Seminars & Colloquia
Craig Douglas
University of Wyoming
"Dynamic Big Data Applications"
Monday April 28, 2014 09:30 AM
Location: 3211, EBII NCSU Centennial Campus
(Visitor parking instructions)
We provide a scientific yet simple definition of a fully dynamic data application and compare it to a variety of application systems that range from traditional static applications to fully dynamic. The ability of an application to control and guide the measurement process and determine when, where, and how it is best to gather additional data has itself the potential of enabling more effective measurement and prediction methodologies.
Big Data is a new paradigm that asks the question, “What can you do if you have all of the known data for a given problem?” It is subsuming the concept of computational sciences due in large part to the fact that many interesting computational science applications, as they became dynamic data enabled, generate almost infinite amounts of data that has to be mined in order to find the useful information. The data may come from a network of sensors, databases, or a combination.
Creating a usable computer system to create dynamic, big data applications is currently too complex and needs to be simplified. A framework for creating a useful toolkit for developing general dynamic big data driven application systems is described.
Examples of significant problems from a number of different fields that can be solved using our paradigm are described during the talk.
Prof. Craig Douglas holds an endowed chair as a School of Energy Resources Professor of Mathematics at the University of Wyoming (since 2008). He is also an Associate Director and Visiting Professor of the Center for Numerical Porous Media at King Abdullah University of Science & Technology (KAUST, since 2012).
He has an A.B. in Mathematics from the University of Chicago and a M.S., M.Phil. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Yale University. Before that Prof. Douglas graduated from high school at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools after attending other schools in Houston, Texas and Paris, France.
After completing his Ph.D., Prof. Douglas worked first at Yale and then at Duke University. He moved to IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York in 1986 and re-acquired an affiliation with the Computer Science Department at Yale. He was a professor at the University of Kentucky for 10 years with positions in computer science, mathematics, and mechanical engineering. Prof. Douglas has also been a visiting senior at CERFACS (Toulouse, France) and a visiting professor in Pavia, Wuhan University, Shanghai University, and Texas A&M during his career.
Prof. Douglas' research group conducts research in Dynamic Big Data Driven Applications, algorithms for eXtreme Technical Computing on massively parallel compute clusters, hydrology, and the numerical solution of partial differential equations.
Host: Randy Avent, Computer Science, NCSU