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Dr Ellis's research interest is in environmental systems analysis, including air quality simulation and meterologic modeling, along with optimization of bridge inspection and maintenance policies, and with parameter identification for ambient vibration studies.
Computing System Support
For several years now, I have been serving as the principal computing
system support person for several faculty and students using my
parallel linux cluster. This support is comprised of hardware maintenance,
software maintenance and updating, application installation and maintenance
and as-needed problem resolution.
New Course Development
I am developing a new course involving engineering and scientific programming and computing. I and others have complained over the years that our undergraduate and (especially) graduate students suffer from not having any/enough programming skills and experience. What little programming/computing experience students get is now usually in the form of spreadsheet manipulation. That may suffice for the purpose of training engineering undergrads for employment, but falls well short, in my estimation, with regard to training undergraduates and graduate students for research-related work.
The course will involve traditional programming languages (e.g., fortran and C) along with extensive hands-on work involving classic problems in numerical analysis, simulation and optimization, traditional library usage (e.g., BLAS, LAPACK, IMSL, etc.) and so on. I will also devote a significant amount to time to parallel computation - things that I have learned over the years in working on my linux cluster. This will include creating (from scratch) parallel versions of serial code using MPI directives. Interacting with the operating system (linux) will of necessity also be a major topic and the course will therefore include training and hands-on work with shell scripts and resource managers/schedulers.
I plan to offer the course for the first time in Spring 2009.
Research Interests
- Stochastic programming applications
- Development of multiobjective, stochastic acid rain abatement strategies
- Regret-based models for decision-making under uncertainty
- Models for optimizing the design of groundwater and air pollution monitoring networks
- Surface water quality optimization studies
- Stochastic analyses of structural system reliability
- System parameter identification for vibrating structures
- Mathematical modeling of infectious disease
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