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26 Illinois undergrads selected for internships with NCSA


Twenty-six University of Illinois undergraduate students have been selected for 2014-2015 internships at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). These talented undergraduates were selected through NCSA’s SPIN (Students Pushing Innovation) program. They will pursue research and development projects—from developing an app to display crystal structure data to enhancing the experience of dance, theater and music performances—with mentors from NCSA and related University programs.

The 2014-2015 NCSA interns and their projects are:

  • Lin Cheng, Computer Science, and Jui-Ting Hsu, Computer Engineering, will assist mentor Volodymyr Kindratenko, a senior research scientist with NCSA’s Innovative Systems Laboratory, with the investigation and deployment of cloud computing technologies to create a flexible and scalable framework for executing complex data-intensive workflows.
  • With mentor Michael Miller, NCSA Event Services, Dhruv Diddi, Computer Engineering, will develop a workflow for live auto captioning and creation of standard caption files for use in video editing.
  • NCSA system engineer Peter Enstrom will mentor a group of students—Ziqiao Ding, Computer Science, Kevin Kang, Aerospace Engineering, Melissa Lin, Economics, and Wenbo Yu, Computer Science—as they determine new ways to display system and job data from the Illinois Campus Cluster program in order to make the information more accessible and useful for system operators, managers, investors, and users.
  • Jon Toenjes, an associate professor of Dance and NCSA Faculty Affiliate, will mentor Hilal Habashi, Computer Science/Math, Naphat Lertratanakul, Computer Engineering, and Utsav Shah, Computer Science, as they investigate and develop mobile apps to enhance the experience of audiences of dance, theater, and music performances at the Krannert Center for Performing Arts.
  • Guy Garnett, an associate professor of Music, NCSA Faculty Affiliate, associate director of the eDream Institute, and leader of the Illinois Informatics Institute, will mentor students pursuing several projects. Matthew Ho, Physics, Constantine Roros, Computer Engineering, and Bentic Joseph Sebastian, Aerospace Engineering, will work on the MovingStories project, developing gestural interfaces for high-level qualitative control of complex systems. Hao Gao, Computer Science/Math, will collaborate with assistant professor Mani Golparvar-Fard, Civil & Environmental Engineering, on autonomous vision-based systems for monitoring construction projects. Lunan Li, Computer Engineering, will collaborate with assistant professor Jian Ma, Bioengineering, on building a web service for personalized cancer genomics. And Henry Lin, Computer Science, will work with Professor Matt Hudson, Bioinformatics, on analysis of “Big Data” from genomic DNA sequencing.
  • Yusheng Hou and Aayush Sharma, Computer Science, will work with mentor Andre Schleife, an assistant professor of Materials Science and Engineering and one of the campus’ Blue Waters Professor, to develop an Android app to display 3D atomic lattices, allowing users to navigate the crystal structure of materials.
  • Donna Cox, director of NCSA’s Advanced Visualization Laboratory (AVL) and the eDream Institute, will mentor Mingwei Hu and Annie Rong, Computer Science. The students will assist with integrating AVL’s Virtual Director camera choreography and remote collaboration software with yt, a fast parallel volume software renderer.
  • Nick Humbles, Computer Science, will work with mentor Omar Padron, a research programmer who assists researchers in effectively using the Blue Waters supercomputer. Humbles will help develop TorusVis, a front-end Javascript library for visualizing data on arbitrary graph topologies, which is primarily intended for high-performance computing system monitoring and analysis.
  • Richard Lee, Computer Science, and Jonathan Pan-Doh, Electrical Engineering, will work with mentor Robert J. Brunner, associate professor of Astronomy, to develop and optimize codes used to analyze image data collected through observational astronomy.
  • Chuck Rozhon, Computer Science, will work with NCSA research scientist and astronomer Matt Turk on the development of web widgets for interactive data manipulation of astrophysical data and of libraries for interfacing between running simulations and analysis code.
  • Nathan Russell, Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering, was an NCSA intern in 2013-2014 and will continue working with mentor Colleen Bushell on data modeling and machine learning techniques applied to precision farming.
  • Colter Wehmeier, Architecture, was an NCSA intern in 2013-2014 and will continue working with mentor Donna Cox on developing new digital workspaces and presentation techniques.

For more information on NCSA’s SPIN program and this year’s group of interns, see http://spin.ncsa.illinois.edu/.

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