DISTINGUISHED LECTURE Friday, April 4, 2014 –2:30 PM 113 Information Sciences & Technology Building The Cybertorium By Vipin Kumar, University of Minnesota “Understanding Climate Change: Opportunities and Challenges for Data Driven Research” Climate change is the defining environmental challenge facing our planet, yet there is considerable uncertainty regarding the social and environmental impact due to the limited capabilities of existing physics-based models of the Earth system. This talk will present an overview of research being done in a large interdisciplinary project on the development of novel data driven approaches that take advantage of the wealth of climate and ecosystem data now available from satellite and ground-based sensors, the observational record for atmospheric, oceanic, and terrestrial processes, and physics-based climate model simulations. These information-rich datasets offer huge potential for monitoring, understanding, and predicting the behavior of the Earths ecosystem and for advancing the science of climate change. This talk will discuss some of the challenges in analyzing such data sets and our early research results. This research is funded by the NSF Expeditions in Computing Program, NASA, and Planetary Skin Institute. Bio: Vipin Kumar is currently William Norris Professor and Head of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota. His research interests include High Performance computing and data mining, and he is currently leading an NSF Expedition project on understanding climate change using data driven approaches. He has authored over 250 research articles, and co-edited or coauthored 10 books including the widely used text book ``Introduction to Parallel Computing, and Introduction to Data Mining both published by Addison-Wesley. Kumar co-founded SIAM International Conference on Data Mining and served as a founding co-editor-in-chief of Journal of Statistical Analysis and Data Mining (an official journal of the American Statistical Association). Kumar is a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE and AAAS. He received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee (2013), the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Computer Science Department, University of Maryland College Park (2009), and IEEE Computer Societys Technical Achievement Award (2005). Kumars foundational research in data mining and its applications to scientific data was honored by the ACM SIGKDD 2012 Innovation Award, which is the highest award for technical excellence in the field of Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD). You are invited to a Reception in the West Atrium following the Lecture
Posted on: Wed, 02 Apr 2014 14:26:25 +0000