Fukushima, LENDIT and Cultural Relationships

CS Colloquium
When: Tuesday, 2/28/2012, 3:30 - 4:20 PM
Where: EP 122
Speaker: Akira Tokuhiro, Prof. of Mechanical Engineering, UIdaho

The Fukushima Dai-ichi and Dai-ni nuclear power station with 4 GE-BWRs units at one site and 2 BWR units respectively co-located on the north-central eastern coast of Japan withstood a 9.0 earthquake and a large-scale tsunami on March 11, 2011. All six units were constructed via a GE/Hitachi/Toshiba collaboration from 1967-1979. In spite of the immediate shut down of all units based on ground-level acceleration and decay heat cooling for some 30-45 minutes, loss-of-offsite-power by ingress of water into the diesel generators' pit, initiated loss-of-coolant accident; overall as a 'beyond design basis accident'. Further, all units faced unanticipated challenge of cooling spent fuel pools situated above the reactors in lightly-structured buildings. Several hydrogen explosions later and nearly 1 year since '3/11', the utility (TEPCO) and the Japanese Government are now facing a 20+-year cleanup effort. Evidence suggests that 3 reactor cores have partially-to-fully melted. The scale of the recovery, restoration and remediation effort will be very large. The Fukushima accident is perhaps an example of 'complex issues and challenges' for today's students. These grand challenges, such as climate change, sustaining the global economy, poverty, disease and social unrest will prevail for many years to come. The speaker contends that adoption of common metrics, length(L), energy(E), number (N), distribution (D), information (I) and time (time) [LENDIT] cuts across soft and hard science, engineering and computing domains, and as such offer an analytical `lingua Franca'. Perhaps the ultimate challenge along soft domains is predicting the unpredictable human being. The speaker will try to connect the dots along Fukushima, LENDIT and culture.

CS Colloquium: Computational Bioinformatics

Date: Today, Tuesday 2/21/2012,
Time: 3:30-4:20pm
Location: Room EP 122
Speaker: Rob Lyon, Director of IBEST Computational Resource Core

Title: High Performance Computing in Bioinformatics, or Should I take the Porche or the Station Wagon?

Bioinformatics, the study and application of computer science to biological questions, has rapidly expanded over the last few years. Next generation sequencing is now capable of producing petabytes of data so powerful tools and enormous amounts of computational power are needed to process the data. Unfortunately, bioinformatics tools and applications are lagging years behind the hardware and many tools have never been designed to take advantage of computing in a parallel environment.

We will also discuss areas within bioinformatics where computer scientists with a deep understanding of parallel computing, data processing and performance optimization at a hardware and software level can make significant contributions to the field.

Strategic Use of Fear and Anger in Crisis Decision Makiing

CS Colloquium

Tuesday 2/14/2012,
Time: 3:30-4:20pm
Location: Room EP 122


The speakers this week are Lisa Carlson (Political Science, UI) and Raymond Dacey (Business, UI)
The title of the joint presentation is: The Strategic Use of Fear and Anger in Crisis Decision Making
Abstract:
Researchers have advanced various claims about the effects of emotions, particularly the effects of fear and anger, on decision making behavior. The purpose of this research is to provide a formal assessment of the effectiveness of the strategic use fear and anger in the context of a well-specified basic International Relations crisis decision problem. The formalization is motivated by the experimental work of Lerner and Keltner (2000, 2001) who found that fearful decision makers are risk averting across frames and make pessimistic risk assessments, and that angry decision makers are risk seeking across frames and make optimistic risk assessments. The analysis presented here employs the basic International Relations crisis decision problem to compare the behavior of the decision maker in a fearful state and an angry state, respectively, to the behavior of the decision maker in an emotionally neutral state. The analysis shows when the emotions of fear and anger do and do not have the desired strategic effects. The analysis also shows that the strategic use of fear and anger can have effects that are both counterintuitive and counterproductive.

Visualizing Software Ecosystems as Living Cities

CS Colloquium, Feb 7, 2012, 3:30 PM, EP 122. Speaker: Prof. Clinton Jeffery

Visualizing Software Ecosystems as Living Cities
Abstract:
The tribe of software developers have been slow in coming to the promised land of software visualization, so tantalizing and obvious since its inception in the early 1980's. Although many researchers were persuaded early on that visualization would someday revolutionize difficult tasks in debugging and software maintenance, most software visualizations have been too abstract or depicted information that was easy to obtain but not directly useful. Over the past decade however, several research groups have visualized the evolution of large software systems using progressively more sophisticated "city" metaphors, mapping information about software components onto familiar architectural features such as buildings and roads. This metaphor has been applied to relatively static or slowly-changing information, such as examining months or years of changes in a software repository.

This "software design" talk presents a survey of existing work on visualizing software as cities, and then introduces a "living city" metaphor, in which a set of programs written by a set of authors is visualized as a city populated by dynamic entities such as users, data structures, threads of execution, and bugs. The "living city" does not exist and implementing it will not be easy. The talk will include a discussion of what will be needed, both in terms of open research problems and existing and needed software tools.

Sandia National Labs Summer Institute in California

A week-long, cross disciplinary program for 20 top graduate students at the Sandia California Site. August 5-12, 2012. Topic of discission: Cyber Security Technology, Policy, Law, and Planning for an Uncertain Future. This is a great opportunity to get connected in the information security community.

For details go to:

http://www.sandia.gov/careers/students_postdocs/summer_institute/

Spring Job and Internship Fair

February 8, 2012, 2:00 - 6:00 PM, at the Student Union Building (SUB) Ballroom. Go here for details:

https://uidaho-csm.symplicity.com/events/students.php?mode=list&cf=Spring_12careerf