The Research IT newsletter is designed to communicate monthly progress. Please find archives on our website. 

As we embark on a new semester, it seems a good time to provide a higher level status on the activities of Research IT at Technology Services. It has been nearly two years since this team was formed to bring some coherence to research computing and research enabling services at the campus level. In our first year, we had the support of many across the campus in developing a compelling vision for Research IT at Illinois with a suite of services to be brought to the campus research community based on the community’s expression of needs via the Year of Cyberinfrastructure and related activities. This was embodied in a proposal to campus to consider resourcing the proposed efforts (http://researchit.illinois.edu/documents/).

Please read John's entire message on our website where he addresses:

• The Research IT Portal Project 
• The Research IT Training effort
• The Social Media Macroscope
• Research Computing upgrades

The training project continues to identify opportunities to aggregate and identify valuable trainings for researchers, professors and graduate students. The Research IT calendar provides links to multiple training calendars from across campus. Some quickly upcoming, valuable training sessions are identified here for your convenience.

9/20. Blue Waters Webinar: High-Performance Workflows with Swift

9/21. Blue Waters New User Training

9/22. Software Carpentry Workshop for Women

9/27. Amazon Web Services Lab

9/27. Blue Waters: Software Engineering Practices

9/27. SPSS II: Inferential Statistics with SPSS

10/3. SAS I: Getting Started with SAS

10/4. Stata I: Getting Started with Stata

10/10. SAS II: Inferential Statistics with SAS

10/11. ATLAS.it I: Qualitative Data Analysis

10/11. Stata II: Inferential Statistics with Stata

10/12. ATLAS.it II: Data Exploration and Analysis

10/17. RI: Getting Started with R

10/24. R II: Inferential Statistics

10/25. Blue Waters: Scientific Visualization in Houdini

AWS Labs Planned Through December

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Labs have been scheduled through December. Please check http://cloud.illinois.edu/category/training/ for the updates on times and locations.

AWS Labs give customers an opportunity to learn about AWS services, troubleshoot problems, and consult with the Illinois AWS team and an Amazon solutions architect.

Microsoft Azure Service Status

The University has finalized a contract that provides access to Microsoft Azure. We are currently developing the business processes necessary to provision and rebill access and anticipate general availability for Azure very early in the new calendar year. We are also working with Microsoft on providing similar orientation and laboratory learning opportunities.

If you have questions about Microsoft Azure at Illinois, or if you have already set up a personal Azure account for University business, please contact azure-support@illinois.edu.

Billed By The Second 

Amazon Web Services has announced new per-second billing for EC2 and block volumes. Further details are available at cloud.illinois.edu.

Social Media Macroscope

The Social Media Macroscope (SMM) proof of concept project completed on 9/15. The team included details from the proof-of-concept project on the NSF BigData (DB) Spokes grant. Great work SMM project team and grant writing participants!

Social Media Analytics Presentations

The Social Media Analytics team members are presenting at multiple conferences this fall.

• Joe Yun will present at the Midwest Big Data Hub group in Omaha to discuss issues of community resilience (measuring the sustainability of a community to recover and respond to adverse situations). Joe is one of multiple presenters from Illinois.
• Joe Yun and Jana Diesner will co-host a session titled "Human Centered Data Science and Social Computing" on Data Science Day on October 10th.
• The Social Media Macroscope will be promoted at the Gateways 2017 Conference for Science Gateways. The team will participate on a panel for the Science Gateways Community Institute in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

 To contact us visit the Research IT website or email research-it@illinois.edu.