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ARTICLES
Cellular Coverage
"Can you hear me now?" OIT hopes you will soon answer with a resounding yes. After exploring how to best enhance cellular coverage on campus, OIT is collaborating with several cellular providers to install antennae in selected locations across campus.
Full article
Discover New Ways to Enhance Student Learning Experiences at Upcoming Conference
OIT, in cooperation with the Center for Teaching Excellence, will host the third annual Innovations in Teaching and Learning (ITL) Conference. This conference showcases and celebrates the creativity and dedication of University of Maryland instructors who demonstrate excellence in their teaching endeavors. Full article
Clickers Go Mobile!
Spring
2009 brings a new alternative that allows your students to fulfill any class
requirements for clickers by using mobile devices they may already own. Full article
Unsanitary Use of Memory Sticks Can Lead to Infection
The growing use of memory sticks, USB keys, and flash drives
has prompted the re-emergence of a computer security issue that has been
lying dormant since the demise of the floppy disk — the transmission
of computer viruses using human carrier pigeons. Full article
Let OIT Help With Departmental Computer and Software Purchases
OIT's Software Licensing Office and Terrapin Technology Store are available to help you purchase computer hardware and software for departmental/institutional use.
Full article
Digital Forensics Lab Opens for Business
OIT’s
Digital Forensics Lab (DFL) was created through a partnership with the CyberWATCH
consortium and funding from the National Science Foundation to provide instructors
and students at consortium institutions with access to state-of-the-art computer
forensics facilities.
Full article
MyUM Portal: One Site, One Login Now for Faculty and Staff, Too!
Up
until now the portal has been a student thing. Well not entirely, but with so
few applications that are of use to faculty and staff, why bother visiting www.my.umd.edu
at all? That was then, and this is now. During the spring 2009 semester, OIT will
begin to add more portal features and functions of interest to those other than
students, starting with one of our favorite applications: electronic timesheets! Full article
Reeling
'em in -- Spear Phishing
Spear phishing customizes requests for personal information in many
ways, ranging from clumsy misspelled text messages to very sophisticated messages
using actual graphics from targeted sites, names of officials, and wording combed
from Web pages. If you respond to any of these tactics, even just replying with
a “remove me from your list” or an insult to the spammer, potential
consequences vary from having your e-mail address sold on marketing lists to
having your account hijacked and used to send spam and spear phishing messages.
You might also become a victim of identity theft. Full article
University
of Maryland Begins Mobility Initiative
This past fall, the University of Maryland embarked on
the Mobility Initiative, an exciting project to assess whether mobile
technology can be effectively used to promote engagement between students
and faculty. Since the beginning of the fall semester, 133 University
of Maryland freshmen in the Banneker/Key Scholarship and Maryland Incentive
Awards programs have been taking part in the university’s pilot
program. Full article
Don't
Write Your Password Down: Tips for Creating Strong and Memorable Passwords
Protecting your information should be a priority, and creating
a strong password is not as complicated as it may seem. But what makes
a strong password memorable but not guessable? Full article
Coming
Soon: Microsoft Exchange for Faculty and Staff
Microsoft Exchange is coming to the University of Maryland!
During 2009, all faculty and staff members currently using the Mail@umd
e-mail system (powered by Mirapoint) will be migrated onto the Exchange
system. Full article
Protect Your Wireless Communications with "Umd-secure"
Are you still connecting to the Web using the university's wireless network by opening up a Web browser and logging in via a Web page? If so, then you are using the older "umd" network, and other laptops in your vicinity could potentially monitor your communications. Full article
Message
from Jeff Huskamp,
OIT is beginning a program to more proactively support the research needs of university faculty. Over the past several years, OIT has created data center space for research computers where they can be physically protected, operated in an environment with appropriate power and cooling, and physically accessed by the owning organization as needed. In addition, a shared high-performance computing cluster is available for faculty use on a peer-reviewed basis in collaboration with faculty in several colleges and schools across campus. OIT is now poised to expand upon these existing resources through investments in research support for computational science. During the next couple of years, OIT aims to provide expertise to campus research groups in the following areas: suitable software available for a variety of research problems, methods for parallelizing computer software, and training on existing national high-performance computing resources, such as the National Science Foundation's TeraGrid. In addition to providing these base support functions, OIT is interested in partnering with campus organizations to prepare proposals to funding agencies that involve the capabilities listed above. Such partnerships will enable campus organizations to outsource to OIT the acquisition, installation, and systems administration of needed computing capacity. The critical research computing resources would be housed in a secure environment with support from the OIT systems and operations staff, a potential asset when viewed by funding agencies. As a corollary
to these expanded services, OIT will also begin to collaborate with
campus groups to generate federal funding proposals intended to
not only procure a high-performance computer for this university,
but also to expand outreach to higher education institutions through
K-12 school systems. The goal is to create a resource within the
state that will increase the number of jobs available in computational
science research and development areas, while also creating a pipeline
of computational scientists to fill the jobs in the future. This
pipeline should start being primed with introductory computational
science concepts in elementary schools and end with first rate experiences
in relevant disciplines as part of the college experience. OIT looks
forward to collaborating with colleges and schools on this new direction! |
New
Directions for Research Computing Support
ITforUM
is the
Information Technology Newsletter of the University
of Maryland, published by the Office
of Information Technology.
Letters to
the editor and article suggestions are welcome. Please send correspondence
to ITforUM@umd.edu.
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Credits | Archive. © 2009 University
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