Face of the Week

The must knows about TJ Borelli:
TJ is currently a PhD student at RIT, and has an ambition of joining RIT as a full time professor some good day. He belongs to the ‘Rochester’ area. Born in the town of Irondequoit, he spent most of his life in Webster where he finished his high school education. Now, for almost three and half years he lives in Brighton with his friends. He did his bachelors at St. John Fisher College in Physics and Computer science. Having heard of the reputation of RIT, he joined it to continue his studies. Now working with RIT, professors TJ does research and gives lectures to students and has a goal of becoming a professor.

First impressions about RIT and the quarter system…
On being asked a question about how he liked RIT and the quarter system, TJ sighed deeply and confided that he was a little bit disappointed that the breaks were not at the same time and it looked like students didn’t get as many breaks as in semester system. But as the time passed TJ has gotten used to it, and now he thinks it is good with the school because everything is set up within curriculum and everything is set up with that kind of mentality. He also told that it works fairly well for its purpose, but initially it did take him with surprise.

About his path into the PhD program…
TJ had graduated from St. John Fisher College in physics and Computer science. Having a wish to stay in Rochester area for a little while, and knowing of the reputation of RIT as a good school, especially in computer science, he thought RIT would be a really good choice. Being short on money TJ started working and work had taken a lot of time. According to TJ, working on a job and studying masters at RIT simultaneously was pretty hard. Very much similar to any other student, TJ had approached Prof. Hans-Peter with his problems about how was he going to graduate. Eventually, they worked out a plan of how he was going to graduate. But once, by a favorable cosmic event- that’s a secret, he spoke with Prof. Edith Hemaspaandra about the new PhD program which was in its juvenile stages then. As TJ said, Prof. Hemaspaandra advised him, who was getting pretty close to graduation, to take the classes that he needed, finish up his masters project shortly, and apply for this new PhD program. TJ was fascinated by the thought of getting into PhD program. He did his homework as to what can interest him into PhD and to his surprise he did find something interesting!!! Hence he defended his capstone MS project in January and now he is in the PhD program in Computing Information Sciences pursuing his research and teaching students.

The work on the crossroads of sciences with HP…
The new PhD program in Computing Information Sciences, which is the PhD program, that TJ is involved now is a collaborative PhD program that combines all elements of Computer Science, IT, Networking and Software Engineering and applies it to a specific domain. In TJ’s case the domain is astrophysics. To advance in his researching activities he is taking some classes under the physics department as well.
Many people know that TJ is working with HP, but nobody knows on what they are working. On being asked to share with us about the project that they have done with HP, TJ told that the work he does with HP is related to the Spiegel visualization framework and the Grape Cluster. He explained the whole system in these words: “the Grape Cluster is a big 32 network node 4 teraflop machine that computes a simulation of astrophysics and galaxies coming together. Various astrophysicists, HP and TJ are together working on putting initial condition such as initial position and velocity of each particle, which is called n body problem. You have n number of particles, where each particle is just a collection. You just think of it as an autonomous unit of something and they are interacting with any other particle. So the problem actually has it’s complexity equal to n^2 because each particle has to be compared with other particle, but you can reduce it through use of specialized hardware called grape cards that are optimized for such sort of calculation and being able to reduce by doing various algorithms involving 3d composition and things like that. So basically this hardware that they’ve built together computes this conditions for the simulation and so it runs and produces output, now what you do with the output which is actually just text, so its kind of hard to see what is coming out. So HP with some students under him have built a visualization framework around it so you can actually set up cameras and kind of navigate throughout this data where you can reveal some interesting events. What my system does is that it tows the visualization system Spiegel where to look and when. And it will take a rog that the output of the grape cluster simulation or it could also be incorporated into Spiegel and looks at the image files that are created as output and extracts regions of interest based on morphological processing of how close the particles are together. When things are dense, we are going to find that interesting as a general heuristic of how we classify writings of interest. It extracts regions of interest over time and informs Spiegel and gives the output to Spiegel to look at that location over that duration of time. So that we can see these interesting events and hopefully we can classify them. Working with this, astrophysicist can classify this again into known astrophysical phenomenon and maybe some unknown astrophysical phenomena that we haven’t seen before that we were able to monitor over this process and simulate. “

Experiences with working about HP:
In TJ’s view while working with HP, he had found him very good to work with. He said “ HP keeps very frequent meetings and makes you work harder.” He finds working with HP has been very rewarding and finds him to be a good person to work with.

Not many of us know- 'TJ donates his hair'…
Yes!!!! TJ has donated his hair twice. As TJ had said us, the first time he did it, he just wanted his hair to grow, as he was sick of getting haircut so frequently. So he let it grow for a little while. He had heard from some people that if hair were long enough he might be able to donate them to an organization called ‘Locks of Love’ collects donated hair and makes wigs out of it for people who have hair loss because of going through cancer treatment or things like that. The first time he did donation he gave to organization about 10 inches and it took him a year and a half to grow it. At that time he was at St. John fisher. Just recently he has donated hair to Locks Of Love the second time. It has been another 2 years gone by, and hair grew little bit more than 12 inches so he did the same thing second time. He personally thinks that giving donation and helping the needy should be an important part of each person’s life. Wisely said.

Suggestions for students coming to RIT:
TJ recommends students to be careful with choosing the courses in a way not to overload them. He personally thinks that bridge courses are very helpful to bridge the knowledge gap between students from various educational backgrounds.

On being asked about the difference in the perspective of a student and a Prof....
TJ told us that it’s a very different focus, and although he is still a student, he is also helping out professors with lectures and it very different being in front of the classroom than being in classroom as a student. It is more of playing an active role. It is something that TJ is excited about.

Hobbies…
Genealogy of family, theoretical physics and summer camping.