CNI News

Following up on my earlier posting, here are more details on the upcoming Research Data Management Implementation Workshop scheduled for Washington DC on March 13-14, 2013.

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

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Research Data Management Implementations Workshop funded by the National Science Foundation
March 13 – 14, 2013
Westin Arlington Gateway, Arlington VA

We are pleased to announce the NSF funded workshop on “Research Data Management Implementations” (RDMI).

The objective of this workshop is to bring together research computing communities including researchers, campus information technology (IT) leaders, library/archive specialists, and leading experts in data management to discuss actual implementation architectures as they relate to discipline-specific workflows and deployments. This workshop will build on the results of the NSF funded Research Data Lifecycle Management Workshop held at Princeton University in 2011. RDMI will shift focus to implementations of solutions and encourage open discussion of available strategies for data management in specific fields based on actual case studies.

The workshop is held in conjunction with the Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation (CASC) Spring Meeting, held March 13-15, 2013.

We now seek applications for participation and submissions of position papers for the workshop. In order to apply, please go to https://rdmi.uchicago.edu/ and follow the left hand navigation to register to attend the workshop in Arlington or via live webcast. The deadline for applications and paper submissions is February 20, 2013, but we will accept applications and papers on a rolling basis. There is no cost to register for this workshop. We also encourage reserving hotel rooms at the conference hotel as soon as possible, as there are a limited number of rooms, with a February 6th deadline to reserve at conference rates.

Important Dates:

• Paper submission and registration deadline: February 20, 2013 (but accepted and reviewed on a rolling basis)
• Deadline to receive discounted hotel room rate: February 6, 2013
• Workshop dates: March 13-14, 2013

Workshop Description:

The deluge of data generated from experiments, observations and simulations creates many challenges for researchers. Adequate data management implementations are becoming critical due to the need to not only collect and analyze large volumes of raw data, but also to store and curate that data in ways that facilitate its retrieval and analysis in future studies. As data collections grow in size and complexity, so too does the computing infrastructure needed to support them. Technologies used to create and study data collections are also evolving rapidly. Even when provided with best practices, researchers typically lack the expertise and the hardware and software infrastructure required to implement these solutions. Further complicating the data management process is the fact that these processes often depend on domain specific workflows. Establishing and efficiently executing these data management processes can demand substantial time and resources that most researchers do not have or cannot easily acquire. Researchers need turn-key (but customizable) solutions and community accepted practices to solve their data management problems.

This workshop will bring together research computing communities and leading experts in data management to discuss actual implementation architectures as they relate to discipline-specific workflows and deployments. We will invite submission of position and experience papers that describe implementations of discipline-based data management infrastructure and services, and the ways in which those solutions leverage resources within and outside their institutions. The workshop will also engage participants in a discussion of how a coordinated effort among research computing centers may accelerate the implementation of effective research data management workflows, and contribute to national efforts and initiatives.

On-site participation will be limited to approximately seventy-five leaders. In addition, video-conferencing will be used to reach a much broader range of off-site participants. We hope to engage a diverse population of researchers and professionals involved in research data lifecycle management to represent varying perspectives and differing institutions in the conversation.

We strongly encourage submission of position papers. The papers will help to gather input from a broad community to seed the conversations at the workshop. Position papers should be 2-5 pages, and can be submitted as described on the registration website any time from now through February 20, 2013 at 5pmCST.

This NSF funded workshop is in collaboration between the Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation (CASC), and will be hosted at the Westin Arlington Gateway Hotel in Arlington, VA Wednesday, March 13 – Thursday, March 14, 2013. The workshop will include a reception and dinner at the Westin Hotel on Wednesday, March 13th at 6:30pmEST. The findings of the workshop will be described in a report made available following the workshop.

Please feel free to contact the organizing committee by email if you have any questions, concerns, or suggestions at rdmi.

Kind regards,
RDMI Organizing Committee

Hakizumwami Birali Runesha – Chair
Director of Research Computing, The University of Chicago

Rajendra (Raj) Bose
Manager, Research Computing Services, Columbia University

Julio Facelli
Professor and Interim Chair of Biomedical Informatics, Director Center for High Performance Computing, The University of Utah

Ian Foster
Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor: Department of Computer Science; Director: Computation Institute; Distinguished Fellow: MCS Division, Argonne, The University of Chicago

Thomas Furlani
Director Center for Computational Research, Interim Associate Vice President for Information Technology, University of Buffalo

Ruth Marinshaw
Chief Technology Officer – Research Computing, Stanford University

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CASCmem mailing list
CASCmem
http://lists.osc.edu/mailman/listinfo/cascmem

The Advanced Core Technologies Initiative (ACTI) at EDUCAUSE has just released a report from a working group that has been studying the development and depolyment of institutional services to help researchers to prepare data management plans to accompany grant proposals. The report can be found at:

http://www.educause.edu/library/resources/developing-institutional-research-data-management-plan-service

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

In December 2012 Brown University hosted a fascinating workshop (which I was unfortunately unable to attend) looking at issues in the reproducibility of computational and experimental mathematics, which has many connections to broader questions about scientific data management and cyberinfrastructure requirements to support reproducibility. The workshop web page, which can be found at

http://icerm.brown.edu/tw12-5-rcem

links to many of the presentations and position papers, as well as extensive reference resources.

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

Many readers of CNI-announce are aware of the work of the newly-formed Research Data Alliance, which gave a presentation at our December 2012 CNI Member Meeting in Washington.

Fran Berman, who leads the United States participation in the Alliance, has asked me to share the note below with the CNI community, inviting participation in the RDA Launch Event, which will be held in Gothenburg, Sweeden on March 18-20, 2013.

Clifford Lynch
DIrector, CNI

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Colleagues,

I am writing to invite you to attend the launch and first Plenary of the Research Data Alliance (rd-alliance.org), which will take place March 18-20, 2013 in Gothenburg, Sweden. The Research Data Alliance (RDA) is being formed as a global community-driven organization to accelerate data-driven innovation through research data sharing and exchange. Broad community engagement and targeted efforts are critical to the RDA’s success and we invite you to participate actively in the RDA.
Please join us for the for 3 days of outstanding speakers, working sessions, active contributions, and community discussion at the RDA’s launch and first Plenary. An invitation can be found on the rd-alliance.org website at http://rd-alliance.org/invitation/, and the link to registration is at http://rd-alliance.org/registration. We look forward to your participation and hope to see you in Gothenburg!

Fran Berman
Chair, RDA/US

The Spring 2013 CNI Membership Meeting will be held on April 4-5 (Thursday and Friday) at the Westin Riverwalk in San Antonio, TX. Registration materials will be sent shortly to designated member representatives. Please note that the meeting and hotel registration deadline is Tuesday, March 5. For more information, see the meeting website:

http://www.cni.org/mm/spring-2013/

We are now accepting proposals for project briefings, 45-minute or one-hour sessions that focus on a specific institutional project related to digital information or a discussion of a hot topic. A limited number of project briefings are accepted. Proposals may be submitted via online form:

http://www.cni.org/mm/spring-2013/s13-submit-a-proposal/

or via an e-mail message to Joan Lippincott at joan. Proposal submissions are due no later than Thursday, February 21.

The Twitter hashtag for this meeting is #cni13s.

We look forward to seeing you in San Antonio!

MOOCs, Mobility, and Changing Scholarly Practice: CNI’s Perspective on 2012 and 2013, the opening plenary from CNI’s fall 2012 membership meeting by director Clifford Lynch, is now available on CNI’s two video channels:

YouTube:

Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/55881513

In this talk, Clifford looks back on the events of 2012, and he discusses CNI’s program for the coming year.

Previously-released video from this meeting:
-Massive Open Online Courses as Drivers for Change (Lynne O’Brien, Duke U.)
http://youtu.be/UbK0i4mhpWU

Look for more announcements soon on videos of other sessions from the fall 2012 CNI meeting. To see all videos available from CNI, visit CNI’s video channels on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/cnivideo) and Vimeo (http://vimeo.com/channels/cni).

I wanted to share the following announcement from Rajendra Bose about a workshop that I think will be of considerable interest to the CNI community.

With best wishes for 2013

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI
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We have received NSF funding for a workshop on Research Data Management Implementations (RDMI).  The workshop will be held March 13-14, 2013 at the Westin Hotel in Arlington, VA, and will be in conjunction with the Spring Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation (CASC) Meeting (http://www.casc.org).  We will send out complete information soliciting position and experience papers and registration to attend the workshop shortly.

The organizing committee is comprised of Hakizumwami Birali Runesha, University of Chicago – Chair; Rajendra Bose, Columbia University; Julio Facelli, University of Utah; Ian Foster, University of Chicago; Thomas Furlani, University of Buffalo; and Ruth Marinshaw, Stanford University.

More information about the workshop can be found at
http://rdmi.sites.uchicago.edu/

Thank you,

The RDMI 2013 Workshop Organizing Committee

Massive Open Online Courses as Drivers for Change by Lynne O’Brien of Duke University, a project briefing session presented at CNI’s fall 2012 membership meeting (http://www.cni.org/mm/fall-2012/), is now available on CNI’s two video channels:

Vimeo:

YouTube:  http://youtu.be/UbK0i4mhpWU

About the presentation:
Since announcing a partnership with Coursera in July 2012, Duke has launched two Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and has eight more in development. Spanning humanities, social sciences and science topics, these courses have over 320,000 enrollments as of October 2012. Duke’s goals in experimenting with MOOCs are to drive teaching innovation in both campus-based and online courses, to extend Duke’s commitment to knowledge in service to society, and to expand Duke’s reach and reputation in a global environment.

In this presentation, O’Brien describes how the Coursera partnership has shaped campus discussions about higher education and teaching, and she discusses the impact of MOOCs on library planning and academic technology support. O’Brien also explores the rapidly evolving format of MOOC courses and considers what the implications may be for campus-based courses in the near future.

More videos of other sessions from the fall 2012 CNI meeting are forthcoming. All videos from CNI are available on CNI’s video channels:  YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/cnivideo) and Vimeo (http://vimeo.com/channels/cni).

The US National Academies Board on Research Data and Information (BRDI) is clearing out its publication release backlog as a special holiday gift for us all. This is the last of a number of announcements I’ve shared over the past week or two noting these releases for CNI-announce readers.

The report I’m covering here is based on an excellent symposium that the Academies hosted in Washington DC in May 2011 on Scientific Knowledge Discovery in Open Network Environments. The full announcement is below. The report is available for free download as a PDF.

With Best Wishes for the Holidays

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI
(Full Disclosure: I am currently co-chair of BRDI and was a participant in the symposium.)
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Dear Colleagues:

On behalf of the National Research Council, I am pleased to transmit to you the report:  The Future of Scientific Knowledge Discovery in Open Networked Environments: A National Symposium and Workshop. It is available freely at: http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=18258 on the websites of the National Academies Press and the Board on Research Data and Information (BRDI).

As you know, BRDI held a national workshop on this topic in Washington, DC on 10-11 March 2011 to bring together key stakeholders in this area for intensive and structured discussions. The meeting explored options to obtain and promote a better understanding of the computer-mediated scientific knowledge discovery processes and mechanisms for openly available data and information online across the scientific domains. The workshop resulted in a report that synthesizes the contributions of the experts, and presents an authoritative and high-level review of the most promising and effective research opportunities in this area.

Sincerely yours,

Paul F. Uhlir
Director,
Board on Research Data and Information

On July 5-6 2012 JISC and CNI held a small invitational meeting in Birmingham, England to explore developments in scholarly communications and the implications of these for research institutions. A report from the meeting, prepared by Alma Swan,  is now available at

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/reports/2012/transforming-opportunities.aspx

The JISC Inform web site also contains a collection of video clips of interviews with some of the meeting participants at

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/inform/inform35/CNIandJisc.html

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI