JoAnn Kuchera-Morin

Biography

Dr. JoAnn Kuchera-Morin is Composer, Director and Chief Scientist of the AlloSphere Research Facility, is Distinguished Professor of Media Arts and Technology and Music at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on creative computational systems, multi-modal media content, and facilities design. She created and was Chief Scientist of a multi-million dollar sponsored research program for the University of California—the Digital Media Innovation Program. This led to the creation of a Digital Media Center in the California NanoSystems Institute and the AlloSphere instrument, a 30-foot diameter, three-story high metal cylinder inside an echo-free cube, designed for immersive, interactive scientific and artistic investigation of multi-dimensional data sets. Professor Kuchera-Morin serves as the Director of the AlloSphere Research Facility located within the CNSI. She earned a Ph.D. in composition from the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester in 1984.

Research

The AlloSphere Research Group focuses on providing researchers with tools to speed up their research through interactive visualization and computation. The recently released Toolkit for Interactive Computation (TINC), is a python and C++ library to assist the interactive exploration of complex datasets and HPC output for large parameter sweeps. By caching analysis of data from the HPC cluster, the TINC software platform can turn slow workflows into real-time interactive analysis, computation, and visualization, verifying and validating the models prior to experimentation. TINC is a general-purpose interactive computation and visualization platform for many different domains and we are currently applying it to materials simulations, interfacing with the software package CASM, A Clusters Approach to Statistical Mechanics, that is designed to enable first-principles statistical mechanics studies of complex crystalline materials.