The upcoming Spring meeting of the North Carolina Emergency Management Association, the 2007 North Carolina All Hazards Conference, will feature much of the work being done through RENCI’s disaster research efforts.

CHAPEL HILL, NC—The Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) will open its doors to the public on Friday, March 2, for an open house that will showcase a wide range of technologies and projects related to disaster research, bioinformatics, public health, high performance computing and high resolution visualization.

Disasters—from hurricanes and floods in the east to landslides in the mountains to ice storms in the central Piedmont—are a prime example of a multifaceted issue that no single discipline can effectively address. And they are costly: Between 1980 and 2005, North Carolina suffered more than 20 weather-related disasters that caused at least $1 billion [...]

On a bright December morning, something was afoot in the skies over Franklinton, North Carolina. Not a plane, and certainly not a caped superhero, it was RENCI’s Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) on its maiden voyage. And while not as dramatic as Wilbur and Orville’s first flight more than 100 years ago, it was nonetheless [...]