Christine Kirkpatrick finds new partners at Atlanta forum
By: Sneha Lele, San Diego Supercomputer Center REHS Intern
The first Minority Serving Cyberinfrastructure Consortium (MS-CC) Annual Meeting was recently held in Atlanta and brought together HBCU and TCU leaders and their partners from across the country—including West Hub Principal Investigator Christine Kirkpatrick of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego.
“Participating institutions in the MS-CC work together to accomplish more with the finite resources each institution has, but make no mistake, the MS-CC members are leaders that the academic community at large should be engaging with and learning from,” Kirkpatrick said. “The research professionals and faculty at the MS-CC meeting understand how to broaden the (STEM) pipeline, where the gaps are, and are full of ideas and proven models for rising to the challenges we all face. In addition, so many of the groups were working on projects that make a difference to their local community, from workforce development curriculum to establishing data repositories to capture local knowledge and culture.”
The MS-CC is a partnership focused on advancing cyberinfrastructure capabilities for Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU), Hispanic Serving Institutions ( HSI), and Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCU) campuses, collectively referred to as Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs). Their goal is to advance connections across campuses around data, research computing, teaching, curriculum development, professional development and capacity building. The program also works to enhance communication between researchers, IT professionals, campus leadership and institutional members as well as support IT for research enabled professional and career development.
The MS-CC Student Hackathon took place in-person during the MS-CC Annual Meeting, The event provided an opportunity for students enrolled at an HBCU or TCU to come together, learn new skills and collaboratively apply those new skills to a particular problem in a defined amount of time. Students worked with the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) Director of Training and Professional Development Charlie Dey and TACC Senior Systems Administrator Je’aime Powell.
Hackathon participants were equipped with a laptop and an interest in learning new skills; each team practiced coding training and advancements in machine learning through the two-day hackathon.
Students used the Susceptible-Infected-Removed (SIR) epidemiological computer model, which utilizes Ordinary Differential Equations (ODE), to create their projects.