News

Apr 27
0

U-M students invited to apply for MICDE fellowships — May 19 deadline

By | Educational, Funding Opportunities, General Interest, News

University of Michigan students are invited to apply for Michigan Institute for Computational Discovery and Engineering (MICDE) Fellowships for the 2017-2018 academic year. These $4,000 fellowships are available to students in both the Ph.D in Scientific Computing and the Graduate Certificate Program in Computational Discovery and Engineering. Applicants should be graduate students enrolled in either program, although students not yet enrolled but planning to do so may simultaneously submit program and fellowship applications.

Fellows will receive a $4,000 research fund that can be used to attend a conference, to buy a computer, or for any other approved activity that enhances the Fellow’s graduate experience. We also ask that Fellows attend at least 8 MICDE seminars between Fall 2017 and Winter 2018, attend one MICDE students’ networking event, and present a poster at the MICDE Symposium on March 22, 2018. For more details and to apply please visit http://micde.umich.edu/academic-programs/micde-fellowships/.

Interested students should download and complete the application form, and submit it with a one-page resume as a SINGLE PDF DOCUMENT to MICDE-apps@umich.edu. The due date for applications is May 19, 2017, 5:00 E.T. We expect to announce the awardees onJune 5, 2017.

We encourage applications from all qualified candidates, including women and minorities.

Apr 24
0

MICDE Annual Symposium – Poster Competition Winners

By | Educational, Events, Research

Fifty-six posters were submitted to the 2017 MICDE symposium poster competition.

Last week’s MICDE annual symposium included a poster competition for students and postdocs. The event featured 56 posters that highlighted the interdisciplinary nature of the institute. (Some of the posters were described in a story in the Michigan Daily). All of the titles and abstracts submitted are in this spreadsheet.

Victor Wu, Ph.D. Candidate in the department of Industrial and Operations Engineering, won first place and $500 for his poster “Multicriteria Optimization for Brachytherapy Treatment Planning.” Wu and co-authors Epelman, Sir, Pasupathy, Herman and Duefel, introduced an efficient Pareto-style planning approach and intuitive graphical user interface that enables a planner or physician to directly explore dose-volume histogram metric trade-offs for brachyotherapy treatment – a common method for treating cancer patients with radiation.

Sambit Das, Ph. D. Candidate of Mechanical Engineering, earned second place and a $250 prize for his work on “Large Scale Electronic Structure Studies on the Energetics of Dislocations in Al-Mg Materials System and Its Connection to Mesoscale Models“. 

Third place, also with a $250 prize, went to Joseph Cicchese, Ph. D. Candidate in the Department of Chemical Engineering, for his poster titled “How to optimize tuberculosis antibiotic treatments using a computational granuloma model“. Cicchese and co-authors Pienaar, Kirschner and Linderman, proposed a method of combining an agent-based and multi-scale model of tuberculosis granuloma formation and treatment with surrogate-assisted optimization to identify optimal tuberculosis treatments.

 

Apr 20
0

New private insurance claims dataset and analytic support now available to health care researchers

By | General Interest, Happenings, HPC, News | No Comments

The Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation (IHPI) is partnering with Advanced Research Computing (ARC) to bring two commercial claims datasets to campus researchers.

The OptumInsight and Truven Marketscan datasets contain nearly complete insurance claims and other health data on tens of millions of people representing the US private insurance population. Within each dataset, records can be linked longitudinally for over 5 years.  

To begin working with the data, researchers should submit a brief analysis plan for review by IHPI staff, who will create extracts or grant access to primary data as appropriate.

CSCAR consultants are available to provide guidance on computational and analytic methods for a variety of research aims, including use of Flux and other UM computing infrastructure for working with these large and complex repositories.

Contact Patrick Brady (pgbrady@umich.edu) at IHPI or James Henderson (jbhender@umich.edu) at CSCAR for more information.

The data acquisition and availability was funded by IHPI and the U-M Data Science Initiative.

Apr 11
0

Designing optimal shunts for newborns with heart defects using computational modeling

By | General Interest, Happenings, News, Research

shuntFor babies born with hypoplastic left heart syndrome, several open-heart surgeries are required. During Stage I, a Norwood procedure is performed to construct an appropriate circulation to both the systemic and the pulmonary arteries. The pulmonary arteries receive flow from the systemic circulation, often by using a Blalock-Taussig (BT) shunt between the innominate artery and the right pulmonary artery. This procedure causes significantly disturbed flow in the pulmonary arteries.

A group of researchers led by U-M Drs. Ronald Grifka and Alberto Figueroa used computational hemodynamic simulations to demonstrate its capacity for examining the properties of the flow through and near the BT shunt. Initially, the researchers constructed a computational model which produces blood flow and pressure measurements matching the clinical magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and catheterization data. Achieving this required us to determine the level of BT shunt occlusion; because the occlusion is below the MRI resolution, this information is difficult to recover without the aid of computational simulations. The researchers determined that the shunt had undergone an effective diameter reduction of 22% since the time of surgery. Using the resulting geometric model, they showed that we can computationally reproduce the clinical data. The researchers then replaced the BT shunt by with a hypothetical alternative shunt design with a flare at the distal end. Investigation of the impact of the shunt design revealed that the flare can increase pulmonary pressure by as much as 7%, and flow by as much as 9% in the main pulmonary branches, which may be beneficial to the pulmonary circulation.

Read more in Frontiers in Pediatrics.

Apr 03
0

MICDE awards four Catalyst Grants

By | General Interest, News, Research

The Michigan Institute for Computational Discovery and Engineering has awarded its first round of Catalyst Grants, providing $75,000 each to four innovative projects in computational science. The proposals were judged on novelty, likelihood of success, potential for external funding, and potential to leverage ARC’s existing computing resources.

The funded projects are:

Title: From Spiking Patterns to Memory formation — Tools for Analysis and Modeling of Network-wide Cognitive Dynamics of the Brain
Researchers: Sara Aton, Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology and Michal Zochowski, Department of Physics, Biophysics Program
Description: The aim of the research is to develop models as well as analysis tools to understand network-wide spatio-temporal patterning underlying experimentally observed neural spiking activity. The research team has developed novel tools to analyze dynamics of neuronal representations across time, before during and after learning. These tools, for the first time, compare the stability of network dynamics before and after memory encoding.

Title: Integral Equation Based Methods for Scientific Computing
Researcher: Robert Krasny, Department of Mathematics
Description: This project expands the application of numerical methods in which the differential equation is first converted into an integral equation by convolution with the Green’s function, followed by discretization and linear solution. Recent advances in numerical analysis and computing resources make this expansion possible, and the research team believes that integral equation-based numerical methods are superior to traditional methods in both serial and parallel computations. The project will attempt to apply these numerical methods to studies of viscous fluid flow, protein/solvent electrostatics, and electronic structure.

Title: Computational Energy Systems
Researchers: Pascal Van Hentenryck, Industrial and Operations Engineering (IOE); E. Byon, IOE; R. Jiang, IOE; J. Lee, IOE; and J. Mathieu, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Description: The research team aims to develop new algorithms for the U.S. electrical power grid that integrate renewable energy sources, electrification of transportation systems, the increasing frequency of extreme weather events, and other emerging contingencies.

Title: Black Swans, Dragon Kings, and the Science of Rare Events: Problems for the Exascale Era and Beyond
Researchers: Venkat Raman, Aerospace Engineering; Jacqueline Chen, Sandia National Laboratory; and Ramanan Sankaran, Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Description: The purpose of the project is to develop the computational frameworks for exploring the tails of distributions, which lead to rare but consequential (and often catastrophic) outcomes. Two such rare events are “Black Swans” (occurring from pre-existing but unencountered events) and “Dragon Kings (occurring due to an external shock to the system). The methods developed are expected to have application in aerospace sciences, power generation and utilization, chemical processing, weather prediction, computational chemistry, and other fields.

Another round of Catalyst Grants will be awarded next year.

Apr 03
0

MIDAS starting research group on mobile sensor analytics

By | Educational, Events, General Interest, Happenings, News

The Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS) is convening a research working group on mobile sensor analytics. Mobile sensors are taking on an increasing presence in our lives. Wearable devices allow for physiological and cognitive monitoring, and behavior modeling for health maintenance, exercise, sports, and entertainment. Sensors in vehicles measure vehicle kinematics, record driver behavior, and increase perimeter awareness. Mobile sensors are becoming essential in areas such as environmental monitoring and epidemiological tracking.

There are significant data science opportunities for theory and application in mobile sensor analytics, including real-time data collection, streaming data analysis, active on-line learning, mobile sensor networks, and energy efficient mobile computing.

Our working group welcomes researchers with interest in mobile sensor analytics in any scientific domain, including but not limited to health, transportation, smart cities, ecology and the environment.

Where and When:

Noon to 2 pm, April 13, 2017

School of Public Health I, Room 7625

Lunch provided

Agenda:

  • Brief presentations about challenges and opportunities in mobile sensor analytics (theory and application);

  • A brief presentation of a list of funding opportunities;

  • Discussion of research ideas and collaboration in the context of grant application and industry partnership.

Future Plans: Based on the interest of participants, MIDAS will alert researchers to relevant funding opportunities, hold follow-up meetings for continued discussion and team formation as ideas crystalize for grant applications, and work with the UM Business Engagement Center to bring in industry partnership.

Please RSVP.  For questions, please contact Jing Liu, Ph.D, MIDAS research specialist (ljing@umich.edu; 734-764-2750).