CNI Spring 2018 Membership Meeting

As anticipated, the Internet launched unprecedented access to information, and myriad opportunities to enrich our academic and everyday lives. As information professionals, we have developed many new systems for accessing and creating content, implemented new types of learning activities, and built facilities to make available emerging technologies. With so many options and choices, have we created information environments that are transparent and coherent to our user communities? Have we chosen the best areas of focus for teaching and learning with technology initiatives? Have our new buildings and renovations been developed with attention to a set of underlying principles that relate to the university’s mission? In this talk, Lippincott will focus on the relationship between user communities, information professionals, and the trajectories of developments in access to and creation of content, teaching and learning, and development of spaces and places. She will provide an overview of these areas, highlight exemplars, and raise questions about current practice and future trends.

Joan K. Lippincott is the Associate Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), where she has provided leadership for programs in teaching and learning, learning spaces, digital scholarship, assessment, and collaboration among professional groups. She serves on the boards of the journal portal, The Reference Librarian, and the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) and on the advisory board of the Journal of Learning Spaces. She served on the board of the New Media Consortium (NMC) and on its advisory boards for the Horizon Report for both higher education and libraries. Joan is the current editor of the EDUCAUSE Review E-Content column, she is past chair of the Association of College & Research Libraries’ (ACRL) New Publications Board, and she served as a member of the ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards Review Task Force that produced the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. She has served on the Advisory Boards of the Learning Spaces Collaboratory, the Learning Space Toolkit project, and the EDUCAUSE ELI Seeking Evidence of Impact project. Joan has been a consultant for many academic libraries for their space renovation projects and has been on the planning committee for the Designing Libraries for the 21st Century conference since its inception.

Abstract:  Research in data-intensive fields is increasingly multi-investigator and multi-institutional, depending on ever more rapid access to ultra-large heterogeneous and widely distributed datasets, which in turn is demanding new technological solutions in visualization, machine learning, and high-performance cyberinfrastructure. I will describe how my NSF-funded Pacific Research Platform (PRP), which provides an Internet platform with 100-1000 times the bandwidth of today's commodity Internet to all the research universities on the West Coast, is being designed from the application needs of researchers.  The disciplines which are engaged in partnering with the PRP range from particle physics to climate to human health, as well as archaeology, digital libraries, and social media analysis. The next stage, well underway, is understanding how to scale this prototype cyberinfrastructure to a National and Global Research Platform.

Larry Smarr is the founding Director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), a UC San Diego/UC Irvine partnership, and holds the Harry E. Gruber professorship in Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at UC San Diego’s Jacobs School. Before that, he was Professor of Physics and Astronomy and the founding director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at UIUC. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, as well as a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2006 he received the IEEE Computer Society Tsutomu Kanai Award for his lifetime achievements in distributed computing systems and in 2014 the Golden Goose Award. He served on the NASA Advisory Council to 4 NASA Administrators, was chair of the NASA Information Technology Infrastructure Committee and the NSF Advisory Committee on Cyberinfrastructure, and for 8 years he was a member of the NIH Advisory Committee to the NIH Director, serving 3 directors. He is currently the Principal Investigator on the NSF Pacific Research Platform grants.

Smarr Subject of Feature Story on Personalizing Surgery
in March Edition of The Atlantic:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/03/larry-smarr-the-man-who-saw-inside-himself/550883/