News

6 additional Illinois fellows selected for collaborations with NCSA

Published Date: Aug 16, 2012

The Institute for Advanced Computing Applications and Technologies (IACAT) has selected six additional researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to receive one-year fellowships to pursue collaborative projects with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

Seven fellows were previously selected to work on projects in animal science, chemistry, astronomy, and other areas. The additional fellowships were made possible by funding from the offices of the Provost and the Vice Chancellor for Research.

The six new fellows and their projects are:

  • Weng Cho Chew (Electrical and Computer Engineering), working with Narayan Aluru (Mechanical Science and Engineering) and NCSA’s John Towns, aims to improve two algorithms used to model Casimir forces, which arise between objects at very small length scales and can affect performance of micro- and nanoelectromechanical systems. The team’s goal is to increase by orders of magnitude the size of the problems that can be solved.

  • Robert B. Haber (Mechanical Science and Engineering) will work with NCSA’s Volodymyr Kindratenko to explore the use of graphics-processing units (GPUs) to accelerate the performance of a solver used to model hyperbolic systems.

  • Xiuling Li (Electrical and Computer Engineering), in collaboration with K. Jimmy Hsia (Mechanical Science and Engineering) and Seid Koric (NCSA), will model the rolling process of strain-induced rolled-up micro- and nanostructures. Understanding of this process could provide guidance for the design and assembly of nanostructures into systems that can adapt to environmental changes in heat, optical radiation, and mechanical actuation.

  • Robert Markley (English) will team with Kenton McHenry, leader of NCSA’s Image, Spatial, Data Analysis Group, and Michael Simeone of the Institute for Computing in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Science (I-CHASS) to build on a previous computational analysis of 17th and 18th-century maps of the Great Lakes region, adding approximately 400 maps to the data set to test a hypothesis that the maps encode short-term meteorological and long-term climatological data in the form of variations in cartographic depictions of coastlines, islands, and water passages among the lakes.

  • Surangi W. Punyasena (Plant Biology) will work with David Tcheng (Illinois Informatics Institute) and NCSA’s Michael Welge. The team plans to use advanced machine learning algorithms to develop a high-throughput automated system to count pollen and spore samples from fossils. This will make it feasible to create large data sets, which is impractical when counts are taken by individual highly trained experts using light microscopes.

  • Ted Underwood (English) will work with Loretta Auvil and Boris Capitanu from the Illinois Informatics Institute and NCSA’s Mark Straka to scale up an algorithm for topic modeling—a technique for mapping the topics that could have produced a given collection of documents. The research team previously established that this method can reveal significant patterns in literary history.


For more information about the IACAT Fellows program, see http://iacat.illinois.edu/faculty_fellows.