A curse of dealing with mounds of data so massive that they require special tools, said computer scientist Valerio Pascucci, is if you look for something, you will probably find it, thus injecting bias into the analysis.

Valerio Pascucci

In his plenary talk titled “Extreme Data Management Analysis and Visualization: Exploring Large Data for Science Discovery” on July 28 during the XSEDE15 conference in St. Louis, Dr. Pascucci said that getting clean, guaranteed, unbiased results in data analyses requires highly interdisciplinary, multi-scale collaboration and techniques that unify the math and computer science behind the applications used in physics, biology, and medicine.

The techniques and use cases he shared during his talk reflected about a decade and a half of getting down in the trenches to understand research efforts in disparate scientific domains, cutting through semantics, and capturing extensible mathematical foundations that could be applied in developing robust, efficient algorithms and applications.

Fewer Tools but Greater Utility

“You can build an economy of tools by deconstructing the math, looking for commonalities, and developing fewer tools that can be of use to more people,” Pascucci said in a post-talk interview. And to avoid developing biased algorithms, “you try to delay as long as possible application development.” The goal, he noted, is to create techniques that leave little room for mental shortcuts, or heuristics, and emphasize a formalized mathematical approach.

Creating those techniques, however, requires cross-pollination between, and integration of, data management and data analysis, tasks that have traditionally been performed by different communities, Pascucci pointed out. Collaboration that combines those efforts, he added, is a necessary ingredient for a successful supercomputing center or cyberinfrastructure—a dynamic ecosystem of people, advanced computing systems, data, and software.

Processing on the Fly

In managing large datasets, a platform for processing on the fly is important, said Pascucci, because researchers need to be able to make decisions under incomplete information. “This is something that people often underestimate,” he added.

One innovation that Pascucci and his colleagues at the Center for Extreme Data Management, Analysis, and Visualization (CEDMAV) at the University of Utah have developed is a framework, called ViSUS, for processing large-scale scientific data with high-performance selective queries on multiple terabytes of raw data. This data model is combined with progressive streaming techniques that allow processing on a variety of computing devices, from iPhone to simple workstations, to the input/output of parallel supercomputers. The framework has, for example, enabled the real-time streaming of massive combustion simulations from U.S. Department of Energy platforms to national laboratories.

Read more from HPC Wire . . .

The 2015 Outstanding Staff and Teaching Awards were announced Friday, Aug. 21, representing stellar work by individuals in the University of Utah’s College of Engineering.

Dean Richard Brown honored the recipients during his annual fall faculty and staff meeting held this year at the newly-refurbished Rio Tinto Kennecott Mechanical Engineering Building.

Outstanding Teacher — Joe Zachary, professor (lecturing), School of Computing

Teachers do more than just give lessons to students. They make a positive impact on people that will last their whole lives. Nothing could be more true of a professor’s legacy than School of Computing professor Joe Zachary. For more than 25 years, Joe has tackled and mastered complex topics in computer science and conveyed them in classrooms with passion, dedication and an innate ability to reach out to students in an effective way. Each year, he continues to get the highest scores from students and fellow faculty members. Whether it’s been one year or 10 years since graduating, former students of Joe’s always ask about him and gladly mention the impact he has had on their lives. And the students who have him today already are passing on similar accolades. As one student says: “I want to pursue a degree in computers science . . . and I owe it to Joe Zachary for fueling this desire.” Another added: “I can say definitively that he is the most talented and dedicated professor that I have ever had.” The College of Engineering is proud and fortunate to have someone as committed and gifted as Joe Zachary.

View the rest of the award recipients here.

This year’s GREAT Camps at the University of Utah proved to be another successful summer journey for hundreds of Utah students wanting to learn about the power of computers, graphics and robots.

The GREAT Camps (Graphics and Robotic Exploration with Amazing Technology) invite students from elementary, middle and high schools to participate in one-week programs in which they learn programming for games, animation, and build LEGO robots.

“In one camp . . . they recreate games from my childhood like ‘Space Invaders,’ and they laugh because they manage to do that in an afternoon what took poor engineers back in the Seventies months and months to do,” said School of Computing assistant professor David Johnson, who is the director of the camps. “So they can see how technology has improved and how the tools that are available get better and better.”

This year, Johnson also hosted a GREAT camp for refugee students from Africa as part of their after-school program. Some have come from countries including Sudan, Congo, and Nigeria.

“In computer science, we’re eager to share our enthusiasm for it. It’s also a great field to be in, and we’re hopeful that some of these kids will get interested in computer science and pursue it as a career,” Johnson said.

Microsoft, SanDisk, the Utah STEM Action Center, and the Lauer Family Foundation were sponsors of this year’s camps.

Check out more about the University of Utah’s GREAT Camps.

Software may appear to operate without bias because it strictly uses computer code to reach conclusions. That’s why many companies use algorithms to help weed out job applicants when hiring for a new position.

But a team of computer scientists from the University of Utah, University of Arizona and Haverford College in Pennsylvania have discovered a way to find out if an algorithm used for hiring decisions, loan approvals and comparably weighty tasks could be biased like a human being.

The researchers, led by Suresh Venkatasubramanian, an associate professor in the University of Utah’s School of Computing, have discovered a technique to determine if such software programs discriminate unintentionally and violate the legal standards for fair access to employment, housing and other opportunities. The team also has determined a method to fix these potentially troubled algorithms. Venkatasubramanian presented his findings Aug. 12 at the 21st Association for Computing Machinery’s SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining in Sydney, Australia.

“There’s a growing industry around doing résumé filtering and résumé scanning to look for job applicants, so there is definitely interest in this,” says Venkatasubramanian. “If there are structural aspects of the testing process that would discriminate against one community just because of the nature of that community, that is unfair.”

Read the full press release in the U News Center.