This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) will create the Center on Simulation, Visualization and Real-Time Prediction (SiViRT Center) to integrate the simulation-based research activities in the Colleges of Engineering and Sciences at UTSA, provide computational infrastructure and intellectual leadership for developing outstanding interdisciplinary programs in computationally related research and education, and develop collaborative relations within UTSA, the University of Texas Health Science Center (UTHSCSA) and other regional, national, and international institutions. The SiViRT Center will also attract minority undergraduate and graduate students to engineering and science careers, enhance diversity in UTSA, improve the retention of under-represented minority students and prepare the next generation of scientists and engineers to meet the challenges of solving scientific and engineering problems using reliable, high-performance computational systems and simulations.
The SiViRT Center will include three interacting and interdependent research teams in the areas of imaging, real-time prediction and uncertainty quantification. The imaging team will be responsible for the creation of new theory as well as efficient methods and procedures for imaging processes, high fidelity filtering, and image fusion to be used in real-time simulations and control processes. The real-time prediction team will establish a general framework for real-time control and prediction with applications in cancer treatment modeling, surgical control, neuro-biological response simulation and intelligent unmanned vehicles. The uncertainty quantification team will create a general framework for uncertainty quantification in diverse engineering systems and applications of this framework will be sought in engineering fields such as: mechanics of bone fracture; heat transfer with nanofluids; and fate and transport of nanoparticles.
The three teams are complementary and support the vision of the SiViRT Center: to be in the forefront of research and to significantly enhance the integration of research and education at UTSA. The multidisciplinary effort on fundamental scientific and engineering research will result in noteworthy technological developments and significant creation of knowledge by bringing together experts from the disciplines of Engineering, Science, Statistics, Biology and Medicine. The Center's educational programs will become the focus of attraction for high school students who will follow science and engineering careers; will provide encouragement and incentives for undergraduate students to pursue research; and will attract, encourage, support, advise, mentor and assist in the placement of doctoral students, who will become the next generation of researchers and university educators.
