National Science Foundation Office of Cyberinfrastructure www.nsf.gov/dir/index.jsp?org=OCI


Organization Overview:

The Office of Cyberinfrastructure coordinates and supports the acquisition, development, and provision of state-of-the-art cyberinfrastructure resources, tools, and services essential to the conduct of 21st century science and engineering research and education.

OCI supports cyberinfrastructure resources, tools, and related services such as supercomputers, high-capacity mass-storage systems, system software suites and programming environments, scalable interactive visualization tools, productivity software libraries and tools, large-scale data repositories and digitized scientific data management systems, networks of various reach and granularity, and an array of software tools and services that hide the complexities and heterogeneity of contemporary cyberinfrastructure, while seeking to provide ubiquitous access and enhanced usability.

OCI supports the preparation and training of current and future generations of researchers and educators to use cyberinfrastructure to further their research and education goals, while also supporting the scientific and engineering professionals who create and maintain these IT-based resources and systems and who provide essential customer services to the national science and engineering user community.

Daniel Atkins, founding dean of SI and a professor at the School, is the director of the NSF's Office of Cyberinfrastructure. You can learn more about the OCI by reading Dan's OCI blog.

Projects:

  1. Cyberinfrastructure Project (One Student)
    2. OCI has a high requirement for information sharing and for support for distributed work. It is currently exploring some options to facilitate this. For the student position, OCI would like to have a student who is capable of doing two or more of the following:
    • Human-computer interface type review of the NSF OCI Web site, in order to make suggestions and develop a plan of action for improvement.
    • Set up a Macintosh iWeb blog environment and possibly other social type software (i.e., Web 2.0). Also give some tutorials on use.
    • Analyze several internal NSF social software tools and provide recommendations for scenarios of use within OCI. These could include a Wiki product, Groove, and SharePoint.


    The student would also have a unique opportunity to learn more about the National Science Foundation.

    Participant Comments

    "I proposed different methods for carrying out virtual interactive meetings. It was good. The people there were VERY friendly. OCI is quite new. Things are picking up pace. My supervisor was great. She was keen to listen to what I had to say and always had time to answer questions."


The School of Information's Alternative Spring Break is open to graduate students studying at the School of Information. Undergraduates looking for Alternative Spring Break opportunities should look into the University of Michigan Alternative Spring Break program administered by U-M's Ginsberg Center.

 

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