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1. Extended Abstract: Northeast Cyberteam - Methods, Results and Expansion via the Cyberteam Portal

   Goodhue, John; Ma, Julie; Del Maestro, Adrian; Najafi, Sia; Segee, Bruce; Valcourt, Scott; Zottola, Ralph (November 2020, Supercomputing (SC20))

   null (Ed.)

   Computing has become an essential component of research and education for nearly every scientific discipline. Meeting the need for support staff who can help faculty make the best use of available computing resources is a significant challenge for small and mid-sized institutions. The NSF-sponsored Northeast Cyberteam is addressing this challenge by building a pool of research computing facilitators that can be shared across institutional boundaries while also developing self-service tools that reduce the support burden. The Cyberteam Portal, developed to support the Northeast Cyberteam has enabled adoption of program methods by other communities of practice and collaboration with the broader research computing community. 

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2. An Expansion of the User Support Services for the Research Computing Group at the University of Colorado Boulder

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3332186.3332229  

   Knuth, Shelley L.; Frahm, Joel; Monaghan, Andrew J.; Trahan, Daniel; Sampedro, Zebula; Holt, Aaron; Dunn, Timothy; Hauser, Thomas; Burns, Patrick (July 2020, PEARC '19: Proceedings of the Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing on Rise of the Machines (learning))

   In any research computing (RC) environment, the role of the user support group is a combination of education, consulting, and outreach. As this role is the most public-facing of a research computing group's team, it is important to ensure an excellent level of support is provided to users. The Research Computing group at the University of Colorado (CURC) Boulder maintains a large-scale computing cluster with several hundred active users, among other services, and has done so since 2011. The user support group at CURC provides a variety of services intended to support these users. This paper describes those services the CURC group provides, as well as explores the various ways that these services have been improved in 2018-19. The impact on users is also assessed. 

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3. Examining the role of computing identity in the computing experiences of women and racially minoritized undergraduates: a literature review

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s12528-023-09375-0  

   Clarke, Nagash; Mondisa, Joi-Lynn; Packard, Becky Wai-Ling; Queener Schemanske, Carin; Tuladhar, Anu; Gosha, Kinnis (May 2023, Journal of Computing in Higher Education)

   This paper offers a synthesis on computing identity and the experiences of women and minoritized populations in computing and computer science in higher education. Examining computing identity and its role in the computing experiences of minoritized undergraduates can help us better understand ways to engage and support women and minoritized individuals in the computing field thus increasing participation and persistence of these groups in computing. In this article, we present a review of research literature on computing identity within the experiences of women and minoritized undergraduate students in computing. The research questions guiding this work are: (1) What research literature exists about computing identity?, (2) According to existing literature, what are the experiences of women and racially minoritized undergraduates in computing (e.g., persons who identify as Black, Hispanic/Latinx, Indigenous people)?, and (3) What theoretical frameworks are used to guide existing computing identity literature? Emergent themes include the need to focus on exposure to computing, persistence, career expectations, and engagement. While there is no consensus on a computer identity framework, there is research guided by social cognitive career theory, social identity theory, and practice theory. We conclude that computing identity, including its multiple conceptualizations, offers multiple opportunities for informing and broadening participation of minoritized populations in computing. Future research should include further conceptual exploration of computing identity. 

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4. Support for Broadening Participation through Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software

   https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1145/3408877.3439629  

   Braught, G. (January 2021, Proceedings of the Annual SIGCSE Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education)

   null (Ed.)

   The necessity and benefits of broadening participation in computing and the roles that computing programs must play in addressing this challenge have been well documented. Elevating the social value of computing has been advocated as an approach to increasing the appeal of computing to both women and other underrepresented groups. This poster adds empirical support for that approach. It reports on the analysis of projects selected by students over four years of a two-semester senior capstone. In this capstone students select Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) communities with which to engage. The students learned about FOSS principles and processes and were introduced to humanitarian FOSS (HFOSS). They completed pre-semester surveys and engaged in a three-stage project selection process. The types of projects that students considered (FOSS or HFOSS) support the assertion that computing with social value is appealing to both females and students in underrepresented groups. Analysis of pre-semester attitude surveys adds additional insight and suggests further avenues for investigation. 

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5. TRAIL: Audit Trails for Enhanced Reproducibility and Observability of Research Computing

   https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17246911  

   Rosenberg, Jake; Cardone, Richard; Curbelo, Gilbert; Vanessa, Gonzalez; Black, Steven; Tijerina, Sal; Rivera-Sanchez, Erik; Dahan, Maytal; Stanzione, Dan (January 2025, Zenodo)

   As research projects grow more complex and researchers use a mix of tools - command-line scripts, science gateways, and Jupyter notebooks - it becomes increasingly difficult to track exactly how a final result was produced. Each tool often keeps its own logs, making it hard to reconstruct the full sequence of computational steps. This lack of end-to-end visibility poses a serious challenge for scientific reproducibility. Yet advanced computing remains a critical part of nearly every field of academic research, and researchers continue to rely on a wide range of interfaces to run their scientific software. To address this challenge, the Advanced Computing Interfaces group at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) created a system that collates logs from multiple sources - science gateways, Jupyter notebooks, and the Tapis platform - into one unified “audit trail.” The TACC Research Audit and Integration of Logs (TRAIL) system allows researchers and staff to follow the complete path a dataset or file took: from the moment it was first uploaded to TACC, through every step of computation, to the final result. This kind of tracking helps ensure scientific results can be reproduced and gives advanced computing services better insight into how data and resources are being used. 

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