News
UDRF Awards Funding
Soil moisture is critical to plant growth and thus food security. Rodrigo Vargas Ramos, assistant professor of plantand soil sciences, using a combination of mathematical models and HPC techniques, will create a global map of soil moisture representing every day from 1980 to 2015. His collaborator and mentor is Michela Taufer, David and Beverly C. Mills Career Development Chair of Computer and Information Sciences.
HPC Leadership
Established in 1988, the annual SC conference has grown in size and impact. Approximately 5,000 people participate in the technical program, with about 11,000 people overall. “This is a well-deserved honor for Prof. Taufer and marks heras one of a few recognized leaders in the field of HPC,” says CIS chair Kathy McCoy.
Highly Cited Researcher
Professor Wu is in the top one percent by citation in Reuters ‘Web of Knowledge. “This is indeed a great honor and an acknowledgement of the impact of our cross-disciplinary team science — research excellence that has been achieved by our entire team of faculty, students and scientific staff at the University of Delaware and our collaborators at partner institutions nationally and internationally,” Wu said.
HPC Star
Professor Sunita Chandrasekaran has won one of three 2016 IEEE-CS TCHPC Awards for Excellence for Early Career Researchers in High Performance Computing. The award recognizes individuals who have made outstanding, influential, and potentially long-lasting contributions within five years of receiving their doctoral degrees.
Reproducing Results
Professor Michela Taufer is a co-author on the paper Enhancing Reproducibility for Computational Methods, published online in the journal Science. The paper emerged from the Reproducibility Session at the AAAS Forum on Science and Technology Policy, held in Washington, D.C., on May 1-2, 2014.
CIS Distinguished Lecture Series
Francine Berman is Edward P. Hamilton Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Senate-appointed member of the National Council on the Humanities. Her lecture, “Got Data? Building a Sustainable Data Ecosystem,” will take place at the Roselle Center for the Arts on Tuesday, Dec. 6, from 2-3:15 p.m.
Eager Grant
Professor Shatkay is spending her sabbatical at an unusual place for a computer scientist – a hospital. An expert in computational biology and medical informatics, she is applying machine learning methods to electrocardiograms that have been annotated by experts at Johns Hopkins to identify which signals in the echo images indicate trouble and where to measure the heart for the greatest accuracy.
GPU Computing
GPU Education Centers are institutions recognized for integrating GPU-accelerated computing into their mainstream science and engineering curricula. Sunita Chandrasekaran, assistant professor of computer science, will direct the effort at UD. Chandrasekaran explains that GPU-accelerated computing is the use of a graphics processing unit together with a central processing unit to overcome the power and space limitations inherent in previous generations of high-performance.
SPARC-ing Ideas
On Tuesday, Sept. 20, the ribbon was cut on the new facility, which features inspiring quotes on the wall, rolling whiteboards, comfortable furniture, and screens for sharing ideas. Department Chair Kathleen McCoy envisions the SPARC Lab providing valuable opportunities for students to learn how to work together and “become good computer scientists.” “I think we’re going to see great things coming out of this space,” she says. “It will be a place where a lot of good work will get done.”
New Named Professor
Lori Pollock has been named Alumni Distinguished Professor effective Sept. 1. “Lori has a rich record of accomplishment, and she is a role model for faculty in both her accomplishments and how she approaches the job,” said Errol Lloyd. “She has been recognized locally and nationally for her contributions to computer science education, her research, her service to the profession, and her mentorship of students and young faculty.”
Cisters Goes National
CISTERS is a well established group that brings together women in technology-driven fields at the University of Delaware. CISTERS now has become an official ACM-W student chapter. A sub-group of the Association of Computing Machinery, ACM-W celebrates, supports, and advocates for women in computing, providing a wide range of programs and services and working in the larger community to advance the contributions of technical women.
Big Data for Better Medicine
Professors Cathy Wu and Vijay Shanker receive National Institutes of Health funding to facilitate translation of biomedical data. Two new grants from NIH are to continue building the capacity to use big data for precision medicine, aimed at designing individually targeted therapies for maximal efficacy and minimal side effects.