Travis Desell, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science
University of North Dakota

About Me


I am an assistant professor at University of North Dakota, and was previously a post-doctoral researcher and adjunct professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. I am currently the information director of the ACM Computing Surveys Journal. My main research interest is collaborative computational science using large scale distributed and high performance computing environments, with particular focus on evolutionary algorithms, neural networks, computer vision and simulation.

I have been the main developer and community liaison of the MilkyWay@Home volunteer computing project from the time of its creation in 2007. MilkyWay@Home uses volunteered computers to determine the origin and structure of the Milky Way Galaxy with the help of different evolutionary algorithms, maximum likelihood evaluation and n-body simulation. MilkyWay@Home has grown to over 25,000 volunteers from over 150 countries, who are contributing around 400 teraflops of computing power [boincstats.com], faster than many supercomputers. I have also implemented versions of this software which are also currently being used by astrophysicists on RPI's BlueGene/L supercomputer and various cluster computing environments.

In a continuation of my work interacting with the public and developing open source volunteer computing systems, I have also been working on other volunteer computing and crowd sourcing projects, such as Wildlife@Home, which combines crowd sourcing with volunteer computing to analyze avian nesting video to gain a better understanding of the behavior of different federally protected species, SubsetSum@Home which is studying a problem in theoretical computer science, and DNA@Home which is currently under development for finding protein binding sites in DNA and other bioinformatics purposes. These projects are all part of the Citizen Science Grid hosted here at the University of North Dakota.

I collaborate with professors Jim Higgins and Brandon Wild on the National General Aviation Database (NGAFID), a project for data mining aviation data to help improve safety in general aviation.

I have also been a main contributor in the development of both the compiler and runtime of SALSA, a programming language based on the actor model of computation. SALSA enables easy development of concurrent and transparently distributed applications by following actor semantics.

Contact Information


Email and Phone:

tdesell@cs.und.edu
701-777-3477
Email is the best and most reliable way to contact me.

Office Hours:

Streibel Hall 220
To be decided and by appointment.

Address

Department of Computer Science
University of North Dakota
Streibel Hall Room 220
3950 Campus Road Stop 9015
Grand Forks, North Dakota 52802-9015

Publications


Press

  1. Volunteers Create a 'Web' of Power. June 18, 2012. [UND Discovery]
  2. PCs Around the World Unite To Map the Milky Way. February 10, 2010. [RPI News] [Science Daily]


Data Releases

  1. Wildlife@Home. [Last Update: April 1, 2015]
  2. National General Aviation Flight Information Database (NGAFID). [Last Update: October 20, 2014]


Theses

  1. Travis Desell. Asynchronous Global Optimization for Massive-Scale Computing. PhD Thesis. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. December 2009. [pdf]
  2. Travis Desell. Autonomic Grid Computing using Malleability and Migration: An Actor-Oriented Software Framework. Master's Thesis. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. May 2007. [pdf]


Books

  1. Sima Noghanian, Abas Sabouni, Travis Desell and Ali Ashtari. Microwave Tomography - Global Optimization, Parallelization and Performance Evaluation. Springer. 2014. [html]


Book Chapters

  1. Nathan Cole, Travis Desell, Daniel Lombranaa Gonzalez, Francisco Fernandez de Vega, Malik Magdon-Ismail, Heidi Newberg, Boleslaw Szymanski and Carlos A. Varela. Evolutionary Algorithms on Volunteer Computing Platforms: The MilkyWay@Home Project. In F. Fernandez de Vega, E. Cantu-Paz (Eds.): Parallel and Distributed Computational Intelligence. SCI 269, pages 63-90. Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg. 2010. [pdf]
  2. Kaoutar El Maghraoui, Travis Desell, Boleslaw K. Szymanski, James D. Teresco, and Carlos A. Varela. Towards a Middleware Framework for Dynamically Reconfigurable Scientific Computing. In L. Grandinetti, editor, Grid Computing and New Frontiers of High Performance Processing. Advances in Parallel Computing, Volume 14, pages 275-301. Elsevier. 2005. [pdf]


Journal Articles

  1. Andrei P. Kirilenko, Travis Desell, Hany Kim, and Svetlana Stepchenkova. Crowdsourcing Analysis of Twitter Data on Climate Change: Paid Workers vs. Volunteers. Sustainability. November 3, 2017. [pdf]
  2. AbdElRahman ElSaid, Travis Desell, Fatima El Jamiy, James Higgins and Brandon Wild. Optimizing Long Short-Term Memory Recurrent Neural Networks Using Ant Colony Optimization to Predict Turbine Engine Vibration. arXiv: Neural and Evolutionary Computing (cs.NE). October 10, 2017. [pdf]
  3. Travis Desell. Large Scale Evolution of Convolutional Neural Networks Using Volunteer Computing. arXiv: Neural and Evolutionary Computing (cs.NE). March 15, 2017. [pdf]
  4. Susan N. Ellis-Felege, Travis Desell and Christopher J. Felege. A Bird's Eye View of... Birds: Combining Technology and Citizen Science for Conservation. Wildlife Professional 8: 27-30. Spring 2014. PDF courtsey of The Wildlife Professional. [pdf]
  5. Travis Desell and Carlos Varela. SALSA Lite: A Hash-Based Actor Runtime for Efficient Local Concurrency. Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science: Concurrent Objects and Beyond. 23 pages. 2013. [pdf]
  6. Matthew Newby, Nathan Cole, Heidi Jo Newberg, Travis Desell, Malik Magdon-Ismail, Boleslaw Szymanski, Carlos Varela, Benjamin Willett, and Brian Yanny. A Spatial Characterization of the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy Tidal Tails. The Astronomical Journal. Volume 145, Number 6. May 2013. [pdf]
  7. Travis Desell, Jason LaPorte, Carlos A. Varela, and Gustavo Guevara. Modular Visualization of Distributed Systems. CLEI (Latin-american Center for Informatics Studies) Electronic Journal: Special issue of best papers presented at CLEI'2010. Volume 14, Number 1, Paper 7. April 2011. [pdf]
  8. Kaoutar El Maghraoui, Travis Desell, Boleslaw K. Szymanski, and Carlos A. Varela. Malleable Iterative MPI Applications. Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience. Volume 21, Issue 3, pages 393-413. March 2009. [pdf]
  9. Nathan Cole, Heidi Newberg, Malik Magdon-Ismail, Travis Desell, Kristopher Dawsey, Warren Hayashi, Jonathan Purnell, Boleslaw Szymanski, Carlos A. Varela, Benjamin Willett, and James Wisniewski. Maximum Likelihood Fitting of Tidal Streams with Application to the Sagittarius Dwarf Tidal Tails. Astrophysical Journal. Volume 683, pages 750-766. 2008. [pdf]
  10. Travis Desell, Kaoutar El Maghraoui, and Carlos A. Varela. Malleable Applications for Scalable High Performance Computing. Cluster Computing. pages 323-337. June 2007. [pdf]
  11. Kaoutar El Maghraoui, Travis Desell, Boleslaw K. Szymanski, and Carlos A. Varela. The Internet Operating System: Middleware for Adaptive Distributed Computing. The International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications (IJHPCA): Special Issue on Scheduling Techniques for Large-Scale Distributed Platforms. Volume 20, Issue 4, pages 467-480. 2006. [pdf]


Conference and Workshop Proceedings

  1. Travis Desell. Developing a Volunteer Computing Project to Evolve Convolutional Neural Networks and Their Hyperparameters. The 13th IEEE International Conference on eScience (eScience 2017). Auckland, New Zealand. October 24-27 2017. To appear. [pdf]
  2. Connor Bowley, Marshall Mattingly III, Andrew Barnas, Susan Ellis-Felege and Travis Desell. Toward Using Citizen Scientists to Drive Automated Ecological Object Detection in Aerial Imagery. The 13th IEEE International Conference on eScience (eScience 2017). Auckland, New Zealand. October 24-27 2017. To appear. [pdf]
  3. Travis Desell. Large Scale Evolution of Convolutional Neural Networks Using Volunteer Computing. The 2017 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO) - Evolutionary Machine Learning Poster Session. Berlin, Germany. July 15th-19th 2017. [pdf]
  4. AbdElRahman ElSaid, Fatima ElJamiy, James Higgins, Brandon Wild, Travis Desell. Optimizing LSTM Recurrent Neural Networks Using Ant Colony Optimization to Predict Aircraft Engine Vibration. The 2017 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO) - Late Breaking Abstracts. Berlin, Germany. July 15th-19th 2017. [pdf]
  5. Marshall Mattingly III, Andrew Barnas, Susan Ellis-Felege, Robert Newman, David Iles and Travis Desell. Developing a Citizen Science Web Portal for Manual and Automated Ecological Image Detection. The IEEE 12th International Conference on eScience (eScience 2016). Baltimore, MD, USA. October 23-27, 2016. Best of Conference Award. [pdf]
  6. Connor Bowley, Alicia Andes, Susan Ellis-Felege and Travis Desell. Detecting Wildlife in Uncontrolled Outdoor Video using Convolutional Neural Networks. The IEEE 12th International Conference on eScience (eScience 2016). Baltimore, MD, USA. October 23-27, 2016. [pdf]
  7. AbdElRahman ElSaid, Brandon Wild, James Higgins and Travis Desell. Using LSTM Recurrent Neural Networks to Predict Excess Vibration Events in Aircraft Engines. The IEEE 12th International Conference on eScience (eScience 2016). Baltimore, MD, USA. October 23-27, 2016. [pdf]
  8. David Apostal, Sara Faraji Jalal Apostal, Ronald Marsh and Travis Desell. Towards Modeling a Complex Geological Simulation. The 2016 Spring Simulation Multi-Conference (SpringSim 2016). Pasadena, California, USA. April 3-6, 2016. [pdf]
  9. Travis Desell and Carlos A. Varela. Performance and Scalability Analysis of Actor Message Passing and Migration in SALSA Lite. The 5th International Workshop on Programming based on Actors, Agents, and Decentralized Control (AGERE!), held in conjunction with ACM SIGPLAN conference on Systems, Programming, Languages and Applications: Software for Humanity (SPLASH). Pittsburgh, Pennslyvania, USA. October 26th, 2015. [pdf]
  10. Kyle Goehner, Rebecca Eckroad, Leila Mohsenian, Paul Burr, Nicholas Caswell, Alicia Andes, Susan Ellis-Felege, and Travis Desell. A Comparison of Background Subtraction Algorithms for Detecting Avian Nesting Events in Uncontrolled Outdoor Video. The 11th IEEE International Conference on eScience (eScience 2015). Munich, Germany. August 31 - September 4, 2015. [Data Release and Supplementary Material]. [pdf]
  11. Kris Zarns, Archana Dhasarathy, Sergei Nechaev and Travis Desell. Searching the Human Genome for Snail and Slug With DNA@Home. The 11th IEEE International Conference on eScience (eScience 2015). Munich, Germany. August 31 - September 4, 2015. [pdf]
  12. Thomas O'Neil and Travis Desell. Empirical Support for the High-Density Subset Sum Decision Threshold. In the 14th IEEE Canadian Workshop on Information Theory (CWIT'15). St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada. July 6-9, 2015. (Copyright IEEE 2015). [pdf]
  13. Travis Desell, Kyle Goehner, Alicia Andes, Rebecca Eckroad, and Susan Ellis-Felege. On the Effectiveness of Crowd Sourcing Avian Nesting Video Analysis at Wildlife@Home. In the 15th International Conference on Computational Science. Reykjavík, Iceland. June 1-3, 2015. [pdf]
  14. Travis Desell, Sophine Clachar, James Higgins and Brandon Wild. Evolving Deep Recurrent Neural Networks Using Ant Colony Optimization. In the 15th European Conference on Evolutionary Computation in Combinatorial Optimisation (Evo* 2015: EvoCOP). Copenhagen, Denmark. April 8-10, 2015. [Data Release and Supplementary Material].. [pdf]
  15. Travis Desell, Sophine Clachar, James Higgins and Brandon Wild. Evolving Neural Network Weights for Time-Series Prediction of General Aviation Flight Data. In the 13th International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature (PPSN 2014). Ljubljana, Slovenia. September 13-17, 2014. [Data Release and Supplementary Material]. [pdf]
  16. David Apostal, Kyle Foerster, Travis Desell and Will Gosnold. Performance Improvements for a Large-Scale Geological Simulation. In the 14th International Conference on Computational Science (ICCS 2014). Cairns, Australia. June 10-12, 2014.
  17. Travis Desell, Robert Bergman, Kyle Goehner, Ronald Marsh, Rebecca VanderClute, and Susan Ellis-Felege. Wildlife@Home: Combining Crowd Sourcing and Volunteer Computing to Analyze Avian Nesting Video. In the 2013 IEEE 9th International Conference on e-Science. Beijing, China. October 23-25, 2013. [pdf]
  18. Travis Desell. Using Actors and the SALSA Programming Language to Introduce Concurrency in Computer Science II. In the Third NSF/TCPP Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Computing Education (EduPar-13), held in conjunction with the 27th IEEE International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium. Boston, Massachussets. May 20, 2013. [pdf]
  19. David Apostal, Kyle Foerster, Amrita Chatterjee and Travis Desell. Password Recovery Using MPI and CUDA. In the 19th Annual International Conference on High Performance Computing. Pune, India. December 18-21, 2012. [pdf]
  20. Travis Desell, Malik Magdon-Ismail, Heidi Newberg, Lee Newberg, Boleslaw K. Szymanski, and Carlos A. Varela. A Robust Asynchronous Newton Method for Massive Scale Computing Systems. In the 2011 IEEE International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Software Engineering (CiSE 2011). Wuhan, China. December 9-11, 2011. [pdf]
  21. Travis Desell, Lee A. Newberg, Malik Magdon-Ismail, Boleslaw K. Szymanski and William Thompson. Finding Protein Binding Sites Using Volunteer Computing Grids. In the 2011 2nd International Congress on Computer Applications and Computational Science (CACS 2011). Bali, Indonesia. November 15-17, 2011. [pdf]
  22. Travis Desell, Benjamin A. Willet, Matthew Arsenault, Heidi Newberg, Malik Magdon-Ismail, Boleslaw Szymanski and Carlos A. Varela. Evolving N-Body Simulations to Determine the Origin and Structure of the Milky Way Galaxy's Halo using Volunteer Computing. In the Proceedings of the IPDPS'11 Fifth Workshop on Desktop Grids and Volunteer Computing Systems (PCGrid 2011). Anchorage, Alaska, USA. May 20, 2011. [pdf]
  23. Travis Desell, David P. Anderson, Malik Magdon-Ismail, Heidi Newberg, Boleslaw Szymanski and Carlos A. Varela. An Analysis of Massively Distributed Evolutionary Algorithms. In the Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (IEEE CEC 2010). pages 1-8. Barcelona, Spain. July 2010. [pdf]
  24. Travis Desell, Malik Magdon-Ismail, Boleslaw Szymanski, Carlos A. Varela, Heidi Newberg and David P. Anderson. Validating Evolutionary Algorithms on Volunteer Computing Grids. In the Proceedings of the 10th IFIP International Conference on Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems (DAIS 2010). pages 29-41. Amsterdam, Netherlands. June 2010. [pdf]
  25. Travis Desell, Malik Magdon-Ismail, Boleslaw Szymanski, Carlos Varela, Heidi Newberg and Nathan Cole. Robust Asynchronous Optimization for Volunteer Computing Grids. In the Proceedings of the 5th IEEE International Conference on e-Science (eScience2009). pages 263-270. Oxford, UK. December 2009. [pdf]
  26. Nathan Colen, Heidi Newberg, Malik Magdon-Ismail, Travis Desell, Kristopher Dawsey, Warren Hayashi, Xinyang Fred Liu, Jonathan Purnell, Boleslaw Szymanski, Carlos Varela, Benjamin Willett and James Wisniewski. A Study of the Sagittarius Tidal Stream Using Maximum Likelihood. In the Proceedings of the 18th Annual Conference on Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems. Quebec City, Quebec, Canada. November 2009.
  27. Travis Desell, Anthony Waters, Malik Magdon-Ismail, Boleslaw Szymanski, Carlos Varela, Matthew Newby, Heidi Newberg, Andreas Przystawik and Dave Anderson. Accelerating the MilkyWay@Home volunteer computing project with GPUs. In the 8th International Conference on Parallel Processing and Applied Mathematics (PPAM 2009). Wroclaw, Poland. September 2009. [pdf]
  28. Nathan Cole, Heidi Newberg, Malik Magdon-Ismail, Travis Desell, Boleslaw Szymanski, Carlos Varela. Tracing the Sagittarius Tidal Stream with Maximum Likelihood. In the Proceedings of the International Conference on Classification and Discovery in Large Astronomical Surveys. pages 216-220. Ringberg Castle, Germany. October 2008.
  29. Travis Desell, Boleslaw Szymanski, and Carlos A. Varela.. An Asynchronous Hybrid Genetic-Simplex Search for Modeling the Milky Way Galaxy using Volunteer Computing. In the Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2008). pages 921-928. Atlanta, Georgia. July 2008. [pdf]
  30. Travis Desell, Boleslaw Szymanski, and Carlos A. Varela. Asynchronous Genetic Search for Scientific Modeling on Large-Scale Heterogeneous Environments. In the Proceedings of the 17th International Heterogeneity in Computing Workshop (HCW/IPDPS'08). IEEE. pages 12. Miami, FL. April 2008. [pdf]
  31. Boleslaw Szymanski, Travis Desell, and Carlos A. Varela. The Effect of Heterogeneity on Asynchronous Panmictic Genetic Search. In the Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Parallel Processing and Applied Mathematics (PPAM'2007). LNCS. Gdansk, Poland. September 2007. [pdf]
  32. Travis Desell, Nathan Cole, Malik Magdon-Ismail, Heidi Newberg, Boleslaw Szymanski, and Carlos A. Varela. Distributed and Generic Maximum Likelihood Evaluation. In the Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE International Conference on e-Science and Grid Computing (eScience2007). pages 337-344. Bangalore, India. December 2007. Best paper finalist. [pdf]
  33. Kaoutar El Maghraoui, Travis Desell, Boleslaw K. Szymanski, and Carlos A. Varela. Dynamic Malleability in Iterative MPI Applications. In the Proceedings of 7th IEEE International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGrid 2007). pages 591-598. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. May 2007. Best paper award nominee. [pdf]
  34. Travis Desell, Kaoutar El Maghraoui, and Carlos A. Varela. Malleable Components for Scalable High Performance Computing. In the Proceedings of the HPDC'15 Workshop on HPC Grid programming Environments and Components (HPC-GECO/CompFrame). IEEE. pages 37-44. Paris, France. June 2006. Best paper award. [pdf]
  35. Travis Desell, Harihar N. Iyer, Abe Stephens, and Carlos A. Varela. OverView: A Framework for Generic Online Visualization of Distributed Systems. In the Proceedings of the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software (ETAPS 2004), eclipse Technology eXchange (eTX) Workshop. Barcelona, Spain. March 2004. [pdf]
  36. Travis Desell, Kaoutar El Maghraoui, and Carlos A. Varela. Load Balancing of Autonomous Actors over Dynamic Networks. In the Proceedings of the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, HICSS-37 Software Technology Track. pages 1-10. January 2004. [pdf]


Technical Reports

  1. Carlos A. Varela, Gul Agha, Wei-Jen Wang, Travis Desell, Kaoutar El Maghraoui, Jason LaPorte, and Abe Stephens. The SALSA Programming Language: 1.1.2 Release Tutorial. Technical report 07-12. Department of Computer Science, RPI, Troy, NY, USA. February 2007. [pdf]
  2. Kaoutar El Maghraoui, Travis J. Desell, and Carlos A. Varela. Network Sensitive Reconfiguration of Distributed Applications. Technical report 05-03. Department of Computer Science, RPI, Troy, NY USA. 2005. [pdf]
  3. Harihar N. Iyer, Abe Stephens, Travis Desell, and Carlos A. Varela. OverView - Dynamic Visualization of Java-Based Highly Reconfigurable Distributed Systems. Technical report. Worldwide Computing Laboratory, RPI, Troy, NY USA. August 2003. [pdf]


Public Talks

  1. Travis Desell. Wildlife@Home. South Big Data Hub VITAL Data Series - Video Data Analysis. Online - Hosted by Georgia Tech. October 27, 2015. [pdf]
  2. Travis Desell. Lightning Talk - Digital Agriculture - Unmanned Aircraft Systems, Plant Sciences and Education. The 12th IEEE International Conference on eScience (eScience 2015). Baltimore, Maryland. October 25, 2015. [pdf]
  3. Travis Desell. Using LSTM Recurrent Neural Networks to Predict Excess Vibration Events in Aircraft Engines. The 12th IEEE International Conference on eScience (eScience 2015). Baltimore, Maryland. October 25, 2015. [pdf]
  4. Travis Desell. Developing a Citizen Science Web Portal for Manual and Automated Ecological Image Detection. The 12th IEEE International Conference on eScience (eScience 2015). Baltimore, Maryland. October 25, 2015. [pdf]
  5. Travis Desell. A Comparison of Background Subtraction Algorithms for Detecting Avian Nesting Events in Uncontrolled Outdoor Video. The 11th IEEE International Conference on eScience (eScience 2015). Munich, Germany. September 1, 2015. [pdf]
  6. Travis Desell. On the Effectiveness of Crowd Sourcing Avian Nesting Video Analysis at Wildlife@Home . In the 15th International Conference on Computational Science. Reykjavik, Iceland. June 3, 2015. [pdf]
  7. Travis Desell. Evolving Deep Recurrent Neural Networks Using Ant Colony Optimization. The 15th European Conference on Evolutionary Computation in Combinatorial Optimization. Copenhagen, Denmark. April 9, 2015. [pdf]
  8. Travis Desell. Citizen Science at the University of North Dakota. Biology Department Seminar. Grand Forks, North Dakota. March 6, 2015. [pdf]
  9. Travis Desell. MilkyWay@Home. Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ. November 8, 2013. [html]
  10. Travis Desell. Wildlife@Home: Combining Crowd Sourcing and Volunteer Computing to Analyze Avian Nesting Video. The 9th International Conference on E-Science (e-Science 2013). Beijing, China. October 23, 2013. [html]
  11. Travis Desell. Crowd Sourcing Big Data. Digital Lightning, 'TED' Style Talks hosted by UND's Digital and New Media Working Group. University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, ND. April 22, 2013.
  12. Travis Desell. FOQA in University Flight Operations. Aviation Safety InfoShare. Denver, CO. March 20, 2013.
  13. Travis Desell. DNA@Home: Using Volunteered Computers for Finding Transcription Factor Binding Sites. UND Epigenetics and Epigenomics Symposium. University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, ND. November 15, 2012. [ppt] [keynote]
  14. Travis Desell. Wildlife@Home. The 8th International BOINC Workshop. University of Westminster, London, UK. September 27, 2012. [ppt] [keynote]
  15. Travis Desell. Wildlife@Home. The UND Digital Media Showcase. Fire Hall Theatre, Grand Forks, North Dakota, USA. April 11, 2012. [ppt] [keynote]
  16. Travis Desell. Asynchronous Methods for Scalable and Robust Numerical Optimization. Invited Talk. IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown, New York, USA. April 5, 2012. [ppt] [keynote]
  17. Travis Desell. Finding Protein Binding Sites using Volunteer Computing Grids. The 2011 2nd International Congress on Computer Applications and Computational Science (CACS 2011). Bali, Indonesia. November 15-17, 2011. [ppt] [keynote]
  18. Travis Desell. From Analyzing the Tuberculosis Genome to Modeling the Milky Way Galaxy: Using Volunteer Computing for Computational Science. Public Talk. University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, North Dakota, USA. November 2010. [ppt] [keynote]
  19. Travis Desell. MilkyWay@Home and Volunteer Computing at RPI. Invited Talk. RPI Center for Open Source Software (RCOSS), Troy, New York, USA. April 2010. [ppt] [keynote]
  20. Travis Desell. Asynchronous Global Optimization for Massive-Scale Computing. PhD Defense. RPI, Troy, New York, USA. November 2009. [ppt] [keynote]
  21. Travis Desell. Robust Asynchronous Optimization using Volunteer Computing Grids. The 5th Annual Pan-Galactic BOINC Workshop. Barcelona, Spain. October 2009. [ppt] [keynote]
  22. Travis Desell. An Asynchronous Hybrid Genetic-Simplex Search for Modeling the Milky Way Galaxy Using Volunteer Computing. Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2008). Atlanta, Georgia, USA. July 2008.
  23. Travis Desell. Scientific Discovery Through Computationally Intensive Maximum Likelihood Evaluation. NSF Symposium on Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation (NSF-CDI 2007). Troy, New York, USA. September 2007.
  24. Travis Desell. Malleable Components for Scalable High Performance Computing. Workshop on HPC Grid Programming Environments and Components (HPC-GECO/CompFrame). Paris, France. June 2006.
  25. Travis Desell. OverView: A Framework for Generic Online Visualization of Distributed Systems. European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software (ETAPS 2004), eclipse Technology eXchange (eTX) workshop. Barcelona, Spain. March 2004.