IU Open Systems Lab Researcher Receives Microsoft Award
Congratulations to Joseph Cottam of the Open Systems Lab (OSL) on recently receiving the first ever Microsoft award from the International Network of Social Network Analysis (INSNA) for his paper "Extended Assortivity and the Structure in the Open Source Development Community", co-authored with OSL director Andrew Lumsdaine. The award includes a $1,000 cash prize provided by a donation from Microsoft given to authors of outstanding papers that address social relations aspects of software development. Cottam and Lumsdaine introduce a set of tools they call "Developmetrics" to investigate community formation and product development in the open source software community. Read the paper.
The IEEE eScience 2008 Conference, hosted by Indiana University, is now accepting papers and proposals for tutorials; posters, exhibits and demos; and workshops and special sessions. Visit the IEEE eScience 2008 Conference website.
University Information Technology Services will deploy a new, improved and much larger wireless network on the two core campuses during the next few months. The IU community will find it easier to connect securely to the IU network and the Internet. Users will see the new wireless network displayed as "IU Secure."
The new system utilizes a standard called WPA2 Enterprise to replace VPN (virtual private networking) as the means for securely accessing wireless networks. It will provide an authenticated and encrypted wireless connection in a way that is significantly more user friendly than VPN, a full path to the 802.11N standard when it is officially ratified later this year, and potential access speeds exceeding 100Mbps.
Indiana University neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor was selected as one of Time Magazine's "100 most influential people in the world."
One morning in 1996, a congenital malformation of the blood vessels in her brain exploded, and for four hours she watched her mind deteriorate "through the eyes of a curious scientist." Her account, My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey, describes in lay terms the anatomy underlying her experience of stroke, and her commitment during the next eight years to rebuild the left side of her brain.
Taylor teaches neuroanatomy for the IU School of Medicine and studies brain cancer cases at IU's Midwest Proton Radiotherapy Institute, in Bloomington. She also serves as president of the Greater Bloomington Area Affiliate of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, and is the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center's national spokeswoman for the mentally ill, for which she makes presentations nationwide -- often singing to lighten the mood -- about the human brain and brain donation. More information is available.
Katy Borner, Steven J. Sherman and Alessandro Vespignani will oversee the EpiC project, short for Epidemics Cyberinfrastructure, which they hope will make the sharing and re-using of epidemics datasets and algorithms as easy as sharing videos via YouTube.
EpiC will also provide services to researchers who may not have easy access to sophisticated analysis and visualization tools. A Web portal will allow scientists anywhere in the world to upload their epidemiological data for colleagues to see, and also have it analyzed using models of their choosing. The system will be designed to handle all sorts of epidemics, from the pathogen-based SARS to human behavioral epidemics.
More information is available.
The mission of the Research Technologies (RT) division of UITS is to provide and support the world-class research computing resources that enable new scientific and artistic breakthroughs at Indiana University. RT supports IU's researchers, scientists, artists, clinicians, and students; fosters collaborations; and aids innovations that advance information technology at IU and in the state of Indiana. RT systems and services support all IU campuses.
Indiana University's Big Red system is one of the fastest supercomputers in the world. Big Red is part of a comprehensive strategy to build an advanced cyberinfrastructure to support Indiana University research, which includes high performance computers, massive data storage systems, data resources, advanced instruments, sensor networks, and expert consultants, all linked together by advanced software and high performance networks to improve research productivity and enable breakthroughs not otherwise possible.
