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SAVE THE DATE: MIDAS Annual Symposium, Oct. 11

By | Events, General Interest, News

Please join us for the 2017 Michigan Institute for Data Science Symposium.

The keynote speaker will be Cathy O’Neil, mathematician and best-selling author of “Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy.”

Other speakers include:

  • Nadya Bliss, Director of the Global Security Initiative, Arizona State University
  • Francesca Dominici, Co-Director of the Data Science Initiative and Professor of Biostatistics, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
  • Daniela Whitten, Associate Professor of Statistics and Biostatistics, University of Washington
  • James Pennebaker, Professor of Psychology, University of Texas

More details, including how to register, will be available soon.

Big Data in Transportation and Mobility symposium highlights diverse, emerging issues

By | Events, General Interest, News

MBDH-transThe Big Data in Transportation and Mobility symposium held June 22-23, 2017, in Ann Arbor, MI brought together more than 150 data science practitioners from academia, industry and government to explore emerging issues in this expanding field.

Sponsored by the NSF-supported Midwest Big Data Hub (MBDH) and the Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS), the symposium featured lightning talks from transportation research programs around the Midwest; tutorials and breakout sessions on specific issues and methods; a poster session; and a keynote address from two representatives of the Smart Columbus project: Chris Stewart, Ohio State University Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, and Shoreh Elhami, GIS Manager for the city of Columbus.

Speakers and attendees came from a number of organizations from across the midwest including the University of Michigan, University of Illinois, University of Nebraska, University of North Dakota, North Dakota State University, Ohio State University, Purdue University, Denso International America, Fiat Chrysler, Ford Motor Company, General Motors, IAV Automotive Engineering and Yottabyte.  

“This was an extremely valuable opportunity to share information and ideas,” said Carol Flannagan, one of the organizers of the symposium and a researcher at MIDAS and the U-M Transportation Research Institute. “Cross-discipline and cross-institutional collaboration is crucial to the success of Big Data applications, and we took a significant step forward in that vein during this symposium.”

Topics addressed in talks, breakouts, and tutorials included:

  • New Analytic Tools for Designing and Managing Transportation Systems
  • New Mobility Options for Small and Mid-sized Cities in the Midwest
  • Automated and Connected Vehicles
  • Transforming Transportation Operations using High Performance Computing
  • On-Demand Transit
  • Using Big Data for Monitoring Bridges

At the closing session, participants outlined some areas that could be fruitful to focus on going forward, including increasing data-science literacy in the general public; diversity and workforce development in data science; public data-sharing platforms and partners; and privacy issues.

For a complete list of speakers and topics, please see the agenda. Videos of selected talks will be posted at midas.umich.edu in the coming days.

ARC-TS seeks input on next generation HPC cluster

By | Events, Flux, General Interest, Happenings, HPC, News

The University of Michigan is beginning the process of building our next generation HPC platform, “Big House.”  Flux, the shared HPC cluster, has reached the end of its useful life. Flux has served us well for more than five years, but as we move forward with replacement, we want to make sure we’re meeting the needs of the research community.

ARC-TS will be holding a series of town halls to take input from faculty and researchers on the next HPC platform to be built by the University.  These town halls are open to anyone and will be held at:

  • College of Engineering, Johnson Room, Tuesday, June 20th, 9:00a – 10:00a
  • NCRC Bldg 300, Room 376, Wednesday, June 21st, 11:00a – 12:00p
  • LSA #2001, Tuesday, June 27th, 10:00a – 11:00a
  • 3114 Med Sci I, Wednesday, June 28th, 2:00p – 3:00p

Your input will help to ensure that U-M is on course for providing HPC, so we hope you will make time to attend one of these sessions. If you cannot attend, please email hpc-support@umich.edu with any input you want to share.

MIDAS starting research group on mobile sensor analytics

By | Educational, Events, General Interest, Happenings, News

The Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS) is convening a research working group on mobile sensor analytics. Mobile sensors are taking on an increasing presence in our lives. Wearable devices allow for physiological and cognitive monitoring, and behavior modeling for health maintenance, exercise, sports, and entertainment. Sensors in vehicles measure vehicle kinematics, record driver behavior, and increase perimeter awareness. Mobile sensors are becoming essential in areas such as environmental monitoring and epidemiological tracking.

There are significant data science opportunities for theory and application in mobile sensor analytics, including real-time data collection, streaming data analysis, active on-line learning, mobile sensor networks, and energy efficient mobile computing.

Our working group welcomes researchers with interest in mobile sensor analytics in any scientific domain, including but not limited to health, transportation, smart cities, ecology and the environment.

Where and When:

Noon to 2 pm, April 13, 2017

School of Public Health I, Room 7625

Lunch provided

Agenda:

  • Brief presentations about challenges and opportunities in mobile sensor analytics (theory and application);

  • A brief presentation of a list of funding opportunities;

  • Discussion of research ideas and collaboration in the context of grant application and industry partnership.

Future Plans: Based on the interest of participants, MIDAS will alert researchers to relevant funding opportunities, hold follow-up meetings for continued discussion and team formation as ideas crystalize for grant applications, and work with the UM Business Engagement Center to bring in industry partnership.

Please RSVP.  For questions, please contact Jing Liu, Ph.D, MIDAS research specialist (ljing@umich.edu; 734-764-2750).

Video, slides available from U-M presentations at SC16

By | Events, General Interest, News

Several University of Michigan researchers and research IT staff made presentations at the SC16 conference in Salt Lake City Nov. 13-17. Material from many of the talks is now available for viewing online:

  • Shawn McKee (Physics) and Ben Meekhof (ARC-TS) presented a demonstration of the Open Storage Research Infrastructure (OSiRIS) project at the U-M booth. The demonstration extended the OSiRIS network from its participating institutions in Michigan to the conference center in Utah. Meekhof also presented at a”Birds of a Feather” session on Ceph in HPC environments. More information, including slides, is available on the OSiRIS website.
  • Todd Raeker (ARC-TS) made a presentation on ConFlux, U-M’s new computational physics cluster, at the NVIDIA booth. Slides and video are available.
  • Nilmini Abeyratne, a Ph.D student in computer science, presented her project “Low Design-Risk Checkpointing Storage Solution for Exascale Supercomputers” at the Doctoral Showcase. A summary, slides, and poster can be viewed on the SC16 website.
  • Jeremy Hallum (ARC-TS) presented information on the Yottabyte Research Cloud at the U-M booth. His slides are available here.

Other U-M activity at the conference included Sharon Broude Geva, Director of Advanced Research Computing, participating in a panel titled “HPC Workforce Development: How Do We Find Them, Recruit Them, and Teach Them to Be Today’s Practitioners and Tomorrow’s Leaders?”; Quentin Stout (EECS) and Christiane Jablonowski (CLASP) teaching the “Parallel Computing 101” tutorial.

HPC User Meetups set for October, November and December

By | Educational, Events, General Interest

Users of high performance computing resources are invited to meet ARC-TS HPC operators and support staff in person at an upcoming user meeting:

  • Monday, October 17, 1:10 – 5 p.m., 2001 LSA Building (500 S. State St.)
  • Wednesday, November 9, 1 – 5 p.m., 1180 Duderstadt Center (2281 Bonisteel Blvd., North Campus)
  • Monday, December 12, 1 – 5 p.m., 4515 Biomedical Science Research Building (BSRB, 109 Zina Pitcher Pl.)

There is not a set agenda; come at anytime and stay as long as you please. You can come and talk about your use of any sort of computational resource, Flux, Armis, Hadoop, XSEDE, Amazon, or other.

Ask any questions you may have. The ARC-TS staff will work with you on your specific projects, or just show you new things that can help you optimize your research.

This is also a good time to meet other researchers doing similar work.

This is open to anyone interested; it is not limited to Flux users.

Examples of potential topics:

  • What ARC-TS services are there, and how to access them?
  • I want to do X, do you have software capable of it?
  • What is special about GPU/Xeon Phi/Accelerators?
  • Are there resources for people without budgets?
  • I want to apply for grant X, but it has certain limitations. What support can ARC-TS provide?
  • I want to learn more about the compiler and debugging?
  • I want to learn more about performance tuning, can you look at my code with me?
  • Etc.

Dr. Greg Wilson, founder of Software Carpentry, to speak on U-M campus Oct. 12-13

By | Educational, Events, General Interest, Happenings

The founder of Software Carpentry, Dr. Greg Wilson, will be on the U-M campus to give two public talks. Over the past 18 years, The Software and Data Carpentry organizations have sought to improve the data analysis and computing skills of researchers around the world. The organizations’ materials are developed collaboratively under the Creative Commons-Attribution license and taught by hundreds of trained volunteer instructors. Dr. Wilson will present two talks that you are invited to attend. Both talks will be in the Clark Library presentation space on the second floor of Hatcher South:

“Software Carpentry: Lessons Learned”
1:00 pm on Wednesday, 10/12, Clark Library
Since its start in 1998, Software Carpentry has evolved from a week-long training course at the US national laboratories into aworldwide volunteer effort to improve researchers’ computing skills. This talk will explore the lessons we’ve learned along the way about applying open source software development techniques to teaching at scale, and about getting people and institutions to change the way they work.

“Not on the Shelves: What Nonexistent Books, Tools, and Courses Can Tell Us About Ourselves”
11 am on Thursday, 10/13, Clark Library
Hundreds of books about writing compilers are currently on the market, but there are only three about writing debuggers. Spreadsheets are used to do calculations more often than every other kind of tool combined, but thirty-five years after their invention, version control systems still can’t handle them. Everyone thinks we should teach children how to program, but undergraduate courses on computing education are practically nonexistent.  This talk will explore what
these gaps in our books, tools, and courses tell us about the state of computing today, and about what it could look like tomorrow.

For more information: pschloss@umich.edu

Globus 101 webinar scheduled for Oct. 6

By | Educational, Events, General Interest, News

The OU Supercomputing Center for Education & Research (OSCER) is hosting a webinar on managing research data with Globus. Globus is software-as-a-service for research data management and provides high speed, secure file transfer; file sharing directly from existing stage systems; and data publication to institutional repositories. Developed and operated by the University of Chicago, Globus has become a preferred service for moving and sharing data between and among a wide variety of storage systems at research labs, campus computing resources, and national facilities across the US. In this session, you will learn about the features of the Globus service, and how to use it to streamline your research data flows. The webinar will help you answer these questions: How can Globus help me overcome the challenges I face in moving increasingly “big” datasets? How can I share data with collaborators at other institutions more efficiently? How can I use Globus to more easily leverage large-scale computing resources, both on campus and beyond? The presentation is aimed at those new to Globus, but attendees with prior Globus experience may also benefit by learning about new and planned features.

For more information and to register: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ou-globus-101-webinar-tickets-27272257055