Through the looking glass

I attended a half-day seminar at UC Berkeley, this past Thursday. The seminar is part of the i4Science lecture series.

The link will take you to a detailed presentation of what they are about. In a nutshell, they are taking on simulation and modeling problems (climate, systems neuroscience, combustion, etc.,) that are very compute intensive. They are working with massive number of processors and coming up with innovative algorithms to address the computing and data modeling challenges.

These are such fascinating times to be a student. Exciting opportunities abound. I encourage students looking to make an impact on science and society to visit the link below

http://citris-uc.org/about

One of the lectures was by Jim Spohrer. If you click on the name it will take you to his presentations on Slideshare.net. He has been a tireless evangelist for a new discipline called Service Science, which is basically about harnessing Information and Communications Technology(ICT) for improving people’s lives. I urge you to take a look at his presentations.

There were many interesting tidbits of information. The one I got most excited about is this vision of the future video from Corning. For a technophile like me, this is the sort of thing that produces an intense cognitive rush. Absolutely brilliant/breathtaking stuff.