News and Announcements
2013 ICL Winter Reception
As is our annual tradition, ICL recently held our Winter Reception at the Bridgeview Grill on Neyland Drive. There were plenty of ICLers, and significant others, mingling and enjoying good food, drinks, and conversation.
ICL alum Mathieu Faverge and Shirley Moore dropped by to socialize with the rest of the ICL crew, and we have posted a few photos from the reception for your entertainment. Here’s to another great year at ICL!
Amy Szczepanski, Null_Sets, and Glitch Art
Amy Szczepanski, an assistant research professor in EECS and member of the Joint Institute for Computational Science (JICS), has been the subject of attention on the UTK campus (and beyond) for her work on a project called Null_Sets. Null_Sets is a collection of artwork that “visualizes the size and structure of data.” Amy worked alongside Evan Meaney, an assistant professor from UTK’s art department, to develop an open source script that takes full bodies of text and exports them as JPEG images.
So far, this work has garnered attention from Tennessee Today, UTK’s Big Orange – Big Ideas campaign, and a Jury Prize at the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival. On February 22nd, we invited Amy to give an ICL lunch talk about her work, where she explained more about Null_Sets, but also talked at length about glitch art—art where one takes a perfectly good image, removes some of the code using a hex editor, and saves the changes. The strategic (or random) removal of certain portions of the hex code results in glitches (i.e., Glitch Art). Amy did a live demonstration for the ICL group (photo posted above).
If you missed Amy’s talk or would like to hear it again, she will be presenting at the faculty Mic/Nite on March 13th, 5:30pm, at the Relix Variety Theatre on 1208 North Central Ave. Please RSVP if you plan to attend.
Conference Reports
SIAM CSE 2013
This year’s SIAM conference on Computational Science and Engineering (SIAM CSE), held in Boston, Massachusetts on February 25 – March 1, featured in-depth technical discussions on a wide variety of major computational efforts on large problems in science and engineering.
Several members of the ICL team, including Jack Dongarra, Azzam Haidar, Mark Gates, Ichitaro Yamazaki, Jakub Kurzak, and Piotr Luszczek, made the voyage to Boston to participate alongside ~1,200 other conference goers. In fact, this year’s SIAM CSE conference, made up of 20 mini symposia, had the largest turn out of any SIAM workshop.
Jack gave a talk on Monday afternoon called Soft Error Resilience for One-sided Dense Linear Algebra Algorithms. Azzam gave a talk, A Hybrid CPU-GPU Generalized Eigensolver for Electronic Structure Calculations, later that afternoon. Following up on Azzam’s talk on symmetric eigensolvers, Mark gave a talk on Achieving High Performance with Multiple-GPU Non-symmetric Eigenvalue Solvers. Ichi gave a talk on Mult-GPU Tridiagonalzation on Shared-and-distributed-memory Systems, while Jakub and Piotr gave talks on Multithreading API in the PLASMA Library and Designing Fast Eigenvalue Solvers on Manycore Systems, respectively.
All in all, it was a very active workshop for the ICL group, and there were several ICL alum in Boston for the conference, including Marc Baboulin, Hatem Ltaief, and Mathieu Faverge.
Interview
David Rogers
Where are you from, originally?
I’m native to East Tennessee. I was born in Chattanooga. My family moved to Knoxville when I was in 2nd grade after my father joined the University of Tennessee faculty, so I grew up in Knoxville and around UT.
Can you summarize your educational background?
I earned a BFA in Graphic Design from the University of Tennessee in 2000.
Where did you work before joining ICL?
I started working for ICL as a student, so I did not previously have a full-time job. There was a time period when I worked part-time at ICL and part-time at Metro Pulse in their advertising design/production department before joining ICL full-time after graduation.
Tell us how you first learned about ICL.
As part of the graphic design program, students are required to complete practicums in their junior and senior years. ICL was a sponsor in this program. Normally, the faculty members at UT do not place students into practicums. It is up to the students to seek out practicum positions. However, in my case with the practicum at ICL, I recall my professor Cary Staples essentially handpicked me for the position. She knew I would be well suited for the kind of work that ICL needed.
What do you work on at ICL?
I’m part of the Technical Support Group (TSG), which provides an infrastructure of support for ICL’s research activities. The main areas I work on are media design (e.g., project handouts, posters, annual report), information design (e.g., graphics for proposals, papers, or presentations), and web development. From time to time, I have had opportunities to work on unique projects that combine two or more of these areas of work, such as CTWatch and IESP. Last fall, I worked with NICS on designing UT’s presence at SC12, including the booth’s panel designs and kiosk software.
What do you like about working at ICL?
I appreciate the opportunities I have to work on a wide variety of projects at ICL. In most areas of the industry, designers are highly specialized. For example, print design, illustration, information design, and front-end web design are commonly separate positions or roles in a team. And developers are another profession altogether. I prefer a holistic approach to solutions, and I’m interested in all of these various aspects of design and development, so I appreciate that I have been able to work across all these areas at ICL. There have been new and interesting challenges every year in both small-scale and large-scale projects.
What are your interests/hobbies outside work?
I usually have some kind of freelance project or personal project I’m working on that keeps me busy in addition to my roles as husband, father, and homeowner. However, my main hobby is playing fantasy baseball. I was recruited into a league with some guys who lived on my floor when I was a freshman at UT and I have been playing in that league ever since. Consequently, I closely follow both Major and Minor League baseball.
I consider photography to be another hobby. I completed the non-credit UT Photography Certificate program a few years back, so I think that means I’m a certified photographer. I am also an avid podcast listener and have learned a lot about photography and many other subjects by listening to podcasts.
Tell us something about yourself that might surprise people.
I was once a phone-a-friend for someone who was on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” My friend’s question was “Which singer was known as ‘the Velvet Fog’?” I searched Google to find the answer (my friend called me because he knew it was a very Google-friendly question, not because of my knowledge of 1960s jazz singers).
If you weren’t working at ICL, where would you like to be working and why?
While I enjoy being able to work on a variety of design solutions at ICL, my interests have trended more towards web design and development in recent years. So, if I were not working at ICL, I might like to be working on web design and development projects for a design group.
