A benefit that I thoroughly enjoy from being the CIO at Missouri University of Science and Technology is the opportunity to promote, support and participate in research activities. The capstone event that represents IT’s involvement with research is our “Research and Technology Development Conference”, RTD2014, that takes place next week, September 15-16. Putting together a conference such as this is an incredible amount of work which tells you that last year’s event must have been successful or we would never have committed to another year. Actually that is true, at this point in the life span of RTD, 4th annual, a negative outcome would cause us to abandon the effort for the following year. But no, this year’s RTD will be more amazing and we will probably be motivated to continue the tradition.
Here is a quick overview of what the RTD attendees can expect.
Keynote speakers this year include:
(Monday) Wesley Chun, from Google and author of the “Core Python” Series of books
(Tuesday) Mark Suskin, PhD, from the NSF Division of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure
The conference content is focused around three major pillars:
Computational Science, led by University of Oklahoma and University of Nebraska
Additive Manufacturing, led by University of Louisville and Missouri S&T
Large Scale Visualization, led by Indiana University and University of Texas
Monday morning kicks off with various workshops focused around our Pillars and a very popular Python workshop provided by Wesley Chun. The sessions scheduled for Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning will be showcasing the latest developments in the 3 Pillar areas driven by the lead institutions.
In addition, the RTD Monday Night Social is a networking event not to be missed. In keeping with S&T interests, there will be catered BBQ (from various vendors across Missouri), music, and an incredible fireworks show by the S&T explosives experts.
So why do we do this? The original driver for such a conference is the need to create an opportunity for your university research community to collaborate. Typically this is called Cyberinfrastructure Days at many research institutions and it is required if you receive government research funding. Last year we decided to expand this to more of a regional event thinking that it would promote more intercampus collaboration. It has definitely stimulated more regional research collaboration with respect to sharing resources such as HPC. The potential for RTD justifies the investment especially with help from our vendor community, but it is our amazing staff and students who make it successful. We plan on launching a number of new projects after introducing them at RTD. I’ll follow up with a recap post.
