FEATURE
Opening the A
leksei Sorokin (Ph.D. AMAT 3rd Year) found a wealth of resources while spending a summer conducting research with Argonne National Laboratory, while also gaining a glimpse as to what it is like to conduct research at a national laboratory as a possible career. “Having experience at a national laboratory is a big help,” he says. “I’m still trying to decide if I want to get into teaching, a national lab, or the industry.” Sorokin says the opportunity to work at Argonne came as a suggestion from his Ph.D. adviser, Fred Hickernell, vice provost for research and professor of applied mathematics. Hickernell found a scientist working on a project that overlapped Sorokin’s Ph.D. work. After connecting with Vishwar Rao at Argonne, Sorokin began working on “Credible Intervals for Probability of Failure with Gaussian Processes.” “The computing resources and access to the supercomputers they have at Argonne makes training these Gaussian models really easy,” Sorokin says. “You just need to make time to use these machines to do your large-scale modeling. It’s really nice to have easy access to those.”
10
Sorokin explained it would be possible to conduct the research using third party resources at companies such as Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services. However, it would have cost a lot of money and time to use those resources, making it more difficult to conduct the research. Illinois Institute of Technology has been strengthening ties with the research community at Argonne to expand research opportunities for its students, in addition to the resources of a national laboratory for faculty research. To strengthen its commitment to research excellence and experiential learning, Illinois Tech recently appointed joint faculty of five staff scientists from Argonne. Valerie Taylor has accepted an appointment as a research professor, while Xingfu Wu and Michael Kruse have been named research associate professor through Argonne and Illinois Tech’s joint appointment program. The program’s goal is to maximize the intellectual and physical resources of both Argonne and Illinois Tech in order to promote research and collaboration in areas that align with the scientific priorities of Argonne and the United States Depart-
ment of Energy. Taylor, Wu, and Kruse are collaborating with several computer science faculty members at Illinois Tech in high-performance computing. Argonne computer scientists Bogdan Nicolae and Michael E. Papka also joined Illinois Tech’s Department of Computer Science as research professors to enhance stronger research connections between the laboratory and Illinois Tech faculty and students. Nicolae is a technical lead of a project that develops a checkpoint-restart framework for HPC applications. Papka’s research focuses on scientific visualization, large data analysis, and enabling science with computers and computing technology. “We are delighted to announce these new appointments, which will bring a wealth of opportunity to our faculty and students, including additional funding, more diverse research, and increased collaboration,” says Professor Shlomo Argamon, the former chair of Illinois Tech’s Department of Computer Science. “This brings great benefits to our department, the College of Computing, and the university as a whole.” The appointees may serve as coadvisers to Ph.D. candidates at Illinois
