Infrastructure and Practices to Facilitate Research Collaboration

Presentation at the Fourth Annual ECAR/HP Summer Symposium for Higher Education IT Executives, July 13-15, 2005, New Castle Island, New Hampshire. The potential for IT to take research to new levels depends on our ability to acquire, manipulate, store, render, visualize, archive, and transport unimaginable amounts of data. Realizing this potential also depends on human factors, especially the capacity of researchers from different disciplines to assemble virtually and face-to-face to interpret findings from a variety of perspectives. Ferri manages the new Synthesis Center at the San Diego Supercomputer Center and shares insights about how environments there are being organized to foster dialogue across disciplines.