Keynote and State-of-the-Field Talks (Plenaries)

IMPORTANT NOTICE:
Jill Mesirov is unable to give her State-of-the-Field presentation due to illness. Kim Baldridge will speak instead. Her title is "Breaking Down Activation Barriers and Increasing Rates of Reaction for Scientific Discovery". More information will be added below as we get it.

SC2003 wishes Jill a speedy recovery and thanks Kim for her willingness to step in on very short notice.

SC2003’s plenary speaker program provides an unparalleled opportunity to hear and talk with some of the leaders in the field.

Opening the technical portion of the program on Tuesday, Nov. 18, will be keynote speaker Donna Cox, a full professor in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who has held a joint appointment with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications since 1985. A renowned expert on computer visualization, Cox has authored many papers and monographs on computer graphics, information design, education and scientific visualization. She has exhibited computer images and animations in more than 100 invitational and juried exhibits in the past nine years, and her work has appeared on international television, including NOVA, CNN, and NBC Nightly News. Her talk on “Beyond Computing: The Search for Creativity” brings together the high technology of computational science, the high innovation of the arts and humanities, and the high creativity needed to address the really big questions, from understanding the universe to enriching the human condition.

Read the abstract for Cox’s talk, entitled, “Beyond Computing: The Search for Creativity”

Read a short biography for Donna Cox

Four high performance computing (HPC) leaders will describe the state of the field in subsequent plenary sessions.

• Judy Estrin, Chairman of Packet Design Inc. and co-founder of three tech firms, will answer the question “Is There Anything New on the Networking Horizon?” Of course, the answer is a resounding “yes”, from improving operational efficiency on critical infrastructures to enabling new forms of entertainment with always-on high bandwidth.

• David Culler, Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley and renowned researcher in many areas of computer science, will focus on “Networking the Physical World.” His description of sensor networks – from basic hardware through self-organizing network topologies – clearly shows their potential to advance the scientific endeavor.

• Frieder Seible, founding Chair of the Department of Structural Engineering and currently Dean of the Jacobs School of Engineering and Professor of Structural Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, will discuss the “Physical Infrastructure Assessment and Protection to Mitigate Natural and Man-made Disasters.” In other words, how can today’s (and tomorrow’s) cyberinfrastructure help solve important problems like earthquake damage control?

• Canceled due to illness! Jill Mesirov, Chief Information Officer and Director of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research, will give a presentation on "Computational Paradigms for Integrative Approaches to Genomic Medicine."

• Kim Baldridge, the Director of Integrative Computational Science at San Diego Supercomputer Center, will give a presentation on "Breaking Down Activation Barriers and Increasing Rates of Reaction for Scientific Discovery". Dr. Baldridge is an award-winning computational chemist who can speak to all aspects of the scientific process, from the basic chemistry to the sociology of collaborative projects.

Also, a special session will feature plenary talks on work that is, literally, award-winning. See the Awards and Prizes page for more details.