The hubzero conference

Andy Burnett

Andy Burnett is CEO of Knowinnovation Inc, a consulting firm with offices in Cambridge, Paris, and Buffalo NY. The firm focuses on mechanisms to accelerate scientific innovation.

Prior to joining Knowinnovation Andy was Co-director of the Centre for Creativity at the Cranfield School of Management, in the UK.

Designing Your Ideal Creative Network.

Tuesday, September 25, 2012, 11:00am – 11:30am

Abstract

Difficult problems can often be solved by talking with the 'right' person. But, finding that person can be tricky. Social networking systems might make this easier, but they aren't really designed for problem solving. This talk will explore some of the ways in which we might develop networks that can amplify our problem solving skills.

Noshir Contractor

Noshir Contractor is the Jane S. & William J. White Professor of Behavioral Sciences in the McCormick School of Engineering & Applied Science, the School of Communication and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, USA. He is the Director of the Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) Research Group at Northwestern University.

He is investigating factors that lead to the formation, maintenance, and dissolution of dynamically linked social and knowledge networks in a wide variety of contexts including communities of practice in business, translational science and engineering communities, public health networks and virtual worlds. His research program has been funded continuously for over 15 years by major grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation with additional current funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), Army Research Institute, Army Research Laboratory, Air Force Research Laboratory, and the Gates Foundation.

Professor Contractor has published or presented over 250 research papers dealing with communicating and organizing. His book titled Theories of Communication Networks (co-authored with Professor Peter Monge and published by Oxford University Press) received the 2003 Book of the Year award from the Organizational Communication Division of the National Communication Association and was translated into Simplified Chinese in 2010. He is the lead developer of C-IKNOW (Cyberinfrastructure for Inquiring Knowledge Networks On the Web), a socio-technical environment to understand and enable networks among communities, as well as Blanche, a software environment to simulate the dynamics of social networks.

Some Assembly Required: Organizing in the 21st century

Monday, September 24, 2012, 9:00am – 9:30am

Abstract

Recent technological advances provide comprehensive digital traces of social actions, interactions, and transactions. These data provide an unprecedented exploratorium to model the socio-technical motivations for creating, maintaining, dissolving, and reconstituting into teams – for research, business, or social causes. Using examples from research in virtual organizations (such as nanoHUB) and massively multiplayer online games, Contractor will argue that Network Science serves as the foundation for the development of social network theories and methods to help advance our ability to understand the emergence of effective teams. More importantly, he will argue that these insights will also enable effective teams by building a new generation of recommender systems that leverage our research insights on the socio-technical motivations for creating ties.

David De Roure

David De Roure is Director and Professor of e-Research in the Oxford e-Research Centre, the UK’s National Strategic Director for Digital Social Research and has a coordinating role in Digital Humanities in Oxford. Focused on advancing digital scholarship, he has worked closely with multiple disciplines including bioinformatics (in silico experimentation), chemistry (smart labs), environmental science (sensor networks), social sciences (social statistics, behavioural interventions and social machines) and digital humanities (computational musicology). He runs the myexperiment.org social website for sharing scientific workflows and has an extensive background in distributed computing, Web, Linked Data, and social computing, promoting new forms of scholarly communication in the context of increasing automation. David has been closely involved in the UK e-Science programme and is chair of the UK e-Infrastructure Academic Community Forum, a champion for the Web Science Trust and leads the W3C Web Observatory Community Group.

myExperiment and the rise of Social Machines

Tuesday, September 25, 2012, 9:00am – 9:30am

Ewa Deelman

Ewa Deelman is a Research Associate Professor at the USC Computer Science Department and a Project Leader at the USC Information Sciences Institute. Dr. Deelman's research interests include the design and exploration of collaborative, distributed scientific environments, with particular emphasis on workflow management as well as the management of large amounts of data and metadata. At ISI, Dr. Deelman is leading the Pegasus project, which designs and implements workflow mapping techniques for large-scale applications running in distributed environments. Pegasus is being used today in a number of scientific disciplines, enabling researches to formulate complex computations in a declarative way. Over the years, Dr. Deelman worked with a number of application domains including astronomy, bioinformatics, earthquake science, gravitational-wave physics, and others. As part of these collaborations, new advances in computer science and in the domain sciences were made. For example, the data intensive workflows in LIGO (gravitational-wave physics) motivated new workflow analysis algorithms that minimize workflow data footprint during execution. On the other hand, improvements in the scalability of workflows enabled SCEC scientists (earthquake science) to develop new physics-based seismic hazard maps of Southern California. In 2007, Dr. Deelman edited a book on workflow research: “Workflows in e-Science: Scientific Workflows for Grids”, published by Springer 2007. She is also the founder of the annual Workshop on Workflows in Support of Large-Scale Science, which is held in conjunction with the Super Computing conference. In 1997 Dr. Deelman received her PhD in Computer Science from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Her thesis topic was in the area of parallel discrete event simulation, where she applied parallel programming techniques to the simulation of the spread of Lyme disease in nature.

Managing Workflows Within HUBzero: How to Use Pegasus to Execute Computational Pipelines

Monday, September 24, 2012, 11:30am – 12:00pm

Abstract

This talk will focus on the ability to construct and execute computational pipelines/workflows within the HUBzero environment using the Pegasus Workflow Management System. Pegasus is available today in NEES.org, DiaGrid.org, and other hubs. Pegasus allows users to develop workflows at a high-level of abstraction, without worrying about the details of the execution environment. The workflow includes information about the workflow steps, the input and output data they take-in and produce. Each hub is pre-configured for a particular execution environment, so that users can seamlessly launch their workflows on the available resources. Pegasus provides monitoring interfaces to follow the progress of the workflow. When failures occur, it tries to recover from them. However, if recovery is not possible, Pegasus provides detailed failure information. The standalone version of Pegasus has been used in a variety of domains: astronomy, bioinformatics, earth science, physics, and others. Pegasus within the hub opens up its capabilities to a broader range of users.

Gerhard Klimeck

Gerhard Klimeck is director of the Network for Computational Nanotechnology (NCN) and professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University. His research interest is the modeling of nanoelectronic devices, genetic algorithm-based optimization, and impact studies through science gateways. He is a fellow of both the American Physical Society and the Institute of Physics. His over 320 peer reviewed papers resulted in a citation h-index of 37.

Mythbusting Scientific Knowledge Transfer with nanoHUB.org

Tuesday, September 25, 2012, 8:30am – 9:00am

Abstract

NCN operates nanoHUB.org, a science and engineering gateway providing the capability to perform online simulation resources through a web browser without the installation of any software. In 2007, NCN separated the nano content from the cyber platform, making the HUBzero solution available to other science gateways. Today, more than 230,000 users in 172 different countries annually participate in nanoHUB, an online meeting place for simulations, research, collaborations, teaching, learning and publishing. Over 12,000 users run simulation software from their browser in nanoHUB’s science computing cloud. Cumulatively over 14,000 students in over 700 classes utilized nanoHUB simulations in classrooms and over 1,400 authors reference nanoHUB in over 850 scientific publications. The platform has spawned nanoHUB-U and, in turn, Purdue HUB-U, interfaces for online courses that are broadly accessible around the world.

Thomas Kurfess

Thomas R. Kurfess received his S.B., S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in mechanical engineering from M.I.T. in 1986, 1987 and 1989, respectively. He also received an S.M. degree from M.I.T. in electrical engineering and computer science in 1988. Following graduation, he joined Carnegie Mellon University where he rose to the rank of Associate Professor. In 1994 he moved to the Georgia Institute of Technology where he rose to the rank of Professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. In 2005 he was named Professor and BMW Chair of Manufacturing in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Clemson University’s International Center for Automotive Research. In 2012 he returned to Georgia Tech as a Professor of Mechanical Engineering, where he is currently on leave and is serving as the Assistant Director for Advanced Manufacturing at the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Executive Office of the President of the United States of America. In this position he has responsibility for engaging the federal sector and the greater scientific community to identify possible areas for policy actions. He is responsible for coordinating Federal advanced manufacturing R&D, addressing issues related to technology commercialization, identifying gaps in current Federal R&D in advanced manufacturing, and developing strategies to address these gaps. He has served as a special consultant of the United Nations to the Government of Malaysia in the area of applied mechatronics and manufacturing, and as a participating guest at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in their Precision Engineering Program. He currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Society of Manufacturing Engineers, and the National Center for Manufacturing Sciences. His research focuses on the design and development of advanced systems targeting the automotive sector (OEM and supplier) including vehicle and production systems. He has significant experience in high precision manufacturing and metrology systems. He has received numerous awards including a National Science Foundation (NSF) Young Investigator Award, an NSF Presidential Faculty Fellowship Award, the ASME Pi Tau Sigma Award, SME Young Manufacturing Engineer of the Year Award, the ASME Blackall Machine Tool and Gage Award, the ASME Gustus L. Larson Award, an ASME Swanson Federal Award, and the SME Education Award. He is a Fellow of the AAAS, the SME and the ASME.

Manufacturing An America Built to Last

Monday, September 24, 2012, 9:30am – 10:00am

Abstract

President Obama stated in the 2012 STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS that an AMERICA BUILT to LAST requires an innovative and strong manufacturing industry. The US manufacturing industry is at a transformational point in history and requires support from the US government to flourish. Dr. Kurfess will speak about the impact of manufacturing on innovation and the polices and initiatives that the White House is enacting to support the economic engine of America.

Gerry McCartney

Gerry McCartney serves as Purdue University's chief information officer and is responsible for overseeing the University’s information technology organization. He also holds an appointment as the Inaugural Director of the Innovation for Commercialization Center.

Under McCartney's leadership, Purdue has developed the nation's largest campus cyberinfrastructure for research, with five supercomputers listed in the internationally known Top500 list. Also during his tenure, Purdue has developed some of the nation's most advanced learning and classroom technologies, including Signals and Hotseat. In addition, in 2010 McCartney provided oversight to a campus-wide restructuring of the information technology resources used by the nearly 15,000 faculty and staff on campus.

McCartney is an associate professor in Purdue's College of Technology and is the inaugural recipient of the Olga Oesterle England Professorship of Information Technology.

Before becoming CIO, McCartney served two years as assistant dean for technology at Purdue's Krannert School of Management, where he taught in the MBA, executive MBA and engineering management programs. From 1993 to 2004, McCartney was associate dean and chief information officer at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. He was director of the Krannert Computing Center from 1990 to 1993 and was manager of user services at the Purdue Computing Center from 1988 to 1990. He also has held managerial positions in the computing centers at both the University of Notre Dame and Maynooth College in Ireland.

Creating Tools for Research and Instruction

Monday, September 24, 2012, 10:30am – 11:00am

Jarek Nabrzyski

Jarek Nabrzyski is director of the University of Notre Dame's Center for Research Computing (CRC). Before coming to Notre Dame Nabrzyski worked at LSU's Center for Computation and Technology, and before that, at Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center (PSNC). It was at PSNC where he got first interested in building science gateways and middleware tools. During his 13 years at PSNC Nabrzyski has built a team that developed and supported the GridSphere portlet framework, and later the VineToolkit framework. Both were used by many grid computing collaborations worldwide.

Within his last three years at Notre Dame Nabrzyski was involved in supporting many research projects. CRC's Interactive Collaborative Environments team developed many science portals / gateways, including some that used the HUBZero framework.

Nabrzyski has received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the Poznan University of Technology in Poland.

Cyberinfrastructure and Scientific Portals at the University of Notre Dame

Tuesday, September 25, 2012, 10:30am – 11:00am

HUBzero is growing leaps and bounds these days, powering everything from simple collaborative websites to compute intensive portals such as nanoHUB. Does this mean it’s a great fit for any website? When should HUBzero be used, and when other tools are a better fit? In this talk I will present Notre Dame's Center for Research Computing experiences with building science gateways, where both, HUBzero and non-HUBzero solutions were used.

Nancy Wilkins-Diehr

Nancy Wilkins-Diehr holds a BA in mathematics and philosophy from Boston College and an MASc from San Diego State University in aerospace engineering. She has held engineering positions with General Dynamics and General Atomics in San Diego. Since 1993, she has held a variety of positions at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, including Associate Director of Scientific Computing and project manager for the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI). She was the area director for the TeraGrid Science Gateways program from 2004-2011. Currently, Wilkins-Diehr co-directs NSF's XSEDE Extended Collaborative Support Services (ECSS) program and is a co-principal investigator on the XSEDE project. ECSS pairs members of the XSEDE user community with expert staff members for an extended period to work together to solve challenging science and engineering problems through the application of cyberinfrastructure. She is the PI on a new conceptualization grant through NSF's Scientific Software Innovation Institutes (S2I2) program to plan a Science Gateway Institute in collaboration with members of the HUBzero team and contributors from Elizabeth City State University, Indiana University, the University of Michigan and the University of Texas.

The Science Gateways and their Democratization and Acceleration of Science

Tuesday, September 25, 2012, 9:30am – 10:00am

Abstract

As science today grows increasingly digital, it poses exciting challenges and opportunities for researchers. Whether it¹s streaming data from sensors, simulating the formation of tornadoes, annotating and sharing tagged audio and video data, or using geographic information systems to anticipate the spread of disease, the frontiers of transformative science are enormous and continue to grow. Many scientists are turning to web portals or science gateways to allow them to analyze, share, and understand large volumes of data more effectively. The existence of science gateways ‹ and the sophisticated cyberinfrastructure (CI) tools and resources behind these accessible web interfaces can significantly improve the productivity of researchers facing the most difficult challenges. Most important, science gateways can democratize access to the cyberinfrastructure that enables cutting edge science. Now the best minds can tackle today¹s most challenging science problems, regardless of institutional affiliation.

Science gateway developers face several challenges. They often work in isolation even though development can be quite similar across domain areas, they bridge local, campus, national and sometimes international cyberinfrastructure, they need foundational building blocks so they can focus on higher-level grand-challenge functionality. Sustainable funding for science gateways can also be difficult to secure as they span the worlds of research and infrastructure. Experiences from the 7-year TeraGrid Science Gateways program, continuing gateway activities in XSEDE and new efforts to form a Science Gateways Institute will be discussed.

Welcome and describe the format of the Science Gateways breakout session

Tuesday, September 25, 2012, 1:30am – 1:35am

NSF Science Gateway Institute

Tuesday, September 25, 2012, 3:55am – 4:10am

Ann Bessenbacher

Ann Bessenbacher is a Project Coordinator for the Discovery Learning Research Center at Purdue University. She is the technology steward for STEMEdhub.org and also works on the management team for CLEERhub.org. She is also the database administrator and curator for all of the assessment data at the DLRC. Before that Ann served as the Data Operations Manager at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado. She works on the communities of practice for two different websites built on Purdue’s Hubzero technology. She has fifteen years of experience in the delivery of information and data, as well as the management and analysis in both scientific and administrative areas.

STEMEdhub.org a Group Approach to Hubs

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Abstract

Authors: Ann Bessenbacher, Debora Steffen, Gabriela Weaver, Wilella Burgess

Unlike most hubs that are designed around one central concept, STEMEdhub.org was created under the general concept of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) Education and it was designed as a set of smaller hubs set up as groups. We envisioned communities of practice being created under these smaller group umbrellas in the beginning, but as the hub evolves and grows over time we see the communities blending with each other and new larger communities emerging. The group approach has also allowed us to maximize the benefits of having a hub to many projects while sharing the expense of creation and maintenance amongst them. It also provides a robust and sustainable base that will continue beyond the life of any one project.

At the moment STEMEdhub.org has groups under three central themes: K-12 education, undergraduate education, and STEM education conferences. While developing groups in these areas we have discovered best practices, as well as how to maximize group features. During the presentation I will show how we have set-up the hub amongst the different groups, the best practices we have learned, new resource organization developed for groups, the challenges of working with multiple groups and agendas, as well as ideas for future group developments.

Ann Christine Catlin

Ann Christine Catlin is a research scientist in the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing at Purdue University. She received a B.S. in Mathematics from Seton Hill University and an M.S. in Mathematics from Notre Dame University. She was a research scientist in the Computer Science Department at Purdue before moving to the Rosen Center. Catlin worked on the design and development of problem-solving environments for partial differential equation-based applications on multi-computer platforms, and co-authored more than 40 peer-reviewed publications over a ten year period about her research. She created a knowledge-based shipboard troubleshooting system for the U.S. Navy, for which she won the School of Science Merit award for Extraordinary Achievement in 2004 and the Techpoint Mira Award in 2005. Catlin’s work at the Rosen Center has focused on creating a database technology for the HUBzero platform and using the technology to build customized databases. She has built 30 medical and scientific databases across 8 Hubs, supporting global data sharing for cancer research, infusion pump alert analysis, earthquake engineering, disaster and failure studies, nutrition science, pharmaceutical excipients, thermal measurements, and more. She is currently developing a service that allows Hub users to create their own databases.

Hub Databases: Moving Collaborative Research Forward

Monday, September 24, 2012, 11:00am – 11:30am

Abstract

Databases are now well established resources on many Hubs, and have been used for more than 3 years by large scale research projects and smaller research groups to support the collection, exploration, and sharing of data. We will take a tour of the databases at the Hubs, investigating why Hub communities need databases, and how databases are used to promote collaborative research. We will also take a brief look at the process of building a customized database, describing how the components of the database technology are used in conjunction with existing Hub infrastructure such as groups and tools. Finally, we will present the newest development in databases: a component that allows users to create their own databases at the Hub.

John Cobb

John Cobb is a researcher at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) specializing in introducing high performance computing and cyberinfrastructure for different areas of science and engineering research, particularly experimental and observational data sciences and areas that have not traditionally used these tools to accelerate and increase the impact of their research. His professional preparation includes a doctorate is in theoretical physics specializing in large scale computational plasma physics modeling and simulation applied to alternative fusion energy concepts. He has worked in several science areas, all with the unifying theme of applying advanced computation to solve research problems. Such areas have included: advanced fusion concepts; plasma based semiconductor fabrication equipment modeling; neutron scattering science; biological and ecological data synthesis, archive, and curation. Some of his previous positions have included: scientific computer user advisory committee chair for ORNL; CIO, IT-staff, and computer Security officer during the construction period for the Spallation Neutron Source; ORNL TeraGrid resource provider principal investigator; and Co-investigator and leadership team member for the national science Foundation’s DataONE Datanet project. He is currently on staff at ORNL’s Computer Science and Mathematics division.

An interoperable data repositories case study: DataONE

Monday, September 24, 2012, 1:45pm – 2:15pm

Joseph Cychosz

Joseph Cychosz began his computing career in 1974 at the University of Illinois where he became an electrical engineer by degree, and a programmer by trade, while working with the Control Data computer systems, a system comprising the university's computing center and PLATO system. Upon leaving the University of Illinois, Cychosz went to work for Control Data, where he eventually served as technical liaison between CDC's Supercomputing and CADCAM divisions and various university efforts. One of those efforts evolved into Purdue's NSF funded ERC for Collaborative Manufacturing.

With the founding of the Network for Computational Nanotechnology (NCN) and the NASA Institute for Nanoelectronics and Computing in 2002, Cychosz joined these efforts as systems manager and has migrated to production manager for online presentations. His team over the last 10 years have produced in excess of 40 nanotechnology related courses and more than 1500 lectures/seminars for nanoHUB.org. He also serves as site lead for the NCN@Purdue effort and general ombudsman for the other site leads.

Cychosz has a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois and a master's degree in mechanical engineering from Purdue University. He has published several articles on computer graphics and has authored contributions in the Graphics Gems series. He has chaired various committees for SIGGRAPH and is a member of ACM SIGGRAPH and the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers.

The Production Process for Online Presentations on nanoHUB.org

Monday, September 24, 2012, 3:30pm – 4:00pm

Abstract

Over the past 10 years, the NCN has produced more than 1400 online presentations in the form of course lectures, seminars and workshop presentations, and tutorials and has made them available on nanoHUB.org. These presentations have been viewed by almost 400,000 users and during the past year, more than 90,000 users have watched at least one of these presentations. In 2005 the NCN first introduced podcasts to nanoHUB.org.

This presentation will provide an overview of the techniques that NCN uses today to place lecture content on nanoHUB.org. A brief history of how we got from our first days of online content to the current methods we employ will also be presented. The NCN currently uses a variety of commercial and in-house developed tools in its production process and delivers content to the nanoHUB (podcasts, HTML5), iTunes U and YouTube.

WIND: A HTML5 presentation production tool

Tuesday, September 25, 2012, 1:30pm – 2:00pm

Abstract

Authors: Tianwei Liu, Joseph M. Cychosz

Since the advent of FLASH based presentations, new technological solutions have become available that are designed to support a plurality of devices, including mobile devices. One such technology has been HTML5. The NCN nanoHUB team has developed a HTML5 production tool, WIND, that it uses in the production of online presentations. WIND presentations work with a reference video and a powerpoint file. We have special techniques we use for presentations that are PDF and Keynote based. The talk will present how to use this tool and the techniques it uses.

Edward Duffy

Edward Duffy is a computational scientist in Clemson Computing and Information Technology, the university's central IT organization. Duffy’s primary responsibility is research support for the university’s high-performance cluster, and high-throughput Condor grid. His research support duties range from teaching classes for researchers new to the cyberinfrastructure resources; sitting down with researchers one-on-one to optimize their experience with the resources; and developing web applications dedicated to running specific research tools on the computational resources. He has helped bring computation to researchers in almost every science and engineering department on campus, as well as researchers from the agriculture, forestry, psychology, and architecture departments. As a part of Clemson’s University “Desktop to TeraGrid” project, Duffy has worked to bring Clemson’s computational resource to researchers at other academic institutions across the state of South Carolina.

Porting HUBzero to RHEL6

Tuesday, September 25, 2012, 4:00pm – 4:30pm

Abstract

In this presentation we discuss our effort in porting the HUBzero platform from Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 "lenny" to Redhat Enterprise Linux 6.0, RHEL6. RHEL6 is the most commonly utilized enterprise-class Linux distribution, and is required by our University's data center to integrate with existing services for virtual machine management, firewall management, data backup management, system monitoring, and security updates. We have taken the open source HUBzero packages, available from hubzero.org, and repackaged them from Debian's .deb format to RHEL6's .rpm package format. Building RPM packages not only includes the required software and data files, but also post-installation scripts to properly configure the software in an RHEL6 environment and setting a YUM repository for hosting our RPM packages. During the talk, we will cover the issues involved in porting the HUBzero platform to different versions of OpenLDAP, MySQL, Apache, and OpenVZ than it was originally designed for. Finally, we will present a GitHub hosted repository of our RPM build scripts, so that other HUBzero users may easily contribute changes.

Rudi Eigenmann

Rudolf Eigenmann is a professor at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Technical Director for HPC of the Computing Research Institute at Purdue University. He is a co-principal investigator for Information Technology in the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) Operations project, 2009-2014. His research interests include optimizing compilers, programming methodologies and tools, performance evaluation for high-performance computers and applications, and cyberinfrastructures. Dr. Eigenmann received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering/Computer Science in 1988 from ETH Zurich, Switzerland.  Address: 465 Northwestern Ave., West Lafayette, IN 47907, eigenman@purdue.edu

Introduction to data session

Monday, September 24, 2012, 1:30pm – 1:45pm

Amy Hatfield

Amy Hatfield joined Purdue University Libraries as Assistant Professor of Library Science, Metadata Specialist. Amy received her Master of Library Science from Indiana University, School of Library and Information Science with a specialty in library technologies.

Previous to Amy’s appointment to the Purdue Libraries, Amy was Associate Librarian, Digital Initiatives in the Indiana University School of Medicine, Ruth Lilly Medical Library.  While at the Medical Library, Amy and a colleague co-developed a mobile application for third and fourth year medical students which tracks required clinical skills acquired through their clinical rotations. In addition, Amy was involved in many funded digitization projects. Before Amy began her academic career, she was a programmer for a small technology consulting firm in Indianapolis.

As Metadata Specialist, Amy will engage with Purdue Faculty and Researchers through consultation and participation in projects with a metadata component. She is also involved with the Purdue Community in her role as Metadata Specialist for the Purdue University Research Repository (PURR). Amy’s research interests include “knowledge systems,” based on semantic web technologies;  optimizing metadata models for interoperability and reuse;  and the development of a Metadata Resource Database (MRD) that will identify appropriate metadata schemas and controlled vocabularies based on a specific domain or discipline. The MRD will be made available globally for guidance in the selection of metadata models and vocabularies to document, describe, and make discoverable research datasets in digital environments.

ISO:16363 & OAI-PMH: Research Data Management in the HUBzero Environment

Monday, September 24, 2012

Abstract

Authors: Amy Hatfield, Neal Harmeyer, Matthew Kroll, Brandon Beatty

The Purdue University Research Repository (PURR), built on the HUBzero platform, is designed to provide a virtual collaboration space for scientific research with the support of long-term preservation strategies. In light of the National Science Foundation Data Archiving Policy which states “researchers have a special obligation to scientific openness and accountability when the research is publicly funded," PURR serves as both research environment and data management provider. As PURR users may submit research data in a variety of file formats, a number of steps must be taken to successfully maintain data functionality. In order to insure long-term preservation and accessibility of the data, preservation actions take place at submission and throughout the life of each dataset. At present, HUBzero does not include robust long-term preservation support; as such, the PURR Project Team has been working to extend the PURR HUBzero platform to that end. The primary guiding document in this process has been the ISO:16363 Standard for Trustworthy Digital Repositories. The ISO standard calls for the implementation of descriptive and preservation metadata models, digital preservation planning and procedures, and a commitment to repository security and longevity. Additionally, the project team has focused upon integration of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). During a panel presentation, the PURR Project Team will illustrate and discuss the methods being employed to extend the HUBzero platform to comply with the NSF Data Archiving Policy and ISO:16363 Trusted Digital Repositories Standard.

George Howlett

Introducing the Rappture Toolkit

Monday, September 24, 2012

Abstract

Rappture is the Rapid APPlication infrastrucTURE, a toolkit within the HUBzero platform that makes it easy to develop a graphical user interface for scientific modeling tools. Once you describe the input/output for your simulator, Rappture handles the rest, generating a graphical interface automatically based on your description. Within your code, you access the input values and save resulting output values by using the Rappture application programming interface, which has bindings for a variety of languages, including C/C++, Fortran, MATLAB, Octave, Python, Perl, Java, Ruby, and Tcl. You can embed the Rappture calls within your tool, or create a wrapper script that wraps around your tool, leaving it untouched. Either way, users will see a simple, graphical interface where they can enter input values, press the "Simulate" button, and visualize the outputs as line graphs, contour plots, 3D isosurfaces, molecules, and more. They can run your tool again and again, and explore your model within a large parameter space. The resulting application is easy to deploy on any HUBzero-powered site, so a large community of users can access it through their web browser.

This talk provides an overview of Rappture and shows how to create tools in minutes by using the new Rappture builder.

What is under the hood?

Monday, September 24, 2012

Abstract

Rappture is the Rapid APPlication infrastrucTURE, a toolkit within the HUBzero platform that makes it easy to develop graphical user interfaces for scientific modeling tools.

This talk picks up where Introducing the Rappture Toolkit left off, showing how Rappture invokes your tool, passes in input values, and extracts output results. It takes a close look at the XML language that Rappture uses to describe your tool.

More Rappture objects

Monday, September 24, 2012

Abstract

Rappture is the Rapid APPlication infrastrucTURE, a toolkit within the HUBzero platform that makes it easy to develop a graphical user interface for scientific modeling tools.

This talk picks up where Introducing the Rappture Toolkit and What's Under the Hood? left off, showing how to create more complex arrangements of controls. Use the group object to group related input elements. Use the phase object to create separate panels of controls. Use the enabled tag to enable/disable one control based on the value of another. Use the note object to add documentation to your tool.

Advanced Visualization

Monday, September 24, 2012

Abstract

Rappture is the Rapid APPlication infrastrucTURE, a toolkit within the HUBzero platform that makes it easy to develop a graphical user interface for scientific modeling tools.

This talk shows how to generate complex outputs and leverage Rappture's built-in visualization capabilities. Use mesh and field objects to create contour plots and surface plots. Use the structure object to represent molecules. Use the sequence to group images, plots, and molecules into animated sequences.

Uploading and publishing new tools

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Abstract

HUBzero lets you access simulation tools online via an ordinary web browser. Where do the tools come from? From you--hundreds of you throughout the world who are developing simulation and modeling tools for your hub. Anyone can upload their own code onto a hub and publish a tool for a limited group of colleagues or for the entire world to use. The code can be kept protected or given out as open source.

This tutorial shows you exactly how to do that, starting with the tool registration form, taking you through the process of uploading code into a Subversion repository, developing and testing your code within a workspace, and finally, approving and publishing your tool. This is a good starting point for all new tool developers, to help them understand the overall process.

Regression Testing

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Abstract

Rappture is the Rapid APPlication infrastrucTURE, a toolkit within the HUBzero platform that makes it easy to develop a graphical user interface for scientific modeling tools.

This talk describes the new Rappture Regression Tester tool, which executes a series of tests that you define to verify the correct operation of your tool. Use this tool as you fix bugs and introduce new features, to make sure that your tool continues to function correctly in all cases. Where discrepancies are found, this tool will flag the differences and help you understand whether your tool is broken or the new behavior is correct.

Michael Grobe

Michael works as a Principal Systems Analyst in the Advanced Biomedical IT Core within Indiana University’s Pervasive Technology Institute. He has a background and considerable experience in Web development, the construction and management of computer networks, and High Performance Computing. He came to the Pervasive Technology Institute to work on the Centralized Life Sciences Database, a large collection of genomics data, and has worked most recently on a variety of projects related to the Semantic Web and Indiana’s CTSI Hub, including installation of the Purdue Database tools, definition of prototype tools for performing simple analyses (frequencies, cross-tabulations, correlation matrices) of data in DB tables, the manipulation of data about science researchers organized by the Vivo Consortium, software for searching the local Clinical Trials database, and is currently exploring the REDCap plugin facility.

Using cceHub components to build simple data exploration tools

Monday, September 24, 2012

Abstract

Several components developed as part of the cceHUB database project (namely com_dataview and com_form) were used to PROTOTYPE a new component supporting basic data exploration functions: the creation and display of frequency charts/tables, cross-tabulations, simple regressions, and correlation matrices.

These functions access individual tables already uploaded to databases accessible from the Hub; there is no provision at this time for uploading data that can then be explored, although tools for doing so have also been built using com_form, and could in principle serve that function.

This presentation would hope to identify interest among conference attendees to justify further development of the PROTOTYPE, since this software is not ready for deployment at this time.

For more information, including screen shots, see: http://mypage.iu.edu/~dgrobe/dataexplore/

Derrick Kearney

Derrick Kearney is a software engineer for HUBzero and Purdue University.

Scientific Workflows with Pegasus

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Debbie Maron

Debbie Maron, MA, MSLIS, is based at Purdue University. She is a librarian with HABRI Central, a hub-based repository on the human animal bond, and with PURR (Purdue University Research Repository), a hub-based repository for datasets. She is currently working on GIS and semantic ontology development within the HABRI Central environment. Debbie also enjoys music, film, and learning about the Semantic Web.

Usability Evaluation of a Research Repository and Collaboration Website for Human-Animal Bond Researchers

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Abstract

Authors: Tao Zhang, Deborah J. Maron, Christopher C. Charles

This paper describes an empirical usability evaluation of HABRI (Human-Animal Bond Research Initiative) Central as part of the effort to develop an open-access research repository and collaboration platform for human-animal bond researchers. By repurposing and altering key features of the original HUBzero system, HABRI Central hosts previously published materials from related disciplines and an extensive bibliography, in addition to traditional hub materials such as tools and datasets. It is expected that changes made in HABRI Central can be extended to other hubs with similar bibliographic functionality requirements.

Seven graduate students in the College of Veterinary Medicine at Purdue participated in the usability evaluation. They performed tasks including exploration of the system, finding an article in the repository, submitting an article to the repository, adding bibliographic information of an article to the repository, and using user groups and questions and answers. Participants also answered open questions regarding their overall experience and rated HABRI Central’s usability using the System Usability Scale (SUS). Response measures included task successfulness, navigational steps, task time, participant comments and behavior notes recorded by the experimenter. The evaluation took about one hour for each participant.

Results of the evaluation showed that the overall user experience of HABRI Central is satisfactory, but the results also indicated a number of usability issues. Participants had difficulty in inputting metadata such as resource type and author information when submitting an article to the repository. Participant comments and experimenter notes during the article submission process indicated that the workflow could be further improved to reduce user confusion. There were also interface design issues regarding page layout and consistency. It is expected that findings from this study and the evaluation methodology can be extended to the development and evaluation of similar systems based on the HUBzero platform.

Suresh Marru

Marru leads the service oriented architectures and scientific workflow efforts. He is a Co-Principal Investigator on the NSF funded Open Gateway Computing Environments and its predecessor Open Grid Computing Environments. Through his multiple roles, Marru was instrumental in success of the Linked Environment for Atmospheric Discovery (LEAD) project. He was a Co-Principal Investigator on the LEAD Project leading the Portal & Orchestration thrust group. Marru coordinates the TeraGrid Grid Infrastructure Group’s science gateways program at Indiana University and has been working very closely with GridChem, UltraScan, BioVLAB and OLAS gateway projects.

Suresh received a B.E. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Osmania University, India and an M.S in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Oklahoma.

XSEDE Science Gateway

Tuesday, September 25, 2012, 5:00pm – 5:15pm

Courtney Matthews

Courtney Matthews is the Digital Data Repository Specialist with the Purdue University Research Repository (PURR). PURR is the online research data management and collaboration platform for Purdue researchers. Courtney coordinates the daily operation of the PURR project, including campus outreach and advocacy, data management planning consultation, and collaboration with subject specialist Librarians to enable researchers to better steward their data.

Courtney graduated from the University of King’s College / Dalhousie University with an Honors Degree in History in 1999. He then completed an MLIS from the Dalhousie University School of Information Management in May of 2010. From May 2010 till July 2012 he has worked on the Islandora Project at the University of Prince Edward Island’s Robertson Library in multiple capacities. As Community Liaison Librarian he managed the Telling Island Stories (TIS) project. TIS is the mobile (iPad) overlay for the Fedora/Drupal based Islandora digital preservation framework. Courtney is excited to be attending and speaking at Hubbub for the first time.

PURR: A Research Data Curation Service Model Using HUBzero

Monday, September 24, 2012

Abstract

Authors: Courtney Earl Matthews, Michael Witt

The Purdue University Research Repository (PURR, http://research.hub.purdue.edu) uses HUBzero to provide a research collaboration and data management solution for campus researchers. The National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and other funding agencies have begun requiring that researchers describe in their grant proposals how they will manage and share the data that will be produced in their research. Purdue researchers can include PURR in their data management plans, invite collaborators to work with them in private projects on PURR, and publish datasets that can be cited using Digital Object Identifiers (DOI). This presentation will explore Purdue’s data repository service model including its service definition, governance, roles and responsibilities, workflows, policies, and support, in addition to the functional role of HUBzero. The collaborative approach of the Purdue University Libraries, Office of the Vice President for Research, and Information Technology at Purdue in developing and maintaining PURR will also be presented. Support for the entire research data lifecycle – from the creation of datasets to their long-term digital preservation and eventual reuse – will be displayed in a live demonstration that will include an overview of the project functionality and dataset publication that was developed for PURR.

Michael McLennan

Michael McLennan is a senior research scientist at Purdue University’s Rosen Center for Advanced Computing, where he is Director of the HUBzero Platform for Scientific Collaboration. He received a Ph.D. in 1990 from Purdue University, supported as an SRC Graduate Fellow, for his dissertation on dissipative quantum mechanical electron transport in semiconductor heterostructure devices. He spent 14 years working in industry at Bell Labs and Cadence Design Systems, developing software for computer-aided design of integrated circuits. He created [incr Tcl], an object-oriented extension of the Tcl scripting language, which has been used by thousands of developers worldwide on projects ranging from the TiVo digital video recorder to the Mars Pathfinder. He coauthored two books, Effective Tcl/Tk Programming (Addison-Wesley, 1997) and Tcl/Tk Tools (O’Reilly Media, 1997). His latest project is the Rappture Toolkit, which accelerates the process of creating scientific tools for simulation and modeling.

Opening remarks

Monday, September 24, 2012, 8:30am – 9:00am

Venkatesh Merwade

WaterHUB: Enabling hydrological exploration, modeling and collaboration

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Abstract

Authors: Lan Zhao, Carol X. Song, Venkatesh Merwade, Shandian Zhe

Studies of water in the environment are fundamental in many research disciplines. The importance of understanding water related issues, including quantity and quality at local, national, and global sales, has grown significantly in the past decade. There is a strong need for a community-oriented cyberinfrastructure for researchers and educators to explore hydrological processes using observed data and computationally intensive modeling tools. For example, the SWAT model (Soil and Water Assessment Tool) has been widely used to study the impact of land management practices in large, complex watersheds. The model is data intensive and requires a lot of computation power, for example, to calibrate for a large watershed. However, researchers typically run this model as a stand-alone desktop application, which not only limits the size of the problems that researchers can tackle due to resource constraints, but is not conducive to collaboration. No service exists that allows modelers to share their model inputs which are time-consuming to set up. This presentation will describe the development of a hydrological collaboration tool and workflow, SWATShare, in the WaterHUB (http://water-hub.org). SWATShare not only supports end-to-end SWAT simulations using the XSEDE HPC resources but also allows easy data/model publishing, discovery and sharing within the community. The SWATShare tool builds on top of the HUBzero web platform and is implemented using an extensible layered system architecture including a FLEX based GIS user interface, a set of geospatial data and modeling services, and HPC resources at the backend. It extends the core HUBzero software stacks to bring large scale geospatial data and modeling capabilities into HUBzero. We will also discuss our experience of using SWATShare in a civil engineering graduate-level class taught at Purdue in fall 2011 as well as future work. Our experience developing the WaterHUB will also contribute to a recently awarded NSF SI2 project.

Linas Mockus

Dr. Mockus is currently Sr. Research Scientist at Purdue University where he is actively supporting QbD projects. From 2004 to 2008 he was with Allergan as Sr. Project Engineer and from 1997 he was with Pfizer as Sr. Development Engineer. He earned his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Purdue University as well as equivalent degree in Computer Science from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.

Using the work-flow management functionality in the PharmaHUB

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Abstract

Authors: L. Mockus, G. Joglekar, J.M. Laínez, G.V. Reklaitis

The pharmaHUB (www.pharmahub.org) was created for research collaboration and knowledge sharing in the pharmaceutical domain. The pharmaHUB is implemented on the HUBzero2 platform whose main features include the capability of performing interactive simulation and modeling tools via a web browser. Currently, the pharmaHUB encompasses a range of contributed models and simulations, including particle-surface adhesion, DEM modeling of rotating drums, hopper discharge and high shear mixing, compartment modeling of particle blending, roller compaction, cake filtration, tablet dissolution, visualization of molecular crystals and multipurpose plant production planning among others. These tools address different portions of the product development cycle and are deployed independently. However, it is usually required along the product development cycle to have the outputs of some of these tools as partial inputs for another one. Here, we describe the use of one of the latest Hub capabilities which allows connecting different independent simulation tools using a Pegasus workflow management model. Two examples are provided. One of them is related to the process of individualizing drug dosage regimens using two tools: a Bayesian parameter estimator for the drug gabapentin and a dose optimizer. The second example is an interactive data entry and retrieval system for managing the information generated during dry powder blending experiments. The key component of the system is the workflow for the associated experiment. The workflow allows capturing the operational aspect of a work procedure. It also provides the reference points for defining the data to be recorded and designing the data entry forms. Each recorded experiment is an instance of its associated workflow. The experimental data is stored in a MySQL database and can be retrieved using a graphical user interface.

Gaspar Modelo-Howard

Gaspar Modelo-Howard is the CyberSecurity Engineer for the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES), at Purdue University. He is also working towards a Ph.D. degree in Computer Engineering, with research interest at the intersection between network security and machine learning. Mr. Modelo-Howard came to Purdue after spending seven years as an information security officer for the Panama Canal Authority and five years as a college professor. He has an M.Sc. in Information Security from Royal Holloway, University of London, and a B.Sc. in electrical engineering from Universidad Tecnologica de Panama. He is a member of IEEE, Usenix and ACM.

CyberSecurity for NEEShub: Best-practices and Lessons Learned

Tuesday, September 25, 2012, 4:30pm – 5:00pm

Abstract

The George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) operates a shared network of civil engineering experimental facilities aimed at facilitating research on mitigating the impact of earthquakes. The network depends on a reliable distributed cyberinfrastructure among 15 universities to successfully work as an integrated co-laboratory for over 5,000 users from around the world.

Cybersecurity is a critical aspect to achieve the reliability required for research environments such as NEES. The network has developed a comprehensive cybersecurity approach that includes best-practice cybersecurity policies and controls and annual security audits at each of the NEES sites. The goal of the cybersecurity practices is to protect the computational resources and archived research data at NEES from malicious access that might violate the data’s confidentiality or integrity or make the network or its data unavailable. Eight types of security controls have been implemented: user authentication; access control; perimeter defenses; network engineering; monitoring/auditing; data loss prevention; security evaluations; and patch management.

In this talk, we will review the evolution of the NEES cybersecurity infrastructure since its inception at Purdue University and will present a description of the security controls implemented to fulfill the particular requirements of this projects. Finally, we will share experiences and lessons learned from a handful of actual cybersecurity incidents.

Gaurav Nanda

Gaurav Nanda is a third year PhD student in the School of Industrial Engineering at Purdue University. He is working with Prof Mark Lehto in the area of collaborative knowledge management in a large enterprise scenario. Before joining the PhD program, he worked for five years with Infosys Technologies designing and implementing large-scale software systems in the area of retail banking. He obtained his Bachelors in Agricultural and Food Engineering and Masters in Water Resource Development and Management from Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. He worked in the area of non-conventional optimization during his Bachelors and Masters Thesis.

Implementation of HUBzero as a Knowledge Management System in a Large Organization

Monday, September 24, 2012

Abstract

Authors: Gaurav Nanda, Jonathan Tan, Peter Auyeung, Mark Lehto

HUBzero has not only been an effective research and academic collaboration platform but through this study, it has also proven itself to be an effective knowledge management solution for commercial organizations. Knowledge management efforts typically focus on organizational objectives such as improved performance, competitive advantage, innovation, the sharing of lessons learned, integration and continuous improvement of the organization. In an ongoing project with Reliability Engineering division of a large company, the HUB-in-a-box version of HUBzero has been successfully implemented to play the role of a knowledge base of different reliability tools being used in the company like Failure Mode Effects Analysis, Reliability Growth Curves etc. HUBzero acted as a medium for building organizational memory and will allow people in working different areas to collaborate in a social networking manner which will not only improve the quality of the work but will also save a lot of time by reusing the work done by colleagues to solve a similar problem.

Challenges faced during the implementation of HUBzero included selection of the HUBzero server and maintaining its security, which were accomplished with the help for HUBzero development team at Purdue. We also devised a method for automated data collection from people and getting author's consent before publishing. A dashboard was developed by interfacing HUBzero and one of the existing groupware in the organization for selecting and publishing good quality resources.

Some of the areas in which ongoing/future work is planned include developing a generic guideline/template for requirements analysis for HUBzero implementation projects. We also want to develop the measures of effectiveness, metrics detailing how much HUBzero actually helps the end users by performing usability analysis. Based on the results of these studies, we expect to enhance the usability of HUBzero as a knowledge management system in a large enterprise setting.

Stanislav Pejša

Stanislav Pejša is the Data Curator at the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulations (NEES) located in Discovery Park at Purdue University. He is primarily responsible for the quality of data uploaded to the NEES data repository. He oversees evolution of data from mere aggregation of sensor measurements to fully curated research projects with metadata and documentation necessary for re-use, long-term access, and preservation. He is also involved in developing workflows and metadata solutions for improving access to and preservation of the research data stored in the repository and delivered through the NEEShub platform. He is interested in exploring new ways of effective sharing and interoperability of research data and issues related to their preservation.

Data Curation and Quality Assurance in NEEShub

Monday, September 24, 2012

Abstract

Earthquake engineering is a vibrant inter-disciplinary area that brings together researchers from seismology, structural, mechanical, and geotechnical engineering whose effort results in saving lives and protecting property during earthquakes and tsunamis. The NEES Data Repository serves the needs of the earthquake engineering community. Research teams carry out path-breaking research on small and large scale models using among other equipment shake tables, tsunami basins, and centrifuges. Such diversity represents a challenge for the collection of data and of sufficient documentation to make the data and the conditions of their origin understandable, not only to the earthquake research community, but also to practitioners and educators in the present and in the future.

Data use and re-use is one of the key goals of the NEES, during this talk I will discuss some of the solutions implemented by the NEEScomm IT team in the NEEShub that help to manage research data, collect necessary metadata and documentation for correct understanding and interpretation of the archived data. The high-quality of metadata, their consistency and predictability is essential for successful stewardship of research data and for easy transfer of knowledge from the research team to the repository with as little loss as possible. The tools that assist research teams with archiving their data need to be intuitive and non-intrusive so that the processes of metadata capture and solicitation of documentation can be pushed upstream back to the research teams that are the best source information. The NEES preservation framework is a blend of system provided data, information extracted from the files themselves, and metadata solicited from the research teams. It is an environment that provides storage for long-term access to authentic re-usable research data and preservation services, as well as virtual space for sharing and collaboration.

Marlon Pierce

Pierce is the Assistant Director for the Science Gateways Group in Research Technologies Applications at Indiana University. Pierce received his Ph.D. Florida State University (Physics) in 1998 in computational condensed matter physics. His current research and development work focuses on computational sciences with an emphasis on Grid computing and computational Web portals. Prior to forming the Science Gateway Group, Pierce served as assistant director for the Community Grids Laboratory at Indiana University's Pervasive Technologies Institute. Pierce supervises the research activities of software engineering staff and Ph.D. students, and serves as principal investigator on multiple federally-funded research projects. Pierce leads research efforts in the following areas: the application of service-oriented architectures and real-time streaming techniques to geographical information systems and sensor networks; the development of open source science Web portal software for accessing Grid computing and data resources; and Grid-based distributed computing applications in computational chemistry and material science, chemical informatics, and geophysics.

GridChem/ParamChem

Tuesday, September 25, 2012, 5:15pm – 5:30pm

Marc Robinson

Marc Robinson is an M.S. student of Computer Science at Tennessee Technological University, with a specialty in machine learning. He received his BS in Computer Science from TTU in 2010. While finishing his graduate degree, he serves as the primary administrator for the Upper Cumberland Rural STEM Initiative Hub, a HUBzero platform created with the intent of providing an area for local STEM educators, administrators, and professionals to collaborate and share resources. He also is the show developer and presenter for astronomy-themed presentations at the Millard Oakley STEM Center Virtual Theater.

Upper Cumberland Rural STEM Initiative

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Abstract

Authors: Sally Pardue, Marc Robinson

The Upper Cumberland Rural STEM Initiative through the Millard Oakley STEM Center at Tennessee Technological University is using HUBzero to power an online collaboration zone designed to bring together three key partner types to enhance science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education. Twenty-one local education agencies (LEAs) covering more than 6000 square miles and serving more than 72,000 students, eleven community and business entities, and three post-secondary institutions form the UCRSI. This regional project serves a economically challenged rural area and is part of the TN STEM Innovation Network (theTSIN.org), a funded program under Tennessee's Race To the Top grant from the federal Department of Education. HUBzero allows the UCRSI project to reduce start-up costs and to decrease time to implementation by not requiring a "design and build from scratch" approach to communication. We are able to jumpstart a welcoming interactive web portal where members can immediately retrieve useful information and form working groups to share STEM education resources across the boundaries of k-12 education, higher education, and industry. UCRSI.org hosts open groups formed by the membership of teachers, community volunteers, and families as well as restricted groups for related professional development workshops for STEM education. The presentation will provide a timeline for live site implementation and strategies for membership growth and engagement.

Brian Rohler

Brian Rohler is a senior software engineer for NEEScomm located in the Purdue Research Discover Park. He received his BS from Purdue University in 1988. He spent over twenty years in industry working in different roles at Delphi Automotive Systems, a subsidiary of General Motors. He filled multiple positions within the company as a manufacturing engineer, production support engineer, software engineer and manager of the Delphi facility at the Purdue Research Park. He now leads, develops and supports the cyber-infrastructure for NEEShub.org. He currently spends most of his time supporting NEEShub as a hardware engineer, system administrator, scientific tool developer and the developer of the Windows tools which are only available on NEEShub.org. He has been on the team since the beginning (2009) and hopes to continue supporting and developing for NEEShub for many years.

Windows Tools on NEEShub

Tuesday, September 25, 2012, 2:00pm – 2:30pm

Abstract

Authors: Brian Rohler, Rajesh Thyagarajan, Dawn Weisman

The signature service of a hub is its ability to deliver interactive, graphical simulation tools through any web browser. In the world of portals and cyber-environments, this capability is unique. Unlike a portal, tools in a hub are interactive; actions can be performed, without waiting for a web page to refresh. Results can be visualized without having to obtain a login to a supercomputer, reserve time on a supercomputer, or wait for a batch job to engage. New tools can be deployed without writing special code for the web.

The Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) infrastructure is made up of 14 earthquake engineering and tsunami research sites located at universities across the United States. NEEShub (http://nees.org) connects the work of the research sites’ experimental facilities, researchers, practitioners, educators, and students. NEEShub acts as the gateway to the earthquake engineering research data repositories and to a virtual research environment.

NEEShub is powered by the Hubzero infrastructure and hence includes a tool execution and delivery mechanism based on Virtual Network Computing (VNC). Using this architecture, NEEShub has over 50 different tools, out of which 11 are Windows based, with more tools under development. NEEShub relies on its user community to contribute tools and other resources. Participation from the community is important as this helps NEEScomm provide a more sophisticated set of useful tools to the NEES community.

NEEShub is the first and currently, the only hub that provides Windows based tools to the NEES community. This presentation will present greater insight into the tools that are available on the NEEShub, demonstrate the complete Windows tool contribution workflow and offer insight into the implementation details including the system architecture, software and hardware requirements.

Omar Sobh

InvertNet: Advancing Digitization of Biological Collections

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Abstract

Authors: Omar Sobh, Joe Leigh, Obaid Sarvana, Nahil Sobh

InvertNet, one of the three Thematic Collection Networks (TCNs) funded in the first round of the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Advancing Digitization of Biological Collections (ADBC) program, is tasked with providing digital access to ~60 million specimens housed in 22 arthropod (primarily insect) collections at institutions distributed throughout the upper midwestern USA. The traditional workflow for insect collection digitization involves manually keying information from specimen labels into a database and attaching a unique identifier label to each specimen. This remains the dominant paradigm, despite some recent attempts to automate various steps in the process using more advanced technologies. InvertNet aims to develop improved semi-automated, high-throughput workflows for digitizing and providing access to invertebrate collections that balance the need for speed and cost-effectiveness with long-term preservation of specimens and accuracy of data capture. The proposed workflows build on recent methods for digitizing and providing access to high-quality images of multiple specimens (e.g., entire drawers of pinned insects) simultaneously. Limitations of previous approaches are discussed and possible solutions are proposed that incorporate advanced imaging and 3-D reconstruction technologies. InvertNet couples efficient digitization workflows with a highly robust network infrastructure capable of managing massive amounts of image data and related metadata and delivering high-quality images, including interactive 3-D reconstructions in real time via the Internet.

Rajesh Thyagarajan

Rajesh Thyagarajan holds a Bachelors of Sciences (Electronics), Masters in Computer Applications, Honors in Systems Management, Post Graduate Honors in Planning and Project Management and is currently pursuing his Masters in Business Administration from Krannert School of Management and will graduate in December 2012. He has about 15 years of work experience that includes development, implementation, IT solution design and architecture, IT strategy, Project and Program Management. Rajesh has worked in the Asia Pacific, Middle East, India and the United States. He held many positions in the past including Solution Architect, Data Architect and Project Manager during his consulting assignments at several Fortune 100 and 500 companies. He was part of the Cummins Enterprise Architecture team and involved in introducing cutting-edge technologies and designing enterprise level IT architecture, Solution Architect for IT projects that were implemented across the corporation. Rajesh has worked on teams at Harley Davidson and GE that worked on IT Projects to solve business problems including building strategic decisions, process improvement, and new product innovation. He also served as Data Architect with the Enterprise Data warehouse group at HP, Houston and was the Territory IT Head at Lifestyle, a Landmark Group company; responsible for the IT operations of Lifestyle across the seven Emirates. Rajesh was also involved in IT Solution Delivery for Prudential Insurance Corporation, Singapore Tourism Board, Hangseng Bank, LG Capital, Siam Commercial Bank and Pacific Century Cyberworks. Rajesh also has served on the board of a several United Way Agencies, Rotary Club of Columbus and the Indian Boy Scouts movement. Rajesh is currently a Software Engineer at Purdue University for the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) involved in design, development and support of the NEEShub Cyberinfrastructure.

Windows Tools on NEEShub

Tuesday, September 25, 2012, 2:00pm – 2:30pm

Abstract

Authors: Brian Rohler, Rajesh Thyagarajan, Dawn Weisman

The signature service of a hub is its ability to deliver interactive, graphical simulation tools through any web browser. In the world of portals and cyber-environments, this capability is unique. Unlike a portal, tools in a hub are interactive; actions can be performed, without waiting for a web page to refresh. Results can be visualized without having to obtain a login to a supercomputer, reserve time on a supercomputer, or wait for a batch job to engage. New tools can be deployed without writing special code for the web.

The Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) infrastructure is made up of 14 earthquake engineering and tsunami research sites located at universities across the United States. NEEShub (http://nees.org) connects the work of the research sites’ experimental facilities, researchers, practitioners, educators, and students. NEEShub acts as the gateway to the earthquake engineering research data repositories and to a virtual research environment.

NEEShub is powered by the Hubzero infrastructure and hence includes a tool execution and delivery mechanism based on Virtual Network Computing (VNC). Using this architecture, NEEShub has over 50 different tools, out of which 11 are Windows based, with more tools under development. NEEShub relies on its user community to contribute tools and other resources. Participation from the community is important as this helps NEEScomm provide a more sophisticated set of useful tools to the NEES community.

NEEShub is the first and currently, the only hub that provides Windows based tools to the NEES community. This presentation will present greater insight into the tools that are available on the NEEShub, demonstrate the complete Windows tool contribution workflow and offer insight into the implementation details including the system architecture, software and hardware requirements.

Dawn Weisman

Dawn Weisman is the NEEScomm Director of IT in charge of NEEShub at Purdue University. She has been with NEEScomm since the start of the project in August 2009. In this position, she is responsible for Release and Resource Planning for the NEEShub, Operational readiness of the NEEShub, and the leadership of a talented team of Software Professionals who support and enhance NEEShub.

Prior to Purdue Dawn was with Hewlett-Packard for 11 years in multiple web-focused positions including Program Management Manager for Worldwide eCommerce Commercial stores, Project Management Manager for Worldwide eCommerce Telesales systems, Manager of a development team for the HP Australia and Canada stores, and Senior IT Project Manager for the North American Business Web Store Integration effort supporting the HP and Compaq merger.

Dawn has held a variety of IT positions including Software Developer, Business Analyst, Project Manager, Program Manager, and Director. However, the discipline of Planning in various capacities has been a common thread through her career requiring both intellectual, collaborative, and creative energy.

Dawn holds a Master of Science degree in Computer Science and is working toward a PhD in Information Technology specializing in IT Strategic Planning.

The Balancing Act of Release Management

Tuesday, September 25, 2012, 11:30am – Noon

Abstract

The Wish list is the mechanism many Hubs use to collect requests for new or enhanced functionality. A large Wish list is a classic ‘good problem’ indicating an active user community with creative ideas for improving a Hub.

Since most IT teams are limited in the number of people available to implement wishes, numerous decisions need to be made regarding how to work through wishes in the Wish list or, for more complex Hubs, how to bundle a set of wishes into a software release. Variables such as strategic direction, available resources, user expectations, yearly timing, and wish complexity/duration must all be taken into account.

NEEScomm IT, the team responsible for NEEShub, has been managing a large, diverse Wish list since July 2010. Working with key users in the NEES community, an overall release process has been developed and followed to review, prioritize, and select wishes for each release cycle. This talk will describe the basic steps in the NEES release process and lessons learned from multiple iterations through the process.

Sam Wilson

Sam is a Hub Liaison for HUBzero. He enjoys helping hub managers understand how hubs work, and how they can properly configure and manage their hub. Prior to joining the HUBzero team, Sam worked with the Networks and Security division of Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP). While there, he worked to develop improved methods for telecommunications data access, including an iPhone web app for ITaP employees to access data in the field. Sam received his BS in Management with a focus in Management Information Systems from Purdue University.

Groups and Collaboration, Administrative Tasks, Day-to-day Management

Monday, September 24, 2012, 1:30pm – 3:00pm

Tao Zhang

Tao Zhang is an Assistant Professor of Library Science at Purdue University, working as a Digital User Experience Specialist. He was a Research Associate in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at Vanderbilt University (2009 - 2011). He received his PhD in Industrial Engineering from North Carolina State University in 2009.

Usability Evaluation of a Research Repository and Collaboration Website for Human-Animal Bond Researchers

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Abstract

Authors: Tao Zhang, Deborah J. Maron, Christopher C. Charles

This paper describes an empirical usability evaluation of HABRI (Human-Animal Bond Research Initiative) Central as part of the effort to develop an open-access research repository and collaboration platform for human-animal bond researchers. By repurposing and altering key features of the original HUBzero system, HABRI Central hosts previously published materials from related disciplines and an extensive bibliography, in addition to traditional hub materials such as tools and datasets. It is expected that changes made in HABRI Central can be extended to other hubs with similar bibliographic functionality requirements.

Seven graduate students in the College of Veterinary Medicine at Purdue participated in the usability evaluation. They performed tasks including exploration of the system, finding an article in the repository, submitting an article to the repository, adding bibliographic information of an article to the repository, and using user groups and questions and answers. Participants also answered open questions regarding their overall experience and rated HABRI Central’s usability using the System Usability Scale (SUS). Response measures included task successfulness, navigational steps, task time, participant comments and behavior notes recorded by the experimenter. The evaluation took about one hour for each participant.

Results of the evaluation showed that the overall user experience of HABRI Central is satisfactory, but the results also indicated a number of usability issues. Participants had difficulty in inputting metadata such as resource type and author information when submitting an article to the repository. Participant comments and experimenter notes during the article submission process indicated that the workflow could be further improved to reduce user confusion. There were also interface design issues regarding page layout and consistency. It is expected that findings from this study and the evaluation methodology can be extended to the development and evaluation of similar systems based on the HUBzero platform.

Hao Zhong

Hao Zhong received his B.S. degree in Astronautics Engineering from Harbin Institute of Technology, China and M.S. degree in Industrial Engineering from Purdue University, USA. He is currently a PhD student in school of Industrial Engineering and a research assistant in PRISM Center (Production, Robotics, and Integration Software for Manufacturing & Management) at Purdue University. His research interests include modeling and optimization of collaboration support systems and collaborative robotics systems.

Collaborative Intelligence on HUB-CI to Enhance Senior Design Engineering Courses

Tuesday, September 25, 2012, 2:30pm – 3:00pm

Abstract

Authors: H. Zhong, J.D. Velasquez, G. Nanda, E. Huebner

Collaboration is one of the key outcomes of Senior Design (SD), a course common to many engineering schools, aiming to encourage students to work in teams, analyze and synthesize unstructured problems in practical settings, and help prepare students for the workplace. SD students face challenges with locating, synthesizing, and integrating the distributed knowledge and expertise in an effort to address the real-world problem given to them as part of the course. Due to the overload of information, the innovation and decision-making expected of the students can sometimes be slow, erratic and disjointed. To enhance the collaboration of SD students, HUB-CI, which is being developed by faculty members and students of the School of Industrial Engineering at Purdue University Collaboratorium Initiative, enhances HUB capabilities with collaborative intelligence (CI). Collaborative Control Theory (CCT) methodologies and tools have been designed to optimize the utility of various networks on HUB-CI. In the portfolio of HUB-CI, Collaborative Network Optimization (CNO) matches resources to related collaborative participants by minimizing the total cost of mapping. Based on CNO, the tool CNO Team Formation can automatically provide dynamic matching and grouping of students to appropriate projects according to students’ skills, area of interest, and customer expectations. Another methodology in HUB-CI, Collaborative Insight (Co-Insight), is the core of collaboration tools such as Co-viz and Co-design. It facilitates collaboration by reducing conflicts and errors while participants are working asynchronously in parallel. Co-viz keeps the collaborative decision-making smoother by providing analytics results and visualizations automatically, and Co-design enables remote physical collaboration in the lifecycle of engineering development through telerobotics testbeds. Several existing and emerging HUB-CI protocols and tools designed in the domain of education and engineering are also being applied for cultural, art, business, and healthcare networks. Preliminary results from the implementation of HUB-CI in a SD course will be presented.