Center for Advancing the Study of CyberInfrastructure (CASCI)

at the B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences

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About CASCI

The Center for Advancing the Study of Cyberinfrastructure (CASCI) at RIT is a new, fundamentally "virtual", research center within the Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences. The Center is motivated by the opportunities of computing disciplines to advance modern science and engineering research, the so-called cyberinfrastructure initiative. The new center serves as an umbrella organization encompassing several independent specialty laboratories and recruits faculty across the Institute to participate in multidisciplinary efforts.

The center's primary mission is to enhance education and research afforded by emerging cyberinfrastructure through research, education and service. The research activities of the new center focus on the framework supporting science and engineering research and directly support domain-specific informatics. This research serves a fundamental role for the faculty and students in the Ph.D. program in the Golisano College. The result is a center that addresses a most critical singular goal: "To join the [computing] community with scientific and engineering disciplines to build a high-performance, networked system of distributed computing, storage, visualization capabilities, and sensors on an unprecedented scale with national, and ultimately global, presence."

Mission

The mission of the CASCI is multifold, including:

• Encourage innovation, scholarship, and entrepreneurship in domain-specific informatics
• Enhance the Institute's computing environment for research in science and engineering
• Manage, protect, and maintain shared computing infrastructure and resources
• Provide service to the RIT research community in all areas of Cyberinfrastructure

Goals

The primary objective of the CASCI is to create faculty/students and industry/government ventures to study and implement furture Cyberinfrastructure technologies for solving computing problems in focused domains where we do renowned local expertise in the Institute. Key specific goals are:

• Ensure that the center's community (stakeholders) benefit from its activities by promplty disseminatin intellectual production in the appropriate form and by building innovative laboratories with critical mass of faculty, students and resources bridging disciplines so as to have greater impact within the college, RIT, and externally.
• Provide faculty satisfaction, motivation (support), and venture opportunities by acting as a catalyst for the study and application of Cyberinfrastructure technologies to foster faculty participation in collaborative research and to develop multi-college research collaboration and strong partnerships and to provide multidisciplinary education including exploring entirely new and emerging areas of expertise.

Structure

The new center will serve as an umbrella organization and catalyst to focused groups of multidisciplinary faculty and students. The center itself will have no specific research members, and hence will function much like a "virtual" center. Instead, the new center will house several laboratories populated with researchers from multiple disciplines. The new center gives all associated labs equal footing to better coordinate research efforts and facilities for the benefit of the whole CI initiative. The directors of these specialty laboratories will form part of the management structure of the new center under the leadership of the deans of represented colleges.

There are four basic components to the model for the new center, namely:

• Management structure with shared participation
• Member laboratories sponsoring multidisciplinary faculty and students working on domain-specific projects
• Cyberinfrastructure in support of domain-specific informatics
• Computing infrastructure at the service of the center and other centers throughout the institute .