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Friday, 12 July 2013
Check Out the Latest Issue of Scholar: Beyond the Bottom Line
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Christine Singh, J.D.
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Congratulations to the Class of 2013: Learn How to Register for Commencement
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Cross the Stage
Earning a postsecondary degree takes dedication, sacrifice and discipline. Students who are planning to complete their Strayer University degree this year, have the opportunity to celebrate their achievement at commencement.
Strayer University hosts regional commencement ceremonies throughout the year to celebrate the hard work of the Class of 2013. Students may choose which ceremony to attend:
March 16, 2013 – Liacouras Center, Philadelphia, Pa., 10:00 a.m.
Registration and Regalia Deadline: February 15, 2013
May 18, 2013 - Georgia Dome, Atlanta, Ga., 10:00 a.m.
Registration and Regalia Deadline: April 19, 2013*
*The Atlanta ceremony is limited to the first 1,800 student registrations
June 29, 2013 - Verizon Center, Washington, D.C., 10:00 a.m.
Registration and Regalia Deadline: May 31, 2013*
*The Washington, D.C. ceremony is limited to the first 1,800 student registrations
August 10, 2013 – Time Warner Cable Arena, Charlotte, N.C., 10:00 a.m.
Registration and Regalia Deadline: July 12, 2013
October 26, 2013 - Norfolk Scope Arena, Norfolk, Va., 10:00 a.m.
Registration and Regalia Deadline: September 27, 2013
December 7, 2013 - 1st Mariner Arena, Baltimore, Md., 10:00 a.m.
Registration and Regalia Deadline: November 8, 2013*
*The Baltimore ceremony is limited to the first 1,100 student registrations
Any student within two courses of earning an associate, bachelor’s or master’s degree is invited to attend commencement. To register, visit https://icampus.strayer.edu/graduation. Eligible students should register, note their confirmation number, and order their regalia by the deadlines listed above.
Jacquelynn Stephens
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Julie Dipresso
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Learning Resources Centers Support Successful Learning
Students use LRC for assistance outside of the classroom...
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Monthly online videos offer students insight into University’s tools and resources…
Sorry, I could not read the content fromt this page.University Receives Prestigious Accreditation from ACBSP
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Thursday, 11 July 2013
SWAY Studio and Subaru
Reflections from a window off the front of the Subaru Impreza and background psychedelic animation, all created with NVIDIA Quadro, give the commercial a distinctive and impressive look.SWAY studio, a leading Los Angeles-based visual effects studio, was contracted to produce the CG effects for Peel Out. The new Subaru commercial features images of a couple who peel themselves from the pages of a magazine, climb into the seats of a Subaru Impreza, and journey across a living-room table and through the countryside. The 30-second spot alternates between CG and live-action shots, taking the viewer on a creative ride.
Due to the large number of images needed to create the commercial, SWAY used a large number of textures to differentiate each image from the others and create a seamless and unified look and feel. The sheer volume and size of the texture files would have normally required excessive swapping of data from memory, resulting in system slow downs. To meet the production schedule, SWAY needed large frame buffers to speed the process.
The live-action couple driving into a CG magazine page. All the textures used in the shot could be loaded into the NVIDIA Quadro frame buffer.Enter NVIDIA Quadro® with its large frame buffers, which gave SWAY the ability to upload all the different textures at once and work with the entire heavily textured scene in real time. With all the textures in memory, the director and effects supervisor could visualize and plan the shots precisely and on the fly, saving countless hours of production time.
NVIDIA Quadro professional GPUs formed the basis for an integrated production pipeline that also featured Autodesk 3ds Max for animation, Combustion for graphics, Nuke and Flame for compositing, and V-Ray for rendering.
“NVIDIA Quadro FX 4400 increased our productivity by providing a streamlined and seamless display of our work,” says Mark Glaser, owner and creative director of SWAY. “This saved us valuable time by not having to think about the amount of data we are working with. The time saved by NVIDIA, is time we used to improve the precision and detail of the final commercial.”
NVIDIA has produced Quadro boards with frame buffers as large as 1.5 GB, allowing large, detailed, and precise textures to be used for the highest-quality, real-time graphics.
Total Immersion
A variety of real-world activities can be experienced differently if blended with computer data. This notion, called "augmented reality," combines features of the real world with a virtual environment. One way to implement augmented reality is through the use of live video imagery, which is digitally processed and then enhanced with interactive 3D graphic objects. The possibilities are endless. For example, an auto manufacturer could experience in real-time how its newest model will interact with different surroundings, such as the busy streets of Manhattan. Or, imagine an interactive 3D version of yourself climbing the steps of the Egyptian Pyramids or taking a thrilling roller coaster ride. The challenge is to make this technology accessible to a broad range of developers across a spectrum of industries.
The concept of augemented reality is shown here--where real and virtual worlds blend to create a unique experience.
Total Immersion of Paris, France, is a pioneer in the augmented reality field. From the beginning, Total Immersion has been committed to providing systems that run on affordable PCs and integrate into the user’s technology infrastructure. To demonstrate augmented reality’s application to the entertainment industry, Total Immersion recently worked with Futuroscope in France to create "Wild Animals." In this "ride," a stylized wagon travels through a jungle, the desert, and other environments where 3D animals appear and interact with people in real-time. "Wild Animals" will be launched at the Futuroscope theme park in July 2007 utilizing Total Immersion’s real-time visual software and NVIDIA graphics.
Augmented reality has a wide range of potential applications, from automotive design to entertainment.
Bruno Uzzan, CEO of Total Immersion, comments: "Augmented reality is no longer an abstract notion. It is transforming our previous ideas about visualization. In the near future, augmented reality will dramatically affect how we work, play, travel, and communicate, as data is converted to information in an immersive environment. The implications are enormous as we enhance a user's view of the real world by adding virtual objects to it in a realistic manner."
To learn more, please visit: www.t-immersion.com.
Images courtesy of Total Immersion.
UIUC | Molecular Dynamics
Challenge 
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s (UIUC) Nanoscale Molecular Dynamics (NAMD) and Visual Molecular Dynamics (VMD) are powerful and widely used tools for simulating and visualizing biomolecular processes. Simulating complex molecular systems is time consuming and requires large, sophisticated clusters of computers.
Solution 
To boost performance, the UIUC researchers ported the “cionize” ion placement tool to an NVIDIA GPU computing solution. The goal was to accelerate the computationally intensive kernels for calculating the interaction of biological molecules and ions. In doing so, UIUC researchers achieved speedups on ion simulations over 100 times that of an 18-CPU cluster (based on total CPU time vs total GPU time).
With a three-GPU workstation, a similar calculation for time-averaged electrostatics in the VMD tool reaches 705 gigaflops of realized performance. This remarkable performance allows any bioscience researcher to have the equivalent of a computing cluster on their workstation.
Impact 
With GPU computing, these molecular simulations are no longer restricted to clusters in server rooms. By running the simulations on workstations in individual labs and desktops, projects are no longer competing with one another for scarce computing resources and the researchers are getting the results when they need them, as opposed to when they can be scheduled.
Furthermore, with GPUs in large-scale server clusters, new classes of problems can be addressed for which the necessary computing power was only a dream a year ago.
The combination of NAMD and NVIDIA computing solutions is a marriage of cuttingedge research and software development, aimed at harnessing the nation’s fastest supercomputers to decipher the tiniest components of living cells. These new computing tools are quickening the pace of drug discovery and other vital research in unraveling biological processes.
For more information, visit: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/
For more information about NVIDIA GPU computing solutions, visit www.nvidia.com/tesla
University of Groningen and NVIDIA High Performance Computing
University of Groningen and NVIDIA High Performance Computing
A drawing of a section through the human eye, with a schematic enlargement of the retina. NVIDIA's technology is used in research to simulate the complex processes which take place in these structures.
The Center for High Performance Computing and Visualization (www.rug.nl/rc/hpcv) at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands offers scientists state-of-the-art facilities for virtual reality, visualization, and supercomputing. It houses the fastest computer in the Netherlands, a 12288 core BlueGene/L. However, neuroscience researcher Dr. Hans van Hateren has found that PC-based GPUs from NVIDIA provide better performance for his work to simulate neuronal responses in the human eye.
By simulating retinal circuits (computationally very demanding), Dr. van Hateren’s research aims to provide new insights into the functioning of the human eye--an important step in the development of artificial models of the human visual system, which would have a wide range of important medical, scientific, and industrial applications. These include the design of retinal implants to help improve the vision of people with sight problems, and the development of visual systems for robots.
The Zernikeborg building, where the University of Groningen's Center for High Performance Computing and Visualization is housed.
Dr. van Hateren explains: "With NVIDIA’s technology, it’s possible to use fast algorithms that closely mimic the complex physical and chemical processes occurring in the human retina. The high performance of NVIDIA’s solutions means we’re able to create simulations which very accurately match the way retinal neurons behave. Not only has NVIDIA technology been instrumental in the development of this retinal model, its high performance allows us to mimic some of the complex processes involved in human sight. The results of these simulations are providing new insights into how we see."
For more information visit: www.rug.nl/rc/hpcv.
Image of retina reproduced courtesy of http://www.webvision.med.utah.edu/.
NVIDIA and the NVIDIA logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of NVIDIA Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries.
University of Southern California
University of Southern California In partnership with the university-affiliated Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), the University of Southern California (USC) has spent years researching and developing simulated environments. By being immersed in a computer-generated version of a stressful situation, students and patients can learn about and overcome otherwise debilitating emotional responses such as the depression and flashbacks experienced by sufferers of post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD).
Computer generated images of wartime
help PTSD patients recover.To create real-life emotional responses requires visually believable virtual worlds. The therapist must be able to interactively control the scene, introducing stimuli based on the patient's reactions. Real-time scene rendering with high-quality visual quality previously required high-end server systems. Dr. Skip Rizzo and his team wanted a solution that could be more broadly deployed.
Realistic view from the
tanker driving position.By leveraging the work being done by Jarrell Pair at ICT, Rizzo and his team are now able to take advantage of a solution based on NVIDIA graphics technology. The NVIDIA platform allowed ICT to leverage a wealth of video game virtual content. In a project sponsored by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, the ICT team recycled the virtual art assets designed for the combat video game "Full Spectrum Warrior" to recreate battlefield scenes, required for treating soldiers with PTSD. Other civilian applications are being deployed by Rizzo and other clinical psychologists. For example, this immersive exposure therapy technique is being used to treat fire fighters affected by the World Trade Center attack on September 11, 2001.
Realistic image from
the top of a tanker.
A psychologist himself, Rizzo believes virtual reality therapy is so effective because it can place patients in simulated environments that help them to recall and process painful memories rather than avoid them. In traditional talk therapy, Rizzo said, "you're asking somebody who's been traumatized by an environment to imagine it in the great detail needed to produce a therapeutic habituation effect. With virtual reality, we know what the person is seeing and can present relevant stimuli at a pace that the patient can handle." Sounds are also very important for emotion. According to Rizzo, "The sound of a bullet flying by can raise someone's arousal level in a way that maybe a visual might not." Future upgrades will include smells like gasoline, burning rubber and gunpowder-important because smell is so tightly linked to memory and emotion.
More Information
For more information, please visit http://www.ict.usc.edu
Images courtesy of USC.
University of Washington and Imprint Interactive Technology
Severe burns are some of the most painful injuries imaginable. Patients require daily care to clean the wound and daily physical therapy to stretch the newly healed skin. Despite aggressive use of medication, the majority of burn patients report severe to excruciating pain during wound care.
Large reductions in pain-related brain activity are shown when participants experience SnowWorld.
Imprint Interactive Technology, based in Seattle, WA, designs virtual reality (VR) simulations and games for training, therapy, and medical research. Imprint recently joined forces with a research team lead by Dr. Hunter Hoffman and Dr. David Patterson at the University of Washington’s Harborview Burn Center. Using NVIDIA graphics and Virtools™ 3D software, the teams created an immersive experience called SnowWorld, which is designed to offset excessive pain during therapy by distracting patients. To experience SnowWorld, patients wear a helmet hooked up to the virtual world. SnowWorld gives patients the feeling they are floating through an icy 3D canyon, where they can throw snowballs at various objects, including snowmen, igloos, mammoths, and penguins.
SnowWorld provides immersive interactivity for the patient undergoing therapy.
Controlled studies show an impressive 40-50% reduction in pain ratings when patients are immersed in SnowWorld. According to Dr. Hoffman, “VR pain distraction results are encouraging and a growing number of burn centers around the world are now pioneering the use of SnowWorld with their patients. NVIDIA graphics are helping us transform the way medicine is conducted.”
Beginning December 8th 2006 and running through August 2007, a hands-on demonstration of SnowWorld will be on exhibit at the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in Manhattan, New York City.
To learn more about the exhibit, please visit: http://ndm.si.edu.
To learn more about Imprint Interactive Technology, please visit: www.imprintit.com.
Images courtesy of Imprint Interactive Technology and U.W.
Brain scan image by Todd Richards and Aric Bills, U.W., copyright Hunter Hoffman, U.W.
Using computational modeling and mathematical simulation to study biomechanics of surgery
Mathematical “whole human” model
Dang Orthopaedics uses computational modeling and mathematical simulation to study the biomechanics of surgery. Working in collaboration with researchers at the University of California, San Francisco and the New England Musculoskeletal Institute at the University of Connecticut Health Center, Dang Orthopaedics is studying the biomechanics of the spine and shoulder through realistic mathematical representations of human anatomy.
When conservative therapies have failed to treat pain or weakness caused by mechanical deformation or inflammation of the nerve roots in the cervical spine (the neck), surgeons may turn to “discectomy and fusion,” where the disc between the affected vertebrae is removed and the spine is then stabilized using bone graft or metal plates and screws. Although this operation has excellent outcomes overall, accelerated arthritis in the rest of the spine is a potential future complication. Surgeons hypothesize that increased strain in the remaining motion segments of the spine after surgery contributes to the accelerated arthritis, but research has been difficult due to the inability to measure this change in strain in actual patients and the limitations of testing with anatomic specimens. An accurate computational simulation of the stresses on the cervical spine following surgery was needed to determine the biomechanical consequences of discectomy and fusion.
Dang Orthopaedics developed a computational model of cervical spine fusion using Toyota’s Total Human Model for Safety (THUMS) technology. Originally developed to simulate the effect of automotive accidents on the body, THUMS is one of the most sophisticated “whole human” finite element models in use today, with over 91,000 individual elements. Dang Orthopaedics is the first orthopaedic research lab in the United States to receive an academic license for THUMS and to adapt the automotive engineering tool to general orthopaedic research.
Once Dr. Dang had the cervical spine model complete, they used LS-DYNA, an advanced multipurpose simulation tool, to isolate the biomechanical effects of single- and two-level cervical spine fusion. LS-DYNA was originally developed by the U.S. Department of Energy and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for nuclear weapons development and certification.
Working with these sophisticated tools requires high-precision, scientific visualization and a complex software development environment throughout the entire development process, from conception to post-simulation data analysis. The size and number of the models that needed to be loaded simultaneously, the computational burden, and the need to view the final results on multiple, high-resolution monitors meant that Dang Orthopaedics needed a high-end, professional graphics solution for its systems. The choice was NVIDIA Quadro professional graphics technology and NVIDIA multi-display technology, the solution that provided the graphics horsepower, stability, and visual fidelity.
As a result of Dr. Dang’s research, surgeons have quantitative data on the biomechanical effects at the adjacent motion segments following cervical spine fusion for the first time. This information will guide future research in the area of multi-level artificial vertebral disc replacement and hopefully reduce the incidence and severity of post-surgical complications like accelerated arthritis.
Alan B.C. Dang, MD comments: "Our use of professional graphics technology from NVIDIA provides us with uncompromising stability and multi-monitor performance, even with large 30” 2560x1600 displays. The ability to load multiple 3D models, terminal windows, and documents simultaneously without running out of graphics horsepower or compromising visual fidelity or system stability allows us to focus our energy on the research tasks at hand instead of troubleshooting technical issues.”
Images courtesy of Dang Orthopaedics.
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