Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Humanities High Performance Computing Collaboratory (HpC) is a summer institute for graduate students and faculty who are conducting scholarship in the digital humanities. HpC offers two five-day workshops, one with the University of Illinois’ Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science (I-CHASS), and the other at the University of South Carolina’s Center for Digital Humanities (CDH). Attendees will 1) receive a comprehensive education in four computational concentrations: computer vision, augmented reality, game design, and mobile app development; 2) receive instruction in digital humanities project design and management; 3) obtain hands on experience with a variety of technical platforms; 4) work with technical staff to outline pilot explorations in at least one area of computational concentrations; and 5) join a year long virtual community where scholars will support their peers in authoring digital humanities projects.

The first workshop will take place in Champaign, IL on June 10-14. The second will take place in Columbia, SC on August 5-9. There will be a two-day concluding conference to be hosted by CDH August 25-26. From June 10 2011 to June 10 2012, participants will be linked by an online collaboratory where they can discuss, plan, and develop new projects in the digital humanities.

Because the goal of HpC is to familiarize scholars in the humanities with the crucial technologies and methods of advanced computing, applicants need not have any technical background or expertise.

Please send a letter of interest that outlines your current technical and intellectual investment in digital humanities and C.V. to Michael Simeone, mpsimeon[at]illinois.edu. Please submit your application before January 15th, 2012. HpC will select a total of 25 applicants for participation in the institute.

HpC Lead Faculty:

Dr. Jijun Tang received a Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of New Mexico. He is currently an associate professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of South Carolina. His research interests include high-performance computing, algorithm development, computational biology and computer games. In the past years, Dr. Tang’s research was supported by National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and Office of Naval Research (ONR). Dr. Tang and his group have extensive teaching experience in computer game, mobile application and software project management, including offering a senior level game development course for undergraduate and graduate students for the last five years, and various short courses for people with various background of programming.

Dr. Song Wang is currently an associate professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of South Carolina. His research interests include computer vision, medical imaging, and machine learning. He has published more than 30 papers and his research has been supported by National Science Foundation (NSF), Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). He is currently serving as the Publicity/Web portal Chair of the Technical Committee of Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TCPAMI), IEEE Computer Society and an Associate Editor of Pattern Recognition Letters. He received the PhD degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 2002.

Dr. Kenton McHenry received a Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2008. He is currently a Research Scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and lead of the Image, Spatial, and Data Analysis (ISDA) group. His background is in computer vision with interests in the areas of image segmentation, object/material recognition, 3D reconstruction and digital curation. Kenton and the ISDA group are investigating means of providing immediate free searchable access to the upcoming 1940 census data release, which consists of over 3 million un-transcribed digitized census forms. The goal is to explore methods of allowing users to find information within the image data without months of effort by thousands of human transcribers. Kenton has recently become engaged in the GroupScope project. With the goal of studying large group behaviour, GroupScope brings together overlapping collections of video and audio and attempts to automate and/or aid in the identification of interactions between the people observed.

Dr. Alex Yahja works on the interface between technologies and the humanities, social sciences and the arts as an Assistant Director in Modeling and Semantics at I-CHASS. The problems he has worked on include collaboration across disciplines, model validation and improvement, network-based recommendation, mapping of research activities, disaster response, and semantics-based specification and collaboration. Alex received a PhD in computation, organizations and society and two Masters of Science degrees, one in engineering and public policy and one in robotics, from Carnegie Mellon University. His current research interests include semantics, idea evolution, innovation drivers, dynamic social networks, organization and management, modeling and simulation, and machine learning.

Dr. Alan Craig is the Associate Director for Human-Computer Interaction at the Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science. He is also a researcher at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Alan has focused his career on the interface between humans and machines. He has been involved in many different capacities related to scientific visualization, virtual reality, data mining, multi-modal representation of information, and collaborative systems and has produced award winning scientific visualizations. Alan is among the pioneers in using sound to represent scientific data. He has been with NCSA for nearly twenty-five years where he has aided scientists in adopting high performance computing technologies to advance their research. In his role with I-CHASS he is bringing HPC methodology, tools, and techniques to researchers and educators in humanities, arts, and social science. He is co-author of the book Understanding Virtual Reality, published by Morgan Kaufmann Publishing, and author of the newly released book, Developing Virtual Reality Applications, from Elsevier Publishing. He is currently authoringUnderstanding Augmented Reality, also for Elsevier. In the past two years, he has received three patents related to different aspects of information technology.

Founded in 2004 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, I-CHASS charts new ground in high-performance computing and the humanities, arts, and social sciences by creating both learning environments and spaces for digital discovery. I-CHASS presents path-breaking research, computational resources, collaborative tools, and educational programming to showcase the future of the humanities, arts, and social sciences.

For more information on I-CHASS, please visit: http://www.ichass.illinois.edu