News
Dr. Sarang Joshi joins SCI Institute
Dr. Sarang Joshi has joined SCI as an Associate Professor of the Department of Bio Engineering. Before coming to Utah, Dr. Joshi was an Assistant Professor of Radiation Oncology and an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Prior to joining Chapel Hill, Dr. Joshi was Director of Technology Development at IntellX, a Medical Imaging start-up company which was later acquired by Medtronic. Sarang's research interests are in the emerging field of Computational Anatomy and have recently focused on its application to Radiation Oncology. Most recently he spent a year on sabbatical at DKFZ (German Cancer Research Center) in Heidelberg, Germany, as a visiting scientist in the Department of Medical Physics where he focused on developing four dimensional radiation therapy approaches for improved treatment of Prostate and Lung Cancer.Dr. Joshi received his D.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis. His research interests include Image Understanding, Computer Vision and Shape Analysis. He holds numerous patents in the area of image registration and has over 50 scholarly publications.
Steve Corbató Named Associate Director of the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute
Steve Corbató has joined the University of Utah's Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute as its Associate Director. The Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute has established itself as an international research leader in the areas of scientific computing, scientific visualization, and imaging, and in this new position Steve will help lead more than 100 faculty, staff and students in pursuing innovative, ground-breaking research and development aimed at solving important problems in science, engineering, and medicine.Steve most recently served as Managing Director for Technology Direction and Development at Internet2, a non-profit, university-led consortium focused on developing and deploying advanced Internet technologies. In that role, he oversaw a broad portfolio of initiatives in high-performance networking, middleware, network diagnostics, and security. He also worked to develop overall strategy and key relationships for Internet2's next generation of network infrastructure.
Claudio Silva Receives Second IBM Faculty Award
has been honored once again with a coveted IBM Faculty Award. This award is designed to promote innovative, collaborative research and honor outstanding faculty working in disciplines of interest to IBM. Dr. Silva is being recognized for his work developing efficient rendering techniques for large-scale scientific visualization. Much of modern science and engineering occurs on a computer, analyzing data collected from a variety of sources. Often the size of the datasets under analysis overwhelms the processing ability of whatever computer resources are available. Usually, in order to visualize a dataset it is necessary to have the entire dataset in main memory at once. Dr. Silva's project is developing faster, more efficient algorithms for processing large data and methods for dynamically loading only those parts of the data immediately needed for visualization. These methods show great promise for significantly improving our ability to visualize large datasets.This award includes $30,000 to support ongoing research. This is the second year in a row IBM has chosen to honor Dr. Silva with this award.
Steve Parker Listed Among HPCwire's 2006 "People to Watch"
Parker, SteveResearch Assistant Professor
University of Utah
"The impact of high-performance computing on society has been astounding, but I believe that we are just starting to see the tip of the iceberg. HPC is going to play an integral role in tackling many of the world's toughest scientific challenges as we continue through the 21st century, and will shape our national policy, our laws, and even our health."
- Steve Parker
Why he's worth watching: As Research Assistant Professor at the University of Utah, Steve Parker specializes in HPC environments, focusing on tackling the toughest multi-scale, multi-physics computational challenges. "I believe that the HPC community needs more effective ways to bring large-scale machines to bear on a vast array of challenges," explains Parker. "Software that is easy to understand, reusable, robust, and reliable is vital to achieving the promise of HPC. We need software that can compute, manage, analyze, and visualize data in a much more straightforward manner, and it must scale to solve problems both large and small."
The Center for Integrative Biomedical Computing
SCI is pleased to announce the launch of our new NCRR Center for Integrative Biomedical Computing (CIBC), a five year extension of our previous NCRR center but with a new broader scope. With the new center, we will be conducting exciting research and development that builds upon the successes of previous investments, enhancing our existing strengths, and responding to a set of compelling new biomedical problems. We will continue to develop integrated problem solving environments that make advanced computational tools available to biomedical scientists. We will also continue to pursue advanced research in technical and biophysical approaches to bioelectric field problems in cardiology and neurology. Since the founding of our original NCRR Center, software research has evolved, and so too has our vision of how we can best design software to have the most impact on biomedical research. Integration is still at the core of this vision, though in order to more effectively serve researchers using other systems, we are moving away from our previous strategy of absorbing and incorporating other software into our system to what we call "bridging", in which we provide researchers with the flexibility to link to whatever software systems will meet their needs.
SCI Institute Welcomes New Faculty
Mike Kirby joins us from Brown University.The focus of his research focus deals with large- scale scientific computing and visualization, with an emphasis on the scientific cycle of mathematical modeling, computation, visualization, evaluation, and understanding. His primary research interests are: Computational Science and Engineering, Concurrent Programming, Scientific Visualization, Interdisciplinary Collaboration across Computer Science, Engineering, Applied Math, Computational Steering, and High Performance Computing.Martin Berzins joins us from the University of Leeds where he is also Professor of Scientific Computing, Co-director of the Computational PDEs Unit, and head of the Scientific Computing and Visualization research group. His primary interests are in the fields of Adaptive Numerical Methods and software, Unstructured Tetrahedral Meshes, Reacting Flows, Time Dependent PDEs, Parallel Algorithms, and Computational Fluid and Solid Mechanics Applications.
SCIRun/BioPSE 1.24.2 Now Available
Thanks to everyone for their feedback on the 1.24.0-beta pre-release. Based on your suggestions, we fixed important bugs over the past few weeks, and we added many great new features as well.This version of SCIRun/BioPSE contains a new PowerApp called "BioImage" for the processing and visualization of medical image volumes. With BioImage users can directly load a variety of native data formats (e.g. DICOM, Analyze, VFF, NRRD, PICT) and can apply processing algorithms to specify and enhance regions of interest within the volume (e.g. cropping, resampling, histogram equalization, median filtering, contrast / brightness). The BioImage visual interface allows users to interact with their data both in 2D "slice views" (powered by the new ViewSlices module), as well as in a full 3D "volume rendering view" (powered by our new high-performance volume rendering modules). Users can seamlessly move between the 2D and 3D views to precisely control how different features of their data are displayed, and to gain both quantitative and qualitative insights.
SCIRun ported to SGI Prism
Using SCIRun's advanced volume rendering PowerApp 'BioImage' we are able to fully exploit the powerful graphics capabilities of the Prism system. The combination with BioImage, the Prism's graphics capabilities and a 64-bit architecture allow for interactive visualization of very large datasets.
Greg Jones Appointed State Science Advisor
By PR and Business Wire News, 9/12/2005 03:36:02 PM MTUtah Governor Jon M. Huntsman, Jr., has appointed Gregory M. Jones, PhD as the new State Science Advisor. The position is part of the Governor's Office of Economic Development (GOED) and oversees the state's economic clusters to create jobs.
Before joining state government, Dr. Jones was the associate director of the Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute in Salt Lake City and an adjunct assistant professor of Radiology at the University of Utah. He was also president and chief operations officer of Visual Influence Inc., a spin-off company of SCI.
Chris Johnson Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
Chris Johnson, a distinguished professor of computer science and director of the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute, has been elected by his peers as a fellow in the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Johnson is one of 376 AAAS members who were given the distinction this year "because of their efforts toward advancing science applications that are deemed scientifically or socially distinguished," the group says. Johnson specifically was cited "for distinguished contributions to scientific computing and scientific visualization." The AAAS, founded in 1848, is the world's largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal Science, which has an estimated total readership of 1 million.
Chuck Hansen Receives IEEE 2005 Visualization Technical Achievement Award
has been awarded the 2005 Visualization Technical Achievement Award by the Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee of the IEEE Computer Society (IEEE VGTC). The award is in recognition of "seminal work on tools for understanding large-scale scientific data sets".This is an international award and is the highest honor and recognition in visualization research. The IEEE VGTC started this award just last year, so Chuck is the second recipient of the IEEE Visualization Technical Achievement Award.