Center for Computational Earth Sciences at the SCI Institute
Ross Whitaker (PI), Chuck Hansen, Claudio Silva, Valerio Pascucci, and Greg Jones have been awarded funding to create the Center for Computational Earth Sciences at the SCI Institute.
Visualizing Election Polls
A New, Animated, Interactive Way to Analyze Opinion Data Media Contacts
Oct. 6, 2008 - Do you want to know the percentage of white women who support vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin? What about college-educated versus high school-educated white women? Or those who also hunt?
University of Utah computer scientists have written software they hope eventually will allow news reporters and citizens to easily, interactively and visually answer such questions when analyzing election results, political opinion polls or other surveys.
NVIDIA Recognizes University Of Utah as a CUDA Center Of Excellence
University of Utah Latest in a Growing List of Exceptional Schools Demonstrating Pioneering Work in Parallel Computing
Santa Clara, CA & Salt Lake City, UT - July 31, 2008 - NVIDIA Corporation, the worldwide leader in visual computing technologies, and the University of Utah today announced that the university has been recognized as a CUDA Center of Excellence, a milestone that marks the beginning of a significant partnership between the two organizations.
Daniel Kopta, who was part of the author team that received the Best Paper Award at SASP '08 for their paper: "TRaX: A Multi-Threaded Architecture for Real-Time Ray Tracing," Josef Spjut, Daniel Kopta, Spencer Kellis, Solomon Boulos, Erik Brunvand
Hao Wang, Carlos Scheidegger, and Claudio Silva won the Best Paper Award at the IEEE International Conference on Shape Modeling and Applications (SMI), 2008 with "Optimal Bandwidth Selection for MLS Surfaces."
Remembering Gene Golub - Salt Lake City, Utah
Friends of Gene Golub gathered at Chris Johnson's and Kate Coles' home on February 29, 2008 to remember Gene.
Those attending the event in Salt Lake City were:
Nelson Beebe, Department of Mathematics, University of Utah Adam Bargteil - Carnegie Mellon University Martin Berzins, School of Computing and SCI Institute, University of Utah Mary Anne Berzins, Human Resources, University of Utah Elaine Cohen, School of Computing, University of Utah Kate Coles, Department of English, University of Utah Steve Corbato, Office of Information Technology, University of Utah Chuck Hansen, School of Computing and SCI Institute, University of Utah Chris Johnson, School of Computing and SCI Institute, University of Utah Greg Jones, SCI Institute Tom Lyche, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo Rich Riesenfeld, School of Computing, University of Utah Kris Sikorski, School of Computing, University of Utah Claudio Silva, School of Computing and SCI Institute, University of Utah Barry Weller (Gene's Cousin), Department of English, University of Utah
The February 2008 Issue of Salt Lake magazine includes a profile of groundbreaking research being conducted at the University of Utah on the problem of Autism. Advancements in brain image analysis techniques developed by SCI researchers Guido Gerig, Ross Whitaker and P. Thomas Fletcher are specifically mentioned. (print version only)
Announcing VisTrails 1.0
Fig 1: The VisTrails history tree contains a node for each version of a workflow (or pipeline) as it evolves over time. This results in a complete audit trail of the steps that were taken in a computational task.
VisTrails is a new system that provides data and process management support for exploratory computational tasks. It combines features of both workflow and visualization systems. Like many workflow systems, it enables seamless integration of loosely-coupled resources such as specialized libraries, grid, and web services. Likewise, it parallels some visualization systems by providing a mechanism to perform parameter explorations and result comparisons. But unlike these systems, VisTrails was designed to manage exploratory activities, where computational tasks are iteratively refined as users formulate and test hypotheses. A key distinguishing feature of VisTrails is a comprehensive provenance infrastructure that maintains detailed history information about the steps followed and data derived in the course of an exploratory task. VisTrails leverages this information to provide novel operations and user interfaces that streamline this process.
The paper "Querying and Creating Visualizations by Analogy", by Carlos E. Scheidegger, Huy T. Vo, David Koop, Juliana Freire, and Cláudio Silva was selected as the "Best Paper" at IEEE Visualization 2007. In this paper, the authors introduce a new framework that allows users who are not necessarily programmers to query and refine pipelines (or workflows) by analogy. They describe a query-by-example interface which allows users to construct as complex, structure-based queries (e.g., find workflows that resample a data set before extracting an isurface) by example, using the same interface used to build pipelines. They also introduce analogy as a first-class operation to create and refine pipelines. The analogy operation allows casual users to modify pipelines without having to directly edit their definitions. These features have been implemented in their open-source workflow and provenance management system called VisTrails, which can be downloaded from the SCI Website.
Steve Parker Selected Member of DARPA Computer Science Study Group
Dr. Steve Parker has been selected by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to be a member of the 2008 DARPA . The program supports university researchers with research grants for up to three years, while informing them of the Department of Defense's information technology needs and priorities. Dr. Parker will receive $100,000 the first year, and potentially as much as $750,000 during the second and third years.
CIBC Collaborator Mario Capecchi Wins Nobel Prize
The NIH Center for Integrative Biomedical Computing (CIBC) and the Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute would like to join the international scientific community in extending our heartiest congratulations to our University of Utah colleague Dr. Mario Capecchi as one of the three recipients of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. This award recognizes the ground-breaking work of Dr. Capecchi and his scientific contemporaries, Dr. Oliver Smithies of Cardiff University in the UK and Dr. Martin Evans of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in the development of genetic targeting of embryonic stem cells in mice. This novel technique selectively alters individual genes in the mouse DNA. Through studies employing genetic targeting, medical researchers now can better elucidate the roles that particular genes play in the animal development. The application of this method has revolutionized the study of mammalian biology and contributed to the development of new animal models for numerous human diseases in addition to cancers occurring in mice.
The Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute and the Musculoskeletal Research Laboratories are proud to announce the 1.0 release of the software FEBio, "Finite Elements for Biomechanics". FEBio is a nonlinear finite element software package that is specifically designed to address problems in computational biomechanics. Some of the features of note include capabilities for contact, rigid bodies and kinematic joints, nonlinear anisotropic constitutive models, simulation of active contraction, poroelasticity, element formulations for nearly-incompressible materials and parallel solution of the linear system of equations. After extensive testing in our lab and with our collaborators, we are happy to offer this free software to the research community. FEBio is currently available for WindowsXP, MacOS/X, Suse Linux (64 bit Opteron/Athlon64) and SGI Altix (64 bit Itanium2). We would be happy to port FEBio to other Unix/Linux platforms. The FEBio distribution includes the User's Manual, Theory Manual and several test problems to verify proper operation.