Sponsors and partners include the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, the Air Force Office of Sponsored Research, Lucent Technologies, Michelin, General Motors, Boeing, the University of California at Irvine, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and the University of Minnesota. Watson also is engaged in multidisciplinary efforts to apply analysis and design optimization , genetic algorithms , and parallel computing to problems in aerospace, automotive, and maritime engineering. These efforts use new evolutionary computation strategies to design new composite laminate structures such as aircraft wing components, and more traditional tools to explore problems related to the analysis of flexible structures and viscous fluid flow around complicated geometrical shapes. Additional sponsors and partners include Boeing, NASA Langley, and Notre Dame, as well as the departments of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering, Engineering Science and Materials, and Civil Engineering at Tech. Across the campus, a diverse group of researchers participate in projects investigating the digital libraries of today and tomorrow.
Efforts focus on integrating technology with the best, most humanistic aspects of living libraries.
The newest project under the DLRL umbrella will construct a petaplex a very large storage cluster with 100 processors and supporting systems to be used for exploration of highly decentralized approaches to digital libraries. The installation was purchased by Information Systems and will be placed in the Computing Center during summer 1999, a valuable addition to high-performance computing support for activities across the campus. Roger Ehrich recently received funding from Tecomac, a small firm developing leading edge searching technology, for the research and production of wavelet-based data compression to support inclusion of multimedia content into large data repositories. The driving need is to be able to deliver the information with minimal time delays and the highest possible quality. Computers in Education Inquiry into the use of computer technologies to support education encompasses work in a wide range of computer science areas.