CSL Professor Zhizhen Zhao named 2017-18 NCSA Faculty Fellow

ECE and CSL Assistant Professor Zhizhen Zhao has been recognized as a National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) Fellow for 2017-18. She joined the ECE faculty in fall 2016 and is an affiliate of the Coordinated Science Lab.

NCSA Fellows help solve challenges ranging from deep learning to volcano activity. They work with experts at NCSA on projects that overlap with NCSA's six thematic research areas (e.g., the Blue Waters project, XSEDE, the Midwest Big Data Hub, Industry program).

According to Zhao, LIGO, a research lab operated by Caltech and MIT, has revolutionized a new frontier of astronomy with their detections of gravitational waves (GWs). Multi-messenger astrophysics incorporates gravitational radiation and is dependent on removing these weak GWs from the background noise and then characterizing the source. However, there are high computational costs associated with this current approach.

“We propose to develop a unified and highly efficient computational framework to process the data,” said Zhao. “The application of new deep learning techniques in GW astrophysics, astronomy, and astroparticle physics has the potential to accelerate scientific research and unlock new opportunities by enhancing the way we use HPC resources and exploit emerging hardware architectures such as DL-optimized GPUs.”

See Zhao’s full proposal.