Tech Corner

Tech Corner

Advisory committee guides technology priorities

To facilitate the continuous communication required for the complex issue of technology, Provost Eugene Levy and Kamran Khan, vice provost for information technology (IT), have created an advisory committee of faculty, staff and students from across campus.

Created last fall, the Information Technology Advisory Committee (ITAC) has been providing advice on technology priorities for academic computing and facilitating communication across the Rice community. In an advisory capacity, the committee will assist Khan with the development of a campus-wide IT strategy.

“IT plays an increasingly important role in the challenges we [as a campus] face,” Khan said. “My role is to listen to and work with the committee on common themes that will advance our academic and scholarship programs and mission.”

Working collaboratively with the committee, Khan hopes to initiate discussions on institutional priorities, including security, the campus network, support for classroom technologies and research computing, a campus portal and enterprise system, digital library requirements and the dissemination of critical IT information.

Levy said this is an opportune time to reconstitute an advisory committee for academic computing. “Last year, in recognition of the magnitude of the jobs involved in supervising academic computing and the library, we separated what had been a combined responsibility into two separate positions,” he said. “Now, with a dedicated vice provost for library and a dedicated vice provost for IT, we can ensure that each of those critical parts of the university gets the full-time and focused attention that it needs.

“The ITAC will ensure that the academic community has direct input to strategic thinking and planning to meet information technology needs.”

After careful consideration of committee membership and structure, Levy appointed faculty and academic professional representatives from each school or division at Rice, with each member to serve two- or three-year staggered terms. Four committee members serve by virtue of their positions at Rice — vice provost and university librarian, vice provost for research and graduate studies, associate vice president of administrative computing and a representative from the Office of the General Council. The two co-chairs are the vice provost for information technology and a co-chair named by the provost.

The first faculty co-chair is Ken Kennedy, University Professor, the Ann and John Doerr Professor in Computational Engineering in Computer Science and professor in electrical and computer engineering. “The ITAC provides a forum for communication between the faculty, students and staff and IT, making it possible to ensure that IT policies and procedures reflect the needs and priorities of the university as a whole,” he said. “At the same time, the ITAC must facilitate a better understanding within the university community of the challenges we face due to rapid changes in technology and its uses and misuses.”

Other ITAC members are Randy Castiglioni, Chuck Henry, Paula Sanders, Al Napier, Jordan Konisky, Moshe Vardi, Siva Kumari, Qimiao Si, Gus Scuseria, Becky Heye, Chris Kelty, Arthur Gottschalk, Erzsebet Merenyi, Joe Davidson, Michael Byrne, Albert Pope, Sagar Bhatt (graduate student) and Jack Hardcastle (undergraduate).

Software requests due April 8

Because the process of purchasing, licensing, installing and testing software can take several weeks for each computer classroom or lab, faculty and staff should start considering their software needs for fall 2005 courses.

Requests for software used in instructional classrooms and labs are due April 8. (This deadline does not apply to requests for research lab software.)

The online request form is available at <www.rice.edu/market/software/swrform.html>.