Piet Hut has an interesting paper out:
http://arxiv.org/abs/0712.1655
I’ve been thinking off and on about these things, i.e., how can we use these emerging modalities for scientific collaborations, teaching, etc. Piet (who is a very interesting and computing-savvy guy) has already done a lot.
Roy Williams began this discussion with the following e-mail:
Dear instructors,
I forward here a notice about a summer school in Australia, because I like the syllabus very much. It is very practical — programming, unix, software engineering, web programming. There is no theory or far horizon. One of us (Graham) is going there.
At Caltech, I think the students interested in escience have great opportunity to find out about theory and far horizon (CS, IST, CNS, etc), but much less is available that is hands-on nuts and bolts.
Roy
FIRST ANNOUNCEMENT
The 2nd Aus-VO Summer School
Computational skills and techniques for modern astronomy
School of Physics / School of IT
The University of Sydney
March 26th - 28th 2008
Following the success of the inaugural Aus-VO Summer School in 2007
we are pleased to announce that it will run again in 2008.
Computational techniques are becoming increasingly important in
astronomy. In order to support the development of such techniques
in our current and future generation of astronomers, we are hosting
a Summer School that will provide an introduction to a selection of
common tools and techniques that we believe can facilitate and enhance
research productivity. The Summer School will consist of lectures and
practical exercises. All exercises will be tailored specifically to
astronomy applications.
The intended audience is postgraduate students and other interested
astronomers. We also encourage honours students to attend.
This is a great opportunity to develop or update your IT skills!
Topics include:
* Introduction to programming in Python
* Scientific Python
* Advanced Unix skills - scripting, regular expressions
* Version control with Subversion
* Writing CGI scripts
* Querying databases with SQL
* Creating databases with MySQL
* Introduction to XML and web services
* Doing science with the Virtual Observatory
If there is enough demand, we will run advanced topics for people attending for the second time.
There will be a range of presenters from astronomy and IT, including:
James Curran USyd (School of IT)
Matthew Graham Caltech
Malte Marquarding ATNF
Ray Norris ATNF
Tara Murphy USyd (School of Physics / School of IT)
Alan Fekete USyd (School of IT)
Andrew Hopkins USyd (School of Physics)
Expressions of interest:
Please send email to tara@physics.usyd.edu.au if you’d like to
be added to our distribution list and receive subsequent
announcements.
Registration will open in January 2008.
Participants should bring their own laptop to work on. Windows,
Mac OS and Linux will be supported, and the relevant software will
be provided for download beforehand.
Important Dates:
7th December 2007 First Announcement
(expressions of interest)
January 2008 Registration opens
February 2008 Registration closes
26th - 28th March 2008 Aus-VO Summer School
The Local Organising Committee is:
Tara Murphy tara@physics.usyd.edu.au
Andrew Hopkins ahopkins@physics.usyd.edu.au
James Curran james@it.usyd.edu.au
Anne Green
please contact us if you have any enquiries.
More information is available on the website:
http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/astrop/ausvoss
This site will be updated as the schedule and other details are
finalised, so keep an eye on it. A second announcement will follow
in the next month with further information.
“Cloud computing” is a major new hot trend. Basically, you can outsource your computing and data storage needs to some compu-heavy company with an excess capacity, like Amazon, Google, etc. (Google Amazon’s EC2 and S3 for some examples). They can run machines more economically than most universities. This may well be a significant way for scientific computing in the future.
Now, big companies want students to learn how to do this, partly because they are leooking to hire some competent people. Take a look at these press releases:
http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/20071008_ibm_univ.html
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071008-google-and-ibm-team-on-cloud-computing-initiative-for-universitiesgoogle-and-ibm-team-on-cloud-computing-initiative-for-universities.html
Somebody want to try it out?
I went to the annual, Microsoft Research sponsored, workshop on e-Science:
https://www.mses07.net/main.aspx
It was co-sponsored by a very interesting organization, RENCI:
http://www.renci.org/
(I especially recommend looking at Dan Reed’s presentations and his blog. Birds of a feather and all that.)
Here is one interesting article about it:
http://www.hpcwire.com/hpc/1853013.html
I’d be happy to tell you more about it, if anyone is interested.
I found this article interesting, entirely believable, and disturbing:
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9043339
Students (and others), please let me know by email some possible time slots (day of the week, time) when we could schedule a make-up and/or a special lecture. Give me at least 2 or 3 possibilities, and I’ll pick one which seems the best for all concerned. Thanks!
This coming Wednesday October 24, Alfred Inselberg –the inventor of Parallel Coordinates– will give a talk on “Multidimensional Visualization and its applications”. Here is the abstract:
The desire to understand the underlying geometry of multidimensional problems motivated several visualization methodologies to augment our limited 3-dimensional perception. After a short overview, Parallel Coordinates are rigorously developed obtaining a 1-1 mapping between subsets of Euclidean N-space and subsets of 2-space. It leads to representations of lines, flats, curves, intersections, hypersurfaces, proximities and geometrical construction algorithms. Convexity can be visualized in ANY dimension as well as non-orientability (Moebius strip) and other properties of hypersurfaces. This is a VISUAL Multidimensional Coordinate System with applications to Air Traffic Control, Visual and Automatic Data Mining, Interactive Models of Complex Systems.
The talk will be in Jorgensen, Room 74. (One floor below ground level.) Alfred is a Professor at the School of Mathematical Sciences of Tel Aviv University. His textbook on on “Parallel Coordinates” (and Hi Tech entertainment) is being released by Springer in 2007.
For quick links for current infovis packages, check out the Visualization page on the course’s wiki, or the Visualization lecture slides on the eScience 101 course page.
This is the first post of Caltech’s E-Science 101 class blog. See the class website for further information.
