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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Special Features:
UC-SAN DIEGO UNDERGRADS GO ABROAD TO STUDY CYBERINFRASTRUCTURE
Nine undergraduate students from the University of California-San Diego have
arrived in Asia and Australia to conduct collaborative research on a wide
variety of topics related to cyberinfrastructure. They were selected to
participate in the first of a three-year program funded by the National
Science Foundation (NSF) and other organizations, to help prepare more U.S.
engineers and scientists to work on international projects. As part of the
Pacific Rim Undergraduate Experiences (PRIME) program, the students will work
for nine weeks this summer at host research institutions in Osaka, Japan;
Hsinchu and Taipei, Taiwan; and Melbourne, Australia.
The program is sponsored by the NSF's Office of International Science and
Engineering, with additional support from its Division of Shared
Cyberinfrastructure, and the California Institute for Telecommunications and
Information Technology [Cal-(IT)2]. PRIME provides students with an
opportunity to participate in project-based international and collaborative
research experiences that will better prepare them for future scientific
endeavors, particularly in the context of a global workforce. The students all
from UCSD's Jacobs School of Engineering are also expected to develop their
research methods and skills, while achieving greater understanding of the
cultural environments of their host countries.
Each undergraduate has a minimum of two mentors: one affiliated with UCSD, and
another with the host institution. The host organizations are all connected to
the Pacific Rim Applications and Grid Middleware Assembly (PRAGMA)
collaborative program.
Gabriele Wienhausen, founding provost of Sixth College and Cal-(IT)2's
Education layer leader at UCSD, is one of three program coordinators for PRIME
and is the principal investigator of the NSF award. She is joined by Linda
Feldman, director of UCSD's Academic Internship Program, and Peter Arzberger,
PRAGMA's principal investigator, director of the Life Sciences Initiative at
UCSD, and director of the National Biomedical Computation Resource (NBCR).
Japan
Three Jacobs School undergraduates are working in Osaka, Japan with professor
Shinji Shimojo, vice-director of the Cybermedia Center at Osaka University.
Shimojo is a world-renowned scientist who is the principal investigator on a
major award to build a Biogrid in Japan. Assisting in the collaborative
efforts from Osaka University is Susumu Date, an assistant professor in the
Graduate School of Information Science and Technology. Takumi Takahashi, a
pre-med Bioengineering major, will work with Date and Shimojo and UCSD
Bioengineering chair Shu Chien to adapt tools to integrate data from different
genomic databases relevant to cell function. Ramsin Khoshabeh, an Electrical
and Computer Engineering (ECE) major, aims to explore the next-generation IPv6
protocol with respect to key components of the telescience infrastructure.
Stephen Geist, a mechanical engineering major from Thurgood Marshall College
at UCSD, is concentrating on migrating code from a camera at UCSD's National
Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research (NCMIR) to the same camera on the
Osaka microscope. Khoshabeh and Geist are working with professors Shimojo and
Toyokazu Akiyama in Osaka, as well as a team of UCSD mentors including
neuroscientist Mark Ellisman (director of both NCMIR and the Center for
Research in Biological Structure), NCMIR's executive director Steve Peltier,
and center researcher Tomas Molina.
Taiwan
Robert Ikeda and Brandon Smith are at the National Center for High-performance
Computing (NCHC) in Hsinchu, Taiwan, under the guidance of its Grid Computing
Division manager Fang-Pang Lin, and Bioengineering assistant professor Trey
Ideker at UCSD. They are working to develop large-scale, computer-aided models
of biological signaling and regulatory pathways. ECE's Ikeda is pursuing the
development of a graphical user interface for pathway editing and integration
in Cytoscape, while Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) undergrad Smith
will help install a wireless network while extending the Ecogrid in Taiwan's
Ecological Parks. Smith will also be enhancing software of the Collaborative
Lake Metabolism Project that is vital to his proposed research. Smith is
mentored by Lin, Arzberger, and Tony Fountain, who directs the Knowledge and
Information Discovery Lab within the Data and Knowledge Systems program of the
San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC).
Jared Bell, a Revelle College undergraduate who expects to earn his Bachelor
of Science in structural engineering in June of 2005, is also spending the
summer in Taiwan. Bell's research centers on Internet-based virtual laboratory
testing for earthquake resistance of structures using the National Earthquake
Engineering Simulation (NEES) model. He is working for Keh-Chyuan Tsai,
director of Taiwan's National Center for Research on Earthquake Engineering;
NCHC's Fang-Pang Lin; and Chia-Ming Uang, professor and vice-chair of UCSD's
Structural Engineering department.
Australia
Three additional students are performing research at the School of Computer
Science and Engineering at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.
Bioengineering's John Colby, together with CSE's Christopher Kondrick and Duy
Nguyen, will work under the direction of David Abramson, a well-respected
researcher in software for cyberinfrastructure and a developer of Nimrod/G in
Melbourne. Colby, a Revelle College student also majoring in premedical
molecular biology, will employ Nimrod and Continuity to study the impact of
temporal and spatial distribution of two pacemakers around the heart to
understand therapeutic optimizations. Nguyen, who is the first member of his
family to attend college, aspires to incorporate a Rocks cluster, NIMROD, and
GAMESS into a ready system for scientific data computing. And Kondrick will
work on modifying the NIMROD infrastructure to work with two computational
chemistry codes, GAMESS and APBS, to carry out high-throughput chemistry
calculations. Apart from Abramson, the students will also be mentored by UCSD
Bioengineering vice-chair Andrew McCulloch, and two scientists from the San
Diego Supercomputer Center: Kim Baldridge, its director of Integrated
Computational Sciences; and Philip Papadopoulos, SDSC's program manager for
Grid and Cluster Computing, as well as co-principal investigator on the PRAGMA
award.
PRIME students are required to be U.S. citizens or permanent residents, and
must be enrolled as full-time students at UCSD with a minimum GPA of 3.0 (out
of 4.0). In the fall quarter students will participate in the PRAGMA 7
workshop, to be held in San Diego, and will be expected to submit papers on
their experiences abroad and present papers at the UCSD undergraduate research
conference. A gathering will also be held for PRIME participants to celebrate
their successes, and to engage more students and faculty mentors in the
program for 2005.
For further information on the PRIME program, see http://prime.ucsd.edu.
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