The energy equivalent of two tons of coal can be found in a bucket of water and research is underway to harness this clean, safe and almost inexhaustible form of energy. If we could tap this energy source, it would provide thousands of years of clean energy that does not contribute greenhouse gases. This energy powers our sun and is stored in the form of deuterium, which is a hydrogen atom containing an extra neutron. Test reactors such as National Ignition Facility (NIF) and International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) are now being constructed to generate fusion energy. There is an increased need to design and implement computational models to simulate fusion energy. This project proposes to gain insight into the fusion process by configuring a parallel computing cluster at HSU to simulate and control of fusion plasmas.

1. Load operating systems on computational node
2. Establish internodes communications
3. Decide how to parallelize the plasma code
4. Run parallel plasma simulation
5. Conduct computational control experiments
6. Design a poster and write a paper to be published in appropriate conferences / journals

Sketching as a design tool or technique is well-documented in fields such as architecture, engineering and graphic design, to name a few. However, in the field of software systems little attention is paid to the integration of sketching as a design tool. As part of a cross-disciplinary science of design, sketching in software design needs more empirical research and better tools to support this research, as well as tools that facilitate efficient sketching processes for software systems design. The goal of this project is to develop such a tool that not only facilitates efficient sketching processes, but also enables further empirical research to take place by recording design artifacts and knowledge captured through the sketching process. Of particular interest is that this tool enables collaboration among designers via sketching and enables remote sketching activities via hand-held devices.

1. Research the role of sketching in various design processes across several fields (as mentioned above)
Research current, past, and proposed tools for sketching in any such fields
2. Research evaluation techniques for studying the effectiveness of sketching and sketching tools in design processes
3. Evaluate how sketching may be used in software design
4. Construct an architecture and an interface for a collaborative, remote sketching tool for software design which not only allows efficient sketching processes but records essential design artifacts and knowledge needed for empirical analysis of sketching processes
5. Design a poster and write a paper to be published in appropriate conferences / journals

Sudden Oak Death (SOD) is a fungal pathogen that kills oak trees leaving standing dead wood. These dead trees can significantly alter forest fire dynamics leading to hotter and more rapidly spreading fires. These hotter fires are more likely to kill other trees including redwoods and other conifers. Additionally these SOD-killed trees are more likely to generate fire-brands (burning embers that fly through the air and can start new fires).

The purpose of this project will be to design and implement a computer simulation model to understand how fire risk changes over the course of a SOD epidemic, and to assess the relative effectiveness of various management strategies to reduce the spread of SOD and fire risk.

1. Research how fire risk changes over time for individual SOD infected/killed trees.
2. Research how SOD spreads across a landscape.
3. Design and implement a mathematical / computer model that addresses SOD spread and fire risk.
4. Research/design at least two strategies for managing SOD.
5. Compare the effectiveness of the strategies.
6. Design a poster and write a paper to be published in appropriate conferences / journals.

Changes in the global climate, resource availability and the cascading effects of resource limitations are consistently and repeatedly occurring around the world. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment makes the following point: current technology and knowledge can considerably reduce human impacts on ecosystems.

To this end, we believe it will be essential that the gap between data and knowledge be closed quickly and effectively. This gap exists in both within and between scientific domains. Furthermore, these vast scientific data repositories are siloed in ways that make them difficult to access and integrate across disciplinary domains to extract useful knowledge for decision-making by community members, resource managers and elected officials. Bridging these information gaps across scientific disciplines is only the first step, equally important is the timely translation of this information into useful knowledge that is accessible to the people who require it. This need begins with the translation of heterogeneous digital databases into new and relevant knowledge, but also with an eye towards the relationship of this knowledge to the real and complex natural and social systems in which we act. Digital systems hold great promise for bring together not only data, but also organizations and knowledge across both geographic and conceptual spaces. Computing is incestuous and will enable us to extract the desired knowledge to ensure a global management approach of our coasts at home and abroad.

Given a complex regulatory framework, coupled with a multitude of scientific objectives and methodologies for the collection and analysis of scientific data, the computation systems for the translation of data to knowledge are lacking. For decades data has been collected and archived by individual organizations to serve their independent purposes, most often with little or no perspective of how these data might relate to other objectives and analysis. More appropriately, data collection should be tied to the effectively and efficiently answer questions of import and to enable knowledge creation via multidisciplinary data aggregation and analysis. The overall link of the proposed research is the issue of utilizing advances in computation model, methods and techniques to provide for an extraordinary enhancement in solving the analysis problems found in large environmental databases.

1. Identify the domain knowledge and issues related to managing marine ecosystems.
2. Survey of computational tools and models currently used in these domains
3. Design a common framework to bridge the gap between data and knowledge for marine ecosystems.
4. Integrate in the framework computational models and techniques capable of solving issues with data mining, data integration, data fusion and knowledge generation.
5. Design a poster and write a paper to be published in appropriate conferences / journals