In Three Showcase IDI Events, Faculty Will Share Experience of ‘Transformational Projects’

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UC San Diego faculty members will report on the first “Transformational Projects” completed with the help of the year-old Integrated Digital Infrastructure (IDI) program in three showcase events on May 6 and 7, and the campus community is invited to attend.

Among its many responses to the challenges of the next century, the Campus Strategic Plan includes applying advanced information-technology services to support the wide variety of disciplines that increasingly depend on digital data. The IDI was conceived a year ago to provide a campus-wide approach to this vision, coordinating with the Library, SDSC, Qualcomm Institute, ACT, ACMS, and IT professionals in the schools to develop leading-edge integrated solutions that meet the needs of faculty, staff, and students.

To help mark the program’s inaugural year of service, the IDI will showcase some of the 18 Transformational Projects that IDI has helped enable. The leaders of these early experiments will share how they interacted with IDI to enhance the cyberinfrastructure that supports their research or instruction.

In addition to viewing those successes, attendees will also learn how to apply for next year’s support for their own Transformational Projects.

Showcase dates and locations are:

• Wednesday, May 6, 10 a.m. to noon, in the School of Medicine’s Education and Telemedicine (MET) Building, Learning Center Room 143.
• Wednesday, May 6, 2-4 p.m., at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, 4500 Hubbs Hall.
• Thursday, May 7, 10 a.m. to noon, at the Village at Torrey Pines, meeting rooms on 15.

At each event, faculty speakers will describe their research and how IDI supported that work. Registration information, the full agenda for speakers and location maps are available at IDI’s website.

Valerie Polichar and Thomas DeFanti, IDI’s co-program managers, note that the Showcase projects demonstrate how advanced IT tools can transform research and instructional activities. IDI, they say, provides a host of valuable resources for faculty members, researchers, and students, including:

• A “concierge service” to guide you to the right services for your research and instructional needs.
• Support of advanced infrastructure, such as the SDSC colocation facility and the Triton Shared Computing Cluster, to maintain availability and ensure moderate pricing of basic services.
• A new Library facility for preserving and sharing curated UC San Diego digital data sets.
• Opportunity funds for transformational projects and digital research platforms that employ new digital technology in the research lab and in the classroom.

“This will be real celebration of a wide range of pioneering projects,” says IDI director Larry Smarr, also founding director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2). “We hope the entire campus community will attend these inaugural Showcases to learn how IDI can help lead them to similar successes.”