Approximately 60 professionals from academia, industry and the military attended the Fifth Annual Summer Institute for Advanced Computation (SIAC), sponsored by the Information Technology Research Institute and Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC). This year’s SIAC, held at Wright State University on August 27-29, 2003, focused on Homeland Security Computing. “The SIAC2003 on Homeland Security Computing was another successful effort sponsored by OSC,” said Nikolaos Bourbakis, Director of the Information Technology Research Institute at WSU. SIAC is designed for an audience that ranges from graduate students in computer science and engineering to computational scientists and experts in selected fields. The Institute is intended to be an interactive, informal workshop with a lot of question-and-answer periods during the presentations. “The speakers were very informative, and the level of intellectual exchange was wonderful,” said Stan Ahalt, OSC Executive Director. “I was particularly impressed with the focused questions each speaker fielded from the audience -- it was clear that the audience was engaged and eager to learn as much as they could from each speaker!” Topics discussed included security vs. privacy, visualization tools for homeland security, database security, supercomputing and homeland security, as well as other information relating to the conference theme. “The speakers were very well prepared and the topics kept the audience at high level of attendance,” Bourbakis said. The event featured several speakers from various universities including Wright State University, The Ohio State University, the University of Cincinnati, Purdue University, Texas A&M University, and the University of Notre Dame. Speakers from EON Reality, OSC, Air Force Research Laboratory, and Wright-Patterson Air Force Base were also featured on the agenda.