Institute for Advanced Computing Applications and Technologies

There was a great turnout for the Festividad Digital on Sept. 10, with both kids and adults interacting with a waterfall of projected light that responds to movement with sound; 3D images of Manuel Antonio National Park, Costa Rica; a virtual tour of Buenos Aires featuring digital grafitti; and a 3D sculpture that incorporates triggering Latin percussion. See photos at http://edream.illinois.edu/gallery.

Barbara Minsker, an Illinois professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and frequent NCSA/IACAT collaborator, provides simple-to-follow guidelines for setting fellow academics up for success, rather than stress in her new book,  “The Joyful Professor: How to Shift From Surviving to Thriving in the Faculty Life” (MavenMark Books). In an essay published Sept. 17 on the website InsideHigherEd, Minsker describes how she learned to better align her activities with her goals and how she seeks to help others do the same through her book and her non-profit organization, Joyful U, Inc.,which offers retreats and workshops. More information on these events and the book is available at www.joyful-professor.com.

IACAT researcher Klaus Schulten, leader of the Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group at Illinois' Beckman Institute, explains how the Blue Waters supercomputer will help researchers explore the fundamentals of life at the cellular level. Watch his TEDXUIUC from April 2010.

As part of Krannert Center's Opening Night Party, eDream is throwing a Festividad Digital in the Studio Theater from 6 to 10:30 p.m. Sept. 10. See a waterfall of projected light that responds with sound as you move across its surface; 3D images of Manuel Antonio National Park, Costa Rica; a virtual tour of Buenos Aires where you will splash digital murals on barrio walls; a taste of Deke Weaver's upcoming performance, Elephant; and a 3D sculpture on which you scrawl digital graffiti while triggering Latin percussion.

Illinois researcher Klaus Schulten will keynote NVIDIA's GPU conference on Sept 22.

Duane D. Johnson has been named chief research officer at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory. He becomes the first to hold the CRO position, which is responsible for initiating, developing, and supervising the lab’s scientific programs and overseeing the scientific division, including approximately 90 researchers, 200 students, and 20 support staff.

Computer science professor Ralph Johnson, a member of IACAT's Synergistic Research on Parallel Programming for Petascale Applications research team, has won the 2010 ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award.

IACAT deputy director Bill Gropp, also the Paul and Cynthia Saylor Professor in the Department of Computer Science, explains how mathematical modeling (and the computers needed to solve complex equations) are used in scientific research.