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Paul Messina Honored
Computing pioneer, renowned computer scientist, and former CACR Director Paul Messina has been presented with the distinguished Thomas Hart Benton Mural Medallion at Indiana University. “Paul Messina, Indiana University salutes you. Throughout your distinguished career, your work helped lay the foundation for grid and cloud computing, and helped bring parallel computing technology to the forefront of scientific computing,” said IU President Michael McRobbie.
“Paul established the effective use of high-performance computing at Caltech, and was instrumental in showing the broader research community its potential for advancing science at the national scale. His legacy lives on at CACR to this day, for which we are grateful, and we salute his accomplishments” said Mark Stalzer, CACR’s current director.
(Read more at http://www.isgtw.org/spotlight/computing-pioneer-honored-big-red-ii-dedication)
Image courtesy Amber Harmon.
Computing pioneer, renowned computer scientist, and former CACR Director Paul Messina has been presented with the distinguished Thomas Hart Benton Mural Medallion at Indiana University. “Paul Messina, Indiana University salutes you. Throughout your distinguished career, your work helped lay the foundation for grid and cloud computing, and helped bring parallel computing technology to the forefront of scientific computing,” said IU President Michael McRobbie.
“Paul established the effective use of high-performance computing at Caltech, and was instrumental in showing the broader research community its potential for advancing science at the national scale. His legacy lives on at CACR to this day, for which we are grateful, and we salute his accomplishments” said Mark Stalzer, CACR’s current director.
(Read more at http://www.isgtw.org/spotlight/computing-pioneer-honored-big-red-ii-dedication)
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Thursday April 11, 2013
1:00pm
Powell-Booth Room 100
“Turning Large Simulations into Numerical Laboratories”
Alex Szalay, Alumni Centennial Professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy, The Johns Hopkins University
The talk will discuss how large (100TB+) supercomputer-scale simulations can be turned into interactive public laboratories. Examples include simulations of turbulence and various cosmological simulations, soon to reach the PB scale.
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The central disk of our Milky Way galaxy with the Gemini stellar stream highlighted in the top right of the image. Credit: Andrew Drake/Axel Mellinger
A stream of at least 150 ancient variable stars has been confirmed to extend some 130,000 light years beyond our own galaxy’s stellar halo — on the fringes of the Intergalactic Medium, where aside from hot gas and dark matter, space-time becomes as sparse as the deep Sahara. The confirmation, based on analysis of 10 billion year-old dying RR Lyrae stars in the Gemini constellation, was done by an international team of astronomers, including CACR scientist Andrew Drake, who report their findings in The Astrophysical Journal.
(Read the full story)
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Jan 31, 2013 1:00 PM
Keith Spalding 410
Andrew Drake, CACR
We have performed an extensive search for RR Lyrae among the 500 million sources observed by the Catalina Surveys. We detect ~26,000 type-AB RR Lyrae (of which 20,000 are new discoveries) from a region spanning 3/4 of the sky. By determining accurate distances to the stars, we investigate the spatial distribution of structures within the Milky Way halo. Combining the RR Lyrae distances with SDSS spectroscopy we are able accurately trace the velocities and metallicities of hundreds of sources within the Sagittarius tidal streams system. We find the first strong evidence for a dense tidal stream that overlaps the Sagittarius system to distances beyond 100kpc, yet remains unexplained by any existing model.
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Tuesday, January 29th
12:00 – 1:00pm
105 Annenberg
*Lunch will be provided*
SPEAKER:
Alexandre Cunha
Center for Advanced Computing Research and Elliot Meyerowitz Lab, Caltech
TITLE:
Collaborative Image Analysis with the Masses: Challenges and Opportunities
ABSTRACT:
Extracting reliable quantitative information from digital images in an automatic fashion continues to be a difficult task. In many situations classical and contemporary algorithms only provide partial and sub-optimal results that might not be sufficient to carry on research studies thus leading practitioners to rely on manual annotations. We present our work on collaborative image segmentation, an online crowdsourcing system where computers, experts, and non-experts cooperate to produce robust results supporting the research of plant biologists. We address some of the technical and nontechnical challenges in building such a system and discuss the potential in employing the vision of crowds to help solve image processing problems which are still poorly solved by computers alone.
This is a work in progress in collaboration with Elliot Meyerowitz lab at Caltech and with Tsang Ing Ren lab at UFPE, Brazil.
