Upcoming Workshops and Conferences
2012 Summer NCSI/XSEDE Workshops – Register Today!
The 2012 NCSI/XSEDE workshops for undergraduate faculty, pre-college teachers, postdocs, grad students, and undergrads accompanying a faculty member is now open for registration!! Preference for locations has been given to campuses developing computational science programs and committing to substantial local participation.
New in 2012
This year, not all workshops are one-week in length. Additionally, there are a limited number of travel scholarships.
2012 Workshops
Shodor/NCSI 2012 Workshops
A limited number of travel scholarships are available to faculty interested in attending the workshops. The scholarships will provide partial or full reimbursement of travel costs to and from the workshops and/or local housing costs. Preference will be given to faculty from institutions that are formally engaged with the XSEDE education program and to those who can provide some matching travel funds. Recipients are expected to be present for the full workshop. If you are interested in a travel scholarship, please visit http://www.computationalscience.org/scholarship. Scholarship applications can be submitted after you apply for the workshop and is available from the page where you review your application. For a complete list of workshops and workshop locations, please visit http://www.shodor.org/succeed/workshops/current/. For more information about Shodor, please visit http://shodor.org/. For more information about NCSI, please visit http://computationalscience.org/.
XSEDE Happenings
XSEDE12 Visualization Showcase Submissions Due May 15, 2012
A reminder from XSEDE12 - the deadline for viz abstract submissions is Tuesday, May 15, 2012. Take advantage of this opportunity to highlight your work on screen during the Viz Showcase, Wednesday, July 18. The event occurs during Student Day at the XSEDE12 conference and is followed by an evening reception. Submission details are in the Call For Participation:
https://www.xsede.org/web/xsede12/call-for-participation#02 Please encourage your colleagues and collaborators to submit, and spread the word to others to participate.
Students: Participate in the XSEDE12 Student Program!
XSEDE12, the first conference of XSEDE, the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment, will be held July 16-19, 2012, at the InterContinental hotel in downtown Chicago.
XSEDE provides high-performance computational resources and services for scientists and researchers around the world.
If you are a high school, undergraduate, or graduate student and are interested or engaged in computational research, we encourage you to participate in the XSEDE12 Student Program. Attend introductory tutorials tailored for students new to computational science or more advanced tutorials designed to help you get the most out of XSEDE resources.
- Present your research that uses XSEDE or OSG resources by submitting a paper to our Technical Program.
Pending final approval, the National Science Foundation may provide limited funding to support student travel, lodging, and/or registration costs for attending XSEDE12.
For details on submitting posters and papers, see the Call for Participation:
https://www.xsede.org/web/xsede12/call-for-participation. To apply for travel funding, see the Student Program Support Request:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/XSEDE12StuProg
Research Features from Across XSEDE and Campus Champion Partners
With Shared Memory in Pittsburgh, XSEDE Expands Horizons for HPC Research
Times are changing for HPC (high-performance computing) research, as non-traditional fields of study have begun taking advantage of powerful HPC tools. This was part of the plan when the National Science Foundation’s XSEDE (Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment) program launched in July 2011. In recent months, the program took big steps toward this objective, in that a number of non-traditional projects — the common denominator being the need to process and analyze large amounts of data — were awarded peer-reviewed allocations of time on XSEDE resources. “We’re happy to see these proposals succeed,” said Sergiu Sanielevici of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), who leads XSEDE’s program in Novel and Innovative Projects (NIP). “As a brand new initiative in XSEDE, the NIP team proactively stimulates the development of strong projects that focus on interesting kinds of research that differ from the more typical simulation and modeling applications that have dominated HPC research in previous decades.” To read further, please visit, http://psc.edu/publicinfo/news/2012/032912_HPC_XSEDE.php.
TACC Preparing for Many-Core
The Texas Advanced Computing Center recently hosted the Intel Highly Parallel Computing Symposium, which showcased the experiences of researchers who had ported their scientific computing codes to Intel's Knights Ferry software development platform, the prototype hardware and software development package for Intel's Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture. More than 100 participants from many sectors of the science and technology community attended the symposium. Intel engineers James Reinders and Tim Mattson focused on the goals and research processes that led to the development of Intel's MIC architecture, and the ecosystem of libraries, kernels, and programming paradigms that Intel hopes will make its new coprocessors a long-term success in the high-performance computing community. To read further, please visit http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/news/feature-stories/2012/preparing-for-many-core.
Purdue Researcher Helps Robots 'See' in 3-D Like Humans
Purdue University researchers are developing technology that will enable robots to "see" more like humans do. "Research in the field of robotic vision has typically focused on recording and analyzing [two-dimensional] images, but really it is about [three-dimensional (3D)] visual perception--being able to understand the 3D scene in front of the robot so that it can decide what needs to be done with an object that is in its field of view," says Purdue professor Zygmunt Pizlo. The researchers are developing a model of decision-making to mimic the human mind. "This process eliminates the need for additional range sensors currently used for robotic vision and reduces the time and complexity of robotic sight," Pizlo says. To read further, please visit http://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/research_park_foundation/2012/120502PizloRobotVision.html.
UC San Diego Scientists Uncover Strong Support for Once-Marginalized Theory on Parkinson’s Disease
University of California, San Diego scientists have used powerful computational tools and laboratory tests to discover new support for a once-marginalized theory about the underlying cause of Parkinson’s disease. The new results conflict with an older theory that insoluble intracellular fibrils called amyloids cause Parkinson’s disease and other neurodegenerative diseases. Instead, the new findings provide a step-by-step explanation of how a “protein-run-amok” aggregates within the membranes of neurons and punctures holes in them to cause the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. The discovery, published in the March 2012 issue of the FEBS Journal, describes how α-synuclein (a-syn), can turn against us, particularly as we age. Modeling results explain how α-syn monomers penetrate cell membranes, become coiled and aggregate in a matter of nanoseconds into dangerous ring structures that spell trouble for neurons. To read further, please visit http://www.sdsc.edu/News%20Items/PR042512_parkinsons.html.
NSF Says 'Big Data' Could Remake Science--and Government
Big data is capable of transforming scientific research by switching it from a hypothesis-driven field into one that is data-driven, says Farnam Jahanian, head of the U.S. National Science Foundation's Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate. However, Jahanian notes that before this can be achieved, it will be necessary to secure upfront investment from the government and the private sector to build the infrastructure for data analysis and new collaboration tools. The field of big data analysis seeks to sort through vast data stores to gather intelligence and identify new patterns. Last year the U.S. President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology found a gap in the private sector's investment in basic big data research and development, and in March U.S. officials announced that the government will invest $200 million in research grants and infrastructure building for big data. To read further, please visit http://www.nextgov.com/big-data/2012/05/big-data-could-remake-science-and-government/55549/.
Big Data's Big Problem: Little Talent
A shortage of data scientists capable of providing analysis is an impediment to realizing the advantages of mining big data, according to a recent McKinsey report. Bit.ly chief scientist Hilary Mason says key skills for data scientists include modeling and understanding the data set mathematically, and extracting insights and narratives from the data. Transforming data into information and action is the most challenging aspect of a data analyst's job, and University of Southampton professor Nigel Shadbolt points to the current lack of courses for training data analysts. "As an integrated discipline it is only just starting to emerge," he notes. EMC Corp. president Pat Gelsinger says data science will become a new discipline much like computer science did 30 years ago. "Now nobody has a data-science department; in 30 years every school on the planet will have one," he says. To read further, please visit http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304723304577365700368073674.html.
Intel Researchers Plot a Smarter, Personalized Cloud
Intel researchers recently launched a project to populate neighborhoods with sensors that provide a more accurate picture of elements such as pollution and weather. Intel's Terrance O'Shea says the plan involves gathering weather and air quality information from the sensors, finding the user's exact position, and delivering accurate information for that location using a personalized cloud service. Intel has designed a pollution sensor chip that can be installed in stores and other locations in the neighborhood. The stores carrying sensors can make money by delivering advertisements through cloud services. Intel already is planning a future redesign of its chips that will be equipped with near-threshold voltage technology, which enables central processing units to operate at extremely low voltage levels. To read further, please visit http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9226618/Intel_researchers_plot_a_smarter_personalized_cloud.
Game On! UCLA Researchers Use Online Crowd-Sourcing to Diagnose Malaria
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) researchers have developed a crowdsourcing online gaming system that asks players to distinguish malaria-infected red blood cells from healthy ones by viewing digital images taken from microscopes. The researchers found that a small group of non-experts playing the game was collectively able to diagnose malaria-infected red blood cells with an accuracy that was within 1.25 percent of the diagnostic decisions made by trained medical professionals. "The idea is, if you carefully combine the decisions of people--even non-experts--they become very competitive," says UCLA professor Aydogan Ozcan. The researchers believe that by training thousands of members of the public to identify malaria through their crowdsourced game, a much greater number of diagnoses could be made more quickly. "The idea is to use crowds to get collectively better in pathologic analysis of microscopic images, which could be applicable to various telemedicine problems," says UCLA's Sam Mavandadi. To read further, please visit http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/ucla-researchers-create-crowd-232803.aspx.
Educator Curriculum and Opportunities
Harvard and M.I.T. Team Up to Offer Free Online Courses
Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced a plan to offer free massively open online courses under their edX partnership. Overseeing edX will be a nonprofit organization that Harvard and MIT will govern equally, and each school has pledged $30 million to the initiative. EdX's inaugural president will be Anant Agarwal, director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, while Harvard's contribution will be supervised by provost Alan M. Garber. University officials say the new online platform would be used to research educational technologies and methods as well as to build a global community of online students. Included in the edX project will be engineering courses and humanities courses, in which crowdsourcing or software may be used to grade essays. Harvard Corporation's Lawrence S. Bacow says education technology currently lacks "an online platform that gives faculty the capacity to customize the content of their own highly interactive courses." To read further, please visit http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/03/education/harvard-and-mit-team-up-to-offer-free-online-courses.html?_r=1.
Struggle Continues to Plug Embedded Programming Gap
Critics say the growing embedded programming gap can be attributed to university curriculums for introductory computer science courses, which recently have focused more on Java than other languages. "Many universities went to Java because ‘that’s where the jobs are,’ but ironically may have produced a generation of programmers with over-specific but superficial skills who are now losing jobs to overseas competition with broader and deeper talents," says New York University professor Robert Dewar. "To be blunt, adopting Java to replace previous languages used in introductory programming courses, such as Pascal, Ada, C, or C++, was a step backward pedagogically." In response, Industry expert Michael Barr recently created the Embedded Software Boot Camp, which focuses on skills such as controlling hardware in C or C++ and writing more formal device drivers. The most recent embedded boot camp attracted programmers from Belgium, Canada, Mexico, Turkey and the United States, illustrating the lack of emphasis on embedded programming. To read further, please visit http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4372250/Struggle-continues-to-plug-embedded-programming-gap.
MIT CS4HS Creative Computing Workshop
August 8-11, 2012 – MIT Media Lab
Deadline to enter the participant raffle: Monday, May 21, 2012.
The ScratchEd Team at the MIT Media Lab is hosting its 4th annual Creative Computing summer workshop, held in collaboration with Google's CS4HS initiative. New educational technologies will be explored and instructional strategies to engage students in creative design activities -- and, in the process, help students develop as computational thinkers and computational creators. The workshop will feature technologies developed at the MIT Media Lab, with presentations and demonstrations by Media Lab researchers. Hands-on sessions will focus on Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu), an easy-to-use programming environment that enables students to create interactive stories, games, animations, and simulations. As students create and share Scratch projects, they learn to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively -- while also learning important mathematical and computational ideas. The workshop is open to all media specialists, technology coordinators, computer-science teachers, and others who focus on the integration of new technologies into elementary, middle, and high school classrooms. The workshop costs $80 per participant -- this covers parking, meals and workshop materials. Housing and travel are not included in the registration fee. Workshop participants will be selected by a lottery process. For more information, see http://cs4hs.media.mit.edu
Summer Computational Workshops Offered to Educators Through National Computational Science Institute and XSEDE
Several workshops are being held around the country this summer, aimed at educators who want to introduce or expand the use of computational resources in their classrooms. Faculty who are teaching at the college level, especially from Minority-Serving Institutions, are encouraged to apply. Applications from secondary school teachers in appropriate disciplines will be accepted on a space-available basis. A limited number of travel scholarships are available to interested faculty. The scholarships will provide partial or full reimbursement of travel costs to and from the workshops and/or local housing costs. Preference will be given to faculty from institutions that are formally engaged with the education program of XSEDE — Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment — and those institutions that can provide some matching travel funds. Recipients are expected to be present for the full workshop. Those interested in a travel scholarship should register for the desired workshop, and then create an account and complete the scholarship application at
http://www.computationalscience.org/login?came_from=/scholarship
Student Engagement Opportunities and Information
2012 STARS Celebration
August 11 – 13, 2012 - Hampton, Virginia
Join the 2012 STARS Celebration, an annual leadership conference that allows for student, faculty, and industry partners to share and disseminate their best practices among their colleagues from across the country. An integral part of the STARS Computing Corps, the Celebration showcases the accomplishments of the Corps’ past year, while simultaneously introducing fresh ideas to excite participants in their continued mission of broadening participation through student-led regional engagement. Through our dedication to recruiting, retaining, and engaging the brightest minds in computing, we are building and preparing a larger, more diverse national computing workforce for the 21st Century. For more information and to apply, please visit http://www.starsalliance.org/celebration/2012/.
NASA's National Community College Aerospace Scholars Program at NASA Johnson Space Center
Application Deadline - June 1, 2012
National Community College Aerospace Scholars (NCAS) is a program funded by NASA's Exploration Systems Mission Directorate (ESMD) and the Minority University Research and Education Program (MUREP) and administered by NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC). Community college students from across the nation who are interested in the areas of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics will apply to travel to NASA for a three-day experience. This opportunity will provide a hands-on project featuring engineering career possibilities. Selected students will begin the semester commitment with Web-based preparation prior to their onsite visit. The only cost to the student is a $30 registration fee; NASA covers travel (up to $700), food, and lodging. For more information and to apply, please visit http://ncas.aerospacescholars.org/apply.
Alabama Computer Science Camps
July 16- August 3, 2012 – University of Alabama
The University of Alabama Department of Computer Science within the College of Engineering will host a series of Computer Science camps. High School students have the option to stay in our dormitories as residential campers (the 2011 camps had students attending from 7 states). Students will be taught multiple topics of Computer Science while learning to program a computer in several exciting contexts (e.g., game programming in Java, robotics in Java, and Android smartphone programming in App Inventor and Java). For more information, please visit http://www.cs.ua.edu/outreach/camps/ or contact Dr. Jeff Gray at gray@cs.ua.edu.
UC Berkeley Undergraduates Take Top Honors in UC-Sponsored Big Ideas Competition
Student teams' development of innovative tools has earned them awards in the University of California (UC) Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society's recent Big Ideas competition. Winning first prize in the contest was Politify, an algorithm developed by UC Berkeley undergraduates Nikita Bier and Jeremy Blalock that enables anyone to enter a few simple facts about themselves to determine how presidential candidates' agendas will impact their lives and the U.S. government. "I wanted to find a way to quantify [candidates'] proposals," Bier says. "We read their Web sites, and we wrote direct mathematical algorithms for what they propose." Politify has drawn 250,000 uses and is fueling interest among both Democrats and Republicans. To read further and learn about additional winning entries, please visit http://research.universityofcalifornia.edu/stories/2012/05/big-ideas.html.
News at 11:00: XSEDE Partners and Staff in the News
PSC Scientist Phil Blood Talks About XSEDE for RCE-CAST
Philip Blood received his Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the University of Utah where, using massively parallel molecular dynamics simulations on NSF supercomputers, he studied how proteins remodel cellular membranes. In 2007, Philip joined the Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center (PSC) as a Senior Scientific Specialist. He currently works with scientists in the fields of computational chemistry, biophysics, bioinformatics, economics, and various other disciplines to advance science through supercomputing. Philip also works in the XSEDE Campus Champions program, an effort to help more researchers at U.S. institutions take advantage of the national supercomputing resources available through XSEDE. To hear the presentation, please visit http://www.rce-cast.com/components/com_podcast/media/63RCE-Xsede.mp3
Last But Not Least – Items of Interest
Robot Sensing and Smartphones to Help Blind Navigate
Edwige Pissaloux and colleagues at Pierre and Marie Curie University's Institute of Intelligent Systems and Robotics have developed technology that could eventually let blind users navigate their surroundings without assistance. The system features glasses outfitted with cameras and sensors like those employed in robot exploration, and it generates a three-dimensional map of the user's environment and their position in it, which is continuously updated and displayed on a handheld electronic Braille device. The system produces nearly 10 maps each second, which are transmitted to the Braille device and displayed as a dynamic tactile map. Pissaloux says the Braille map's update speed is sufficient for a visually impaired wearer to navigate an area at walking speed. Other robotics technology being applied to help the visually impaired includes software that predicts how far a robot has traveled according to on-board sensor data, which is being tweaked to track a person's movements based on the length of their stride. To read further, please visit http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21428625.700-robot-sensing-and-smartphones-help-blind-navigate.html.
21st Century Cities--and Microsoft's Energy-Smart Buildings
Microsoft's Innovation & Policy Center recently hosted a panel discussion on 21st Century Cities as part of the @Microsoft Conversation series. The panel discussed the technology and policy opportunities and challenges involved in making cities smarter and more energy efficient. Microsoft's Rob Bernard says Microsoft researchers are working with partners to develop analytics and visualization tools that allow for the effective integration and analysis of data from new and existing sensors and systems. He says the project, which is in its first phase of deployment, is already producing benefits and savings. One source is the integration of information that enables Microsoft to operate its buildings more efficiently, according to Bernard. Future opportunities include improving algorithms, rules, and tools that could lead to more effective presentations of the information and better decision-making. To read further, please visit http://www.cccblog.org/2012/04/26/.
What Online Social Networks May Know About Non-Members
Heidelberg University researchers have found that through network analytical and machine-learning tools the relationships between members and the connection patterns to non-members can be evaluated with regards to non-member relationships. The researchers used contact data to correctly predict that two non-members know each other with about 40 percent reliability. "Once confirmed friendships are known, predicting certain unknown properties is no longer that much of a challenge for machine learning," says Heidelberg professor Fred Hamprecht. In an online social network it is possible to infer information about non-members using friend-finder applications. The Heidelberg researchers made their calculations using a standard procedure of machine learning based on network analytical structural properties. The separation of members and non-members was modeled using a wide possible range of simulations, and these partitions were used to validate the study results. Using standard computers, the researchers were able to calculate which non-members were most likely friends of each other in just a few days. To read further, please visit http://www.uni-heidelberg.de/presse/news2012/pm20120430_netzwerke_en.html.
