UNIVERSITY OF HERTFORDSHIRE
             COMPUTER SCIENCE RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM

                            presents

          "Diderot: A Parallel Domain-Specific Language 
               for Image Analysis and Visualization"

                    Professor John Reppy 
                 (University of Chicago, USA)

                    26 May 2011  (Thursday)
                     Lecture Theatre E350

                  Hatfield, College Lane Campus
                           1-2 pm

                  Everyone is Welcome to Attend

                  Refreshments will be available

Abstract:

The analysis of structure in three-dimensional images is increasingly
valuable for biomedical research and computational science.  At the
same time, the computational burden of processing images is increasing
as devices produce images of higher resolution (e.g., typical CT scans
have gone from 128^3 to roughly 512^3 resolutions).  With the latest
scanning technologies, it is also more common for the the values measured
at each sample to be multi-dimensional rather than a single scalar,
which further complicates implementing mathematically correct methods.

Diderot is a domain-specific language (DSL) for programming advanced
3D image visualization and analysis algorithms.  These algorithms,
such as volume rendering, fiber tractography, and particle systems,
are naturally defined in terms of a continuous tensor field that
is reconstructed from the discrete image data.  Diderot provides a
high-level mathematical programming model coupled with a bulk-synchronous
parallelism model that is designed to both enable rapid prototyping
of new image analysis algorithms and high performance on GPUs and
other parallel platforms.

In this talk, I will give an overview of the design of Diderot and
early examples of its use.  I will then describe aspects of its
implementation, including preliminary work on generating code to
run on GPUs.

Diderot is joint work with Gordon Kindlmann, Lamont Samuels, and
Nick Seltzer.



About the Speaker:

John Reppy is a Professor of Computer Science and a Senior Fellow of
the Computation Institute at the University of Chicago.  He received
his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1992 and spent the first eleven
years of his career at Bell Labs in Murray Hill NJ.  He has been
exploring issues in language design and implementation since the late
1980's, with a focus on higher-order, typed, functional languages.  His
work includes the invention of Concurrent ML and work on combining
object-oriented and functional language features.  His current research
is on high-level languages for parallel programming, including the
Manticore and Diderot projects.


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Hertfordshire Computer Science Research Colloquium
http://homepages.stca.herts.ac.uk/~nehaniv/colloq