The Division consists of 31 full-time staff, four of whom are in Boulder. Of these, three are support staff. We employ six faculty members on a part-time basis, and seven others intermittently. We also have a variety of guest researchers and summer students.
Division staff provide expertise in a broad array of continuous and discrete mathematics, including ordinary and partial differential equations, integral equations, optimization models, geometric models, and compression algorithms. They develop analytic and computational methods, and consult and collaborate extensively, conducting their activities in the context of an heterogeneous computing environment that includes desktop workstations, graphics devices, high performance computers, and international computer networks. They are involved in the full range of professional activities, including publishing papers, presenting talks at meetings, conferences, shortcourses, and colloquia, editing, refereeing for journals and funding agencies, and participating in professional societies. Many of these activities are detailed elsewhere in this report.
This year a reorganization of NIST combined the Computing and Applied Mathematics Laboratory and the Computer Systems Laboratory into the Information Technology Laboratory. A formal reorganization package has been submitted, with official approval expected later this year. Many changes have been effected in preparation for the reorganization. ACMD acquired the Compression Algorithms Group, consisting of four full-time permanent members, (A. Nakassis (Group Leader), W. Majurski, R. Onyshczak and F. Spielman), secretary, (J. Myrick) and two part-time faculty members (A. Youseff and S. Lomonaco). Their mission is to develop algorithms and testing methodologies for compression. At present, they are concentrating on image compression, with particular attention to wavelet-based methods. In addition E. Bromberg joined the Division full time after having served as a Senior Advisor to the Director of the Computing and Applied Mathematics Laboratory and K. Remington joined the Mathematical Software Group from the former Scientific Computing Environments Division. K. Cassel is working temporarily in the Division following a two-year post doctoral position with R. Rehm. A new post doctoral position has been granted; the candidate is expected here this summer.
Several members of the division were recognized and honored this year in a variety of professional ways. R. Boisvert was named to the ACM Publications Board and was reappointed as Editor-in-Chief for the ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software. D. Lozier was appointed as Associate Editor of Mathematics of Computation and I. Beichl became a columnist for the IEEE journal Computing Science and Engineering, coauthoring a monthly article on ``Computing Prescriptions.'' P. Boggs was appointed to the SIAM Science Policy Committee.
A. Carasso received his second patent on his novel and efficient image deblurring system and was the leadoff speaker at a recent Gordon Conference to discuss the mathematical foundations of this work. C. Witzgall, J. Bernal, and M. McClain were recognized by the U.S. Army Technical Engineering Center for their pioneering work on terrain modeling; their algorithm was used to model the Southwest USA bsed on a very large data set. F. Hunt was awarded funding from the NIST Competency Program jointly with colleagues in the NIST Building and Fire Research, Physics, and Manufacturing Engineering Laboratories for a proposal entitled, Advanced Methods and Models for Appearance of Coatings and Coated Objects. W. Mitchell was a finalist in SIAM's 1995 Wilkinson competition for mathematical software for his work on adaptive grid generation. Finally, R. Pozo was invited to be a visiting scientist at ETL in Japan to discuss work on parallel linear algebra.