Shaping future of computing
BY judy lin
UCLA Today
UCLA researchers who use computers to do complex calculations,
simulations and visualizations to study everything from experimental
drugs to global warming will get a boost with the recent formation
of the Institute for Digital Research and Education (IDRE). It will
foster multidisciplinary research engaging faculty campuswide.
“Computation and visualization are regarded as an equal and
indispensable partner, along with theory and experiment, in the
advance of scientific knowledge and engineering practice,”
said Vice Chancellor of Research Roberto Peccei, who will oversee
the institute’s operations.
Directing IDRE will be Professor Alan J. Laub of electrical engineering
and mathematics, who comes from UC Davis with a distinguished career
in control theory, numerical linear algebra and advanced computing.
He was dean of the engineering school at UC Davis and, before that,
chair of electrical and computer engineering at UC Santa Barbara.
He also spent two years at the U.S. Department of Energy directing
the Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing program and
co-chairing the High-End Computing Revitalization Task Force for
the National Science and Technology Council.
“Individual researchers have succeeded in picking much of
the low-hanging fruit,” Laub said. “We must now move
up to the next level, using teams to compute and simulate things
we otherwise couldn’t. An astrophysicist studying the origin
of stars, for example, can simulate and visualize their formation
with the aid of teams of mathematicians and computer scientists
working on supercomputers.”
In keeping with its collaborative nature, the institute will be
governed by a council of deans representing the physical and life
sciences in the UCLA College, the Henry Samueli School of Engineering
and Applied Science, the David Geffen School of Medicine, the School
of the Arts and Architecture and the School of Theater, Film and
Television. The institute also will benefit from staff resources
and state-of-the-art facilities of Academic Technology Services
through a partnership with the Office of Information Technology.
“I intend IDRE to be a unifying force on this campus, bringing
researchers together in unique and innovative ways,” Laub
said. “There are no limits to what we can do to make UCLA
an even bigger contributor to the field of digital computation and
education.”
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