The 2000 CSO Winners Have Been Selected!

On Thursday, April 27, 2000, the Education Center on Computational Science and Engineering awarded our CSO winners, Lena van der Stap and Patrick McNairnie,  for their outstanding work on "Simulation of The Contractile Behavior of An Isolated Cardiac Myocyte" (http://www16.electrom.com/Simulation/).  See their submission paper. The awards presentation was given at Casa Real in Aztec Center on the San Diego State University campus.

Submittals for the 2001 CSO competition are now being accepted.


Please read on below for additional details.

Overview:

Computational Science is a rapidly growing area at the intersection of science and computing. Your instructors may have already talked about new approaches in computational chemistry and biology, computer and network engineering, spatial informatics, etc. You may have already used simulation, visuualization, Web-based collaboration, digital libraries, and similar approaches in your projects.

YOU MAY BE DOING IT ALREADY, AND HAVE ALREADY SEEN HOW INTELLIGENT USE OF COMPUTERS MAY ENHANCE SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY!

We hope you will take this opportunity to share your findings with fellow students. The EdCenter opens a competition of computational science projects developed by SDSU undergraduate students.

Cash prizes of $500 each will be awarded to winning teams

See the details in our previous announcement.

Deadline: March 1, 2001. 
Place: Education Center on Computational Science & Engineering, LA 073 ("under the dome").
Contact: edcenter@sdsu.edu, 619-594-0491

What are we looking for?

We are looking for projects that demonstrate how creative, intelligent computing helps solve scientific problems, in various fields.

On the formal side, your project submission should include:

• A submission form
• A text description of the project (at least 8 pages, not including graphics)
• A brief web page describing the logic and main outcomes of the project.
• Software demonstration, in some appropriate form (linked to the Web page, if the software runs on the Web; a video of simulation experiments; visualization snapshots, or similar)

How do you start?

• Revisit your recent projects that involved computers (beyond using a word processor to type up a term paper, obviously, or a web page of links to the work of other people). We are interested in your work, we want to reward your efforts to be creative.
• Try to think about how creative use of computers helped you approach the solution more quickly and made the results more presentable. Whether you discovered a new phenomenon, or found a new way to demonstrate the known - we are interested in your approaches and results. CREATIVE THINKING IS WHAT COUNTS THE MOST!
• Assemble a team of partners (though this is not necessary).
• Explore how others have used computational science tools in attacking various scientific problems. A good place to start would be the Ed Center's NPACI Showroom, a collection, by discipline, of a small subset of computing activities and NPACI and the Alliance Thrust Areas.
• Come down to the Ed Center to discuss your project ideas.

Important!

YOU DON'T HAVE TO WRITE YOUR OWN CODE FOR THIS PROJECT! There are at least two other ways.

• First: Team up with someone who can write code.
• Second: Find an appropriate software. Specifically, we recommend scientific software tools developed at the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI: www.npaci.edu) and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC: www.sdsc.edu). These tools are freely available, and implement many computational science ideas and approaches, in fields ranging from physics, biology and chemistry to social sciences.

Remember: it is SMART USE OF COMPUTING THAT COUNTS - and writing code is not necessarily a smart thing to do. We encourage you to use tools from the NPACI (HINT: this will bring you additional points)

ELIGIBILITY

Any student enrolled in a degree-granting undergraduate course of study at SDSU during 2000-2001 academic year is eligible. Team projects can be submitted (and are encouraged). At least 2/3 of the team should be undergraduate students, and the main author should be an undergraduate. Class projects are also encouraged.

April  26, 2000 (preliminary announcement) - Deadline to apply: March 1, 2001