My publications are listed here. Here is a professional profile and biosketch. Here is a typical institutional ID photo.
Here is my long resume in postscript, PDF, HTML, RTF, ASCII, and MS Word. Here is my short resume in postscript, PDF, HTML, RTF, ASCII, and MS Word. I am married to Dr. Rebecca A. Efroymson, and we have one son, Sam.
In April 2006, I was astonished to receive the S.I. Auerbach Award for Excellence in Environmental Science for 2005. Before presenting the Award, my Division's Director gave an introductory speech, revealing in stages who had won the Award. In my acceptance presentation, I tried to highlight a few consistent directions in my random-walk ecological career. The Environmental Sciences Division gave me a fancy plaque and a framed certificate that tells a lot of very nice lies about me. They also put up a poster in the lobby showing the august group of past awardees.
Projects with which I have been involved that have Web pages include:
The publication on this simulation model in Ecological Modelling is available as pdf and postscript, and the source code for the model is available here. This project was featured in the "Why Files".
This project was selected as an example for the Advanced Visual Systems applications site.
This project was also featured in the Oak Ridge Summit, where a special version of one of our animated scientific visualizations was shown, along with a brief summary Web page for the Clinch River Environmental Restoration Project.
Here is the Visualization Group that created the Clinch River animations, and here is a special promotional animation for the Viz Team.
I have written several Web-based publications, including:
I created the Fractal Landscape Realizer with Paul Schwartz and Forrest Hoffman, which generates synthetic multiple-category landscape maps to users' specifications. You can use the Fractal Landscape Realizer to simulate an actual landscape on-the-fly. Click reload to generate another custom synthetic landscape.
To test how well the synthetic landscapes resembled actual maps, we performed a variation of the Turing Test for machine intelligence. In the first phase of our Turing Test of the Fractal Landscape Realizer, we invited more than a hundred experts, when presented with a series of 20 pairs of maps, to distinguish the real map from a synthetic realization. The synthetic landscape realization from each pair was generated by the Fractal Realizer ``on the fly''; therefore, no two experts experienced exactly the same Test. A Preliminary Turing Test Analysis for the first phase of the Test indicated a mean of between 10 and 11 correct in 20 pairs. There was no obvious relationship between score vs. self-rated expertise.
Although the statistical analysis for publication was completed, we released the Continuing Turing Test of the Fractal Realizer to several ecology-, statistics-, and GIS-related Usenet news groups and listservers. As of this writing, nearly 500 people have taken the Turing Test. Anyone can at any time examine the real-time distribution of scores and the real-time percent incorrect choices by map to monitor how the results from the Continuing Turing Test are developing. In addition to the Turing Test approach, we have statistically compared populations of Fractal Realizations to actual maps using Landscape Metrics.I also participated in an international internet experiment on Spatial Interpolation Comparison. By employing different spatial interpolators on the same dataset, we compared their relative effectiveness. Participants received 30% of a dataset and had to interpolate the 70% which is missing. The data were daily rainfall measured in Switzerland when the radioactive cloud released from the Chernobyl Nuclear Power plant passed over Europe.
Forrest Hoffman and I built ORNL's first Beowulf-style parallel supercomputer using personal computers as building blocks. This machine is one of a dozen or so such machines presently operating. Because we have no actual funding for this research, we started by using old surplus486 PCs which had been discarded from all over ORNL. We combine and trade parts until we obtain a minimum configuration, and then we add the PC as an additional processing node in the compound parallel machine. In keeping with the budgetary philosophy of this unfunded project, we dubbed the machine the "Stone SouperComputer", after the story of stone soup. We used the Stone SouperComputer to perform several landscape-scale ecological analyses which would have been very difficult to accomplish on a single serial workstation.
The press has been very interested in our Stone SouperComputer. We were Slashdotted twice for the Stone SouperComputer, the first time in August 1998, and the second time in July 2001. The RidgeLines ORNL newspaper did a front-page article on us, entitled "A poor-man's supercomputer", and so did the University of Tennessee Daily Beacon. Our Beowulf effort was described in Science InScight, and was even translated into Italian, spanish and German. Our machine was also covered in the DOE Pulse.
Stone Soup was covered in the Chicago Tribune as Stone cold cheap supercomputing, and we were discussed at length in SlashDot as The No Cost Super Computer. The American Association for the Advancement of Science interviewed Forrest regarding the Stone SouperComputer. The AAAS Science Update radio program was broadcast Friday, Feb. 18, on the Mutual Broadcasting System, but you can hear the interview now as a RealAudio file here. We were invited in 2001 to prepare a manuscript describing the machine for Scientific American magazine. Thomas Sterling, the inventor of Beowulf-style compound computers, was our coauthor. The Knoxville News-Sentinel included us in a special section on an ORNL "Renaissance" in 2002. For all of the Stone Soup news items, look hereAt its largest, the Stone SouperComputer contained 128 individual PC nodes, with roughly half being Pentium-based machines. In 1999, we obtained shelves for almost all of the nodes , which we arranged in a fortress-like configuration. Forrest and I received an ORNL Teamwork Award for building Stone Soup. Click here to learn more about the Stone SouperComputer.
We have now designed and constructed a new computing cluster for the U.S. Forest Service Landfire project.
Here are some of the things that we have written about Stone Soup, or about projects that we have completed using Stone Soup:
During the summer of 2000, I had two students, Randy Debasa and
Andrew Obeng. Randy and Drew helped us work on our statistical clusteringapplications on the Stone SouperComputer. I have also worked with
Stephanie Gripne, Luojian Chen,
Our research was prominently featured at the ORNL booth during the Supercomputing '99 Conference, and we presented a technical paper in which we interconnected three supercomputers to solve a single problem using Globus.
In June 2000, I was invited to attend a Workshop on Scientific Applications of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Satellites.
In March 2000, I was invited to speak at the annual Horizon Days event held by the Computer Science Department at Indiana University. My talk was well-received, and I was flattered to have been selected as a guest speaker.
In December 1999, I was invited and sponsored to attend a workshop at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria on Harnessing Remote Sensing to Accomplish Full Carbon Accounting. Here is the final report from the workshop.
Here are some publications from my graduate work at the Coweeta Hydrologic Laboratory Long-Term Ecological Research Site in North Carolina, USA. Scroll down to see the citations and their abstracts.
In 1979 I sailed across the Pacific Ocean aboard the square-rigged sailing ship "Eye of The Wind" as part of an expedition called Operation Drake. The ship sailed around the world to commemorate the circumnavigation by Sir Francis Drake. The "Eye" is 100 feet long, had 12 sails, and carried a crew of 38 people. It was quite an adventure. I joined the crew on the Atlantic side of Panama, went through the canal, then sailed to Costa Rica, Galopagos Islands, then Tahiti, then across to Fiji. I got off in Fiji. A series of stamp first-day covers were issued to commemorate the ocean crossing, which took four months. I got to know HRH the Prince of Wales, who was the patron of the expedition, during the trip.
I am interested in Ancient Mayan Glyph writing. Here is my name in Mayan glyphs. We spent our honeymoon in Belize and Guatemala looking at Mayan ruins. I am also interested in early Paleontology, especially the Burgess shale fossils, shown here in diorama. Opabinia is perhaps the best-known of the Burgess shale fauna. I am also interested in the Vendian animals, shown here in diorama. I was recently able to make a Canadian trip and hike up to Walcott's quarry to see the Burgess Shale site firsthand. Otherwise, my hobby is writing unfunded proposals to work on invasive species using niche modeling or parallel interpolation of Forest Inventory Assessment Data productivity. If you are a sponsor, feel free to contact me about funding this research!
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GEOBABBLE! - Geographic Research using High Performance Computing - Watch this space for new developments!
