You are reading 2006’s second issue of The Hub, a biweekly newsletter published by, for and about ITS. The goal of this publication is to provide timely information about the services and activities of our department and to support the ITS community. We welcome your comments and suggestions and encourage you to submit your stories and announcements to its_communications@unc.edu by 5 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 7, to be included in the next issue.
When Jeanne Smythe, Director of Computing Policy, retires from UNC–Chapel Hill on Jan. 31, she’ll have spent over 30 years working in technology for the University. That’s an interesting career for someone who came to the University to get a doctorate in philosophy.
Paul Jones, Jeanne Smythe and Adrian Shelton at Smythe’s Jan. 31 retirement party
Smythe came south after getting a degree in math from the University of Michigan. In 1975, after finishing the coursework for her degree in philosophy, Smythe started work for the UNC Computing Center (UNC–CC) as a technical writer. There followed a series of jobs that included everything from working with a mechanical scanner to supporting and maintaining the academic mainframe computer. In those days the customer base was much smaller and she was familiar with everyone. Smythe notes, “I knew all the customers–they had to submit jobs in person.”
She worked with Paul Jones, now the director of ibiblio.org, to create an e-mail system designed to serve about 20 users in the University’s administration. By the time the system was phased out, there were 6,000 users. Jones remembers that Smythe was the first woman he knew to work in systems and proved her worth with ease. Smythe helped with the transition from the Triangle Universities Computer Center (TUCC) and also the academic mainframe.
Jones discovered, completely by accident, that Smythe was a fast typist. She had hidden this skill because, Jones says, “She’d been told to never let anyone know you could type fast or that’s all you’d get to do.”
Smythe’s most important work for the University started in 1998 with her work on the Y2K project. The next year Smythe headed the newly created Security Office and also acted as the University’s copyright agent. In 2002 she added the role of security officer for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
“Jeanne’s work has been vital,” says Research Compliance Officer Adrian Shelton about working with Jeanne on HIPAA. “She has knowledge and skill and the ability to use her knowledge of operations for implementation. She’s generous with her time and her talent. We will miss her so much.”
The new duties associated with HIPAA illustrated the change in emphasis for computer security. Smythe says, “When I started working with security, our main problem was hackers. Now the job is driven by regulation.”
Although 24×7 uptime for systems was always important for the people Smythe worked with, she notes that it is now critical. In some ways it’s easier to provide that service with resilient and redundant systems. Smythe says, “We don’t have to come in and work for hours to bring systems back up after every storm.”
John Oberlin, associate vice chancellor for IT and long-time co-worker, said, “Jeanne has been an integral link between ITS and a wide range of governing, administrative, policy, legal and law enforcement agencies. Her work spans from the very technical details of electronic security to systems auditing, to management, to IT policy development. She has a very unique and broad set of personal and professional skills. Her expertise includes management skills, deep technical knowledge, and detailed policy analysis, as well as the finer points of diplomacy and discretion.
“Jeanne was a valued member of the ITS/ATN senior management team,” Oberlin continued. She is well respected across a broad range of campus faculty, staff, senior administrators, policy makers, and colleagues. It has been a real pleasure to get to know Jeanne over the years. She has a tremendous strength of character and unquestionable professional ethics. She is not only an outstanding contributor and worker for the University, but she is a wonderful and inspirational person.”
With all the changes and challenges, Smythe still enjoys her work. She thinks it’s the perfect job for anyone who’s easily bored (as she is, she says) since every day brings something new. But she’s interested in spending more time with her family and traveling, so the timing for retirement seemed right. While she’ll miss the work, Smythe is ready for a break and then possibly some completely new and different challenges.
Robyn East, associate vice chancellor for IT and deputy CIO, announced that Doug Brown will assist in the leadership of the security team during the search for a new security officer.
East said, “Jeanne has been a valued member of the University’s IT community, and she will certainly be missed. We wish her the very best as she enters a new phase of her life.”
ITS–Communications has launched ITS News, a new Web page focused on ITS people, projects, services and events. This is directed to the general campus community, who will find a collection of short articles about ITS and updates on technology issues. The page will be updated regularly to offer our campus customers current information about our projects and services. To suggest a topic for ITS News, please e-mail us at its_communications@unc.edu.
ITS Web Systems added the Google Search Appliance (GSA) to www.unc.edu on Jan. 30. Considered by many to be the industry standard for searching Web content, Google offers several enhancements over the previous search engine, including a new interface and better search results based on relevancy and priority.
While www.google.com already indexes most of UNC–Chapel Hill’s Web pages, the GSA resides on the University’s network and can be customized to find documents that would not be found by the regular version of Google.
As part of the implementation that started in November, the ITS Web Systems team has already begun customizing the search system based on success rates for searches. To help improve search results, users are encouraged to use the link on the search page to contact the system administrator to provide feedback. The search page also has links to advanced searches and a section on search tips. The systems team expects about 10,000 search hits per day.
Departments with customized search forms will still be able to access the old search engine until they transition their pages to use the new one. The old search engine will continue to update its collection for a few months.
Google search is now available by clicking the search link found on the UNC-Chapel Hill home page, http://www.unc.edu, or by going directly to the search page at http://search.unc.edu.
As bond-funded renovations continue, this year many classes and campus organizations will struggle to find classroom space. Jeremiah Joyner, manager of ITS Teaching & Learning’s Classroom Hotline, notes that 15 more classrooms went off-line this semester for renovations, including 7 that were already considered technology classrooms.
“Some of those rooms, like Hamilton 100, had been renovated before, but they’re due for an upgrade,” Joyner observed. “We’ll be leveling the stage to encourage greater interaction between the instructor and the class, installing multiple screens so that more content can be viewed at once, and adding a DVD-capable projector with a widescreen format on the center screen.” Furthermore, the classrooms need to be brought up to code, with additional seating for students with disabilities.
The crunch comes because this year 22 classrooms are off-line due to renovation or construction–the highest number of classrooms ever. Some of those classrooms are large–Hamilton 100 seats 442, Greenlaw 101 has a capacity of 176, and Fetzer 109 holds 183 seats–so their temporary closure has an even greater impact on classroom scheduling.
Kelly Rowett-James, assistant university registrar, points out that classroom space is planned well in advance. “We tried to plan these renovations to pose the least stress possible on classes,” she said. “But we’re having to pull out every trick we have in an effort to place all of the sections.”
Some of the classes require a creative approach, renting space at the Presbyterian church or at Hillel. Others are able to be scheduled following the Provost’s guidelines to departments: classes adhere to the standard 50-minute schedule on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays until 3 p.m., and departments can’t block space for a whole semester for potential meetings before 4 p.m. (Individual meetings can be scheduled by petitioning the registrar through an online form at http://regweb.oit.unc.edu/resources/room_request_form.html.)
“Fall 2006 will be the worst” in terms of fitting in all the classes, said Rowett-James. “It’s close, but our analysis shows we can meet campus needs,” she said. “We understand that Hamilton 100 and Fetzer 109 will be ready in time for fall semester, and there will be three large lecture halls available in the new science complex.”
Although the real crunch is expected to last for only one year, Joyner and Rowett-James are planning for two years. Joyner noted, for example, that his team has installed some technology in existing classrooms like Hanes Art 117 and 218 and temporary spaces like Greenlaw 221. Davis Library 214 will be temporarily upfitted this summer. “This is document cameras, laptop connections, DVDs and VCRs, not just Internet connections,” Joyner said. “And we’re using some older equipment that is left over from the renovated rooms. It’ll help make some rooms more usable for a little while while all this is going on.”
The ongoing work is increasing the demand not just for space but for technicians to maintain it, Joyner said. Classrooms often aren’t free for preventive maintenance checks until late afternoon, yet professors still need the Hotline to be available during the day in case something goes wrong. Joyner thinks he might need to hire more student workers to cover all the shifts.
And that’s just the beginning. “With usage comes wear,” Rowett-James observes. As more and more classrooms are renovated to support technology, there will be an ongoing need for greater capital investment and greater numbers of classroom support personnel.–LJB
On Monday, Jan. 9, Tom Cox, Andy Brawn and Steve Kirby of ITS Teaching and Learning produced a live, nationwide interview for C-SPAN with UNC-Chapel Hill School of Law Professor Michael Gerhardt for his scheduled role in the Samuel A. Alito hearings.
On Jan. 12, Gerhardt testified during the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearings examining the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Alito. Professor Gerhardt served as an expert witness for the Democrats.
C-SPAN contacted UNC News Services’ broadcast manager, Karen Moon, for assistance on Jan. 6 with the request to interview professor Gerhardt. Karen then turned to Cox to see if ITS could help. “Gerhardt is one of our star faculty experts,” Moon had told Cox. By Monday morning, Cox, Brawn and Kirby had created a complete news set and were ready to go live at 9:00 a.m.
Cox and Brawn seated Gerhardt at a desk and gave him an earphone by which he could hear the questions of the program host. This method avoids having open speakers (and therefore feedback) on the set.
The audio and video signals travel by Time Warner fiber to Raleigh, where a teleport at Microspace Communications (part of Capitol Broadcasting) links to a nationwide feed. From there C-SPAN can pick up the signal. The interview took about 30 minutes of the program’s three hours.
“We do these [transmissions] periodically,” said Cox. “It’s very gratifying as an ITS team member to help the University get its message out to national news outlets, that we have world-class experts in many fields–constitutional law, medicine, and public health among others. It’s free, enormously valuable publicity for UNC, with millions and millions of people nationwide.”–LJB
Q: How do your roles with ITS, RENCI, research and national policy fit together?
A:…. The bottom line: information technology is pervasive and integral in all walks of life…. Together, we can help determine the national IT agenda, seek interdisciplinary collaborations that utilize IT in scientific discovery and economic development, enhance administration and business process and advance IT research through multidisciplinary projects involving a worldwide community of scholars and students.
Q: How do your roles with ITS, RENCI, research and national policy fit together?
A: It is probably easiest to answer this question by beginning with a bit of history. At Illinois, I also wore several hats, including serving as director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), conducting research as a faculty member in high-performance computing and engaging in national IT policy discussions. For a time, I did all of these things and also chaired the Department of Computer Science. CS at Illinois is huge, with close to 50 faculty, 1800 students and lots of staff. So, wearing many hats is something I have done for a long time.
As I was considering the next steps in my career, I evaluated many options before deciding to come to North Carolina. The offer I accepted was to create the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) and become the first of Carolina’s “super faculty chairs,” which became the Chancellor’s Eminent Professorship. In those roles, I planned to continue research in high-performance computing, teach one class each year on a topic of my choosing, build collaborations across UNC, NCSU and Duke via RENCI, and continue to engage in national policy issues.
Within a few weeks of my arrival, the ongoing search for a vice chancellor for IT failed to reach a satisfactory resolution. After discussion with the chancellor, I accepted the vice chancellorship in May 2004. We worked out an agreement that addressed the following question: How would I fulfill the vice chancellor role without sacrificing the value the University would garner from a multidisciplinary institute like RENCI and an eminent professor with a role in national policy issues? We agreed that I would hire a deputy CIO (Robyn East) to manage the day-to-day operation of ITS on my behalf. This let me delegate the responsibility and the authority for managing staff, budgets and projects, as well as other ITS operational issues, to Robyn and her very capable hands. .
This arrangement also freed me to focus on high-level IT strategy and policy for ITS and the campus, continue research, develop RENCI as an institute of state and national prominence, and engage in important national policy issues related to technology and research and their roles in education, economic development and scientific discovery. The additional time commitment unfortunately forced me to abandon the original plan that I would teach each year. (None of the academically trained vice chancellors at UNC have teaching duties.)
The chancellor and I both interpret the role of vice chancellor for IT very broadly. ITS is part of that role, but not the only part. My role is to look deeply at how IT is shaping the future of the American university, what it means for university engagement in the 21st century, and how we collectively help make UNC–Chapel Hill the leading public university in the United States. In essence, the vice chancellor for IT shapes an important part of the university’s vision for the future, including how it will reach out to new communities, advance research, and equip our students with the best tools for their intellectual pursuits. My various roles complement each other: shaping an IT vision for the campus is augmented by participating in the national debate on IT in research, education and society; and leading a multidisciplinary institute puts one in close contact with the users of technology and provides a deeper understanding of their needs.
In this broad vision, my vice chancellorship, RENCI and my national activities are all vehicles to advance a single, larger goal—the elevation of information technology, both as an enabler and as a research focus, to world-leading status.
With that background, here are some examples of how my roles with ITS, RENCI, research and national policy fit together:
1. Regularly scheduled ITS meetings about strategy, policy and direction, as well as ad hoc and individual meetings, are a critical component of my job. The AVCs and I meet each Wednesday morning to discuss ITS issues, including operations, IT deployment, and other topics of concern. These people are not simply doing the necessary work; they are able to see their work in a larger context and to contribute at a strategic level. I have other, smaller meetings with Robyn and other senior staff each week as well.
2. At the campus level, the strategic IT planning committee process is underway. A coordinating committee and four technical committees (enterprise resource planning, communications, teaching and learning, and research) have been organized and charged with producing a strategic IT plan for the Carolina campus. I am managing and coordinating this activity, which involves roughly 50 faculty, staff and students, plus ITS staff members.
3. With a recurring state budget, RENCI is expanding its statewide engagement and economic development efforts. Two initial project targets are integrated disaster response modeling and analysis and tools for biomedical research. As part of that plan, I have been traveling the state meeting university, government and industry leaders. In December, the chancellor and I were at UNC–Charlotte and East Carolina University. This month, I was at UNC–Asheville and am scheduling meetings at UNC–Wilmington and at NC A&T, Winston-Salem State University and UNC–Greensboro. These target projects will utilize high-end IT infrastructure to transform disaster response and biomedical research, and we envision the benefits extending to other domains. We are also aggressively hiring new staff (roughly 50 new positions over the next few months), and we just moved into new facilities at the Europa Building in late January. The Trustees have also approved selection of a firm to do conceptual design of a new building for RENCI.
4. Via RENCI, I am active in several national and regional partnerships. With SURA, we are exploring infrastructure for integrated coastal monitoring and mechanisms to leverage the National Lambda Rail (NLR). We are working with the Open Science Grid (OSG) on next generation software capabilities, and we now host the software distribution for part of the National Middleware Initiative (NMI). This is the future of multidisciplinary, distributed science. In the years to come, they will be the factors that top researchers weigh when deciding where to do their work. Moreover, these are the same distributed services and data-rich capabilities that will shape the future of administrative applications.
5. Via RENCI, research funding from multiple federal agencies is funneled into our system. I am conducting research in a variety of areas, both locally and in national partnerships, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), Department of Energy (DOE), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Project examples include developing Grid and web services for weather forecasting (LEAD), software tools for lattice QCD calculations, biomedical data analysis and modeling tools (CCEGA), computing on toys—using GPUs and PlayStation2s for scientific computing, science gateways for biology and biomedicine (TeraGrid), performance measurement and modeling for terascale systems (LACSI), next-generation Grid technology and virtualization (VGrADS), scalable performance analysis mechanisms (PERC) and coastal ocean modeling (SCOOP).
6. I am also frequently invited to present lectures at the international, national and regional levels, ranging from conference keynotes (e.g., MASCOTS, HPDC and OOSTech) to regional workshops (SURA Life Sciences) to distinguished lectures at universities (e.g., Rice, William and Mary). These meetings contribute to shaping university research and setting trends for national research policy. The UNC/RENCI presence at these meetings establishes UNC and North Carolina as players in developing national policy.
7. Finally, I serve on a variety of national and international advisory committees. These include my recent service on the President’s IT Advisory Committee (PITAC), where I led the group that authored the report on computational science and economic competitiveness, membership in the advisory committee for the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), chair of the Policy Board for NERSC at LBL, membership on NSF’s Alan T. Waterman Award Selection Committee, the DOE Tri-laboratory Nuclear Stockpile Stewardship Review Committee, the HPC Advisory Committee of the Council on Competitiveness, an NIH advisory committee and several others.
I am also a member of the steering committee for the SC (supercomputing) conference series and Chair of the Board of Directors of the Computing Research Association (CRA), which represents academic computing departments and industrial computing research laboratories to agencies and lawmakers in Washington. I also serve as editor-in-chief for the journal Parallel Computing. These activities help shape computing and its application to problems of national security, scientific preeminence and economic competitiveness.
The bottom line: information technology is pervasive and integral in all walks of life. It will help determine the future of business, education, government and scholarship. The best IT bridges distances, offers business a competitive advantage, enables new discoveries, and, from iPods to telemedicine, impacts our daily lives. It is all about the unifying and integrating role of IT. Together, we can help determine the national IT agenda, seek interdisciplinary collaborations that utilize IT in scientific discovery and economic development, enhance administration and business process and advance IT research through multidisciplinary projects involving a worldwide community of scholars and students.
Retiring today: Jeanne Smythe, Director of Computing Policy; Jim Storey, User Support & Engagement; Barry Williams, Telecommunications & Networking…. Welcome to Eric Olson, who joined ITS Communications in the role of Communications Project Manager on Jan. 30.
