Scientific Computing students are part of an international competition to inject energy and creativity into finding solutions to global problems

SC grad students Olmo Zavala and Nathan Crock and FSU Researcher Samuel Rustin comprised a winning team in NASA’s International Space Apps Challenge recently held in Tallahassee. The International Space Apps Challenge was held simultaneously in 75 cities across the globe. Zavala, Crock and Rustin’s award places their submission, OpenTiles, into international competition with the winning projects from each of the 75 competing worldwide Space Apps Challenge locations. The Space Apps Challenge took place on April 20-21 at Making Awesome, a Tallahassee Makerspace. Judging the competition were Dr. Greg Boebinger, Director of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory; Dr. Gordon Erlebacher, FSU Professor of Scientific Computing; and Stephen Thompson, a retired mathematician. The Department of Scientific Computing was an event sponsor.

SC will participate in a multimillion-dollar grant (FSU share $1 million dollars) awarded by the Department of Energy, Office of Science as part of the Mathematical Multifaceted Integrated Capability Centers (MMICCs) program. SC Chair Max Gunzburger will collaborate with researchers from all over the U.S., including the University of Texas at Austin, Colorado State University, Los Alamos National Lab, Oak Ridge National Lab, MIT, and Stanford University.

Doctoral student K. James Soda recently received funding to work as a Graduate Research Consultant (GRC) with the undergraduate students in Dennis Slice’s shape analysis class (morphometrics) this spring. The course provides an overview of the theory and practice of shape analysis (skulls, fish, cars, insects, faces, etc.). Soda was selected as one of the first GRCs at FSU.

Members of the Scientific Computing faculty are key participants in one of the first Big Data Initiative grants awarded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The grant is part of President Obama’s initiative to improve the nation’s ability to extract knowledge and insights from large and complex collections of digital data and to accelerate the pace of discovery in science and engineering.

The grant will enable FSU to augment the campus network infrastructure by building a private, dedicated campus research path called the NoleNet Express-Lane for use by professors whose research demands an extremely high levels of data transfers and computations.

Recent Scientific Computing Ph.D. graduate Dan Lu was selected for a research spotlight in Water Resources Research, an interdisciplinary journal for research in the social and natural sciences of water. Only a small percentage of articles submitted to this prestigious journal are selected for publication, and an even smaller proportion are chosen for the research spotlight. Lu’s article, “Analysis of regression confidence intervals and Bayesian credible intervals for uncertainty quantification,” will be disseminated to the entire geophysics community (domestic and international) through the AGU newsletter.