VizWorld.com

Louisiana Tech University has just won a U.S. Air Force’s Office of Scientific Research grant for $2.85 Million, to be used to establish the Cyberspace Research Laboratory.

The Cyberspace Research Lab will support advanced research and development functions such as virtualization, visualization, high performance computing, wireless sensor networks and micro unmanned aerial vehicles. These facilities will allow researchers to configure different environments, simulate and test real-life events where security breaches may occur, and develop remedies against such security attacks.

Tapping into the new threat of cyber-terrorism:

“Tech has an important role to play in cyberspace R&D,” said Les Guice, vice president for research and development at Louisiana Tech. “As evidenced by recent attacks government computers, cyber threats are more and more prolific, demonstrating a critical need for further R&D. We intend to play a major role in addressing these needs.”

It’s a good win for Louisiana Tech, and combined with the existing high-speed LONI network it will be one of the top cyberspace research labs in the nation.

via Louisiana Tech to get $2.85 million cyber grant | shreveporttimes.com | The Times.

Science government, grant, louisiana, university

UsaSpending.gov has rolled out a new visualization tool aimed to show Federal spending in the IT sector.  Separating it into the various federal branches (DOD, DOJ, DHS, etc), they then let you look at the various expenditures.  The expenditures (or investments) are separated into “Normal”, “Needs Attention”, and “Significant concerns” (the green, yellow, and red areas) by Cost, Schedule, and CIO Evaluation.

See their demonstration video after the break.

Federal IT Dashboard.

Read more…

Graphics federal, government, infographic, interactive

NVidia presented a great tutorial on CUDA programming at the HPCMP User’s Group conference today.  The slides start with the basics of CUDA & GPGPU technology, and then spread out into some of their specialized CUDA libraries such as CUBLas and NVPP, and discuss several memory optimization strategies.  Definitely worth looking over if you’re a CUDA developer.

UPDATE: Now the slides are available on SlideShare for you to review before downloading.  View the 192slides, & download the 3MB PDF after the break.

Read more…

Science cuda, education, government, nvidia, powerpoint, tutorial

Recognizing that the best way to get data “to the people” is through interactive web2.0 websites with all the basics such as search, query, and visualization, The General Services Administration (GSA) issued a pre-solicitation notice thursday seeking an IT contractor to rebuild the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act website.

Specifically, the work will include updates and changes to the site’s user interface, information architecture and design engineering. According to GSA’s pre-solicitation, the contractor needs expertise in project management, and the ability to “deliver a website with interactive data-visualization, and web-application level functionality.”

via Feds want to build a better stimulus website – New Mexico Business Weekly:.

Science government, interactive, stimulus, web

ELXSI, Louisiana Tech University, and Beyond Vision are collaborating on a new government project called the “Sensor System for Critical Infrastructure Defect Recognition, Visualization and Failure Prediction”.

The general area of Sensory System’s planned activity is to develop a novel deep-penetrating scanning system based on ultrawideband radar for inspecting buried infrastructure such as pipelines tunnels and culverts that can detect fractures quantify corrosion and determine the presence of voids in the surrounding soil to “see” beyond the structure to prevent accidents.

The project is being funded through a grant from the Technology Innovation Program, National Institute of Standards and Technology in the U.S. Department of Commerce.

via ELXS Notice Pursuant to the National Cooperative Research and Production Act of 1993–Sensory System for Critical Infrastructure Defect Recognition, Visualization and Failure Prediction.

Science beyond vision, elxsi, government, lousiana, university

Even the US Department of Defense is getting into CUDA & GPGPU, and their Data Analysis & Assessment Center (DAAC) have begun posting a good set of very detailed tutorials on their website.  The DAAC is a division of the DoD’s High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP), which specializing in maintaining and running supercomputers for various defense researchers.

It looks like they’re still in-progress, but it’s a great collection of very low-level tutorials showing exact translations between classic C & Fortran codes to their CUDA equivalents.  They also have details on enabling double-precision support, working with CUDA error messages, and synchronization issues when using multiple threads.

General Purpose GPU – Visualization.

Hardware, Science cuda, government, gpgpu, training, tutorial

Socrata, the “Social Data Network”, has created a platform for people to publish datasets for public viewing. From their site:

Opening government to new audiences and constituencies is the 21st century battle cry in societies everywhere. At the heart of this movement is open government data, readily accessible over the internet, in a form that maximizes comprehension, interactivity, participation, and sharing, delivered at a fraction of the cost of today’s data download sites. At Socrata, we call this social data discovery, and we’ve engineered a comprehensive suite of Web solutions for delivering social data discovery on government data sites around the world.

Integrating popular social features such as ratings, comments, and sharing, with a full API and RSS support, they’ve taken data from the Data.gov project and others to a new level.  Can’t wait to see some of the visualizations to arise from this.

Socrata | Making Data Social.

Science data, free, government, socrata

Earthquakes are no laughing matter, but the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management has done a pretty successful job of at least making them pretty.  Their new “QuakeQuiz” website presents 6 common scenarios and asks the users what to do.  With some crisp clean infographic-style visuals, it’s pretty and educational at the same time.

QuakeQuizSF.

Graphics earthquake, education, government

Data.gov is online and pumping out publicly viewable data for the world to play with. Getting it up and running was no small task, due to the inherent nature of people to want to closely hold onto the data, or pre-process it into some type of barchart or piechart.  Data.gov is all about pure unprocessed data.  Government Computer News talks about some of the hurdles they’ve had to overcome.

“Once you start applying visualizations to data, you start applying context to it as well, and we don’t think this is the government’s job,” Johnson said. “Visualizations are inherently editorial, and I’m not sure that’s government’s responsibility. I’m not saying don’t do visualization, but don’t do data visualization first. Work on the quality of the data first.”

Ready for reuse? — Government Computer News.

Science data.gov, government

Subsidyscope, an initiative of The Pew Charitable Trusts, has built some interesting interactive visualizations of recent various federal programs meant to “Fix” the economy.  Of particular interest I find the visualization of the TARP program, where you can see not only the rate of spending (both integrated across time & as individual transactions), but the amount of money being sent to each of the banks.

Subsidyscope.com. via Information Aesthetics.

Science economic, flash, government, stimulus, tarp