NCSA awards eight Illinois professors with Faculty Fellowships

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has named Faculty Fellowship awardees for 2017-18. These eight Illinois faculty members will work with NCSA to help solve some of the grand challenges facing all people, including deep learning, the internet of things, data analysis, volcano activity and more.

Each Faculty member will work closely with experts at NCSA on a project that aligns with NCSA’s six thematic research areas and/or major projects (i.e., the Blue Waters project, XSEDE, the Midwest Big Data Hub, Industry program).

2017-18 NCSA Faculty Fellows

Transdisciplinary Convergence in Situated Research Environments: Mapping NCSA across the University of Illinois Campus

Anita Chan, Media and Cinema Studies
Chan will lead a historical investigation of NCSA’s role and impact as a national and campus-wide hub for digital inquiry over the past four decades.

Modeling the Massive HathiTrust Corpus: Creating Concept-Based Representations of 15 Million Volumes

J. Stephen Downie, School of Information Sciences
Downie hopes to make the HathiTrust book collection available for large-scale research use through optimized, concept-based representations. The massive HathiTrust corpus contains 15 million books spanning multiple centuries.

A Data Assimilation Framework for Forecasting Volcanic Unrest

Patricia Gregg, Geology
Gregg will expand current efforts in volcano model-data fusion into a scalable data assimilation strategy that will provide a framework for volcano hazards research worldwide.

Understanding Breast Cancer Disparities in African-American Women

Zeynep Madak-Erdogan, Food Sciences and Human Nutrition
Madak-Erdogan’s work will explore the association between the serum factors and demographic variables related to poor outcomes in African-American women with breast cancer, including neighborhood socioeconomic deprivation and individual characteristics.

Using Wearable Sensors and Affective Diaries to Document How Violence Affects Public Life and Public Health

Ruby Mendenhall, Sociology and African American Studies
Mendenhall will examine the physiological effects of exposure to nearby gun crimes such as shootings as a way to document the public life and health of African-American mothers.

Computational Infrastructure for Collaborative Design of Semiconductor Nanocrystals

Andre Schleife, Materials Science and Engineering
Schleife will develop the data science infrastructure that will enable a new computational/experimental approach to semiconductor nanocrystal design.

Materials Modeling Optimization

Dallas Trinkle, Materials Science and Engineering
Trinkle will scale-up a new materials modeling optimization algorithm and integrate with the Materials Data Facility. This will strengthen connections in materials modeling across campus and NCSA.

Deep Learning to the Rescue: Enabling the Search and Characterization of New Classes of Gravitational Wave Sources with Novel Applications of Machine Learning

Zhizhen Zhao, Electrical and Computational Engineering
Zhao will develop a unified and highly efficient computational framework to process the data from the gravitational waves discovery by LIGO utilizing new deep learning techniques.

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