James Moody from Duke University who will give a talk entitled “More than a Pretty Picture: Visual Thinking in Network Science” on Thursday, October 29, 2009, at 4 pm in McKenna Hall, Room 210-214. Poster can be downloaded here.

Moody will also be giving a joint iCeNSA/Department of Sociology Colloquium on “Diffusion Implications of Network Dynamics” on Thursday, October 29, 2009 at noon in Flanner G20 (Basement Level). Lunch will be provided.

Modeling Social Behavior with Aggregated Location Requests
Kipp Jones, Chief Architect, Skyhook Wireless.

http://www.skyhookwireless.com/howitworks/

Friday, October 23rd 2009
OIT ITC Building, Video Access Grid Room 121
2-3:30pm
Please RSVP by Tuesday, October 20 dpitts@nd.edu


Skyhook Wireless is best known as the provider of location services for mobile devices such as the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch. With tens of millions of devices generating hundreds of millions of anonymous location requests from around the world, Skyhook is in a unique position to observe and study aggregated user behavior. In response, Skyhook has developed novel techniques to analyze and leverage this immense and highly dynamic data set. Understanding user activity allows Skyhook to characterize social behaviors as they appear and evolve. Further, identifying these patterns and events facilitates the development of predictive models for users and groups. Kipp will describe and discuss some of the analytical methods Skyhook uses and present prototypical results based on actual user behavior.


Speaker:
Kipp is currently responsible for the data acquisition, management and processing of Skyhook Wireless's data and related architecture. This work spans areas such as primary data acquisition, spatial and temporal analysis of data for improving system performance, and operational optimization. Prior to joining Skyhook, Kipp spent more than 15 years developing technology and strategy for a number of early stage companies. His technology focus has been centered on information management using internet- and web-specific technologies. He received his BS in Computer Science from the University of Nebraska at Kearney in 1988, and an MS in Computer Science from Georgia Tech in 1995; he is completing his PhD in CS at Georgia Tech, where he achieved ABD status in 2007.

SEMINAR
Dr. Frederica Darema
National Science Foundation

Dynamic Data Driven Applications Systems (DDDAS): The Concept and its Impact
Thursday, October 22, 2009
3:30 p.m.
356-A Fitzpatrick

The Data Driven Applications Systems (DDDAS) concept entails “the ability to dynamically incorporate data into an executing application simulation, and in reverse, the ability of applications to dynamically steer measurement processes”, creating “application simulations that can dynamically accept and respond to ‘online’ field data and measurements and/or control such measurements”. Through the DDDAS concept, the application modeling capability, its accuracy and its efficiency, are enhanced over the traditional computational modeling methods, by complementing and augmenting the computational modeling with dynamic data inputs, which can be dynamically incorporated into the computation at runtime. In reverse, the ability of the executing application to steer the measurement processes, and conduct targeted measurements guided by the executing application, can result into more efficient and more effective measurement processes. By integrating the computational and measurement aspects of an application in a dynamic feed-back loop, DDDAS changes the paradigm of the traditionally distinct computational and measurement processes, and leads to a unification of the computing and instrumentation platforms of an application. Together with presenting examples of new capabilities in many important application areas, the presentation will also discuss the DDDAS computational model representing the unification of measurement and computational platforms, the new measurement capabilities enabled through DDDAS, and in particular in architecting and dynamically managing sensor networks, and the systems software needs for supporting the unified measurement and computational platforms in DDDAS environments.

Download announcement here.

Mathworks to present update on Matlab
Tuesday, October 13, 2009 from 10:00a.m.-2:00p.m.
at the Eck Visitor Center Auditorium.

For more information or to register please visit:
http://www.mathworks.com/company/events/seminars/seminar39692.html

MathWorks will present an update on Matlab - see agenda below

Tuesday, October 13th 2009 in the Eck Visitors Center Auditorium.

Pizza lunch will be provided at 11:30 a.m.

--Register Now--

Register for this seminar at: www.mathworks.com/seminars/und1009

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
MATLAB Seminar at the University of Notre Dame
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

--Who Should Attend--

* All ND faculty, staff, students, and affiliates are welcome to attend

--Agenda--

Presenters:

Todd Schultz, Senior Application Engineer, The MathWorks, Inc.

Session 1 (10:00 a.m. - 11:30 a.m.)

Technical Computing with MATLAB

Attend this free seminar to find out how you can use MATLAB and its add-on products for algorithm development, data visualization, data analysis, and numeric computation. MathWorks engineers will provide an overview of MATLAB through live demonstrations, examples, and user testimonials, showing how you can use MATLAB and related toolboxes to:

§ Access data from many sources (files, other software, hardware, etc.)
§ Use interactive tools for iterative exploration, design, and problem solving
§ Automate and capture your work in easy-to-write scripts and programs
§ Share your results with others by automatically creating reports
§ Build and deploy GUI-based applications

Symbolic computing allows engineers and scientists to find general solutions to their problems that can quickly be evaluated for a wide range of conditions. You will also see how you can:

§ Leverage the extensive functionality available in Symbolic Math Toolbox
§ Conveniently manage and document your symbolic computations
§ Extend the built in functionality available in the toolbox by developing your own custom symbolic functions and libraries

MATLAB provides a flexible environment for teaching and research in a wide range of applications, including signal processing and communications, image processing, math and optimization, statistics and data analysis, control systems, hardware data acquisition, computational finance, and computational biology.

Attendees with beginner to expert MATLAB skills are welcome to attend.

Session 2 (12:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m.)

Speeding Up MATLAB Applications

In this session we will discuss and demonstrate simple ways to improve and optimize your code that can boost execution speed by orders of magnitude. We will also address common pitfalls in writing MATLAB-code and explore the use of the MATLAB Profiler to find bottlenecks. This session will show you how to perform parallel and distributed computing in MATLAB to solve computationally and data-intensive problems on multi-core computers and clusters. We will introduce you to parallel processing constructs such as parallel for-loops, distributed arrays, parallel numerical algorithms and message-passing functions that let you implement task and data parallel algorithms in MATLAB at a high level without programming for specific hardware and network architectures. And without changing the code, we will show you how to run the same application on a computer cluster.

Highlights include:

• Understand memory usage and vectorization in MATLAB
• Address bottlenecks in your programs
• Optimize file I/O to streamline your code
• Transition from serial to parallel MATLAB programs
• Execute applications on a single multi-core or multiprocessor desktop
• Applications of parallel computing

--Register Now--

Register for this seminar at: www.mathworks.com/seminars/und1009

CeNSA, the Interdisciplinary Center for Network Science and Applications presents:

The Distinguished Lecture Series on Social Networks

“What is Social About Social Networks?”

Katherine Faust
Professor, Department of Sociology and Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences
University of California, Irvine

Thursday, October 8, 2009
4 pm
McKenna Hall, Room 210-214

Free and open to the public with reception to follow

Katherine Faust is coauthor of the book Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications (Cambridge University Press) and numerous articles on social networks and network methodology. Her current research focuses on comparison of network patterns across different forms of social relations and animal species, development of methodology for complex network structures, and understanding the relationship between social networks and demographic processes.

Kirk E. Jordan
Emerging Solutions Executive
Computational Science Center
IBM T.J. Watson Research

“Spanning scales - the combination of Mathematics and High Performance Computing impacts Computational Biology”

Tuesday, October 6, 2009
4:00pm
127 Hayes-Healy Center
*Tea at 3:30pm in 257 Hurley*

Computation is playing an ever increasing and vital role in the biological and healthcare sciences. In many instances, scientists are developing mathematical models and using high performance computing to carry out analysis and simulations that provide insight into biological systems. The complexity of these models often demands increasing compute power and sophisticated mathematics for the solution. In collaboration, biological scientists are using thousands of processors to look at their problems in new ways, leading to science breakthroughs. In this talk, I will briefly describe the features of the computational laboratory, I use. I then describe a few examples in bioinformatics and computational biology where mathematics and high performance computing are converging. While progress is being made, there remain many challenges for computational scientists using massively parallel systems on “Big” science problems with impact on society that until now or in current implementations have fallen short. In conclusion, I will point out some of the computational trends that I believe hold opportunity for coupling high performance computing and mathematics to tackle multi-scale biological science problems.

From: justin_smith (AT) wolfram.com
Subject: Mathematica seminar at University of Notre Dame
Date: September 23, 2009 10:08:30 AM GMT-04:00

To support the Mathematica site license at University of Notre Dame, Wolfram Research will be on campus to give a technical talk on Mathematica 7 at 3pm on September 25. The talk will be held in Debartolo Room 215.

This seminar will be given 100% in Mathematica and will show useful teaching and research examples for mathematics, the physical sciences, engineering, and business/economics. Ideas for creating universal examples in Mathematica that can be used by colleagues or students with no prior Mathematica experience will be a central theme.

The content will help attendees with no prior experience get started with the Mathematica language and workflow. Since there is a large amount of new functionality in Version 7, most intermediate and advanced users who attend these talks report learning quite a bit as well. All attendees will receive an electronic copy of the examples, which can be adapted to individual projects.

Students are also welcome; please invite any graduate students or students in your courses.

To make sure we have enough space, please let me know if you plan to attend or if your students are likely to attend. I look forward to meeting you!


Best regards,


Justin Smith
Wolfram Research, Inc.
1-800-965-3726 ext. 3479
fax: 217-398-1108
justin_smith (AT) wolfram.com
http://www.wolfram.com
Wolfram Products:
http://www.wolfram.com/products