Please join us for the next IACS Seminar. Speaker: Gaël McGill Location: Maxwell Dworkin G125, 33 Oxford Street, Cambridge Time: Informal lunch with speaker, 12:30pm. Talk, 1:00pm. Title: Molecular Movies: Exploring Hollywood’s Tools for Biovisualization Abstract: 3D visualizations have become an integral part of experimental biology and can serve as powerful tools of intuition as the need to integrate information from diverse fields becomes paramount. In addition to their more common role in scientific communications and education, cell and molecular visualizations can also directly inform the research and discovery process. We’ll discuss ongoing visualization research in this area and focus on how we are adapting Maya – one of the entertainment industry’s workhorse software packages – for biovisualization. With the creation of these new tools (the ‘Molecular Maya’ software toolkit) we hope to lay the foundation for a visual operating system for biology – a platform that integrates structural, temporal and geographical datasets. Bio: Gaël McGill is Director of Molecular Visualization at the Center for Molecular and Cellular Dynamics at Harvard Medical School where he also teaches scientific visualization. He is the founder & CEO of Digizyme, Inc. a firm dedicated to the visualization and communication of science through advanced technology applications. McGill is the creator of the online portal molecularmovies.org<http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fmolecularmo… and the Molecular Maya software toolkit. He is also a technical editor for Wiley/SYBEX Publishing where he has contributed to leading Maya and ZBrush textbooks. McGill is also currently the Digital Media Director for E. O. Wilson’s ‘Life on Earth’ next-generation digital biology textbook. He has served as a scientific and communications consultant for the Boston Scientific Corporation and is also a scientific advisory board member of Vast Scientific, Sage Science and a board member of the Vesalius Trust. After working at Dupont-Merck Pharmaceuticals and INSERM/Cochin Hospital in Paris, he completed his Ph.D. at Harvard Medical School in the Division of Medical Sciences (Biochemistry & Molecular Pharmacology) and a postdoctoral fellowship at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. His research on the mechanisms of tumor cell death/apoptosis was supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Sandoz Pharmaceuticals fellowships. He received his B.A. summa cum laude in Biology, Music, and Art History from Swarthmore College. For information about future events AT IACS, see http://iacs.seas.harvard.edu/events _______________________________________________ Iacs-events mailing list Iacs-events(a)seas.harvard.edu https://lists.seas.harvard.edu/mailman/listinfo/iacs-events

Please join us for the next IACS Seminar this Friday, October 28th. Speaker: Alán Aspuru-Guzik Location: Maxwell Dworkin G125, 33 Oxford Street, Cambridge Time: Informal lunch with speaker, 12:30pm. Talk, 1:00pm. Title: The Harvard Clean Energy Project: Finding Renewable Energy Materials One Screensaver at a Time Abstract: Which material is best for organic photovoltaics? Using the volunteer computer time of half a million donors. In this talk, Dr. Aspuru-Guzik will describe his group's efforts related to The Clean Energy Project (http://cleanenergy.harvard.edu<http://cleanenergy.harvard.edu/>)/>), a large-scale volunteer-donor distributed computing project to find the best donor and acceptor materials for organic photovoltaics. He will describe their progress towards the goal of an automated search for high-performance materials. Dr. Aspuru-Guzik and his group have currently computed the electronic structure of 2.8 million candidate oligomer building blocks, and successfully carried out a related theory to experiment demonstration jointly with the group of Zhenan Bao at Stanford. Dr. Aspuru-Guzik will describe the status and plans for the project, including the release of our top candidate list of compounds. Come prepared: Go to the Clean Energy Project website, download and install our client software in your computer to help the environment with your free cycles of computer time. Bio: Alán Aspuru-Guzik is Associate Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard. He received his undergraduate degree in Chemistry from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in 1999 and his PhD in Physical Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004. His research focuses on the interface of quantum information and chemistry. In particular, he is interested in the use of quantum computers and dedicated quantum simulators for chemical systems. He and his group recently developed a density functional theory for open quantum systems. He leads the Clean Energy Project, a distributed computing effort for screening renewable energy materials. Since coming to Harvard in 2006, he has received many honors, including the DARPA Young Faculty Award, Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, Sloan Research Fellowship, Everett-Mendelsson Graduate Mentoring Award, and the HP Outstanding Junior Faculty award from the Computers in Chemistry division of the American Chemical Society. Last year he was selected as a Top Innovator Under 35 by MIT's Technology Review magazine. For information about future events AT IACS, see http://iacs.seas.harvard.edu/events _______________________________________________ Iacs-events mailing list Iacs-events(a)seas.harvard.edu https://lists.seas.harvard.edu/mailman/listinfo/iacs-events

Harvard University will be closed on Friday, November 11th in observance of Veterans' Day. The IACS Seminar series will resume on Friday, November 18th. ________________________________ Please join us for the next IACS Seminar on Friday, November 18th. Speaker: Pavlos Protopapas Location: Maxwell Dworkin G125, 33 Oxford Street, Cambridge Time: Informal lunch with speaker, 12:30pm. Talk, 1:00pm. Title: New approaches in period finding for irregular time series: Looking for periodic signals from the cosmos Abstract: The heart, the economy, stock prices, stars and many other real world-phenomena exhibit seasonal or periodic behavior. Two important steps when analyzing data from such processes are discriminating periodic patterns and identifying the period. Doing so on billions of noisy observations made at irregularly spaced time points remains a difficult challenge despite extensive study in different disciplines. In this talk, we present two novel algorithms for period finding. The first uses a nonparametric Bayesian model, based on Gaussian processes, that does not make strong assumptions on the shape of the periodic function. This approaches the problem from a data mining perspective, adding algorithmic and computational considerations and empirical comparisons to evaluate ideas and methods. In addition to identifying the period, this model and set of algorithms provide a regression estimate of the periodic function. The second approach uses maximum likelihood with a new spatio-temporal kernel for discriminating among periodic and non-periodic time series. The new technique is also used for estimating the periods. We tested the method on 50 million astronomical timeseries or 50 billion measurements. Many computational optimizations, parallelization and approximations are presented in order to cope with the large dataset. Bio: Pavlos Protopapas received his Ph.D. in 1996 at the University of Pennsylvania in theoretical nuclear physics. His thesis provided a solution to the Coriolis attenuation problem. He served as the associate director of the National Scalable Cluster Project (NSCP), one of the initial attempts at large scale distributing computing on a grid-like model. Protopapas is a research scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and senior scientist/project leader for the Time Series Center launched by the Harvard Initiative in Innovative Computing. His research interests lie in planetary transits, the outer solar system, photometric variability, microlensing; in computer science he is interested in large databases and data mining in astronomy, with emphasis on feature extraction, anomaly detection, and similarity searches in time series. For information about future events AT IACS, see http://iacs.seas.harvard.edu/events _______________________________________________ Iacs-events mailing list Iacs-events(a)seas.harvard.edu https://lists.seas.harvard.edu/mailman/listinfo/iacs-events

Harvard University will be closed on Thursday, November 24th and Friday, November 25th in observance of the Thanksgiving holiday. The last IACS seminar of the semester will be held on Thursday, December 8th. ________________________________ Please join us for the next IACS Seminar on Thursday, December 8th. Speaker: Nick Trefethen Location: Maxwell Dworkin G125, 33 Oxford Street, Cambridge Time: Informal lunch with speaker, 12:30pm. Talk, 1:00pm. Title: Solving Differential Equations with Chebfun Abstract: Chebfun is a Matlab-based system for computing with functions of a real variable: it overloads Matlab's vectors to functions and matrices to operators. This talk focuses on one of Chebfun's most remarkable capabilities, the automatic solution of ordinary differential equations to spectral accuracy invoked by an overload of Matlab's backslash command. Linear ODEs (also integral equations and eigenvalue problems) are solved by adaptive Chebyshev spectral discretizations. Nonlinear ODEs rely on Newton's method implemented by Frechet derivative linear operators realized with Automatic Differentiation. All this is the work of Toby Driscoll, Asgeir Birkisson, and Nick Hale. The talk will make use of computer demos from start to finish, including solution of these problems by the graphical user interface CHEBGUI. Bio: Nick Trefethen is Professor of Numerical Analysis and head of the Numerical Analysis Group at Oxford University. He was educated at Harvard and Stanford and held professorial positions at NYU, MIT, and Cornell before coming to Oxford in 1997. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a member of the US National Academy of Engineering. As an author he is known for his books Numerical Linear Algebra (1997), Spectral Methods in MATLAB (2000), Schwarz-Christoffel Mapping (2002), and Spectra and Pseudospectra (2005). He is an ISI Highly Cited Researcher, with about 100 journal publications in numerical analysis and applied mathematics, and has served as editor for many of the leading numerical analysis journals. He has lectured in some 15 countries and 25 American states, including invited lectures at both ICM and ICIAM congresses. Some of Trefethen's recent activities include the SIAM 100-Dollar, 100-Digit Challenge, the notion of Ten Digit Algorithms ("ten digits, five seconds, and just one page"), the Chebfun software system for numerical computation with functions instead of numbers, and a book in preparation called Approximation Theory and Approximation Practice. During 2011-2011 he is serving as President of SIAM, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. For information about future events AT IACS, see http://iacs.seas.harvard.edu/events _______________________________________________ Iacs-events mailing list Iacs-events(a)seas.harvard.edu https://lists.seas.harvard.edu/mailman/listinfo/iacs-events

Very interesting seminar! Joon: I think this is relevant to your project. Alan Alán Aspuru-Guzik | Associate Professor Harvard University | Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology 12 Oxford Street, Room M113 | Cambridge, MA 02138 (617)-384-8188 | http://aspuru.chem.harvard.edu | http://about.me/aspuru ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: IACS Info &lt;iacs-info(a)seas.harvard.edu&gt; Date: Fri, Nov 18, 2011 at 3:02 PM Subject: [IACS-events] Seminar Thursday, Dec. 8: Nick Trefethen (Oxford University) on Solving Differential Equations with Chebfun To: iacs-events &lt;iacs-events(a)seas.harvard.edu&gt; Harvard University will be closed on Thursday, November 24th and Friday, November 25th in observance of the Thanksgiving holiday. The last IACS seminar of the semester will be held on Thursday, December 8th. ------------------------------ Please join us for the next IACS Seminar on *Thursday, December 8th. * Speaker: Nick Trefethen Location: Maxwell Dworkin G125, 33 Oxford Street, Cambridge Time: Informal lunch with speaker, 12:30pm. Talk, 1:00pm. Title: Solving Differential Equations with Chebfun Abstract: Chebfun is a Matlab-based system for computing with functions of a real variable: it overloads Matlab's vectors to functions and matrices to operators. This talk focuses on one of Chebfun's most remarkable capabilities, the automatic solution of ordinary differential equations to spectral accuracy invoked by an overload of Matlab's backslash command. Linear ODEs (also integral equations and eigenvalue problems) are solved by adaptive Chebyshev spectral discretizations. Nonlinear ODEs rely on Newton's method implemented by Frechet derivative linear operators realized with Automatic Differentiation. All this is the work of Toby Driscoll, Asgeir Birkisson, and Nick Hale. The talk will make use of computer demos from start to finish, including solution of these problems by the graphical user interface CHEBGUI. Bio: Nick Trefethen is Professor of Numerical Analysis and head of the Numerical Analysis Group at Oxford University. He was educated at Harvard and Stanford and held professorial positions at NYU, MIT, and Cornell before coming to Oxford in 1997. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a member of the US National Academy of Engineering. As an author he is known for his books Numerical Linear Algebra (1997), Spectral Methods in MATLAB (2000), Schwarz-Christoffel Mapping (2002), and Spectra and Pseudospectra (2005). He is an ISI Highly Cited Researcher, with about 100 journal publications in numerical analysis and applied mathematics, and has served as editor for many of the leading numerical analysis journals. He has lectured in some 15 countries and 25 American states, including invited lectures at both ICM and ICIAM congresses. Some of Trefethen's recent activities include the SIAM 100-Dollar, 100-Digit Challenge, the notion of Ten Digit Algorithms ("ten digits, five seconds, and just one page"), the Chebfun software system for numerical computation with functions instead of numbers, and a book in preparation called Approximation Theory and Approximation Practice. During 2011-2011 he is serving as President of SIAM, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. For information about future events AT IACS, see http://iacs.seas.harvard.edu/events _______________________________________________ Iacs-events mailing list Iacs-events(a)seas.harvard.edu https://lists.seas.harvard.edu/mailman/listinfo/iacs-events