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USF’s FlashMob supercomputer event attracted approximately 600 volunteers to campus April 3.
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Supercomputer Exercise Draws Large Crowd
More than 600 people lugging hard drives or ferrying lightweight laptops congregated at USF’s Koret Health and Recreation Center on April 3 for the first “flash mob” computer event in history. Although the voluntary, instantaneous network did not generate enough computer power to rank within the world’s 500 fastest computers, organizers said they still had created a successful experiment.
“It was both an academic research experiment and a social experiment,” said Greg Benson, an assistant computer science professor and one of the organizers of the event. “We proved that people will come together in a revolutionary way to work on hard scientific problems.”
Grown out of a graduate computer science course called “Build Your Own Supercomputer,” the flash mob concept became a global media event as USF faculty and students pledged to build the first voluntary supercomputer. They had hoped a call for volunteers would draw about a thousand computers. Although enthusiastic techies from as far away as Los Angeles and Portland, Ore. showed up for the event, about 669 computers actually materialized. Using two portable generators set up in the Koret parking lot, the network managed a speed of 180 gigaflops or solved 180 billion mathematical operations a second. The group had hoped to attain a speed of 500 gigaflops or 500 billion operations per second in order to merit a ranking among the world’s fastest.
“The ‘flash mob’ concept is very interesting: bring people’s computers together and take some time to solve big problems,” said Samuel Merritt, a Livermore resident who participated in the event with four of his friends. Merritt said he already participates in other non-networked computer projects, such as SETI@home, which uses volunteer computers to search for extraterrestrial life.
The flash mob computer concept generated worldwide media attention, with more than 200 outlets reporting on the event from as far away as Russia and India. Organizers are already talking about a FlashMob II. Organizers are already talking about improving on their experience. “We definitely want to see future flash mob events,” Benson said. “We’re going to improve our software for other flash mob groups to make their own supercomputers.”
Twenty-Four Faculty Promoted or Tenured
Twenty-four faculty received tenure or were promoted this year. Their advancement becomes effective in the fall.
In the College of Arts and Sciences, Martin Claussen (history), Noriko Nagata (modern and classical languages), David Wolber (computer science), and Stephen Zunes (politics) were promoted to full professor. Gregory Benson (computer science), Brandon Brown (physics), William Karney (environmental science), Dorothy Kidd (media studies), Shirley McGuire (psychology), Julio Moreno (history), Vijaya Nagarajan (theology and religious studies), Lisa Wagner (psychology), and Brian Weiner (politics) were promoted to associate professor and advanced to tenure.
In the College of Professional Studies, James Shaw was promoted to professor. In the Gleeson Library/Geschke Center, Randall Souther was promoted to librarian and Sherise Kimura was promoted to associate librarian.
In the School of Nursing, Sally Higgins was promoted to professor. Greg DeBourgh and Mary St. Jonn-Seed were promoted to associate professor and advanced to tenure.
In the School of Business and Management, John Koeplin, S.J. advanced to tenure. Carol Graham was promoted to associate professor and advanced to tenure.
In the School of Education, Kathleen Jonson was promoted to professor. Judith Pace was promoted to associate professor and advanced to tenure.
In the School of Law, Josh Davis was promoted to professor and advanced to tenure.
25 Teams Compete in USF Business Plan Competition
Twenty-five student teams from business schools as far away as India, the United Kingdom, and Israel competed at USF’s sixth annual International Business Plan Competition April 1-3. A team from the University of Pennsylvania, which pitched a virtual bone-biopsy addition for MRI scanners, was named the grand prize winner, taking home a $10,000 first-place purse. Two USF teams competed.
The event generated widespread interest from business students—more than 150 teams from 18 countries applied—because judges are picked from the Bay Area’s rich stable of venture capital firms. Representatives of such companies as Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, Angel Investors, and Stentor acted as judges. Shawn Fanning, founder of Napster, also judged.
“This is the second competition with teams from around the world,” said Mark Cannice, associate professor of business and the competition’s main organizer. “Last year was very competitive but this year we managed to double the number of applicants and doubled the number of judges. We’re pleased that USF is becoming a recognized leader in entrepreneurship.”
Loyola Village Awarded Best Architecture Honor
USF’s Loyola Village was one of 11 recipients of the 2004 Housing Committee Professional Interest Area (PIA) awards, a four-year-old project sponsored by the American Institute of Architects (AIA) to recognize the best examples of housing design as physical necessity, spiritual sanctuary, and valuable resource.
Loyola Village won in the category of multi-family housing, reflecting the award’s three criteria for best housing design. As a necessity, Loyola Village, a two-block high-density university housing complex designed by San Francisco architect and mixed-use housing firm Sedel/Holzman, provides 136 new apartments for the USF community.
As a sanctuary, “The complex has created a convenient and pleasing ascent with mature landscaping, lighting, and furnished plazas and terraces that encourage community interaction,” the award description said.
According to the award, the complex’s studio, one-, two-, and three-bedroom units provide diverse housing opportunities for the USF community, making it a valuable resource.
The PIA awards will be formally conferred in June at the AIA National Convention Expo in Chicago.
Imaging the Future Church
More than 400 people attended a conference at USF to discuss the future of the Catholic Church. Articulating a desire to be a “larger and deeper” church, keynote speaker M. Shawn Copeland, an associate professor of theology at Boston College, set the tone for the day.
Speaking of Vatican II as an invitation for a “radical transformation” by Catholics into a dynamic, lay-focused community, Copeland argued that the work by lay members today is to “communicate across racial, ethnic, and cultural lines...We must not allow ourselves to be divided and turned against each other.”
Issues such as the Church’s response to allegations of abuse by clergy and internal divisions over ordaining women as priests and the Catholic stance on abortion and homosexuality filtered into question-and-answer periods with the audience. Attendees asked how to speak to their bishops on these issues, as well as the request by some local Church authorities that their parishoners not attend the conference. “The whole Church is in a kind of wilderness right now,” Copeland said.
Other speakers included Mary Ann Hinsdale, IHM, an associate professor of theology at Boston College; Fr. Donald Cozzens, visiting adjunct professor at John Carroll University; Leonard Swidler, professor of Catholic Thought and Interreligious Dialogue at Temple University; and James E. Post, president of Voice of the Faithful, one of the conference sponsors. The conference was also sponsored by USF’s St. Ignatius Institute, the Leo T. McCarthy Center for Public Service and the Common Good, and the Theology and Religious Studies department.
Campus Seminar Explores Place Through the Arts
Abstract and concrete reflections on place is the theme of a seminar at USF through April 13 titled “The Poetics of Place: An Arts Festival Creating, Remembering, and Imagining Place.” The seminar includes art exhibits, readings, films, and an ecological symposium on nature and civilization.
Readers and exhibitors include USF faculty, students, and alumni as well as filmmakers Frederick Marx (co-director and producer of Hoop Dreams) and “urban philosopher” Timothy “Speed” Levitch.
“To me poetics is about creation. I wanted to open up place, and the way we interact with place, to as many points of view on place as I could,” said Tracy Seeley, associate professor of English and USF’s National Endowment for the Humanities chair. “All the faculty and students involved will look at it from a creative point of view and the environmentalists will discuss those issues.”
The April 9 symposium, “Creating Place: A Symposium on Nature, Community and a Sense of Place,” will address whether humans and the wild can coexist and will feature environmental writers Susan Griffin, Stanley Crawford, and Rebecca Solnit; organic farmer David Mas Masumoto; and Levitch, author of Speedology: Speed Levitch on New York on Speed.
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USF’s Performing Arts and Social Justice program unveiled its first commissioned play, The Doll Hospital, on March 24 at USF’s Gill Theater. It continues April 7-9 at Brava! For Women in the Arts.
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Performing Arts’ Play Explores Violence, Resistance, and Role of Women
USF’s Performing Arts and Social Justice program unveiled its first commissioned play, The Doll Hospital, based on an ancient Greek play about the brutality of war. The play opened March 24 at USF’s Gill Theater and will continue at Brava! For Women in the Arts in San Francisco’s Mission District April 7-9.
Written by Christine Evans, an Australian playwright and a visiting scholar at USF this spring, and directed by USF Assistant Professor Roberto Gutierrez Varea, The Doll Hospital reflects on the recurrence of violence and the role of women’s resistance and is based on The Trojan Women by Euripides.
“I visited the site of Troy (in Turkey) last summer and it felt like a place of mythical proportions, a place of violent destruction and reconstruction,” Varea said. “We decided we would take on the archaeological metaphor and create our play in layers where history and different conflicts of our time come together.”
The play uses USF students as actors for its English-language script and Varea’s El Teatro Jornalero!, a San Francisco theater group formed by Varea and composed of immigrant day laborers, as its Spanish-speaking chorus.
“The actors in Teatro are the voice of the victims of globalized violence and economic displacement,” Varea said. “I wanted them to represent that because that’s who they are in real life. They represent all the displaced peoples in the world.”
The play opened March 24 to coincide with the date of Argentine dictator General Jorge Videla’s military coup and the murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero in El Salvador by repressive paramilitaries. Nora de Cortinias, head of the Argentine resistance movement Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, will be on hand to speak before the final performance on April 9.
John Edgar Wideman at USF April 15
John Edgar Wideman, one of America’s most important stylistic writers, will read at USF April 15 at 7:30 p.m. in Lone Mountain 148. A professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Wideman is the author of many acclaimed books, including Philadelphia Fire, the memoirs Brothers and Keepers and Father Along: A Meditation on Fathers and Sons, Race and Society, and the social history Hoop Roots. His appearance is co-sponsored by the Master of Fine Arts in Writing Program, the department of English, department of communication studies, the Sport Management program, and the deans of the College of Arts & Sciences.
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