GEON Holds 2005 Cyberinfrastructure Summer Institute for Geoscientists

CSIG05 Participants

Thirty-eight researchers attended the second annual GEON-hosted Cyberinfrastructure Summer Institute for Geoscientists (CSIG) held at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) on the campus of UC San Diego. The attendees included graduate students, postdocs, and researchers

CSIG 05 in session

in geoscience and information technology from a number of agencies and more than 30 institutions in the U.S. and as far away as Japan, Korea, and the United Kingdom. The popular one-week educational program, held from July 18-22, is designed to give geoscientists an "IT headstart" in using powerful new information technologies, or cyberinfrastructure, to enable a new generation of geoscience discoveries. This year, the institute was webcast live and will soon be archived for later viewing. A detailed course program and webcast information is available at http://www.geongrid.org/CSIG05/.
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GEON Has Strong Presence at ESRI International User Conference

The 2005 ESRI International User Conference was held at the San Diego Convention Center July 25-29, 2005 (http://www.esri.com/events/uc/index.html). The work being done on GEON was highlighted by several team members, in a variety of forums at this meeting. A technical workshop titled: “ArcGIS Data Models: Groundwater and Geology Data Models” was presented on Tuesday afternoon, July 26th, and co-convened by G Randy Keller (GEON PI, UTEP); David Maidment (UT Austin); Gil Strassberg (UT Austin) and Joe Breman (ESRI).

Additionally, in a moderated paper session titled “GRID Computing and Map Services of GEON “ on Thursday, July 28, the following papers were presented by SDSC GEON team members:

"Integrating Seismic Events Focal Mechanisms with Image Services in Kepler" Efrat Jaeger-Frank

"Generating composite thematic maps from semantically-different collections of shapefiles and map services" Ghulam Memon

Abstracts for these papers and others can be accessed via http://www.esri.com/events/uc/calendars/agenda_pdfs.html.

Randy Keller Elected a Foreign Member of the Polish Academy of Sciences

Randy Keller

Geo Physicist and GEON PI Extraordinaire, Randy Keller (UTEP), was elected as a Foreign Member of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Andrezj Legocki, Academy President, cited Randy’s “leading position in science as well as significant contribution to the development of cooperation with Poland” as contributing to this honorable distinction. A ceremony to award the diploma and decoration of this appointment will take place at the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Washington at a later date. Congratulations to Randy on this much deserved recognition!

Call for Presentations - GEON Session at AGU 2005

A Session titled "Building A Global Geoscience Cyberinfrastructure: International Collaboration in Geoinformatics" will be held at the AGU Fall 2005 Meeting in San Francisco, December 2005. A call for presentations for this session is being made, with an online abstract submission form available at http://www.agu.org/meetings/fm05/. The deadline for submission is September 8, 2005, and all are invited and encouraged to participate. This session is being convened by Randy Keller (GEON PI, UTEP), Kerstin Lehnert (LDEO, Columbia Univ), Jens Klump (Geo Forschungszentrum Potsdam, Germany); and Walter Snyder (Boise State Univ).

GEON Outreach: GEON Gets Global Exposure

Mian Liu, GEON PI (Univ of MO), was an invited speaker at the “Computational Geodynamics Workshop” in Beijing, China, last month (6/27-28/05). Dr. Liu’s talk introduced GEON and related CI activity to a group of approximately 100 international attendees. This Workshop was organized by the Computational Geodynamics Lab of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), and involved speakers from the USA, Canada, Japan, Australia, and UK, as well as from China. While in Beijing, Dr. Liu also met with with heads of the Computational Geodynamics Lab and the Center of Computer and Information Network of Chinese Academy of Sciences regarding potential future collaborations with GEON.

Dr. Liu also gave an invited talk on GEON and related modeling effort at the 4th annual "Workshop on Community Finite Element Models for Fault Systems and Tectonic Studies" at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), July 11-14th. This workshop served as a venue to discuss progress in numerical modeling of lithospheric deformation, benchmarking existing codes, and defining the challenges that need to be met for future software development. The workshop was open to all interested, especially members of the SCEC, EarthScope, and NASA modeling communities. Further workshop details can be found at: http://www.scec.org/workshops/CFEM/

Papers were presented this summer by GEON team members and collaborators at three major international conferences regarding results from the use of "fuzzy logic" in geophysical data processing. These included:

Emil Platon (GEON, Univ of Utah), Kavitha Tupelly, Vladik Kreinovich (GEON, UTEP), Scott A. Starks, and Karen Villaverde, "Exact Bounds for Interval and Fuzzy Functions Under Monotonicity Constraints, with Potential Applications to Biostratigraphy", Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE International Conference on Fuzzy Systems FUZZ-IEEE'2005, Reno, Nevada, May 22-25, 2005. http://www.fuzzieee2005.org/

Matthew G. Averill, Gang Xiang, Vladik Kreinovich (GEON, UTEP), G. Randy Keller (GEON PI, UTEP), Scott A. Starks, Patrick S. Debroux, and James Boehm, "How to Reconstruct the Original Shape of a Radar Signal?", Proceedings of the 24th International Conference of the North American Fuzzy Information Processing Society (NAFIPS'2005), Ann Arbor, Michigan, June 22-25, 2005. http://morden.csee.usf.edu/Nafipsf/conferences.html

Matthew G. Averill, Kate C. Miller, G. Randy Keller (GEON PI, UTEP), Vladik Kreinovich (GEON, UTEP), Roberto Araiza, and Scott A. Starks, "Using Expert Knowledge in Solving the Seismic Inverse Problem", Proceedings of the 24th International Conference of the North American Fuzzy Information Processing Society (NAFIPS'2005), Ann Arbor, Michigan, June 22-25, 2005. http://morden.csee.usf.edu/Nafipsf/conferences.html

On the use of Expert Knowledge in processing radar and seismic data, the following paper was presented at the 17th World Congress of the International Association for Mathematics and Computers in Simulation IMACS'2005, Paris, France, July 11-15, 2005: http://imacs2005.ec-lille.fr/index.php

Martine Ceberio, Vladik Kreinovich (GEON,UTEP), Sanjeev Chopra, and Bertram Ludaescher (GEON, UC Davis), "Taylor Model-Type Techniques for Handling Uncertainty in Expert Systems, with Potential Applications to Geoinformatics".