AGU 2011

I want to write about all the people I met at AGU to share my experience, as well as help me remember some of the great ideas and details I came across at AGU.

I am posting all my photos to my flickr page:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/moriokakaiju/sets/72157628509203381/

I met a lot of people so I will create a list below. I know the list is incomplete, but I hope I have included enough to spark my memories in the future!

Of course I met with my Korean Colleagues:
Sang-Mook Lee, Changyeol Lee, Byung-Dal So

Then I met with people I know from the University of Minnesota:
David Yuen, David Kohlstedt, Evan Bollig (now at FSU and NCAR), Shunichiro Karato (now at Yale), Saswata Heir-Majumder (now at Maryland), Matt Brotten, Gretchen Beebe

Then there are people I have never worked with but met at AGU (some I knew before others I met for the first time at the conference).
Klaus Regenauer-Lieb, David George, Donald Turcotte (for a brief hello), Paul Tackley,  Yoshi JBD Kaneko, Yichen "Jack" Zhou, Liang "Larry" Zheng, Thomas Geenan, Geraldine Robbins, Yoshio Okamoto, Chris Atchinson, Gina Applebee, and many others I can't recall at the moment.

I had some fantastic conversations with a lot of people at AGU.

Gina Applebee is hands down one of the coolest new people I met at AGU. She is a graduate student in geosciences, but what is really cool is the way she is working to help create educational experiences for the blind. I am unsure of her complete story, but I know that she used to be able to see but has lost her vision, and we had a talk about the tools she uses to help her study. I have a lot of interest in teaching the blind because I want to know more about how to create resources to help the blind learn learn mathematics and computer programming. She is a very cool person, and my description does her little justice. I plan to be in touch with her more in the future.

Yoshio Okamoto, is a high school teacher in Japan who is using  spectral 3D technology to visualize seismic data using POV-Ray. I thought he was a real cool guy doing something I wish I had done years ago! POV-Ray is some fantastic software especially for visualizing simple objects. It uses a syntax similar to C++/Java and allows users to create 3D graphics using basic geometric primitives.

Saswata Majumder was a graduate student when I first met him at the University of Minnesota, and now he is all grown up and a professor at the University of Maryland! It was so good to get caught up with him at AGU; I would often find myself wondering what Sash was up to these days. Now I know and I am very happy to be back in touch with him. It is also really cool that he has come to the dark side of computation and spends a lot of time working on computational geosciences!

I spent about 2 days discussing various computational ideas with Evan Bollig. Back at the U of MN he was an undergraduate at the U of MN with basic math and general computer science skills, and now he almost has a Ph.D. in Computational Science and he has a thing or two to teach me about mathematics! We have a lot of common interests, we both bought "Computational Geodynamics" by Taras Gerya, and the last one to work through all the examples in C++ and Matlab has buy a pitcher of beer.

David George was at AGU for a few days and we had a good chance to talk and I am really hoping to continue working with him in the future. He is a mathematician who works for the USGS developing software solutions to mathematical problems that relate to geophysics. He has written the best software to solve the shallow water equations I have seen, as well as applying the software to work on debris flows and other situations that normally aren't accessible to programs solving the shallow water equations.


So that is a brief recount of people I met and some of the topics I discussed at AGU. It is only the tip of the iceberg, but I don't want this post to go on forever so the rest will have to live in my memories!