Summer Institute on Advanced Computation August 20-23, 2000 College of Engineering & CS Wright State University Dayton, Ohio 45435-0001

Summer Institute on Advanced Computation Aug 20, 2000  Registration and Reception and After Dinner Talk

Welcome and Introduction by DR. OSCAR GARCIA: I want to welcome you all to this second Summer Institute on Advanced Computation. We had a slightly longer institute last year and we received rave evaluations, so we decided we'd do it again. And actually, we did a survey, just as we did the first time, trying to find out what the topic of the institute should be, and it turned out that some of the people here were surveyed and the choice was to study networks of workstations.

And we're going to start our program tonight -- actually there are quite a few people missing. We have a set of about thirty-five registered attendees, and many of them, some of them, are arriving late. Their planes were late and things of that nature, but we're going to start on time, and hopefully we'll keep on time.

I want to ask you also, for the first time this year we're going to have a recording of the lectures during the conversation, and that is actually a mechanism that we're going to use to publish the lectures, at least on the web, and perhaps in hard copy. We have been funded by all the sponsors that you saw listed outside; in particular, Ohio Supercomputer Center has been a major contributor, and also Sun Microsystems was the corporate entity that gave the Ohio Supercomputer Center a grant to conduct the summer institute. In addition to that, of course the Information Technology Research Institute is sponsoring part of the cost, and Wright State University. So those are the major sponsors to whom we are grateful for their help.

So tonight we're going to start the proceedings, as we usually do, with a motivational broadband lecture, and it is our pleasure to have professor Miron Livny, who comes to us from the University of Wisconsin in the Computer Sciences Department. Miron obtained his doctorate from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel; and he has been involved in a series of different projects. The Condor project is not the only project. He has been involved in a variety of very interesting projects, many of them involving biomedical databases and also visual data integration.

His main interest is, of course, High Throughput Computing, which is one of his major research areas, but he has also been involved in the area of visual exploration of information, where he has a group working in the framework and tools for intuitive graphical integration.

I won't give you all the different publications, but one of the seminar papers that I'm sure he is going to be quoting at different lectures comes from the early interfacing Condor on PBN, and a number of other areas in which he was a pioneer.

So let's welcome Miron Livny as our first lecturer in the Summer Institute.