As we return from summer activities and embark on a new academic year, I want to share some recent efforts and planned activities for Technology Services' Research IT team with the campus research community. Based on the proposal to campus entitled, A Bold Investment in Research for the University of Illinois, and the subsequent document, Prioritizing a Bold Investment in Research for the University of Illinois, Research IT has made incremental but steady progress in establishing new research-enabling capabilities for our campus community.
The Research IT team is in the midst of a strategic planning process that will align our efforts with campus priorities and the existing and projected needs of our research community. We envision Illinois as the pre-eminent research university where digitally enabled scholars, researchers, faculty, and staff collaborate to tackle society's grand challenges. Research IT intends to expand and enhance the productivity of a growing and evolving community of campus scholars, researchers, faculty, staff, and their collaborators through effortless interaction with an evolving ecosystem of advanced digital research resources, services, and support. These are fundamental concepts behind prioritizing and planning our efforts.
Of particular note, in collaboration with Engineering IT, the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, NCSA, the iSchool and the Library, we recently launched the Research IT Portal, which provides a central location for finding resources from all across campus. It will develop into your one-stop-shop to efficiently and effectively find, access, and use technology resources, services, training, and support. The portal was developed in response to the need identified across campus to connect researchers to resources. We have already received some very good input from the campus community and we look forward to hearing more from you as we develop additional improvements that will make the portal more valuable to you. We are forming a Research IT Portal Advisory Committee. If you are interested in being involved, please reach out to Amy Hovious.
Research computing topics training is another identified need. The Research IT Portal has feeds from many units that offer training. Those are visible in the consolidated calendar. In addition, we have offered 11 Software and Data Carpentry workshops which have seen strong attendance. For more information about the next Software Carpentry event, visit the Portal. We are currently recruiting from across campus to identify individuals who can both complete Software Carpentry trainer training and subsequently commit to teaching one workshop per month. Further, we are recruiting to provide research computing training and support.
The Statistical Consulting Pilot, run in collaboration with CITL and the Library, already has supported 172 students from 15 units, providing free consultations with graduate students having expertise in a variety of statistical software packages, including R, Stata, SPSS, and SAS. We hope others avail themselves of this service. The pilot will be evaluated after this academic year to determine how to best proceed in light of what we are learning.
We continue to develop the research computing resources and services on campus. Progress continues with the pilot project to establish a high throughput computing (HTC) service for the campus. This is being done through volunteer and donated effort from Engineering IT, Technology Services, and NCSA. As the pilot resource develops, we will work with friendly users to test it prior to making the resource available for general use. We are also working to bring additional public cloud options to researchers beyond the current Amazon Web Services offering. We will share more about this topic in the coming months. Addressing an often expressed concern, Research IT is also developing specialized data movement servers (commonly called data transfer nodes) to simplify data movement across campus and to off-site collaborators. The data movement effort is complemented by access to the campus Globus Online subscription, which unlocks advanced features of the Globus Transfer service.
In order to continue to gather input from the campus community, we have worked with stakeholders across campus to revive the survey administered during the Year of Cyberinfrastructure, so that we can capture new and improved responses from researchers. We have also done a stakeholder analysis and alignment to better understand our stakeholders across campus and how we will engage with them strategically over the coming year. One of the next steps is inviting the research community across campus to join a committee that will help plan and engage with researchers.
This is just a sampling of the ongoing and planned work. We very much hope that these efforts will make a difference among our researchers and we are looking forward to the ongoing development and delivery of capabilities to support research.
