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  • 2017 December Newsletter

    Read the December 2017 Technology Services Research IT Newsletter.

  • NCSA Faculty Fellow Makes Breakthrough in Protein Prediction Using Deep Learning

    Jian Peng, NCSA Faculty Fellow and Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Illinois and graduate student, Yang Liu, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, have discovered a major breakthrough in protein structure predictions using deep learning data processed by NCSA’s  Blue Waters supercomputer published in Cell Systems journal.

    Read the full story.

  • Cancer Center at Illinois Seed Funding Call for Proposals

    The Cancer Center at Illinois (CCIL) was founded to build campus capacity in cancer research. The CCIL Seed Funding Program provides support for Illinois cancer research teams to develop new ideas and innovative approaches bridging the engineering–biology continuum. The expected outcome of this seed grant program is a fundable interdisciplinary research proposal. The CCIL anticipates funding two or three interdisciplinary research proposals during the 2018-2019 cycle.

  • Impact of the Federal Government Partial Shutdown

    As you are aware, a partial federal government shutdown has continued into the new year. While NIH and the Department of Education are funded, others such as NSF, NASA, NOAA, USDA, NIST, and NEH are not.

    Illinois Sponsored Programs Administration (SPA) has developed these FAQs to address some questions that members of the Illinois research community may have.

    Agency Contingency Plans and FAQs can be found on the OMB website:

    https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/information-for-agencies/agency-contingency-plans/

  • Clowder Awarded $5 Million from NSF

    The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded $5 Million to bring together the Clowder community. Clowder, an open source data management tool based on active curation, was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in conjunction with the Coordinated Science Lab (CSL) and Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) department.

  • NCSA, Illinois Technology Services, and College of Media come together to imagine the future of advertising

    Dr. Joseph T. Yun, Leader of Research and Innovation at Technology Services, Research Assistant Professor at the College of Media and NCSA center affiliate, has big ideas for changing the way we understand advertising, research, and consumer behavior in the era of Big Data and social media. Read more

  • Agriculture Technology Innovation Summit - registration open!

    Registration is now open for the 4th AgTech Summit, March 5-6 at the Research Park. Champaign-Urbana is one of the premier AgTech hubs in the nation, and we are uniquely positioned to bring together entrepreneurs, investors, academics, and industry for learning, networking and advancing this sector. 

  • Submission for "Health Make-a-Thon" are now open

    The Health Make-a-Thon is a competition for makers, citizen scientists, and anyone in Champaign County with ideas for improving human health. A panel of experts from the University of Illinois and beyond will review submissions and choose the best. Finalists will pitch their ideas for a chance to win $10,000 in Health Maker Lab resources to create a real prototype of their idea.

  • How Machine Learning is Crafting Precision Medicine

    "Medicine has become more and more individualized since the days of leeches and humors, but in the last 15 years, an explosion of patient data in the form of genetic information and electronic health records (EHRs) has sharpened the doctor’s picture of the individual patient—and of treatments tailored to their precise needs."

  • Statement on executive order to maintain American leadership in artificial intelligence

    President Donald J. Trump is expected to sign an executive order Feb. 11, titled "Maintaining American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence." The order aims to promote sustained investment and innovation in artificial intelligence (AI), enhance access to resources for AI research, and train a next-generation AI research workforce. National Science Foundation (NSF) Director France Córdova, who will participate in the signing ceremony, issued the following statement.

  • Can You Imagine: Visualizing Biomedical Breakthroughs in Data?

    "Making sense of complex biological data is the daily routine for the VI-Bio group at NCSA. Whether it be investigating the role of certain dietary interventions in the human microbiome, working to improve risk prediction in breast cancer, or even developing an app to connect cancer patients and caregivers, VI-Bio is constantly working to make data more accessible, culminating in visual analytic tools for studying genomic and related data.

    What's not routine about this work, however, are the outcomes..."

  • Can you imagine: Supporting data infrastructure with software?

    Data, as well as the software used in the creation and usage of data, are now a major part of scientific research and education, to the point where many groups are pushing for them to be on par with paper publications with regards to dissemination as well as reproducibility. The preservation, sharing, and use of these digital products, however, is far from trivial, with many conceptual, technical, and social complexities that are now being addressed in fields such as computer science, information science, and the evolving cross-disciplinary field of data science.

    Deputy Director of Scientific Software & Applications at NCSA, Kenton McHenry has worked with scientific communities for over 10 years across biology, geoscience, and engineering to develop a service that would mutually support a need at the intersection of all of these communities with regards to utilizing data, specifically data transformations. As a principal investigator of the NSF-funded Cyberinfrastructure for Sustained Scientific Innovation (CSSI) - Clowder, McHenry and his team explore tools around the notion of active curation in support scientific data sharing, management, and reuse.

    Active curation addresses the need for curation around scientific data, such as annotating data with metadata describing it, in order to make it discoverable and usable by others. Specifically, active curation distributes the curation process throughout the lifecycle of the data, leveraging analysis/machine learning to automate a good portion of the process. The Clowder framework provides an open source Dropbox-like capability that allows data to be shared as easily as within Dropbox, but further supports the active curation and exploration of data so that data can be more easily published in community data archives at a later time. This effort further addresses the sustainability of scientific tools such as Clowder, exploring potential service models and brings together a very diverse community made up of academic, education, industrial, and international partners all requiring similar capabilities.

    ABOUT NCSA

    The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign provides supercomputing and advanced digital resources for the nation's science enterprise. At NCSA, University of Illinois faculty, staff, students, and collaborators from around the globe use advanced digital resources to address research grand challenges for the benefit of science and society. NCSA has been advancing one third of the Fortune 50® for more than 30 years by bringing industry, researchers, and students together to solve grand challenges at rapid speed and scale.

  • Scientists Pioneer Use of Deep Learning for Real-time Gravitational Wave Discovery

    This new approach will enable astronomers to study gravitational waves using minimal computational resources, reducing time to discovery and increasing the scientific reach of gravitational wave astrophysics.

    Read more

  • U of I Researcher Recognized with AMC Fellowship for Contributions to Parallel Programming

    NCSA Faculty Affiliate Laxmikant "Sanjay" Kale was named to the the 2017 class of fellows from the Association for Computing Machinery.

    Read more

  • After The Storm: Simulating and Visualizing Extreme Weather with XSEDE

    Stormy weather is perfect for hot tea, warm clothes, and cool science.

    Read more

  • 2018-2019 NCSA Faculty Fellowship Application Now Available

    This competitive fellowship program provides a unique opportunity for faculty and researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign by offering seed funding for startup collaborative research projects.

    Read more

  • New Illinois med school built for health-tech future

    The Carle Illinois College of Medicine in Urbana-Champaign, which will welcome its first class of students in July, bills itself as the first medical doctorate program in the nation designed from inception to integrate engineering with medicine. Its hope is to graduate physician innovators who challenge the status quo and find solutions that reduce costs while improving access to and quality of care.

    Read the Chicago Tribune article on the Carle Illinois College of Medicine.

  • Leading cloud providers join with NSF to support data science frontiers

    The National Science Foundation (NSF) is providing nearly $30 million in new funding for research in data science and engineering through its Critical Techniques, Technologies and Methodologies for Advancing Foundations and Applications of Big Data Sciences and Engineering (BIGDATA) program.

    Read the full story

  • Women in IT Networking at SC applications

    WINS - Call for Participation - SC18 - Dallas, TX

    The Women in IT Networking at SC (WINS) program is now accepting applications for the 2018 program. Awardees will receive funding to participate as a SCinet team member during the SC18 conference in Dallas, Texas. Interested and qualified women are encouraged to apply. Please feel free to distribute this information to your networks and contacts.

    Access the 2018 WINS Application from the WINS website:

    women-in-networking.net/apply-to-wins/

    Application deadline: March 23, 2018 at 11:59pm AoE

    Award notifications will be sent by mid to late May 2018 

    WINS is a three year National Science Foundation-funded program that awards up to five early to mid-career women from diverse regions of the U.S. research and education community IT field to participate in the ground-up construction of SCinet, one of the fastest and most advanced computer networks in the world. WINS is a joint effort between the Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), the Keystone Initiative for Network Based Education and Research (KINBER), and University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR).

    Full text of the official 2018 WINS Call for Participation (CFP) is on the website.

  • 2017 December Newsletter

    Read the December 2017 Technology Services Research IT Newsletter.

  • NCSA Faculty Fellow Makes Breakthrough in Protein Prediction Using Deep Learning

    Jian Peng, NCSA Faculty Fellow and Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Illinois and graduate student, Yang Liu, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, have discovered a major breakthrough in protein structure predictions using deep learning data processed by NCSA’s  Blue Waters supercomputer published in Cell Systems journal.

    Read the full story.

  • Dark Energy Survey data processed by NCSA now available to scientists everywhere

    Researchers around the world can now explore the first three years of data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) processed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

    Read the full story

  • Attend XSEDE's HPC Training Sessions to expand your knowledge of Big Data!

    We would like to call your attention to upcoming events being held at NCSA:

    March 6 - GPU Programming Using OpenACC

    Throughout the year, the Blue Waters and Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) projects, led by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), support a variety of interdisciplinary training sessions, workshops and webinars to assist researchers in expanding their computational and data analytics knowledge and providing skills to advance their research.

    The training sessions are offered as hands-on workshops that provide a convenient way for researchers to learn about the latest techniques and technologies of current interest in high performance computing (HPC). 

    Registration is free and required. The sessions are scheduled for 10 AM until 4 PM Central Time in Room 1030 of the NCSA building at 1205 W. Clark St. in Urbana. RSVP on Facebook to receive regular updates.

    If you need assistance finding relevant training sessions, contact us and we’ll work with you to help address your needs – bw-eot@ncsa.illinois.edu 

    The Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) is a single virtual system that scientists can use to interactively share computing resources, data and expertise. People around the world use these resources and services — things like supercomputers, collections of data and new tools — to improve our planet. XSEDE is supported by the National Science Foundation.

  • Spring Savvy Researcher Training Schedule Released

    The library’s spring schedule for the Savvy Researcher Workshop series has been released.

    Join us for 50 minute, hands-on workshops that will help you improve your research and information management skills.

    Digital Humanities-related sessions include:

    Building Digital Exhibitions with OmekaDigital

    Publishing with ScalarBasics of Data Visualization

    Introduction to Text Mining Concepts and Sources

    Topic Modeling Theory and Practice

    Messy Data? Clean it up with OpenRefine!

    Making Scanned Text Machine Readable through Optical Character Recognition

    Using the DPLA (Digital Public Library) Primary Resources for Research

    GIS for Research I: Introduction to GIS Concepts, Software, and Data

    GIS for Research II: GIS Research, Data Management, and Visualization

    For more details and registration:   http://go.library.illinois.edu/savvyresearcher

    All sessions held in the Main Library, Room 314 unless otherwise noted.

  • New laboratory system allows researchers to probe secret lives of queen bees

    More than a decade after the identification of colony collapse disorder, a phenomenon marked by widespread loss of honey bee colonies, scientists are still working to untangle the ecologically complex problem of how to mitigate ongoing losses of honey bees and other pollinating species. One much-needed aid in this effort is more efficient ways to track specific impacts on bee health. To address this need, a group of Illinois researchers has established a laboratory-based method for tracking the fertility of honey bee queens.

  • Promising Diagnostics for Detecting Latent Tuberculosis Revealed

    A collaboration between the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of IllinoisMayo Clinic, and the University of Michigan are introducing a new machine-learning-driven approach to latent tuberculosis infection (LTBI) diagnostics. While leveraging a high throughput detection technology and powerful bioinformatics, this approach aims to reveal multi-marker signatures for LTBI diagnosis and risk stratification.

  • Technology Services Expanded Walk-in Support Hours

    The Technology Services Help Desk is expanding the hours for walk-in support at the Digital Computer Laboratory. Assistance via email (consult@illinois.edu), phone (217-244-7000) and walk-in is available:

    Monday - Friday: 8am - 9pm

    Saturday/Sunday: 12pm - 5pm

  • Attend the inaugural Industry Data Science Summit

    Learn about cutting-edge data science research happening at Illinois. The summit will take place on May 1-2 at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and will cover topics such as Data Governance, Data Security, Privacy, and Trust, Data Driven Architecture and Management, Data Analytics and Industry-University of Illinois Collaborations in Data Science. Register with the link above.

  • Undergraduate Research & the Humanities: Challenges and Possibilities - Retreat

    A COLLABORATIVE RETREAT

    Friday, August 23, 2019 | 8:30–5 p.m.Levis Faculty Center (919 W. Illinois St., Urbana)

    Registration Form

    Co-sponsored by the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities and the Office of Undergraduate Research

    The Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH) and the Office of Undergraduate Research (OUR) seek to bring together faculty and staff to consider how we engage the undergraduate research experience at Illinois and how we might create a set of new models to shape the future of undergraduate research in both core and emerging fields of study in the humanities. 

    The day will open with a keynote by Ellen McClure, professor of French and Francophone Studies and History, and Director of the Engaged Humanities Initiative at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Panels and discussions/breakout sessions will follow.

    Early bird registration is now open. Registration is required and seats are limited.

    Our hope is to share knowledge and information, to generate conversation and debate about what is desirable and possible, and ultimately to re-center the importance of the humanities in undergraduate education at Illinois. Participants can expect to hear details about competitive grant opportunities to develop ideas that they generate, with particular attention to those that engage digital methods, underrepresented and underserved students, or emphasize a public-facing dimension. These grants will be offered by the Office of Undergraduate Research and IPRH, up to $5,000.

    For questions contact Antoinette Burton (aburton@illinois.edu) or Karen Rodriguez’G (rodrigzg@illinois.edu).

  • 38 Illinois Research Groups Awarded Time on Blue Waters Leadership Supercomputer

    Thirty-eight research groups at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have been allocated new computation time on the Blue Waters supercomputer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), with funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF). This round of allocations provides over 17 million node-hours, equivalent to over half a billion core hours, and is valued at over $10.5 million, helping Illinois researchers push the boundaries of innovation and frontier science discovery.

  • Deadline Upcoming for the "Word Vectors for the Thoughtful Humanist" Series

    The deadline for submitting applications for the "Word Vectors for the Thoughtful Humanist” series of advanced institutes has been extended to March 29, 2019.

    Applications are invited for participation in a new series of advanced institutes on text analysis, sponsored by the Northeastern University Women Writers Project with generous funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. These events will introduce teachers and researchers at varied levels of expertise to the text analysis methods and interpretive questions arising from word embedding models, which represent connections between words as computable spatial relationships. These institutes will explore practical techniques and also interpretive outcomes, working with simple, open-access web tools hosted in the Women Writers Online Lab. 

    Learn about more details and apply. 

  • Apply for the Data Purchasing Program at the University Library

    The University Library is soliciting applications from faculty, academic professionals, and graduate students who need to purchase numeric, spatial, or textual data for their research. Through the Data Purchase Program, funds will be awarded for such data purchases, with a maximum award of $5,000. The application deadline for first consideration is May 28, 2018.

    Visit https://www.library.illinois.edu/sc/purchase/ for more details, including a link to the online application.

  • Funding: IPRH Research Clusters Deadline Approaching

    Deadline: April 5, 2019

    The IPRH Research Clusters initiative enables faculty and graduate students in the humanities and arts from the University of Illinois campus to develop questions or subjects of inquiry that require or would be enhanced by collaborative work.

    For 2019–20, IPRH will award funding to a maximum of six Research Clusters on a competitive basis.

    Successful applicants will receive grants of $2,500 to support their cluster’s activities.

    Learn more about Research Clusters terms and application guidelines.

  • Training: Register now for the 2019 Intermediate Linux Clusters Institute (LCI) Workshop

    Registration is now open for the 2019 Linux Clusters Institute (LCI) Intermediate Workshop, which will be held May 13-17, 2019 at the University of Oklahoma. This workshop provides education and technical training for the deployment and use of computing clusters to the high performance computing community worldwide. Those who have attended an Introductory LCI workshop in the past are especially encouraged to attend.

    If you have some experience as an HPC system administrator and want to expand your skills, this is the workshop for you. In just five days you will: 

    Strengthen your overall knowledge of HPC system administrationFocus in depth on file systems and storage, HPC networks, job schedulers, and CephGet hands-on training and discuss real-life stories with experienced HPC administrators 

    Register: http://linuxclustersinstitute.org/workshops/interm19/register.php 

    Not ready for the intermediate workshop? LCI is offering an Introductory Workshop in August 2019.

    Contact Leslie Froeschl at lfroesh@illinois.edu with any questions.

  • Registration Open for SPaRC'Ed Research Administration Certification Series

    SPaRC'Ed annually solicits applications for participation in the SPaRC'Ed certification series. The SPaRC'Ed committee reviews and selects applicants based upon multiple factors, including their role in sponsored projects administration, their unit's degree of sponsored projects and research involvment, and the applicant's personal statement. Applications of all experience and knowledge levels are encouraged to apply.

    The application form can be accessed from the link below during the application period.

    The 2019-2020 SPaRC'Ed application period is now open and will close on Friday, April 19, 2019.

    Click here to apply.

  • Illinois Astrofest on April 23rd - registration open

    The Illinois Astrofest, sponsored by the Department of Astronomy and NCSA, is an annual showcase for research in astronomy, astrophysics, and related fields at the University of Illinois.  The first Astrofest will be held on the ground floor of the NCSA on Tuesday, April 23, 2019, from 2-4:45 pm.  There will be two oral sessions with a 1-hour poster session in between.  The meeting is open to all members of the campus community, although advance registration is required because of space constraints.  Please use this link to register.

    The latest version of the program is available here.

  • Introduction to MATLAB for Data Analysis

    Join MATLAB expert and U. of I. alumnus, James Kristoff, on April 11 or 12 for a webinar to learn how to utilize MATLAB for Data Analysis. Both sessions will cover how to import data from sources like Excel, SQL Database, .txt files and more. You'll also learn how to manipulate and visualize data and share your results with others. Register for this free webinar through WebStore.

  • NCSA hosting XSEDE HPC Workshop on April 3-4

    The National Center for Supercomputing Applications is one of many host-sites for XSEDE's upcoming HPC Workshop, focused on MPI and parallel programming. If you are a researcher interested in adding high-performance computing to your research, this workshop offers a hands-on introduction. To register, sign up at https://www.xsede.org/web/xup/course-calendar/-/training-user/class/593/session/153

  • Registration for 2019 Linux Clusters Institute's (LCI) Workshops now open

    Registration is now open for the Linux Clusters Institute's (LCI) weeklong, hands-on Introductory and Intermediate workshops. These workshops will cover the fundamentals of setting up and administering a high-performance computing (HPC) cluster and will be led by some of the world's leading HPC experts.

  • Deadly handshake: Blue Waters reveals how staph bacteria cling to human cells

    What makes pathogenic bacteria so persistent? Researchers from the Beckman Instituteat the University of Illinois and the University of Munich (LMU) are using the National Center for Supercomputing Applications' (NCSA) Blue Waters supercomputer to simulate and decipher the physical adhesion mechanism of a widespread pathogen virulence factor.

  • Illinois contributes to EHT's capturing first-ever image of a black hole

    Event Horizon Telescope (EHT)—a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes forged through international collaboration—was designed to capture images of a black hole. Today, in coordinated press conferences around the globe, EHT researchers revealed that they have succeeded, unveiling the first direct visual evidence of a supermassive black hole and its shadow.

  • Cancer Research Advocacy Day - Registration open

    Composed of individuals who have been diagnosed with cancer or have a strong personal connection to it, the Cancer Research Advocacy Group (CRAG) represent and share insights and experiences of cancer survivors. CRAG's Research Advocacy Day at the I-Hotel and Conference Center will promote interactions between cancer survivors, researchers, and clinicians and honor those who have been impacted by the disease. Register to present or find more information.

  • Undergraduate Research in the Humanities: Challenges and Possibilities Retreat

    Friday, August 23, 2019, 8:30–5 p.m. | Levis Faculty Center (919 W. Illinois St., Urbana)

    Registration Form

    IPRH and the Office of Undergraduate Research seek to bring together faculty and staff to consider how we engage the undergraduate research experience at Illinois and how we might create a set of new models to shape the future of undergraduate research that re-centers the importance of the humanities in undergraduate education at Illinois.

    Participants can expect to hear details about competitive grant opportunities to develop ideas that they generate, with particular attention to those that engage digital methods, underrepresented and underserved students, or emphasize a public-facing dimension. These grants will be offered by the Office of Undergraduate Research and IPRH, up to $5,000.

    Keynote by Ellen McClure, professor of French and Francophone Studies and History, and Director of the Engaged Humanities Initiative at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Panels and discussions/breakout sessions will follow.

    Early bird registration is now open. Registration is required and seats are limited.

  • The need for speed: new iforge gpus enable faster models, simulations

    With the latest NVIDIA V100 GPUs and NVlink interconnect, Industry partner engineers and scientists can get more from their machine learning and engineering applications. Read more

  • Register now for the IGB Fellows Symposium

    The Institute for Genomic Biology Fellows Symposium will take place May 2, 2019. Speakers include NIH Distinguised Investigator Elaine Ostrander. Register now.

  • Blue Waters User Claire Porter Wins NOAA David Johnson Award for ArcticDEM Research

    Blue Waters researcher Claire Porter received the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) David Johnson Award for her work as project manager and lead developer of the ArcticDEM project. This award is given to young professionals who “developed an innovative application of Earth observation satellite data that is, or could be, used for operational purposes to assess and/or predict atmospheric, oceanic, or terrestrial conditions.” Porter and the ArcticDEM team use stereoscopic images from satellite data leveraging the high-resolution images with the Blue Waters supercomputer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) to create digital elevation models (DEMs) to map the Arctic, the Antarctic, and soon, the entire world.

  • The Research IT Portal is Live!

    The new, eagerly anticipated Research IT Portal is live! Visit researchit.illinois.edu to use the portal or the Tech Services website to learn more about it.

  • Urban Informatics and the High Frequency City

    The rapid evolution of information technologies to the point where most active citizens are able to access global information using personal devices is changing the city out of all recognition. This lecture will outline the ways in which such technologies are generating a new functioning of the city which we call ‘urban informatics’, and we will explore the implications of these developments for our understanding of the city and its design

  • Harnessing Technology Series to Host Desmond Patton

    The Harnessing Technology for Social Good Series welcomes Desmond Patton, Associate Professor of Social Work at Columbia University. Dr. Patton uses qualitative and computational methods to examine the relationship between youth and gang violence and social media; how and why violence, grief and identity are expressed in social media and the implications on well-being for low income youth of color. Register for the talk.

    Can’t attend? View the event live by visiting: go.illinois.edu/socialwork_techseries

  • Text Encoding Initiative 2019 Call for Papers

    The Program Committee is pleased to announce its call for proposals for the 19th annual Conference and Members’ Meeting of the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium (TEI), which will be held September 18–20, 2019 (Wed-Fri), at the University of Graz, Austria; with workshops September 16–17 (Mon-Tue).

    This year’s theme is: "What is text, really? TEI and beyond"

    This year’s TEI conference wants not only to reach the community interested in digital representation and processing of text, but also to encourage scholars working on the fringes of the TEI and beyond to join us in discussion.