NCSA SPIN – Students Pushing Innovation

Please go to spin.ncsa.illinois.edu for current SPIN information.

 

 

NCSA is looking for Illinois undergraduate students who have big ideas and the creativity, skill, and drive needed to bring them to life. We're offering up to 15 paid innovation fellowships—selected students will work with NCSA mentors during the Spring 2013 semester.

Join us at the NCSA Building (1205 W. Clark St., Urbana) from 4 to 6 pm Oct. 24 for NCSA SPIN (Students Pushing Innovation). Meet NCSA staff and learn more about their research and areas of expertise. Free snacks will be provided courtesy of eDream.

After the SPIN open house, submit your fellowship proposal by Nov. 9.

• SPIN proposal guidelines
• SPIN proposal template

Participating organizations and projects include: Blue Waters, XSEDE, the Illinois Informatics Institute, eDream, HPCBio, and the Illinois Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science.

Questions? Contact spin@ncsa.illinois.edu.

Jerry Fiddler to give talk on innovation at NCSA SPIN

Jerry Fiddler, U of I alum, supporter of eDream, and principal of Zygote Ventures, has helped create and grow a number of companies, as CEO, director, chairman, investor, and advisor and will be giving a talk during NCSA's SPIN event at 4:30 p.m. in the NCSA Auditorium on Oct. 24. Mr. Fiddler will be discussing his philosophies on innovation and sharing his experiences as an interdisciplinary student.

Mr. Fiddler is the founder of Wind River and was CEO and Chairman for 23 years. After its establishment in 1981 in Fiddler's Berkeley garage, Wind River grew to become the leading provider of device software worldwide, with over $400M in annual sales, and market cap well over $1B. He is now the Chairman of Solazyme, a biotech company working with algae for energy, industrial, and health applications. Solazyme is the first company in the world able to make production quantities of biodiesel and other algal oil products.

Watch Fiddler discuss innovation in this 2010 lecture

Participating mentors

Jim Barlow
Head of NCSA Security Operations and Incident Response

Research interests/expertise: Assessing, detecting, and mitigating cybersecurity risks
Personal homepage: http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/~jbarlow/

Jim Barlow interview to come

Donna Cox
Director of eDream and the Advanced Visualization Laboratory

Research interests/expertise: Scientific visualization, 3D, digital arts media, interdisciplinary collaboration
Personal homepage: http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/~cox/

Donna Cox talks about SPIN

Guy Garnett
Associate Professor of Music, Director of Illinois Informatics Institute, Associate Director for Research of eDream

Research interests/expertise: Cultural computing (innovating creative technologies to enhance expression and create a positive cultural and societal impact); advanced full-bodied human-computer interaction models to control virtual worlds; musical and performance applications of machine-learning; and interactive computer performance
Personal homepage: http://informatics.ncsa.illinois.edu/guy-garnett-director/

Guy Garnett interview to come

Merle Giles
Director of Business and Economic Development for NCSA

Research interests/expertise: HPC for industry, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, economic development

Merle Giles interview to come

Vlad Kindratenko
NCSA senior research scientist; ECE Visiting Lecturer

Research interests/expertise: High performance computing with accelerators
Personal homepage: http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/~kindr/

Vlad Kindratenko talks about SPIN

Bill Kramer
Deputy project director for Blue Waters

Research interests/expertise: Extreme-scale computing, sustained petascale performance metric

Bill Kramer interview to come

Jong Lee
NCSA senior research scientist, Image and Spatial Data Analysis Group

Research interests/expertise: Spatial data management and analysis, GIS data visualization, transportation planning, regional science

Jong Lee interview to come

Kenton McHenry
NCSA research scientist, leader of the Image and Spatial Data Analysis Group

Research interests/expertise: Computer vision: segmentation, object/matrial recognition, 3D reconstruction; Cyberinfrastructure: digital preservation and access, high performance and cloud computing
Personal homepage: http://isda.ncsa.uiuc.edu/~kmchenry/

Kenton McHenry interview to come

Michael Welge
Head, NCSA Data-Intensive Technologies and Applications research team

Research interests/expertise: Data visualization and analysis

Michael Welge interview to come

Key dates

• NCSA SPIN event: 4 to 6 p.m. Oct. 24
• Students' SPIN proposals due: Nov. 9
• Selected SPIN fellows notified: first week of December
• SPIN fellowships begin: Spring semester 2013