Highlights from the world of IT.
URI’s IT department devotes time to both internal and external professional development and expansion, relationship building, and advancement of special projects and innovation. Following are highlighted projects, external sharing, and collaboration.
Sept, 2022: URI IT Partners with the MET High School for Internships
ITS and the IT Service Desk is proud to partner with the Met High School in Providence, RI to provide internship opportunities to students interested in IT. Thanks to the Engineering Computer Center, IT Innovation and Pharmacy, for providing opportunities to learn about physical components, programming and application of IT. The internship helps students expand their horizons about their passions, helps them make informed decisions about their future and provides a way to give back to their sponsor.
We were honored to have a visit from Deputy Secretary of Education Cindy Marten on Nov 18th as she shadowed Angel and learned about the Met School intern program. Deputy Secretary Visit Video
Interested in participating? Please contact Terry Wild (twild@uri.edu) to see how you can help fuel the IT passion in these Met students.
Oct, 2022: Conference Poster Presentation
The IT Service Desk, Teaching and Learning Services team, and Cloud Services team all collaborated on a joint proposal for the 2022 EDUCAUSE conference in Denver CO, which was accepted as a poster presentation titled: New World Support: Flexibility and Innovation in Response to Challenges. The team will cover some of the innovative methods IT used to help the campus community shift to an agile mobile workforce and support remote teaching and learning programs during COVID. Terry Wild, Chi Shen, Bob Viens and Michelle Rogers will be presenting the poster at the conference on Thursday, October 27 from 10:15-11:00 a.m., and 3:00 – 3:45 p.m.
August 2022: NSF Grant for Research Computing
The ITS Research Computing team recently received multiple federal grants for boosting computational hardware infrastructure — $1.2M from the Department of Education, $400K from the National Science Foundation (collaborative with UMass Amherst) and $600K from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (collaborative with UMass Dartmouth). These investments are being used to build a collaborative HPC environment called UNITY at the Massachusetts Green HPC Center.
UNITY: https://unity.uri.edu
MGHPCC: MGHPCC.org
Grants announcement PR
May 2022: VR/XR Applied Learning Projects that Engage Students
The IT Innovative Learning Technologies team provides student help to faculty who are endeavoring to enhance or increase the use of digital technology and applied learning in their curriculum and/or classroom. The team has recently completed several virtual reality (VR/XR) projects with faculty that help students understand means and methods of providing humanitarian aid and disaster relief in a virtual environment.
June 2020: Laptop and Ipad Checkout Program for the COVID Isolated
URI IT Services coordinated with vendors, the campus community, and numerous statewide healthcare organizations for the acquisition, programming, and delivery of more than 500 tablet devices for patient use during the height of the pandemic. These devices directly benefited patients in hospitals, senior centers, and nursing homes to ensure their communications with loved ones and care givers. The URI community also pooled more than 200 laptops and internet access points that were provided to under-resourced students upon request.
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