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MURPA fans the e-Science flame- March 2010
The award winning Monash Undergraduate Research Projects Abroad (MURPA) Seminar Series 2010 was launched on 25th February with a showcase of High Definition Video linked presentations from Monash IT undergraduates completing internships at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) in areas of astrophysics, bioengineering and computer science.
Beamed in from UCSD to audiences in Tokyo and Clayton - via support from the AARNet research network - world renowned computer scientist Professor Larry Smarr said from UCSD, “This whole application to education and the ability to have a shared environment with mentors and students across a good fraction of the planet was never something we originally had in mind!”
“The students, on returning to Monash, will be exposed to a mix of diverse seminars from international experts to augment their international research experiences, guiding them towards appropriate honours projects, potential mentors and some stimulating career choices in research,” said organiser Professor David Abramson (Faculty of Information Technology). Student presentations:
“The students touched on some critical aspects of e-Research, such as; data mining, data quality, efficiency of data processing, scientific workflows and related software - for improved usability of experimental data sourced from data banks and directly from scientific instruments - as well as some exciting visualisation applications,” said Professor Paul Bonnington, Director of the Monash e-Research Centre. Aisa Na'im described ‘workflows’ in her ‘ Data Quality Monitor for Scientific Workflows’ presentation as a collection of paths and procedures connected to achieve a certain goal, and presented to the scientist via a simple user interface...Effectively demystifying traditional computer script for users. “In the scientific domain it combines data and computational procedures in steps - enabling the computational workflow to ultimately provide solutions to very specific scientific problems,” Aisa said. Workflows are simple to configure, reusable and easy to share. When data streams into the workflow from different sources at certain times the quality can fall below an acceptable standard. Aisa added rectangles below ‘actors’ (or designed components) within the Kepler workflow program which change in colour to track the quality of each data set. Jonathan McClure’s project 'Data Mining for Bullet Clusters' aimed to design a 'Bayesian network', or logic network of nodes which can work out the probability of an event based upon other 'known' events, to locate a bullet cluster - a collision of two clusters of gas or matter - during galactic simulations. Jonathan soon found out that identifying the best attributes for drawing meaningful comparisons could be quite a challenge. Existing visualisation software hadn’t been carrying out adequate calculations during simulations to locate the specific information he required. He overcame the problem with a literary search uncovering a research paper with more useful attributes such as X-ray emissivity. Jonathan is excited at the prospect of comparing mass density to the mass of a bullet cluster and is refining his Bayesian network with more identifiable ranges. Ben Morgan examined ‘Diffusion Tensor MRI Imaging’ to improve diagnosis of the functioning of the heart via the visualising of the dispersion of water within heart tissue, and particularly sheets of tissue. Ben displayed the tensor results as points on a grid. These were represented by small coloured superqaudrix 3D glyph shapes, “orientated by igon vectors and scaled by igon values,” which by individually revealing their rounded or hard edge translated as isotropic/even distribution, or anisotropic/uneven distribution, of planar (blue colour), or linear (yellow), directional flow. Ben, thanks to helpful support from his UCSD mentor, was able to integrate this into Continuity 6 software "which provides a problem solving environment for multiscale modelling in bioengineering, physiology, and especially, cardio dynamics transport and electrophysiology,” Ben said. Andrew Paterson presented ‘Interactively Visualising Density Fields within Astrophysics’ and wrote a software program to create a fast visualisation tool for observing Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) models, where fluid appears as a density field, to reveal star formation and other galaxy information. “I wrote this to be able to use with the animation tools already in use by Jurgen and others at Calit2." “The great benefit of the MURPA-PRIME exchange program is that the relationships forged over the past three years between the supervisors have lead not only to standard publications and conference papers, but also to extended collaborative work in the fields of bioengineering, theoretical chemistry and astrophysics,” Professor Abramson said.
The MURPA Seminar Series received a prestigious CENIC award at an awards luncheon in Monterey, US on 9th March, for ‘Innovations in Networking’ in support of a student exchange program - involving both PRIME and MURPA student exchanges from UCSD and Monash. MURPA, now in its third year, leveraged off the design of the original PRIME program, which linked international institutions of the Pacific Rim and Grid Middleware Assembly (PRAGMA) consortium, and used key elements from Japan’s PRIUS program, which exchanged academics. “Well, I heard a lot about the technical problems experienced by the students when I arrived," said Professor Abramson. "I actually see this as a wonderful achievement. Let’s face it, isn’t overcoming obstacles what research is all about? ...They’ve understated what they actually accomplished ...They’ve done a fantastic job!”
by Debra Truin |
