A computer image of the entire novel of Moby Dick produced through Meaney and Szczepanski’s code.

How does a computer view the human world—say, the human genome or literary works such as Herman Melville’s Moby Dick?

Two UT professors have provided some insight, thanks to a code they’ve created that allows the computer to transform large-scale data and information into digital images—compressed pictures composed of colorful lines.

Evan Meaney, assistant professor of art, and Amy Szczepanski, assistant research professor in electrical engineering and computer science, have made a body of artwork called Null_Sets using their code. They’ve also provided a way for the public to make their own art using the code, whether it’s converting a love song, the Patriot Act, or the deed of one’s house into colorful images.

“The goal is to challenge people’s assumptions about what computer data looks like,” Szczepanski said. “In some sense, people trust the computer too much and imagine it as some magical box that does something. They forget that there’s actually a lot of human work that went on behind the scenes to make it happen.

“In as much as we mechanize things we’re still doing things for people and to interact with people.”

Amy Szczepanski

Szczepanski and Meaney designed their approach by running code on a supercomputer at the Remote Data Analysis and Visualization Center (RDAV) to create many test images. The center is an initiative of the UT Joint Institute for Computational Science and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The idea for the project began in 2010 while Szczepanski was working on an RDAV project that was trying to find ways to encourage researchers in other fields besides the hard sciences to consider using supercomputing to help their work.

She contacted Meaney, a digital artist, after a recommendation from UT’s visual arts committee. Together, they wrote the code for Null_Sets. The UT Research Foundation is currently working on patenting the code.

The project is receiving widespread recognition. Meaney recently won the jury prize for the Null_Sets project at the Distributed Microtopias exhibition at the fifteenth Annual Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival in Ithaca, New York.

Evan Meaney

Meaney has applied for a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts that would allow him and Szczepanski to turn Null_Sets into an iPad and Android app. Right now, the Null_Sets website has a size limit that means large amounts of data can’t be converted, and the server times out after a certain period. With the app, users would be able to upload and convert large amounts of data conveniently.

“We want to put a better face on it and have it be more user-friendly,” Meaney said.

To learn more about the Null_Sets project, view the collection of art, or make your own, visit Meaney’s website.

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CONTACT:

Lola Alapo (865-974-3993, lola.alapo@tennessee.edu)

Evan Meaney, an assistant professor of art, and Amy Szczepanski, an assistant research professor in electrical engineering and computer science, had the big idea of turning large-scale data and information into art.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8GE7tca6Bc

Together, professors from four different departments within the College of Engineering have won a $15,000 grant from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The grant is phase one of the EPA’s People, Prosperity and the Planet (P3) annual student design competition, which offers students quality hands-on experience that brings their classroom learning to life.

Paul Frymier, associate professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering; Chris Cherry, assistant professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering; David Irick, research assistant professor in Mechanical, Aerospace, and Biomedical Engineering; and Leon Tolbert, head of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, are advising undergraduate engineering students working with teams of high school students to design and construct electric bicycles.

Three local high schools are participating in the project—West, Fulton, and Farragut. A competition between the teams will be held in January.

“The objective of our project is to encourage new teenaged drivers to consider the impacts of their personal transportation choices,” said Frymier. “To make the project interesting, we showed them how to use elementary physics, mathematics, and engineering to select components for converting a bike to an e-bike to navigate a hilly area such as Knoxville.”

Since September, undergraduate engineering students have been advising the teams of high school students on the design and construction of electric bicycles. The high school teams will prepare and orally defend project reports discussing the design process and sustainability impacts of various transportation scenarios, including an e-bike as a commuting option for school and for general personal transportation.

Teams also will participate in a final event test-driving their e-bikes to determine which is the best at climbing hills, energy efficiency, and speed on a prescribed obstacle course.

“One of the teams will be selected as the competition winner based on its written report, the oral defense of their report and the outcome of the various performance trials,” said Frymier. “The winner will receive a trophy and bragging rights.”

Students also will be surveyed before and after the project to determine their attitudes toward and expectations for personal transportation. Results will be analyzed to see if project participation leads to more favorable attitudes toward use of personal transportation options that lower environmental, societal, and economic impacts.

The undergraduate student advisors are Rebekah Patton in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering; Rick Wheeler in Civil and Environmental Engineering; Candice Patton in Electrical and Computer Engineering; Chris Stanfill in Mechanical, Aerospace, and Biomedical Engineering; and Jordan Bryner and Yi Ying Chin in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.

The student advisors are assisted by a team of high school faculty advisors including Karyn Storts-Brinks, David Hawkins Fulton, and Kimberly Kennard at Fulton, Matthew Milligan at Farragut, and Joe Foy at West.

EPA’s P3 has two phases. In the first phase of the competition, teams are awarded a $15,000 grant to develop their idea. They bring the design in April to the National Sustainable Design Expo in Washington, DC, to compete for the P3 Award and a grant of $90,000 to take their design to real-world application.

Forty-five college teams were awarded a total of almost $700,000 in grants in Phase One. For more information about the competition, visit the press release at the EPA website.

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C O N T A C T :

Whitney Heins (865-974-5460, wheins@utk.edu)

Mark Dean, a 1979 graduate in electrical engineering, has the big idea of building a device that will replace everything that you carry in your wallet. Dean is one of the lead inventors of the personal computer and is chief technology officer for IBM Middle East and Africa.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW2ADpj2Jr4

The “TOP500″ list ranking the world’s fastest supercomputers was released today at the SC12 conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, listing Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s (ORNL) massive new system, named Titan, as the fastest computer.

The list of the 500 fastest computers is published twice yearly by a collaboration between Jack Dongarra, distinguished professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the director of the Innovative Computing Laboratory, and colleagues at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of Mannheim. This is the list’s twentieth anniversary.

Titan, which was revealed to the public just two weeks ago, is a supersized upgrade of ORNL’s previous system—Jaguar. The upgrade makes Titan ten times more powerful than its predecessor.

Titan was benchmarked at 17.59 petaflop/s (quadrillions of calculations per second). It is followed by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Sequoia supercomputer, which ran the benchmark at 16.3 petaflop/s. UT’s Kraken placed twenty-fifth and UT’s Beacon placed 253rd. Both machines are managed by UT’s National Institute for Computational Sciences.

UT professors and a variety of national and international research teams will use Titan’s power to solve a wide range of important problems, from developing more comprehensive and exact climate predictions to designing new drugs. UT and ORNL, which currently share more than fifty appointments, five institutes, and several successful programs, have collaborated for more than fifty years to tackle such difficult research challenges.

“Powerful computers allow us to perform simulations to understand what drives the world around us,” said Jeremy Smith, UT-ORNL Governor’s Chair for Molecular Biophysics and director of the Center for Molecular Biophysics at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “The more powerful the computer, the more accurate and detailed our simulations are.”

Titan’s power boost is due to a novel combination of multicore processors and graphic processing unit accelerators (GPUs) also used for computer games. This integration also overcomes some challenges of energy usage, which is critical because supercomputers traditionally consume megawatts of power. Titan was engineered as a hybrid system in order to drastically increase the computational performance, but only minimally increase energy consumption.

“Power (energy) and cooling have become the limiting factor when designing and building even more powerful computing systems,” said Dongarra. “Twenty years ago, power consumption took less than a megawatt. Titan uses about eight megawatts and the next generation could use over a hundred megawatts without major changes to the technology. Addressing this problem will require the creation of new architectures and devices, and better cooling technology. Without such innovations, systems of the size we want to build in the future would be prohibitively expensive to operate.”

Smith is likely to be one of the most frequent users of Titan, as he was with Jaguar. He needs computational power for projects in areas of drug design and biofuels research.

“In drug design, Titan could in principle allow us to select potential drugs that not only hit the desired target but have fewer side effects,” he said. “In biofuel research, we hope to understand the behavior of plant cell walls in greater detail, so that we can propose ways of improving methods of extracting ethanol from plants.”

While Titan may represent progress, it is just a small step closer to the next generation of supercomputers—exascale computing—in which computers perform a billon, billon (1018) calculations per second. Dongarra is leading an international effort to move to that next generation of supercomputing by 2020.

“Science is what is driving us to exascale, not the technology,” said Dongarra. “The science needs are demanding more and more computing power in order to understand the world around us at greater fidelity. In order for us to tackle the kind of scientific problems that we can’t do today, we need exascale computing.”

The supercomputing world is competitive and the TOP500 list is constantly changing as new technology quickly becomes old.

For Dongarra and Smith, witnessing this movement toward exascale is exciting and beneficial for everyone.

“Exascale supercomputing would give us the computing power of fifty Titans,” said Smith. “This would open up whole new vistas for progress in society. At the exascale, for example, we might be able to simulate a whole living cell at atomic detail or find cancer drugs with no toxicity.”

The better and more accurate these simulations are, he said, the more we can find out about many branches of science and medicine, such as climate predictions, nuclear reactor design, supernova explosions, drug design, biofuels, materials design, and other subjects.

To read more about the rankings, visit the TOP500 website.

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C O N T A C T :

Whitney Heins (865-974-5460, wheins@utk.edu

Michael Pickelsimer, graduate student in electrical engineering, has the big idea of charging electrical vehicles without ever having to plug them in.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCX1Px_OL8I

Vander Zanden created a program to use in Computer Science 102 that gives students an easy way to enter computer programs and test them in class. It is a simplified introduction to the type of programming that professionals do.

With help from three senior computer science students, Vander Zanden created a website where students answer questions by writing computer programs. The website immediately grades the answers by running the program to see if it works.

“Students’ attention spans are not nearly as long as they once were,” Vander Zanden said. “I had to find a way to get students more actively involved.”

In addition, he uses a “flipped classroom” approach. He assigns students to watch online videos of his lectures from previous semesters outside of class. He uses class time for discussion and exercises.

He says this approach prevents students from becoming bored during lectures because they can watch them in shorter segments, if they choose. Also, they have more time for hands-on work in class, which he says is essential to learning computer programming.

For his efforts, Vander Zanden has received a Creative Teaching Grant from the Tennessee Teaching and Learning Center. The grants are awarded to instructors who innovatively change the way they teach. They receive $5,000 to implement their ideas.

Blalock, left, with students.

Ben Blalock, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, and two graduate students—Stephen Terry, now an alumnus, and Robert Greenwell—designed a tiny microchip that weighs close to a paper clip and helps control the motors on the rover.

There are about eighty of these Quad Operational Amplifier (op amp) microchips powering the rover’s forty motors. Without them, the rover would not be able to traverse the Martian surface, collect samples with its robotic arm, or maneuver the cameras for sending back pictures of the Red Planet—all central to the mission of finding clues of Mars being able to sustain microbial life.

“These analog chips are in the motor controller electronics that make the camera move, pan around, go up and down,” said Blalock. “They also make the robotic arms move around and operate the wheels on the rover. All these things require motors.”

Although op amps are common in consumer electronics, this analog microchip is unique in that it can withstand 500 days of potential radiation exposure and temperatures ranging from minus 180 degrees Celsius to positive 120 degrees Celsius, more than sufficient for the minus 120 degrees Celsius to positive 20 degrees Celsius temperature swings on the Martian surface each day. The chip underwent rigorous testing, such as operating in thermal ovens, to ensure it could withstand the elements.

“We not only had to design it to meet the Martian surface environment requirements, we also had to overdesign it to operate in environments even colder than minus 120 degrees Celsius to help enable reuse of the microchip for other extreme environment robotic missions in the future,” said Blalock.

The researcher says the innovation represents a paradigm shift in the application of extreme environment electronics in space avionics, possibly opening up the field of space exploration.

“Now, we have access to electronics that are capable of operating out in the ambient,” Blalock said. “This gives us a lot of opportunities that did not exist in the past because we had to worry about their functionality. NASA eventually hopes to go beyond Mars and possibly send rovers to asteroids and moons of planets.”

Using these chips enabled more electronic systems to be implemented on Curiosity‘s exterior, which helped minimize cabling headaches on the rover and made room for the addition of more scientific instrumentation. This is providing NASA’s scientists even more information about the Red Planet.

UT and JPL had worked together in the past, so when JPL needed help designing electrical circuits for Curiosity, they gave Blalock and his Integrated Circuits and System Laboratory team the opportunity. JPL engineers worked in lock-step with Blalock’s team yielding success for Curiosity.

Blalock and his students worked on the chip from 2004 to 2007. To see their hard work finally come to fruition is very fulfilling.

“I’m thrilled that the students had this opportunity,” said the professor. “It helps them grow as circuit designers and makes them more marketable. They were able to do a level of analog chip design that far exceeds whatever they would be called upon to do in the commercial industry. I know for a fact we’re one of the very few university teams—if not the only university team—that’s been able to develop space flight microelectronic hardware.”

Two other professors, Linda Kah and Jeffrey Moersch, associate professors in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, are also working on the mission.

The Curiosity launched on November 26, 2011, and landed on Mars on Monday.

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C O N T A C T :

Whitney Heins (865-974-5460, wheins@utk.edu)

Poore came to UT in 1986 as chair of the Department of Computer Science and served as director of the UT-ORNL Science Alliance from 2000 to 2011. His research focused on the economical production of high-quality software.

Read more about here.

Poore came to UT in 1986. He served as co-director of JICS from 2000 to 2005; director of the Science Alliance from 2000 to 2011; and UT System vice president for information technology and chief information officer from 2008 to 2009. He taught computer science and software engineering courses for more than twenty-five years and was appointed to the Ericsson-Harlan D. Mills Chair in Software Engineering in 1998.

Poore’s research program at UT focused on the economical production of high-quality software. He supervised twenty-six graduate students’ research, and he said their graduation and career success were his greatest source of fulfillment. In 2002, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Computer Society recognized Poore’s work with its highest award in software engineering, the Harlan D. Mills Award, for significant contributions to function-based software development and statistical software testing.

Prior to coming to UT, Poore was director of the Computing Center and associate professor of mathematics at Florida State University and held various leadership positions at the Georgia Institute of Technology. While on sabbatical from UT, Poore was a guest senior scientist at the Fraunhofer Institute for experimental software engineering in Kaiserslautern, Germany, in 2006.

Poore received the Faculty Public Service Award from the College of Arts and Sciences in 1999. His other public service work included being a program manager for the National Science Foundation from 1974 to 1975; a member of the President’s Federal Data Processing Study to assess scientific computing needs at all national laboratories in 1978; and executive director of the Committee on Science and Technology in the US House of Representatives in Washington, DC, in 1983. He was vice president for networking at the Southeastern Universities Research Association from 1984 to 1989; a member of a National Research Council panel on statistical methods in software engineering for defense systems from 2002 to 2003; and a member of the 2010 Census Program for Evaluations and Experiments with the National Academy of Sciences.

Poore co-founded Software Engineering Technology Inc., a company that performed research, training, and technology transfer for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and with other agencies of the US Department of Defense, as well as numerous private companies. The company was acquired by Ericsson in 1998.

He earned a doctorate in information and computer science from Georgia Institute of Technology in 1970.

Poore is survived by his mother, Terresita Poore, of Campbellsville, Kentucky; daughter Pamela Poore Brannon and son-in-law Joe Brannon of Tallahassee, Florida.; son David Poore and partner Eva Vermeulen of Amsterdam, Netherlands; grandchildren Lauren Breza of Knoxville; Maggie Breza and David Breza of Tallahassee; brother Dennis Poore and sister-in-law Debbie Poore of Sarasota, Florida; and sister Judy Poore of Campbellsville, Kentucky.

When UT alum Min Kao, founder and chairman of Garmin, heard that the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science had outgrown its current home in Ferris Hall, he donated $12.5 million toward a new building to house the department. Kao visited the campus last month to dedicate the Min H. Kao Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Building.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYfcDSMnIDI

Jayne Wu, associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Shigetoshi Eda, associate professor of Forestry, Wildlife and Fisheries at the UT Institute of Agriculture Center for Wildlife Health, have developed a portable device that can be used onsite to detect infectious diseases, pathogens, as well as physiological conditions in people and animals.

“Time is of the essence in treating infectious diseases,” said Wu. “This device has the potential to save a lot of lives by saving time in detection. It also saves a lot of money as it is cheaper to detect diseases than the system that is currently being used since we do not have to send them to a lab and have the sample be scrutinized by technicians.”

Disposable sensing chip made of a modified surface acoustic wave resonator.

The device can be used by any health care professional, anywhere. All that’s needed is a droplet of blood to place on a microchip within the device. The microchip is treated with disease-specific antigens—a toxin or other foreign substance that induces an immune response in the body—and captures disease-specific antibodies in the blood. If the antigens and antibodies match, then the device tells the health care provider that the patient or animal is infected. This happens in a matter of minutes.

So far the device has been used to detect tuberculosis in humans and wild animals, as well as Johne’s disease in cattle.

“Johne’s disease is highly prevalent in this country and is causing more than $200 million of annual losses to the US dairy industry,” said Eda. “Since there is no practical treatment for the disease, early diagnosis is critically important for disease control in dairy farms. This, in turn, helps farmers’ business and the milk supply.”

The scientists say they expect the device to be expanded to detect various diseases and physiological conditions. For instance, the researchers predict it could be useful in diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease and cancer. Their recent development indicated the device could detect pathogens in food materials. The device also could be valuable for applications in disaster relief, biodefense or disease outbreaks.

Wu and Eda invention recently received $15,000 from the UT Research Foundation to assist in further developing their technology to improve its positioning for licensing and commercialization. The scientists say they have industry interested in taking their invention to market.

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C O N T A C T :

Whitney Heins (865-974-5460, wheins@utk.edu)