New CITI grants foster campus collaborations

New
CITI grants foster campus collaborations
…………………………………………………………………

BY JADE BOYD
Rice News Staff

The Computer and Information Technology
Institute (CITI) has awarded five Innovation Grants to collaborative teams of
Rice faculty who plan activities as diverse as creating a Web-based curriculum
for music appreciation, establishing a digital archive of Near East travel narratives
and starting a scientific visualization lab at Rice.

The CITI Innovation Grants are funded
through the institute’s Enriching Rice through Information Technology (ERIT)
program. The one-year grants provide seed funding for researchers who are interested
in developing innovative research projects that involve computing and information
technology (IT) resources.

“We had a lot of fine proposals
to choose from, and I’m pleased that we met our goal of funding interesting
new concepts from a wide range of disciplines,” said Jan Odegard, executive
director of CITI. “We are particularly happy that this year’s grants
include collaborative projects involving faculty from the humanities and music,
areas of academia that are too often overlooked with respect to cutting edge
IT and computing research.”

This year’s grants include:

“Sound Reasoning: How To
Listen To and Understand Music” Principal investigators (PI) Anthony
Brandt, assistant professor of composition, and Richard Baraniuk, professor
of electrical and computer engineering and director of the Connexions Project,
will develop an interactive, Web-based curriculum for music appreciation that
integrates text with sound.

Principles that encompass the music
of many different styles, eras and traditions will be described and illustrated.
The course will be integrated into Connexions, a Web-based education platform
that adapts the “open source” software concept to scholarly content,
making it easy to publish course curricula online.

“Rice Scientific Visualization
Environment” PI Bruce Nichol, manager of divisional teams in the IT
Department, will work with co-PIs Joe Warren, professor of computer science;
Lydia Kavraki, associate professor of computer science and bioengineering; and
David Scott, the Noah Harding Professor of Statistics, to investigate what Rice
should offer in the way of scientific visualization.

Scientific visualization refers to
cutting-edge computing techniques that are used to display and manipulate large
amounts of data in both two- and three-dimensional space. The team will use
the CITI funding for a feasibility study, to purchase prototype equipment, to
develop a project plan and to develop a strategy for how Rice might build the
necessary facilities.

“Near East Explorations:
Integrating a Digital Archive of Unique Travel Narratives into Teaching and
Research” PI Michael Decker, a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center
for the Study of Cultures, will work with co-PIs Werner Kelber, director of
the Center for the Study of Cultures; Lisa Spiro, director of both the Electronic
Resources Center and the Educational Technology Research and Assessment Cooperative
at Fondren Library; Geneva Henry, executive director of both the Digital Library
Initiative and the Connexions Project; and Lisa Sweeney, director of the GIS/Data
Center at Fondren Library.

The team will create a digital archive
from printed texts of travelers’ accounts of the Near East in the 18th-20th
centuries. These will be used for interdisciplinary research and education in
fields, including English literature; women’s studies; classical, Near
Eastern and medieval archaeology, history and religious studies.

“High-level Optimization
of S-PLUS Language Programs” PI Ken Kennedy, University Professor,
the Ann and John Doerr Professor in Computational Engineering in Computer Science
and professor of electrical and computer engineering, will join co-PIs Bradley
Broom, research scientist in computer science; John Mellor-Crummey, senior faculty
fellow in computer science and associate director of HiPerSoft; and Rob Fowler,
research scientist and associate director of HiPerSoft, in a research collaboration
with biostatisticians at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.

Biostatisticians commonly write computer
applications in a high-level language called S-PLUS, which facilitates the direct
expression of statistical concepts. The HiPerSoft team plans to build a prototype
compiler that can significantly improve the performance of these S-PLUS applications
on high-performance supercomputers.

“Ethics and Politics in Information
Technology” PI Chris Kelty and co-PI Hannah Landecker, both assistant
professors of anthropology, will join co-PI Sherrilyn Roush, assistant professor
of philosophy, in an investigation of the ethical and political aspects of IT.

The project will sponsor a workshop
at Rice at the end of the year where IT professionals and academicians will
meet with social scientists to discuss how ethical and political issues are
integrally woven into the design and research of technology. Using input from
the workshop, the team will produce a set of case studies that will be useful
both to practicing scientists and engineers who are developing new technologies,
and to historians, anthropologists and philosophers studying science and technology.
The case studies will be published on Connexions.