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2016 CI Forum

Register

Registration is now open for this year's CI Forum.

What is CI?

The National Science Foundation defines CI as a collection of advanced technologies and services to support scientific inquiry. This includes: 

  • Computing clusters and high performance computing systems
  • Data management, data integration, and data storage systems
  • High speed networks
  • Data mining and data visualization
  • Collaboration and security tools
  • Specialists who engineer, construct and facilitate computational systems

The CI Forum is coordinated by the Institute for Cyber Enabled Research (iCER). The CI Forum is jointly sponsored by the Office of the Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies, MSU Libraries, and iCER. This event is based on an initiative originally supported by the National Science Foundation in 2010 to support the implementation and use of cyberinfrastructure at research institutions.


Speakers

Dr. Kenneth M. Merz, Jr.

Kennie provides the unifying vision and direction for iCER's growing development. Before coming to Michigan State University, he was a University of Florida Research Foundation Professor, the Edmund H. Prominski Professor of Chemistry, the Colonel Allen R. and Margaret G. Crow Term Professor and a member of the Quantum Theory Project, all at the University of Florida from 2005-2013.

Shawn Nicholson

Shawn Nicholson is Associate Director of the Michigan State University Libraries where he provides leadership and vision for several units and centers, including Data Services, G.M. Kline Digital and Multimedia Center, and Library Systems.  His scholarly interests center on the use and reuse of data and attendant processes and protocols for long-term stewardship.   He recently co-authored Research data management: Collaborative Approaches and Undergraduate Curriculum Development. Shawn holds Bachelors and Masters in Political Science and a M.S. Library and Information Science and has led study abroad courses to England, Ireland, and most recently New Zealand.  He enjoys all manner of sport as spectator or participant, and welcomes the prospect to sample food and beverage from around the world.

Dr. Steven Gordon

Dr. Steve Gordon is currently Senior Education Lead at the Ohio Supercomputer Center and Professor Emeritus in City and Regional Planning at The Ohio State University. He is the former lead for the education program of the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) program funded by the National Science Foundation. At OSC, Dr. Gordon has led the efforts to start computational science education programs at a number of Ohio institutions. For the XSEDE project, he worked with universities nationwide to assist them in starting computational science education programs by providing program models, shared materials, and professional development activities for faculty.

His academic research centers around water quality and watershed management issues as well as the application of modeling and simulation to environmental assessment, land use change, and the use of Geographic Information Systems. He has published two books and a number of articles related to these issues.

Dr. Dirk Colbry

Dr. Dirk Colbry is the Director of HPC Studies in the newly formed Department of Mathematics, Science, and Engineering. An alumnus of MSU, Colbry has a Ph.D. in Computer Science and his principle areas of research include machine vision and pattern recognition (specializing in scientific imaging). Dr. Colbry also does research in computational education and high performance computing. From 2009 until 2015, Dr. Colbry worked for the Institute for Cyber-Enabled Research as a computational consultant and Director of HPCC. Dr. Colbry collaborates with scientists from multiple disciplines including Engineering, Toxicology, Plant and Soil Sciences, Zoology, Mathematics, Statistics and Biology. Recent projects include research in Image Phenomics; developing a commercially-viable large scale, cloud-based image pathology tool; and helping develop methods for measuring the Carbon stored inside of soil. Dr. Colbry has taught a range of courses, including; communication "soft" skills, introduction to computational modeling, microprocessors, artificial intelligence, scientific image analysis, compilers, exascale programming, and courses in programming and algorithm analysis.

Dr. Amanda Tickner

Amanda Tickner is the GIS and Makerspace librarian at MSU. She has a MLS and PhD in Anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Library support activities include workshops and classroom activities on GIS related topics, assistance with research, software and finding data, and creating maps for publication.

Justin Booth

Justin Booth is the head of Remote Sensing & GIS Research and Outreach Services (RS&GIS) at MSU. RS&GIS provides research expertise in the areas of GIS, remote sensing (RS), global positioning systems (GPS), application development, cartography and graphic design.

Jade Freeman

Jade Freeman is the manager of GIS services at MSU Infrastructure Planning & Facilities, he is responsible for developing and maintaining campus infrastructure records, software systems and applications including CADD, GIS, DM, and web-based applications as related to infrastructure records.

Pat Bills

Pat specializes in designing, integrating, building, and analyzing database systems. He is also the iCER representative on the digital humanities steering committee.

Dr. Alex Dickson

Alex Dickson received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago under Professor Aaron Dinner. There he developed new computational approaches to enhance the sampling of simulations that are driven out of equilibrium. Applications spanned from biomolecular systems, such as an RNA unfolding in a flowing solvent, to model systems from physics, such as sheared Ising models. In 2011, he began as a postdoctoral researcher with Professor Charles L. Brooks III at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he continued developing new enhanced sampling methods for application to atomistic biomolecular systems. A novel method, "WExplore", allows for enhancement of sampling in an undirected fashion, and has been used to observe a wide variety of rare biomolecular phenomena. He also developed a set of analysis techniques that can help visualize the entire space of possible biomolecular conformations in a network plot.

Dr. Chun-Min Chang

Chun-Min draws on his experience in quantum mechanical and molecular dynamics simulations to help HPCC users hone their research to best utilize iCER's supercomputing facilities.

Dr. Zhengqi He

Dr. He is a research associate working at the accelerator physics department of the FRIB project at MSU. He received a BA degree (2010) in Engineering Physics with a minor degree in Computer Science and a Ph.D. (2014) in Engineering Physics at Tsinghua University, China. He joined the FRIB project in 2012 and has been doing research on accelerator physics, modeling, and simulation software development in support of commissioning and operation of the FRIB project. His recent research interest lies in advancing the field of modern accelerator design and control with high-performance/high-fidelity/high-intelligent computer simulations.

Dr. Marcos Dantus

Marcos Dantus received BA and MA degrees from Brandeis University and his Ph.D. (1991) and Postdoc (1991-1993) training at Caltech in the group of Ahmed Zewail, where he helped to develop Femtochemistry and Ultrafast Electron Diffraction. Zewail was recognized for these developments with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1999. Dantus has been a professor at MSU since 1993 and is presently a University Distinguished Professor. He has pioneered the use of shaped ultrafast pulses to prove and control chemical reactions as well as for practical applications such as biomedical imaging, proteomics and standoff detection of explosives. Dantus's development and commercialization of an instrument capable of automated laser pulse compression is enabling research around the world. Dantus regularly collaborates with different branches of the DoD and was invited to DARPA's Scientist Helping America, Arbitrary Waveform Generation, and Program for Ultrafast Laser Science workshops. Dantus has over 210 publications, is Fellow of The National Academy of Inventors, The American Physical Society, and The Optical Society of America.

Ben Meekhof

Ben Meekhof started working at the University of Michigan in 2007 as a system administrator for the ATLAS Great Lakes Tier 2 computing center. In 2016 he moved to UM Advanced Research Computing Technical Services to become the primary engineer for the OSiRIS project.

Dr. Michael Colaresi

Michael Colaresi is a Professor of Political Science, Director of the Social Science Data Analytic Initiative at MSU, and co-editor of the journal International Interactions. He received his Ph.D. from Indiana University in 2002, where he won the Greenough Dissertation Award, and has held positions at Ohio State University and Oxford University before coming to MSU in 2004. In 2006, he and his co-authors were awarded the Gosnell Prize for Excellence in Political Methodology. He has also bee a part of teams that were awarded two National Science Foundation grants. Professor Colaresi's latest book is Democracy Declassified: The Secrecy Dilemma in National Security. He has several current projects ongoing that use large-scale corpora of texts to better understand social science topics such as the dynamics of human rights, tracking state preferences in the United Nations, and measuring political positions in legislatures.

Devin Higgins

Devin Higgins is Digital Library Programmer, and part-time Linked Data Librarian at Michigan State University. Current professional interests include text mining, data visualization, and building digital collections that promote user exploration. His recent research has examined collisions between data and the literary text, particularly in relation to formalist aesthetics and notions of novelty and intervention.

Laura B. McGrath

Laura McGrath is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at MSU, where she specializes in post-45 American Literature and Digital Humanities. Her dissertation, Modernish: Fictions of Industry the 21st Century, uses traditional, ethnographic, and digital methods to explore modernism's symbolic capital in the field of contemporary publishing. Laura is the recipient of the Provost's Pre-Professional Fellowship, and the COGS Disciplinary Leadership Award.

In 2014-2015, Laura was the Project Manager and Graduate Lead of the Digital Humanities and Literacy Cognition (DHLC) lab, where she co-wrote and won an ACLS Digital Innovations Fellowship with Professor Natalie Phillips. She was a 2015-2016 Cultural Heritage Informatics Fellow. She is currently at work on a digital corpus study on the Armed Services Edition, a collection of ~1,500 novels repurposed for American soldiers during WWII, in order to analyze the politics of literary form. Her work has appeared in Symbolism and Books and Culture. She is currently the Andrew W. Mellon Pre-Doctoral Fellow for Digital Liberal Arts at Hope College in Holland, MI.

Dr. Bill Hart-Davidson

Bill Hart-Davidson Ph.D. Purdue University, 1999) is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Writing at Michigan State University and Associate Dean of Graduate Education in the College of Arts & Letters. He is a Senior Researcher in the Writing, Information, and Digital Experience (WIDE) Research Center. Bill's research interests lie at the intersection of Technical Communication and User Experience, and he has published more than fifty peer-reviewed articles and chapters in such areas as visualizing knowledge work processes, information, and user experience design, and computational rhetoric.

He is co-author with Jim Ridolfo of the 2015 volume Rhetoric and the Digital Humanities from the University of Chicago Press. Also in 2015, Bill and the WIDE Research Center won the Conference on College Composition and Communication "Technology Innovator Award", a prize that recognizes a career-long dedication to driving technological  change in the fields of Rhetoric, Writing, and Technical and Professional Communication. Bill is a co-founder of Drawbridge Inc., a learning technology company spinoff of Michigan State University. Drawbridge offers the software service Eli Review, a peer learning platform in use around the world and across the U.S. in both higher education and K-12 schools. Bill is a co-inventor of Eli and serves as the Vice President for Research and Product Innovation at Drawbridge.

Donna Cumberland

Donna Cumberland is the executive director of IT Research Computing at Purdue University. Cumberland has served in a variety of capacities in research computing, and has served as executive director since 2014. As executive director, she is responsible for the vision for all research computing activities at Purdue.

Cumberland joined ITaP research computing in 2007, leading a team of project directors responsible for managing large scale research IT projects. In 2008, she led the deployment of Steele, where the cluster was unpacked, racked, deployed, and running jobs in a single day.

In 2011, Research Computing Support was moved under her leadership, where the Community Cluster Program continued to grow, and she led many efforts in process improvement and empowering faculty with self-service capabilities.

Prior to joining research computing, Cumberland worked in a variety of IT roles at Purdue, including management of outreach and training of IT security and teaching and learning, and as an instructional computing coordinator.

Cumberland received her bachelor's degree and M.B.A. from Purdue's Krannert School of Management, and in her free time is an avid gardener.

Cumberland's vision for Research Computing at Purdue:

To be the one-stop provider of choice for research computing and data services at Purdue - Delivering powerful, reliable, easy-to-use, service-oriented computing to Purdue researchers.