Distinguished Lecture Series 2007/2008
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Integration of Physical and Virtual
Environments in Work and at Play Dr. Henry Fuchs Date: Thursday, October 25, 2007 In this talk we describe techniques to improve the office environment in this age when most activities are computer-related. Many of these techniques use projectors and cameras to create displays on walls and other surfaces. The projector images often overlap with each other and with flat screen displays to create large, seamless high-resolution imagery that can drape over nearly every surface in the room. The cameras also detect the distortions caused by projecting onto corners and other irregularities. These distortions can be largely eliminated by appropriate pre-distortion of the projected images so the final imagery looks correct from the user's point of view. With display imagery everywhere, more user application windows can visible simultaneously and placed permanently where convenient. With sufficient number of cameras in the room, the 3D structure of the environment can also be computed, and when multiple such rooms are connected, video teleconferencing can be accomplished in 3D, approaching what some are starting to call "telepresence." The cameras can be used not just to capture imagery, but for real-time user tracking, as well as to facilitate document recognition, storage, indexing and retrieval. As for the projected imagery, as the number of projectors increases, the enhanced synthesized environment becomes increasingly immersive, and thus increasingly effective for immersive training and play. Applications of these ideas to medical consultation and to flight training will also be described. In short, the future office personal computer will not be merely a laptop with an extra screen, but rather a system immersively integrated with the physical space of the room, supporting a far richer display and interaction environment. |
| Henry Fuchs is the Federico Gil Professor of Computer Science, Adjunct Professor of Biomedical Engineering, and Adjunct Professor of Radiation Oncology at UNC Chapel Hill. He has been active in computer graphics since the early 1970s, with rendering algorithms (BSP Trees), hardware (Pixel-Planes and PixelFlow), virtual environments, tele-immersion systems and medical applications. He received a Ph.D. in 1975 from the University of Utah. He was a member of the faculty of the University of Texas at Dallas from 1975 to 1978. He joined the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1978. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the recipient of the 1992 ACM-SIGGRAPH Achievement Award, and the 1992 Academic Award of the National Computer Graphics Association. | |
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An Overview of High Performance
Computing and Four Research Areas of Importance Dr. Jack Dongarra Date: Monday, November 26, 2007 In this talk we examine how high performance computing has changed over the last 10 years and look toward the future in terms of trends. These changes have had and will continue to have a major impact on our software. We will look at four areas of research that will have an importance impact in the development of mathematical software. |
| Jack Dongarra received his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the University of New Mexico in 1980. He worked at the Argonne National Laboratory until 1989, becoming a senior scientist. He now holds appointments as University Distinguished Professor of Computer Science in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of Tennessee, Distinguished Research Staff member in the Computer Science and Mathematics Division at Oak Ridge National tory (ORNL), Turing Fellow in the Computer Science and Mathematics Schools at the University of Manchester, and Adjunct Professor in the Computer Science Department at Rice University. He was awarded the IEEE Sid Fernbach Award in 2004 for his contributions in the application of high performance computers using innovative approaches. He is a Fellow of the AAAS, ACM, and the IEEE and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. | |
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Tools and Approaches for Large-scale
Parallel Computing Dr. Ewing "Rusty" Lusk Date: Wednesday, March 5, 2008 |
| Ewing "Rusty" Lusk received his B.A. in mathematics from the University of Notre Dame in 1965 and his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Maryland in 1970. He is currently a Distinguished Argonne Fellow and Director of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory. His current projects include implementation of the MPI Message-Passing Standard, parallel performance analysis tools, and system software for clusters. He is a leading member of the team responsible for the MPICH implementation of the MPI message-passing interface standard. He is the author of five books and more than a hundred research articles in mathematics, automated deduction, and parallel computing. | |
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Saving the Digital World Dr. Francine Berman Date: Wednesday, May 14, 2008 The Information Age has brought with it a deluge of digital data. Current estimates are that in 2006, 161 exabytes (10^18 bytes) of digital data were created. Digital content from cell phones, computers, iPods, DVDs, etc. drive modern commerce, research, entertainment, and life. In the science and engineering community, digital data from sensors, satellites, scientific instruments, computers, and other sources provide a critical foundation for modern discovery and education. The Information Age brings both immense opportunities and difficult challenges. Storing the most valuable of our digital data over the long term, rendering it useful for communities of research, education, and practice, and making today's torrent of data available to users (terabytes to petabytes from some scientific instruments alone) provide compelling challenges and opportunities for today's information technologists. The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) is a national Center leading the development and deployment of a comprehensive infrastructure for managing, storing, preserving, and using digital data. Leveraging ongoing collaborations with the research community (National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, etc.), data preservation and archival communities (Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration) and other partners, SDSC is providing innovative leadership in the emerging area of Data Cyberinfrastructure. In this talk, SDSC Director Fran Berman discusses SDSC's approach to building and deploying data-oriented computational and data cyberinfrastructure, and describes the next generation of challenges and opportunities for the data that drives the Information Age. |
| Dr. Francine Berman is a pioneer in Grid Computing and an international leader in Cyberinfrastructure. She holds the High Performance Computing Endowed Chair in UCSD's Computer Science and Engineering Department. Since 2001, Dr. Berman has served as Director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) where she leads a staff of 400 interdisciplinary scientists, engineers, and technologists in the innovation, development, and provision of computational and information infrastructure. Dr. Berman is one of the two founding Principal Investigators of the National Science Foundation's TeraGrid project (providing national Grid infrastructure), and also directed the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI), a consortium of 41 research groups, institutions, and university partners with the goal of building national infrastructure to support research and education in science and engineering. Dr. Berman is currently co-chairing an international Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access. For her accomplishments, leadership, and vision, Dr. Berman was recognized in 2004 as one of the top women in technology by BusinessWeek, as one of the top technologists by IEEE Spectrum, and most recently as a leader in science and technology by Newsweek. |