CCT Lectures

Experimental and electronic music will emanate from the Manship Theatre on Wednesday, Oct. 8 during “Cinema for the Ears: The Best Music You’ve Never Heard.” The concert will begin at 8 p.m. The LSU School of Music hosts this concert in partnership with the LSU Laboratory for Creative Arts & Technologies using the ICAST Audio Sound Theatre, a 27-channel, state-of-the-art, surround-sound environment. ICAST’s capabilities far exceed typical movie theater sound quality and provide an immersive listening experience for the audience. Cinema for the Ears will feature pieces from renowned composer and computer music researcher Roger Dannenberg, from Carnegie Mellon University. The program also will include music from Nick Hwang, Travis Scharr, Corey Knoll and others. The concert takes place with cabaret-style seating, and the composers will discuss their work with the audience prior to performing each piece. Tickets to Cinema for the Ears are $12, with $6 discounted tickets for students. The theatre has a cash bar available during the concert. Order tickets online at www.manshiptheatre.org or by phone, 225-344-0334 or by e-mail, tickets@manshiptheatre.org.

The presentation of Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center (PSNC) will show the transformation from new network services developed within R&D projects into a service platform. The Polish Optical Internet Programme (PIONIER) which was realized between 2000 and 2006 provided the emergent optical networking infrastructure for Polish scientific community. Together with this fabric infrastructure there were also different advanced networking services designed and developed through additional funding mechanisms from internal, national as well as European R&D projects. PSNC is going to present their experience and some examples of services and tools in areas such as: new media, digital libraries, telemedicine and education. They will present tools which have been developed and successfully deployed as operational network services as well as projects which are under development and will provide through research network, new advanced services for scientists, medical doctors and internet users. Presented products which have been already deployed are: Content Delivery System for National iTVP Platform and dLibra Digital Library Framework. Additionally they will also present Netradio project, teleconsultancy system for trauma surgery and services for education. Through the realization of those emergent services within the research network, PSNC is going to embed some of them as the solid components of the research infrastructure. To achieve this goal a new concept of a PLATON platform has been introduced with following five initial services: videoconferencing, HD interactive television, campus computations, educational roaming (Eduroam) and network archiving.

Biological systems are complex information systems, with their information, in complex genetic forms, passed from generation to generation, shared in families of species, and most importantly, coded to produce the ingredients necessary to make the diverse forms of life and to conduct complicated biological processes. Since the discovery of the double helical structure of DNA and hence the secrete of genetic inheritance of life in 1953, biology has entered a new era of research on how biological systems have ever evolved at molecular genetic levels and how genetic information has been coded, stored, and processed at various stages of life. Later, with the completion of the human genome project in 2000, the field of bioinformatics and computational biology has emerged and rapidly developed, as a result of the urgent need for the access to the enormous amount of data generated from all the genomic research projects and also as a result of the recognition of modern biological science as an information science, where informatics and computation have played crucial roles. Indeed, bioinformatics and computational biology have become important and sometimes, even indispensable tools and made great impacts in many fundamental research areas of biology, ranging from genomic sequencing to protein modeling, from gene annotation to protein functional prediction, from structural genomics studies to microarray data analysis, from gene regulatory network analysis to metabolic pathway identification, from drug design to cancer modeling, etc. In this talk, I will give a brief introduction to the field of bioinformatics and computational biology, with a focus on sequence analysis, structural computing, and systems modeling and in particular, on their biological motivations, the related computational problems, the general approaches to the problems, and the mathematical and computational challenges.