EDUCAUSE | Informatics

Research Mission Support

drupal — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 16:56:43 -0500

This meeting will provide a forum for discussing IT support for institutional research missions. The two broad categories of concern include support for research administration and IT support for research activities. Research administration support involves pre- and post-award support, interaction with federal grant systems, regulatory compliance, and intellectual property management. Supporting research activities includes centralized versus decentralized approaches, high-performance computing, advanced networking, and informatics, as well as enabling multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and interinstitutional work.

Engineering Informatics for Bio-Inspired Robots

ckeller — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 14:59:58 -0500

Engineering Informatics for Bio-Inspired Robots is an NSF-funded project trying to break down barriers to collaboration between engineering and computer science departments. Faculty members participating in the project are teaching the next generation of engineers and computer scientists to produce intelligent design by reaching across disciplines. The goal is to ensure that students are better prepared to tackle the multidisciplinary demands of the engineering and computing industries. As part of the project, participating institutions are leveraging cyberinfrastructure to share expertise, store research results, and advocate for multidisciplinary instruction, demonstrating the power of inter-institutional cooperation for teaching and learning.

“Doing Much More Than We Have So Far Attempted”

ckeller — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 17:05:58 -0500

The author states that for computer-based data-conversion and data-capture instruments to fullfill their potential colleges and universities must address three broad areas of need.

GPN: Integrating Shibboleth, Grid, and Bioinformatics

drupal — Sat, 05 May 2007 13:17:02 -0500

The Great Plains Network (GPN) is a regional consortium of public universities in seven states: Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and South Dakota. This effective practice is a companion to "GPN: Building the Regional Middleware Infrastructure" (#294). It describes the creation of applications using middleware tools being developed as part of the NSF Middleware Initiative (NMI). These tools support collaborative research projects and the sharing of resources in a multi-institutional, virtual organization environment. This report is part of the NMI-EDIT Identity and Access Management Case Study Series.

Academic Analytics: The Uses of Management Information and Technology in Higher Education Roadmap

drupal — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 11:21:41 -0600

Since the 1980s, higher education has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on administrative technologies to improve access to information. Institutions implemented new enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, data marts, data warehouses, and technologies to improve reporting. This roadmap analyzes the outcomes at more than 380 higher education institutions. It looks at what the chosen strategies have accomplished, in what ways institutions use the data they collect, whether institutions are investing more resources in tools that enable them to collect and manipulate management information, and the degree to which information and analysis are being used to support institutional decision making.

Academic Analytics: The Uses of Management Information and Technology in Higher Education - Key Findings

drupal — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 11:16:36 -0600

These Key Findings describe the major discoveries of the ECAR research study called "Academic Analytics: The Uses of Management Information and Technology in Higher Education". Since the 1980s, higher education has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on administrative technologies to improve access to information. Institutions implemented new enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, data marts, data warehouses, and technologies to improve reporting. This study analyzes the outcomes at more than 380 higher education institutions. It looks at what the chosen strategies have accomplished, in what ways institutions use the data they collect, whether institutions are investing more resources in tools that enable them to collect and manipulate management information, and the degree to which information and analysis are being used to support institutional decision making.

Academic Analytics: The Uses of Management Information and Technology in Higher Education

drupal — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 10:27:52 -0600

Since the 1980s, higher education has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on administrative technologies to improve access to information. Institutions implemented new enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, data marts, data warehouses, and technologies to improve reporting. This study analyzes the outcomes at more than 380 higher education institutions. It looks at what the chosen strategies have accomplished, in what ways institutions use the data they collect, whether institutions are investing more resources in tools that enable them to collect and manipulate management information, and the degree to which information and analysis are being used to support institutional decision making. A corporate edition is available here.

Informatics and Knowledge Management for Faculty Research Data

drupal — Tue, 18 Jan 2005 10:07:43 -0600

This research bulletin describes the results of a study conducted at the University of California, Santa Barbara, into systems and project requirements for informatics in a broad range of scientific fields (including, but not limited to, bioscience fields), along with requirements in the social sciences and humanities. Faculty were interviewed about what has led them to develop informatics systems in support of their research and what factors are at the forefront as they seek to manage large amounts of research data in a decentralized and collaborative environment. The findings, a mix of the expected and unexpected, have laid the groundwork for new proposals in faculty IT support services.

Bioinformatics: New Technology Models for Research, Education, and Service

drupal — Tue, 13 Apr 2004 09:25:27 -0500

Bioinformatics applies principles of information sciences and technologies to complex life sciences data. Life sciences research and education are increasingly dependent on bioinformatics and advanced information technologies in order to support their experimental approaches. This research bulletin provides an overview of the opportunities, challenges, and strategies for information technology organizations to optimally facilitate bioinformatics research and broader life sciences development efforts in higher education.

Effective Use: A Community Informatics Strategy Beyond the Digital Divide

drupal — Fri, 27 Feb 2004 10:12:13 -0600

A huge industry has been created responding to the perceived social malady, the "Digital Divide". This paper examines the concepts and strategies underlying the notion of the Digital Divide and concludes that it is little more than a marketing campaign for Internet service providers. The paper goes on to present an alternative approach — that of "effective use" — drawn from community informatics theory which recognizes that the Internet is not simply a source of information, but also a fundamental tool in the new digital economy.

China Grid Project Goes Live

drupal — Tue, 14 Oct 2003 15:50:16 -0500

Chinese education officials this week will launch a grid-computing project they say might one day cover 200,000 students at 100 universities around the country. The China Education and Research Grid, managed by the Chinese Ministry of Education, will initially include 12 universities and will be capable of 6 trillion FLOPS (floating point operations per second) by 2005. The power of the grid is expected to increase to 15 trillion FLOPS. Al Bunshaft, vice president of sales and development for grid computing for IBM, which is building the new Chinese grid computer, said it will be used for a University of Hong Kong Web-based language instruction application, video software developed by Peking University, and a suite of bioinformatics applications. The Chinese grid will not be as large as some, such as the U.S. National Science Foundation's TeraGrid, but Bunshaft said it could become the largest grid for remote learning.

Multicampus, High-Performance Computing Infrastructure for Research Support

drupal — Tue, 05 Nov 2002 14:48:54 -0600

The University of Missouri Bioinformatics Consortium is being developed to facilitate intercampus communication and bioinformatics research collaborations across the four campuses of the University of Missouri System. This presentation will discuss the background, strategic planning, and implementation of a high-performance computational infrastructure shared across a multicampus environment.