NMSU College of Engineering associate dean, graduate students use supercomputer

Phillip De Leon has been named associate dean of research and doctoral studies for the New Mexico State University College of Engineering. LAS CRUCES -- Through the use of New Mexico State University's High Performance Computing system, a supercomputer known as Joker, Phillip De Leon, associate dean for research in the College of Engineering, not only conducted research but students in his graduate electrical engineering course also used the system. In the Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning course, which is a data science class De Leon taught in the fall, graduate students used Joker on projects that included developing machine learning codes and evaluating the models with standard datasets. "These projects including identifying a song much like the Shazam app, recognizing handwritten digits like ZIP codes, classifying email as ham or spam, analyzing Twitter feeds, etc.," De Leon said. "Being able to use this system allowed the students to experiment and tune their codes much faster since everything ran much faster. It also allowed for big datasets to be used in training and evaluation."