The mention of blobs may bring to mind something we painted in preschool and our parents hung on the refrigerator door. Or the word may call up a vision of an alien creature featured in a horror movie. Why would a scientist want to study blobs? Even more intriguing, how would artificial intelligence be involved — unless, of course, one wanted to avoid getting too near a blob.

Charlie Catlett, a senior computer scientist in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory and director of the Urban Center for Computation and Data, will give the opening plenary keynote address at the SupercomputingAsia 2020 conference in Singapore. This year’s conference theme is “HPC Empowering Intelligent Cities.”

Whether you are trying to detect a possible radiation signature from a suspicious package or vehicle, or you are measuring power output in a nuclear reactor, being able to detect neutrons efficiently and precisely represents a significant challenge.