VISUALIZATION

Katrina Summit includes discussion of cyberinfrastructure for storm prediction: A year after Hurricane Katrina's devastation of the Louisiana and Mississippi, rebuilding efforts are finally moving forward. But it's the remaining, deeper tears in the region's social fabric that will be the main focus of a unique series of dialogues and events at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign designed to engage the researchers, technologists, artists, activists, and community members in critical conversations about issues that arose in Katrina's wake, including social justice and equity, broken connections and the need for community healing. The free four-day summit "Katrina: After the Storm - Civic Engagement Through Arts, Humanities and Technology" is scheduled to take place Sept. 27-30 in Urbana-Champaign locations and via the Access Grid (see http://agschedule.ncsa.uiuc.edu/meetingdetails.asp?MID=17201 for Access Grid information). Sites that plan to participate via the Access Grid include: Bethune Cookman College, Daytona Beach, Fla.; Boston University; Clark Atlanta University, Atlanta; Florida A&M University, Tallahassee, Fla.; Florida International University, Miami; Jackson State University, Jackson, Miss.; Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge; and Renaissance Computing Institute, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Lectures, panel discussions and other activities will focus on topics ranging from disaster preparedness and deployment of mobile hospitals to re-imagining public schools and the role of social entrepreneurship in rebuilding communities. A panel titled "Inside the Digital Storm: Using Computers to Understand and Predict Dangerous Weather" will be held from 1 to 2 p.m. (Central) on Thursday, Sept. 28; panelists Ed Seidel (director of the Center for Computation & Technology at Louisiana State University), Dan Reed (director of the Renaissance Computing Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) and Bob Wilhelmson (chief science officer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications) will discuss the use of powerful supercomputers, remote sensors, wireless networks, advanced visualization, and cyber-environments to tackle the challenges of understanding and predicting life-threatening storms. The summit is part of the "In|Formation Year," a yearlong program that promotes the human and humane dimensions of technology, initiated by the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC), an international consortium of humanists, artists, scientists, social scientists and engineers. Among the event's sponsors at NCSA and the TeraGrid. For complete summit information, go to www.katrinasummit.uiuc.edu.