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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. 

The Northeast Cyberteam Program is a collaborative effort across Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts that seeks to assist researchers at small and medium-sized institutions in the region with making use of cyberinfrastructure, while simultaneously building the next generation of research computing facilitators. Recognizing that research computing facilitators are frequently in short supply, the program also places intentional emphasis on capturing and disseminating best practices in an effort to enable opportunities to leverage and build on existing solutions whenever practical. The program combines direct assistance to computationally intensive research projects; experiential learning opportunities that pair experienced mentors with students interested in research computing facilitation; sharing of resources and knowledge across large and small institutions; and tools that enable efficient oversight and possible replication of these ideas in other regions. Each project involves a researcher seeking to better utilize cyberinfrastructure in research, a student facilitator, and a mentor with relevant domain expertise. These individuals may be at the same institution or at separate institutions. The student works with the researcher and the mentor to become a bridge between the infrastructure and the research domain. Through this model, students receive training and opportunities that otherwise would not be available, research projects get taken to a higher level, and the effectiveness of the mentor is multiplied. Providing tools to enable self-service learning is a key concept in our strategy to develop facilitators through experiential learning, recognizing that one of the most fundamental skills of successful facilitators is their ability to quickly learn enough about new domains and applications to be able draw parallels with their existing knowledge and help to solve the problem at hand. The Cyberteam Portal is used to access the self-service learning resources developed to provide just-in-time information delivery to participants as they embark on projects in unfamiliar domains, and also serves as a receptacle for best practices, tools, and techniques developed during a project. Tools include Ask.CI, an interactive site for questions and answers; a learning resources repository used to collect online training modules vetted by Cyberteam projects that provide starting points for subsequent projects or independent activities; and a Github repository. The Northeast Cyberteam was created with funding from the National Science Foundation, but has developed strategies for sustainable operations. 

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. 

Augmented Reality (AR) as a technology will improve the way we work and live in the future. The Microsoft HoloLens device allows for rendering of interactive virtual components into a real world space. The HoloLens is an augmented reality headset and can display these virtual components in front of the user’s eyes, so the data needed to complete a real-world task will always be available. The nature of a HoloLens device lends itself useful for applications in a healthcare setting. Potential benefits come from transitioning to a more hands-free environment such as allowing the logging of data while in sterile environments without needing to sterilize repeatedly from touching paper or tablet. This project developed an augmented reality (AR) application to include a care plan tracker established by a patient’s doctor to allow the patient to do daily tasks without a health care worker’s supervision. The application displays the medications that the patient needs to ingest, daily tasks to complete, and health data to record. The application allows the physician to retrieve useful patient information regularly without scheduled physicals. This project sets a baseline that will provide future developers with documentation, research, and this sample application to assist in the design and construction of more complex applications in the future at the University of New Hampshire. 

Abstract: In September, 2017, the Northeast Cyberteam Initiative began a project to build Ask.Cyberinfrastructure.org, aka Ask.CI, a Q&A site which will allow the research computing community to achieve better/faster research results by making it easier to leverage/share experience and knowledge. Establishing a Q&A site of this nature requires some tenacity. In partnership with the Campus Champions, we have gained some traction, and hope to engage the broader community to firmly establish this platform as a tool for the global research computing community. At this BoF, we will describe the process to-date, and interactively encourage the audience to join the effort. 

The NSF-sponsored Northeast Cyberteam program (https://necyberteam.org) is matching student research computing facilitators with research projects at small and medium sized institutions that need help making use of high performance computing resources. Students are selected based on relevant domain knowledge and level of interest in exploring the Research Computing Facilitator role as a career path. Each student is paired with an experienced mentor, and each project lasts 3-5 months. The poster presents results from two of the ~10 Northeast Cyberteam projects that are either completed or in progress at the time of the conference. Students will be prepared to discuss the research projects that they supported, how their efforts advanced each project, reflections on what they learned about the Research Computing Facilitator role, and recommendations on how other sites might make best use of students as Research Computing Facilitators. In the first project, conducted at the University of Maine, improvements to application performance and parallelization have enabled production of forest attribute data at significantly higher volume, changing the philosophy of forest mapping from creating a single map to creating and assessing thousands of maps, making it possible to assess and (to some degree) trade off errors between maps. The second project expanded efforts to introduce computational chemistry into the undergraduate chemistry curriculum at Bridgewater State University. Having access to a high performance computer cluster allows for studying "real world" systems and also provides students with an opportunity to experience how research computing is done in academia and/or chemical/pharmaceutical industries.