSEDE12
Rapid growth in certain segments of the nation’s population is pushing the country’s educational challenges to a crisis level, while too many of the “precious few” under-represented minority students pursuing science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) disciplines are dropping out or changing majors, according to Richard Tapia, an internationally known mathematician. Our concern with under-representation today does not stem from moral or ethical issues,” Tapia, a professor in the Department of Computational and Applied Mathematics at Rice University said during his keynote address to attendees of XSEDE12. To read further, please visit http://www.hpcwire.com/hpcwire/2012-07-26/lack_of_minority_representation_in_science_and_engineering_endangering_us_economic_health.html.
Upcoming Conferences and Workshops
HUBbub 2012: The HUBzero Conference
September 24-25, 2012 – Indianapolis, Indiana
HUBzero is a platform for creating web sites that support scientific research, education, and collaboration. Released as open source during HUBbub 2010 and a new version being released this year at HUBbub 2011, the HUBzero Platform is the basis of nanoHUB.org and 25 other sites, delivering hundreds of scientific tools and seminars to more than 450,000 visitors each year. HUBzero is supported by a consortium of universities including Purdue, Indiana, Clemson, and Wisconsin. See how the unique HUBzero solution has empowered a wide spectrum of projects in nanotechnology, healthcare research, and other areas of engineering and science. Learn through hands-on tutorials how to set up your own hub using HUBzero's open source software, how to create and publish scientific tools on your hub, how to connect the tools to computing clusters and other Grid resources, and how to add new capabilities to the platform For more information and to register, go to: http://hubzero.org/hubbub.
8th IEEE International Conference on eScience
October 8-12, 2012 – Chicago, Illinois
Researchers in all disciplines are increasingly adopting digital tools, techniques and practices, often in communities and projects that span disciplines, laboratories, organizations, and national boundaries. The eScience 2012 conference is designed to bring together leading international and interdisciplinary research communities, developers, and users of eScience applications and enabling IT technologies. The conference serves as a forum to present the results of the latest applications research and product/tool developments and to highlight related activities from around the world. Also, we are now entering the second decade of eScience and the 2012 conference gives an opportunity to take stock of what has been achieved so far and look forward to the challenges and opportunities the next decade will bring. A special emphasis of the 2012 conference is on advances in the application of technology in a particular discipline. Accordingly, significant advances in applications science and technology will be considered as important as the development of new technologies themselves. Further, we welcome contributions in educational activities under any of these disciplines. For more information, please visit http://www.ci.uchicago.edu/escience2012/
SACNAS
October 11-14, 2012 - Seattle, Washington
Registration Deadline – September 12, 2012
The 2012 SACNAS National Conference "Science, Technology, and Diversity for a Healthy World" will take place in Seattle, Washington. Join over 3,500 attendees for four days of scientific research presentations, professional development, networking, exhibits, culture, and community. One of the largest annual gatherings of minority scientists in the country, the interdisciplinary, inclusive, and interactive SACNAS National Conference motivates and inspires. For more information and to register, please visit https://sacnas.org/civicrm/event/info?reset=1&id=42.
EDUCAUSE
November 6-9, 2012 - Denver, Colorado
The EDUCAUSE Annual Conference is the premiere gathering for higher education IT professionals. It provides content and exploration of today's toughest technology issues facing campuses around the world, and convenes some of the brightest minds in the community. When colleagues from around the world converge with some of the most innovative corporate solution providers, you have an event that creates invaluable networking opportunities and professional development. For more information, please visit http://www.educause.edu/annual-conference.
SC12
November 10-16, 2012 - Salt Lake City, Utah
Exhibition - November 12-15, 2012
For 24 years, SC has been at the forefront in gathering the best and brightest minds in supercomputing together, with our unparalleled technical papers, tutorials, posters and speakers. SC12 will take a major step forward not only in supercomputing, but in super-conferencing, with everything designed to make the 2012 conference the most ‘you' friendly conference in the world. We're streamlining conference information and moving to a virtually real-time method of determining technical program thrusts. No more pre-determined technical themes picked far in advance. Through social media, data mining, and active polling, we'll see which technical interests and issues emerge throughout the year, and focus on the ones that interest you the most. For more information and to register, please visit http://sc12.supercomputing.org/content/exhibitor-prospectus.
XSEDE Training at a Glance.
Structured Data, Metadata and Provenance in the Context of Scientific Data Management Projects
August 23, 2012 – 3:00pm- 5:00pm CDT webinar
For more information, please visit https://www.xsede.org/web/xup/course-calendar/-/training/class/48.
XSEDE Training: Introduction to Scientific Visualization on Longhorn 9/6
September 6, 2012 – 9:00am- 5:00pm CDT in person workshop
For more information, please visit https://www.xsede.org/web/xup/course-calendar/-/training/class/50.
International Conference on Parallel Processing
September 10-13, 2012 – Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
For more information, please visit http://psc.edu/index.php/component/jevents/icalrepeat.detail/2012/09/10/28/53|55/international-conference-on-parallel-processing.
Extending High-Performance Computing Beyond its Traditional User Communities
October 8-9, 2012 – Chicago, Illinois
For more information, please visit http://psc.edu/index.php/component/jevents/icalrepeat.detail/2012/10/08/20/53|55/extending-high-performance-computing-beyond-its-traditional-user-communities-.
For a complete list of past and future XSEDE training opportunities, please visit https://www.xsede.org/web/xup/course-calendar.
Research Features from Across XSEDE and Campus Champion Partners
Indiana University Team Accelerates Gene Expression Software
Key software used to study gene expression now runs four times faster, thanks to performance improvements put in place by a team from the Indiana University Pervasive Technology Institute (PTI), the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and Technische Universität Dresden. The timesaving breakthroughs will allow bioinformaticians and biologists who study RNA sequences to analyze more data in a shorter amount of time. This will speed the understanding of biological processes in fields as diverse as ecology, evolution, biofuels and medicine. Robert Henschel and Richard D. LeDuc, of PTI and IU's National Center for Genome Analysis Support (NCGAS), announced the findings at the XSEDE12 conference in Chicago. Henschel and LeDuc, along with partners from the Broad Institute and the Center for Information Services and High Performance Computing (ZIH) at Technische Universität Dresden, teamed up to announce this advance in a fast-growing area of computational biology. To read further, please visit http://www.hpcwire.com/hpcwire/2012-07-17/indiana_university_team_accelerates_gene_expression_software.html.
UCSD, Yale Create Neuroscience Gateway
A new partnership is underway as the University of California San Diego (UCSD) and Yale University have been awarded a grant to build a neuroscience gateway. The three-year, $805,000, NSF-funded endeavor goes by the unwieldy name: "Advanced Biological Informatics Development: Building a Community Resource for Neuroscientists." While the moniker is quite a mouthful, the project aims to make neuroscience-based resources easily available to students and researchers. The partners have been tasked with delivering HPC storage and compute resources as a service for neurological researchers. The details of the grant call for the San Diego Supercomputing Center (SDSC) to build a software infrastructure, taking advantage of the existing Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF) project. To read further, please visit http://www.hpcinthecloud.com/hpccloud/2012-08-14/ucsd_yale_create_neuroscience_gateway.html.
Biomolecular Research Program Extended at Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center
The National Resource for Biomedical Supercomputing (NRBSC) at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) just completed soliciting proposals for another round of research with Anton, a special-purpose supercomputer designed by D. E. Shaw Research (DESRES) that has enabled researchers to achieve exceptional results in the simulation of biomolecules. Anton allows researchers to execute ultra-fast “molecular dynamics” (MD) simulations of proteins and nucleic acids, such as DNA and RNA, over much longer time periods than have previously been accessible to computational study. Insights into biomolecular structure and function facilitated by the use of Anton could potentially lead to the development of new and better therapeutic drugs and other improvements in disease treatment. “Anton performs MD simulations up to 100 times faster than conventional supercomputers,” says Markus Dittrich of NRBSC, “making it possible for the first time to simulate the behavior of proteins over more than a millisecond of biological time. The availability of these extended timescales has opened a new window on many important biological processes.” To read further, please visit http://psc.edu/index.php/newscenter/71-2012press/703-biomolecular-research-program-extended-at-psc.
University of Tennessee, Knoxville Engineering Team Develops Chip for Mars Rover
Universities of Tennessee at Knoxville (UT) researchers have designed a tiny microchip that is being used to help control the rover that recently landed on Mars. There are about 80 Quad Operational Amplifier (op amp) microchips powering the rover's 40 motors, without which the rover would not be able to traverse the Martian surface, collect samples with its robotic arm, or maneuver the cameras for sending back pictures. "These analog chips are in the motor controller electronics that make the camera move, pan around, go up and down," says UT professor Ben Blalock. The new chips can withstand 500 days of potential radiation exposure and temperatures ranging from -180 degrees Celsius to +120 degrees Celsius. "We not only had to design it to meet the Martian surface environment requirements, we also had to overdesign it to operate in environments even colder than -120 degrees Celsius to help enable reuse of the microchip for other extreme environment robotic missions in the future," Blalock says. To read further, please visit http://www.utk.edu/tntoday/2012/08/07/engineering-team-develops-chip-mars-rover-2/.
Educator News and Curriculum
PSC Delivers Training to Minority Institutions
A training program of the National Resource for Biomedical Supercomputing (NRBSC) at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) has taken a unique pro-active role toward filling the gap in scientific training at minority-serving institutions (MSIs). Since 2001, with funding from NIH’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences, PSC’s MARC (Minority Access to Research Careers) program has evolved from providing individual training in what was at first a newly emerging discipline, bioinformatics, to a focus on the development of curricula and research programs at partner universities. “We’ve implemented a multi-disciplinary course in sequence-based bioinformatics at more than 10 universities,” says PSC scientist Hugh Nicholas, who directs the MARC program. As of 2011, with renewal of the program from NIH for five years, the effort of Nicholas and his PSC colleagues, Troy Wymore and Alex Ropelewski, in working with five partner MSIs — North Carolina AT & T; University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez; Johnson C. Smith University; Tennessee State University; and Jackson State University — is to build a concentration or minor in bioinformatics. This expanded outreach reflects dramatic changes in bioinformatics, a field that over the last few years has exploded, because of powerful new sequencing technologies, with data to be analyzed and opportunities to do important research. To read further, please visit http://www.hpcwire.com/hpcwire/2012-07-05/pittsburgh_supercomputing_center_delivers_training_to_minority_institutions.html.
The 'Intelligent Textbook' That Helps Students Learn
The Inquire system aims to be the world's first intelligent textbook. The system, being developed by Vulcan, is an electronic version of Campbell Biology. It includes a machine-readable map of all the concepts covered in the printed textbook, as well as information on how they are related. When a student asks a question, the system converts it to a structured query, and then uses the question to search and find results from the concept map. The researchers recruited 72 De Aza College students to test the system. Students were either presented with the full Inquire system, the Inquire system with the query function deactivated, or a paper copy of Campbell Biology. They were then asked to spend an hour reading a section of the textbook, 90 minutes on homework problems, and to take a 20-minute quiz. Those students who used the full Inquire system scored a grade better on a quiz than the students who did not. To read further, please visit http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21528765.700-the-intelligent-textbook-that-helps-students-learn.html.
Student Engagement Opportunities and Information
Women in Technology (WIT) Supports Women Enrolled in STEM Programs
Women in Technology (WIT) has launched a program designed to serve as a support system for female college students enrolled in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) programs. WIT on Campus will offer events, internships, scholarships, and mentoring and networking opportunities. WIT has selected the Georgia Institute of Technology, Georgia State University, Gwinnett Tech, Kennesaw State University, and Spelman College as the pilot campuses for WIT on Campus. Gwinnett Tech's Philip Gibson notes WIT has long supported high school students and women working in technology, but the new program fills a gap by focusing on women in college. Atlanta has a number of female executives working in science and technology, says Cedric Stallworth, assistant dean of Georgia Tech's College of Computing. "Having them mentor our students would be meaningful to young women who are trying to figure out how to make career, marriage, and family all work," he says. To read further, please visit http://www.ajc.com/jobs/program-supports-women-enrolled-1489513.html.
Women Bridge Computer-Science Gap
Since 1984, the number of computer science degrees awarded to women has steadily declined, with just 13 percent of computer science graduates today being female. The reasons that few women pursue technology careers are complicated and varied, but the bigger picture is that the pipeline from elementary school to a computing career shrinks with each higher level of education, according to DePauw University professor Gloria Townsend, who has received a U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to encourage more women to explore computing as a career. "My own NSF grant works at the undergraduate and graduate school portions of the pipeline to create a number of regional areas where women in computing ... meet biennially at a conference to gain experience speaking and sharing research, networking with each other, interacting with industry sponsors who offer internships and jobs and listening to speakers who share realistic information about life in computing," Townsend says. To read further, please read http://www.chicagotribune.com/classified/jobs/chi-women-bridge-computerscience-gap-20120803,0,659958.story.
Student Cluster Competition Will Return to ISC'13
The HPC Advisory Council (HPCAC), a leading organization for high-performance computing research, outreach and education, and the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC), today announced the return and expansion of the widely successful HPCAC-ISC Student Cluster Competition in next year’s ISC’13 program of events. In a real-time challenge, 9 teams of undergraduate students will build a small cluster of their own design on the ISC’13 exhibit floor and race to demonstrate the greatest performance across a series of benchmarks and applications. To read further, please visit http://www.hpcwire.com/hpcwire/2012-08-13/student_cluster_competition_will_return_to_isc_13.html.
Rice University Offers August PhD Webinar Discussions: Proposal Writing & The Final Defense
Registration Deadlines – August 27 and August 29, 2012 respectively
The ELA Mentoring Program is excited to announce that we will be hosting two Ph.D. workshops in August. Both sessions will be led by presenters Dr. Rubin Landau, Dr. Renetta Tull and Dr. Wendy Carter-Veale.
Proposal Writing: Tuesday, August 28, 10AM Pacific, 12PM Central, 1PM Eastern. To register, please visit https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dDNheWZYUTBDcWNOTEFleVlmVVhhYkE6MA#gid=0 by Monday, August 27, 2012.
The Final Defense: Thursday, August 30, 10AM Pacific, 12PM Central, 1PM Eastern. To register, please visit https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dGt5dmNXOU1oRE5iUFlCSUZhVjdpWkE6MA#gid=0 by Wednesday, August 29, 2012.
Last But Not Least – Computational News of Interest
Touch Your Philodendron and Control Your Computer: Technology Turns Any Plant Into an Interactive Device
Disney Research scientists have developed Botanicus Interactus, technology that enables houseplants to control a computer or other digital device. Once a single wire is placed anywhere in the plant's soil, the technology can detect if and where a plant is touched. Botanicus Interactus is based on capacitive-touch sensing, the same principle underlying touchscreen technology. However, Disney's technology uses the Swept Frequency Capacitive Sensing technique to monitor capacitive signals across a wide range of frequencies, which makes it possible to detect how and where the plant is being touched. Machine-learning algorithms are used to recognize frequency changes associated with touches in particular locations on the plant. "Giving plants a voice, a possibility to respond and engage us, could lead to new forms of entertainment, enhance our lifestyles, and create a new computational platform that could be used for both education and entertainment," says Disney Research scientist Ivan Poupyrev. To read further, please visit http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/08/120806094053.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Latest+Science+News%29.
A Battery That Folds!
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) researchers have developed a super-thin, flexible, all-solid-state battery that could one day lead to phones and gadgets that can be folded. "The technological advance of thin and light flexible displays has encouraged the development of flexible batteries with a high power density and thermal stability," the KAIST researcher says. The advent of a high-performance, flexible, and thin film battery will accelerate the development of next-generation fully flexible electronic systems in combination with existing flexible components such as display, memory, and light-emitting diodes, the KAIST team notes. To read further, please visit http://www.eetindia.co.in/articleLogin.do?artId=8800672256&fromWhere=/ART_8800672256_1800004_NT_0c978568.HTM&catId=1800004&newsType=NT&pageNo=null&encode=0c978568.
Cornell Develops Technique to Share Personal Data While Keeping Secrets Safe
Cornell University researchers have developed a new mathematical technique that allows for the sharing of large data sets of personal data without compromising any one individual's privacy. "We want to make it possible for Facebook or the U.S. Census Bureau to analyze sensitive data without leaking information about individuals," says Colgate University professor Michael Hay, who helped develop the new technique while he was a researcher at Cornell. The Cornell researchers used an approach called crowd-blending privacy, which involves limiting how a data set can be analyzed to ensure that any individual record is indistinguishable from a large group of other records. "The hope is that because crowd-blending is a less strict privacy standard it will be possible to write algorithms that will satisfy it, and it could open up new uses for data," Hay says. To read further, please visit http://www.technologyreview.com/news/428733/how-to-share-personal-data-while-keeping-secrets/
