The Computer Science Colloquium

Gabor T. Herman
(CUNY Graduate Center)

"Using computational methods to visualize the unseen"

During the last four decades an amazing development taken place in science, medicine and technology: we can now observe how macromolecular nanomachines (such as the ribosomes) change their shapes to perform their function, we can produce renderings of the interior of the living heart as it pumps blood, and see how the grains of metals deform and change during a process intending to increase their strength. Such abilities are possible due to a combination of improvements in instruments to collect relevant data (such as electron microscopes, computed tomography scanners, and synchrotons generating monochromatic X-rays), mathematical procedures for turning such data into dynamically varying three-dimensional descriptions, and computational methods that implement such procedures and display the resulting information in times short enough to be practically useful.

The Colloquium is supported by generous contributions from the Bloomberg, Information Builders, Inc. and Netlogic, Inc.