Computation: A Pillar of Science and a Lens to the Future — the 2018 MICDE Symposium

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The Michigan Institute for Computational Discovery and Engineering 2018 Symposium will feature eminent scientists from around the world and the U-M campus. The symposium this year will show how computational science is leading the research at all scales in our lives, from the molecular level to the sky.

Visit the Symposium page for more details.

Please register if you plan to attend.

SPEAKERS


Guruduth Banavar
Chief Technology Officer
Viome


Cynthia Chestek
Assistant Professor, Biomedical Engineering and EECS
University of Michigan


Alison Marsden
Principal Investigator, Cardiovascular Biomechanics Computation Lab
Stanford University


Cleve Moler
Cofounder and Chief Mathematician
MathWorks


Raju Namburu
Chief, Computational and Information Sciences Directorate
Army Research Lab


Stephen Smith
Assistant Professor, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
University of Michigan


Beth Wingate
Professor, Mathematics
University of Exeter

POSTER COMPETITION

The symposium will include a poster competition highlighting outstanding computational work from U-M students and postdocs. First place is awarded $500, and second and third places win $250.

Building a Community of Social Scientists with Big Data Skills: The ICOS Big Data Summer Camp

By | Educational, Feature, General Interest, News

As the use of data science techniques continues to grow across disciplines, a group of University of Michigan researchers are working to build a community of social scientists with skills in Big Data through a week-long summer camp for faculty and graduate students.

Having recently completed its fourth annual session, the Big Data Summer Camp held by the Interdisciplinary Committee for Organizational Studies (ICOS) trains approximately 50 people each spring in skills and methods such as Python, SQL, and social media APIs. The camp splits up into several groups to try to answer a research question using these newly acquired skills.

Working with researchers from other fields is a key component of the camp, and of creating a Big Data social science community, said co-coordinator Todd Schifeling, a Research Fellow at the Erb Institute in the School of Natural Resources and Environment.

“Students meet from across social science disciplines who wouldn’t meet otherwise,” said Schifeling. “And every year we bring back more and more past campers to present on what they’ve been doing.”

Schifeling himself participated in the camp as a student before taking on the role of coordinator this year.

Teddy DeWitt, the other co-coordinator of the camp and a doctoral student at the Ross School of Business, added the camp presents the curriculum in a unique way relative to the rest of campus.

“This set of material does not seem to be available in other parts of the university, at least … with an applied perspective in mind,” he said. “So we’re glad we have this set of resources that is both accessible and well-received by students.”

Participants range in skill from beginning to advanced, but even a relatively advanced student like Jeff Lockhart, a doctoral student in sociology and population studies who describes himself as “super-committed to computational social science,” said that it’s hard to find classes in computational methods in social science departments.

“[The ICOS camp] doesn’t expect a lot of prior knowledge, which I think is critical,” Lockhart said.

Lockhart, DeWitt, and Dylan Nelson, also a sociology doctoral student, are working on setting up a series of workshops in Computational Social Science for fall 2016 (contact Lockhart at jwlock@umich.edu for more information). Lockhart said it’s critical that social scientists learn Big Data skills.

“If we don’t have skills like this, there’s no way for us to enter into these fields of research that are going to be more and more important,” he said.

“A lot of the skills we’ve learned are sort of the on-ramp for doing data science,” DeWitt added.

The camp is co-sponsored by Advanced Research Computing (ARC).

New on-campus data-science and computational research services available

By | Feature, General Interest, News

Researchers across campus now have access to several new services to help them navigate the new tools and methodologies emerging for data-intensive and computational research.

As part of the U-M Data Science Initiative announced in fall 2015, Consulting for Statistics, Computing and Analytics Research (CSCAR) is offering new and expanded services, including guidance on:

  • Research methodology for data science.
  • Large scale data processing using high performance computing systems.
  • Optimization of code and use of Flux and other advanced computing systems.
  • Advanced data management.
  • Geospatial data analyses.
  • Exploratory analysis and data visualization.
  • Obtaining licensed data from commercial sources.
  • Scraping, aggregating and integrating data from public sources.
  • Analysis of restricted data.

“With Big Data and computational simulations playing an ever-larger role in research in a variety of fields, it’s increasingly important to provide researchers with a comprehensive ecosystem of support and services that address those methodologies,” said CSCAR Director Kerby Shedden.

As part of this significant expansion of its scope, the campuswide statistical consulting service CSCAR has been renamed Consulting for Statistics, Computing and Analytics Research. It was formerly known as the Center for Statistical Consultation and Research.

For more information, see the University Record article.

New graduate course offering: “Methods and Practice of Scientific Computing”

By | Educational, News

The Michigan Institute for Computational Discovery and Engineering (MICDE) is pleased to announce “Methods and Practice of Scientific Computing”, the first graduate course designed and organized by MICDE faculty. The course will be taught in Fall 2016, coordinated by Dr. Brendan Kochunas. This foundational course in scientific computing has been developed as a broad introduction to the subject, and has been designed to support research in all disciplines represented in MICDE. In addition to Brendan Kochunas, the course was developed by MICDE professors Bill Martin, Karthik Duraisamy, Vikram Gavini, and Shravan Veerapaneni, and MICDE Assistant Director Mariana Carrasco-Teja.

The details follow:

NERS 590
4 credits
Prerequisites: Graduate standing and permission of instructor.

This course is designed for graduate students who are developing the methods, and using the tools, of scientific computing in their research. With the increased power and availability of computers to do massively scaled simulations, computational science and engineering as a whole has become an integral part of research that complements experiment and theory. This course will teach students the necessary skills to be effective computational scientists and how to produce work that adheres to the scientific method. A broad range of topics will be covered including: software engineering best practices, computer architectures, computational performance, common algorithms in engineering, solvers, software libraries for scientific computing, uncertainty quantification, verification and validation, and how to use all the various tools to accomplish these things. The class will have lecture twice a week and have an accompanying lab component. Students will be graded on homeworks, lab assignments, and a course project.

A draft of the syllabus can be found here. Please contact MICDE at micde-contact@umich.edu with any questions.

Krishna Garikipati appointed Director of MICDE

By | General Interest, News

Statement from S. Jack Hu, U-M Vice President for Research:

krishnaGarikipatiI’m very pleased to announce that Prof. Krishna Garikipati (Mechanical Engineering and Mathematics) has been appointed the new Director of the Michigan Institute for Computational Discovery and Engineering (MICDE). The Institute has grown significantly since its establishment in 2013 as the interdisciplinary home for the development and use of mathematical algorithms on high performance computers at U-M. Prof. Garikipati has been involved as associate director for research since Fall 2014 and is uniquely positioned to take the institute to the next level.

MICDE is a joint initiative of UMOR, the College of Engineering, and the College of Literature, Science and the Arts. In the past year, it has seen many new and important developments, including the launching of two centers focused on network and storage-enabled collaborative science and data-driven computational physics; new planned course offerings for the PhD in Scientific Computing and the Graduate Certificate in CDE; new initiatives on industrial engagement; and the establishment of the Scientific Computing Student Club. A number of new research initiatives are also being planned, with broadening participation of MICDE-affiliated faculty, whose numbers continue to grow.

Prof. Garikipati will take over the directorship of MICDE from Prof. Eric Michielssen (EECS) who founded the institute in Fall 2013 and served as director, in addition to his role as Associate Vice President for Advanced Research Computing. Prof. Michielssen will continue as AVP.