NCSA Headline News

E. Lynn Usery, director of the Center of Excellence for Geospatial Information Science (CEGIS) at the United States Geological Survey (USGS), will give a talk on Geospatial Semantics and CyberGIS at noon Feb. 14 in 219 Davenport Hall. The talk is part of the CyberGIS Speaker Series, which is co-sponsored by NCSA.

ABSTRACT: Digital geographic information systems (GIS) have evolved from concepts of transparent map overlays to digital systems of basic geometric representation of map data to feature-based systems with ontological foundations operating in a distributed parallel computing environment known as CyberGIS. Simultaneous to the evolution of the data and processing systems for geographic information has been a growth in the basic understanding of the fundamental concepts of that information leading to geospatial semantics. The U.S. Geological Survey, as the primary civilian government agency responsible for mapping and geographic information, is developing geospatial semantics for topographic data to be used as a part of CyberGIS. The focus of this work is developing a basic vocabulary using the tools of the Semantic Web. This presentation will focus on the progress to date which includes a basic taxonomy and vocabulary of geographic features developed in the Web Ontology Language (OWL), the provision of legacy USGS datasets for specific research test areas in the Resource Description Framework (RDF) of the Semantic Web with an associated SPARQL endpoint for access, and the development of semantics for geographic features from both raster and vector geometric representations. The use of CyberGIS to help create these semantically enriched data and the use of these data as a part of CyberGIS will be discussed.

The Secretary of State mobile unit will be on campus from 9:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. Feb. 29 in Room 314 Illini Union. Available services are: driver's license renewal, replacement, and corrections; state ID renewal, replacement, corrections; vehicle sticker sales; collegiate license plates passenger, B-truck, and motorcycle license plates; organ/tissue donor registration; vehicle title and registration; parking placards for people with disabilities.

These services will also be available on campus:

• March 28, Room 314 Illini Union
• April 25, room 314 Illini Union

• Illinois PhD candidate Quanyan Zhu will give a talk on "Game-Theoretic Gestaltism on Resilient Cyber-Physical Systems" at 4 p.m. Feb. 15 in 2405 Siebel Center. This talk is sponsored by the Information Trust Institute.
• Shan Lu, Illinois alumnus and assistant professor of computer science at the University of Wisconsin, will give an Illinois-Intel Parallelism Center (I2PC) Distinguished lecture on "Concurrency-bug detection, diagnosis, and fixing" this Thursday (Feb. 16) at 4 p.m. in Seibel Center 3405. The talk will be streamed live at http://media.cs.illinois.edu/live/I2PClive.asx; questions can be directed to the speaker via http://i2pc.cs.illinois.edu/chat.
  
• Hazime Shimizu and Koichi Takahashi of Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology will give a talk on "Next-Generation Power Electronics by Means of SiC" at 3 p.m. Feb. 21 in the Coordinated Science Laboratory auditorium (B02). This talk is sponsored by the Information Trust Institute. 
• David Stork, distinguished research scientist and research director at Rambus Labs, will give a CAS/MillerComm lecture titled "When Computers Look at  Art: Image Analysis in Humanistic Studies of the Visual Arts" at 5:30 p.m. April 19 in Room 62 at the Krannert Art Museum.
  

As Thom Dunning recently announced in an email to all NCSA staff, the center's staff recognition program is being revised for the upcoming academic year. The NCSA Culture Committee (Evan Burness, Nada Cagle, Michelle Gower, Karen Hartman, Jonathan Howell, John Melchi, Jay Roloff, Dave Semeraro, Adam Slagell and Paul Wefel) will roll out a new program by the end of the spring semester. If you have suggestions,  please contact Jonathan.

Reminder: NCSA staff must pay 50 cents for each cup of coffee or tea they consume from the supplies provided on the second, third, and fourth floors of the NCSA Building. New payment receptacles have been installed in each coffee area. Staff can continue to use the available hot water to make their own beverages at no charge.

Cray software engineer Forest Godfrey will give a talk on Cray architecture at 4 p.m. March 1 in Room 3405 Siebel Center. This talk is sponsored by the Illinois-Intel Parallelism Center.

Volunteers are needed for the Illinois Council of Teachers of Mathematics State Math Contest Finals, to be held on campus May 5. More than 3,000 Illinois high school students will be competing and volunteers are needed as: ushers, timers, proctors, graders, for data entry, and other tasks. There are also some volunteers activities that will need to be completed in advance (March and April). For more information or to volunteer, see To http://www.math.uiuc.edu/ictm.

Timothy Bouvet recently took a new position with the Blue Waters system support team. Tim has extensive system administrator experience, having worked for Cray for 9 years and SGI for 4 years before joining NCSA a decade ago. He was a system administrator for NCSA's SGI Origin system, Copper (IBM P690), Cobalt (SGI Altix), and Ember (SGI Altix UV).

Tim is now responsible for assisting in the general setup and system administration of the Blue Waters environment. In particular, he has a leading role in the installation, integration and documentation of third-party software components. Tim will also take a leading role in responding to user service requests related to system services. He currently is working on the TDS (test and development system) and the early science system, which is due to be fully installed and operational early this spring.