CHAPEL HILL, NC – Sharlini Sankaran, formerly assistant director of the NC Department of Commerce Office of Science and Technology, has been named the first executive director of the Research, Engagement, and Capabilities Hub of North Carolina, or REACH NC.  Sankaran assumed her new duties November 14.

Sankaran will lead the continued development of REACH NC, a new statewide, comprehensive web portal to information on research expertise and capabilities at North Carolina’s universities and research institutions. While REACH NC will make it easier for university faculty and staff to locate potential collaborators for research and other scholarly activities, it also will provide businesses, entrepreneurs, state and local government, community organizations, and citizens with unprecedented access to information on university-based expertise and assets.

The development of REACH NC began in late 2009 as a collaborative effort of the University of North Carolina General Administration, NC State University, UNC-Chapel Hill, and the Renaissance Computing Institute, a multi-campus organization that develops and deploys advanced technologies to enable research discoveries and practical innovations.  In 2010, Duke University joined the REACH NC effort as a partner.  The vision is to expand REACH NC to include additional universities and research institutions across the state.  Sankaran’s work will be supported with funding from the Triangle Universities Center for Advanced Studies, Inc., and the Research Triangle Foundation.

Sankaran holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical and computer engineering from Ohio University and a doctorate in biomedical engineering from UNC-Chapel Hill.  At the NC Department of Commerce, Sankaran managed the Green Business Fund, a competitive program that awards grants to small businesses to encourage them to commercialize innovative green technologies.  She also organized the annual NC Nanotechnology Commercialization Conference, an event that features national-caliber speakers and attracts hundreds of attendees, and tracked the success of the One North Carolina Small Business Program and the Green Business Fund in creating jobs and leveraging funding.  Earlier in her career, Sankaran held positions with the Burroughs Wellcome Fund and Sigma Xi.

For more information about REACH NC, visit www.reachnc.org.

Altometrics was founded by Jeff Terrell (above) and Sir Robert Burbridge.

CHAPEL HILL, NC—The founders of Altometrics, Inc., have a goal that sounds simple: make the Internet faster. They want to speed up the performance of your favorite websites, prevent those frustrating slow-downs and enable richer Web services.

The young entrepreneurs recently received a big boost towards reaching their goal in the form of a $150,000 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the National Science Foundation. The award comes with $30,000 in matching funds from the North Carolina Office of Science and Technology. Altometrics is the brainchild of Jeff Terrell, and Sir Robert Burbridge. Terrell, who recently earned his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, serves as the company’s CTO while Burbridge, a former software engineer at Cisco, is the CEO.

“This is huge for us,” said Terrell. “This means the two of us can focus on the business full time and we will be able to hire another employee. It means we will be able to take our products and services to market that much sooner.”

Altometrics is one of five startups that participated in the Carolina Launch Pad during 2010. The Launch Pad is a pre-commercial technology business accelerator aimed at helping UNC-Chapel Hill faculty, staff and students turn their technology innovations into viable businesses.

The Launch Pad is a joint effort of RENCI (Renaissance Computing Institute) and UNC’s Kenan-Flagler School of Business and Office of Technology Development (OTD). Each Launch Pad participant receives office space at RENCI for one year, including Internet access, storage space and phone. Launch Pad entrepreneurs also have the chance to interact with RENCI’s technical experts, work with RENCI communications staff to develop logos and websites, and receive advice and support from experts in the business school, OTD and the Triangle area business community.

Altometrics, which recently moved into its own office space in Durham, is developing a tool that will allow companies to effectively manage the performance of applications that run over networks—including cloud-based applications—that a growing number of businesses rely on. The company’s new data structures and algorithms will not only be able to track performance data but will also identify and diagnose server performance issues in cloud infrastructures without straining server resources.

“It’s a system that observes and profiles server performance even when those servers are in the cloud,” said Terrell, who began developing the new technology as his Ph.D. dissertation. “With more computing infrastructure moving to the cloud, we think the time is right for what we do. We hope to make the idea of cloud computing more prevalent by making the Internet run faster. In turn, that will allow businesses to save on IT expenses and put more resources into their core business concerns.”

In addition to continuing their product development, the Altometrics team plans to apply for a Phase II SBIR grant in 2011.

For more on Altometrics, visit the company website at http://altometrics.com.

For more on Carolina Launch Pad, see www.carolinalaunchpad.org

Carolina Launch Pad supports the Innovate@Carolina Roadmap, UNC’s plan to help Carolina become a world leader in launching university-born ideas for the good of society. To learn more about the roadmap, visit http://innovate.unc.edu.

Carolina Launch Pad, or Launch Pad for short, targets Carolina faculty, staff and students who want to turn their technological inventions and ideas into viable businesses and have not yet developed their ideas into funded start-ups. The program is a partnership involving RENCI, the UNC Chapel Hill Office of Technology Development (OTD) and UNC Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler Business School.

The first group of Launch Pad participants moved into office space at RENCI headquarters at 100 Europa Drive in Chapel Hill last December and will wrap up their participation in December 2009. Each of the five year-one Launch Pad ventures occupied office space at RENCI equipped with a desk, laptop computer, phone, Internet access, and storage space.  The entrepreneurs collaborated with RENCI’s world-class technology experts, attended RENCI lectures and events, and received help in developing logos and websites. In addition, professionals with OTD, the business school and from the Triangle IT community offered coaching and mentoring to the entrepreneurs in partnership with UNC’s Launching the Venture program.

Another five teams or individuals looking to start technology-related businesses will be invited to participate in Launch Pad in 2010. Participants must be faculty, staff, students, or recent graduates of UNC Chapel Hill with a technology business idea that has not been commercialized. An application form is available at the Carolina Launch Pad website. All applications must be submitted by October 15.

“Carolina Launch Pad gave us a place outside the laboratory where we could concentrate on our business idea,” said Cam Patterson, chief of cardiology at the UNC School of Medicine, founding director of the UNC McAllister Heart Institute, and a year-one Launch Pad participant with a venture called Dyzen. “We were able to meet and share ideas with many different technical experts and IT business professionals and to learn how to focus our message to our customers. That’s just not possible when you are in the lab or your campus office.”

New participants in the program will be selected by the Carolina Launch Pad Selection Advisory Committee, which consists of David Knowles, RENCI’s director of economic development and engagement; Ted Zoller, executive director of the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at Kenan-Flagler Business School; Cathy Innes, director of the Office of Technology Development; Timothy L. Quigg, associate chair for administration and finance in the computer science department; and Paul Jones, director of ibiblio.org and a faculty member who teaches in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the School of Library and Information Sciences. Applicants will be notified of their acceptance in November.

Carolina Launch Pad is supported by RENCI through funding from the UNC Chapel Hill Office of the Provost.

For more information, see the Carolina Launch Pad website.

Students from across the state took part in BotCamp 2009 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill June 19 and July 24-25. BotCamp offered a new innovative curriculum, called Bot 2.0, designed to educate, recruit and retain non-traditional students in the study of botanical science.

Bot 2.0 features a curriculum that combines botany, environmental conservation, the use of social networking technologies and metadata literacy. Funded by the National Science Foundation, Bot 2.0 is a collaboration involving RENCI, the Metadata Research Center at UNC’s School of Information and Library Science (SILS), the North Carolina Botanical Garden (NCBG), the UNC Herbarium and UNC Information Technology Services (ITS). Jane Greenberg, Francis Carroll McColl term professor and director of the Metadata Research Center, and Alan Weakley, curator of the UNC Herbarium, lead the project.

RENCI managed BOT 2.0′s technology, which is modeled on the concept of a memex, a theoretical memory augmentation framework that allows users to share, link, correlate and re-find digital information through the application of structured metadata and collaborative tagging. Michael Shoffner, the project’s technology architect and a RENCI advanced software developer, developed a “cloud memex” using social media services such as Facebook and Flickr and mobile phone cameras. His objective interfaces and interaction techniques  that were familiar to the students and would be simple for educators to learn.

“We worked with the faculty team from the beginning to craft the proposal, selected computing technology that would advance the project’s research agenda, and helped pull it all together,” said Shoffner. “Working with these researchers, who are leaders in metadata and botany, has been an amazing experience.”

Eighteen students participated in this year’s BotCamp. They were selected from Alamance Community College, North Carolina A&T University, North Carolina Central University, North Carolina State University and UNC-Chapel Hill. The students’ activities included a tour of SILS with an overview of the field of library information science and visits to NCBG and Battle Park, where they learned about plant identification, folksonomies (user-defined classification systems based on tagging) and metadata systems for classification. The students also participated in competitions, such as discovering the most interesting tree bark and describing a plant using “characters.” Characters are what botanists call the attributes of a plant, such as “bark features,” “twig features,” “leaf type,” etc.

“We had a number of hands-on activities that encouraged students to observe plant characteristics and approach plant identification like biologists while not getting too wrapped up in the formal taxonomic language,” said Greenberg. “The students also had the opportunity to use our Facebook and Flickr sites, and our blog so they could share what they learned with others using the same social networking tools they use every day.”

For more information about BOT 2.0, see the RENCI website or the Metadata Research Center website.

Endeavors, the research magazine of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, highlights RENCI visualization projects in the cover story of its Winter, 2009, edition. View Story

A biochemistry and biophysics professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he heads a research group in the UNC School of Medicine that studies how proteins form, and then uses that information to create computer models that allow scientists to build new proteins that have important applications in medicine, biological research and industrial processes.  In particular, he is interested in manipulating signal transduction pathways, the process by which cells convert biochemical signals into cellular-level reactions and responses.

It’s work that could lead to new treatments, and eventually cures, for serious diseases such as diabetes, Alzheimers, HIV/AIDS and many cancers.  And it requires computing power well beyond that of a small research lab, a fact that led Kuhlman to collaborate with the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI).

Early in 2007, Kuhlman needed compute cycles to virtually create thousands of different protein configurations and determine their abilities to bind with one another. He looked to RENCI, which leads the engagement program of the Open Science Grid (OSG) to help match his research team with the computing power it needed. OSG is a consortium of universities, national laboratories, scientific collaborations and software developers dedicated to meeting the ever-growing computing and data management requirements of scientific researchers. Supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science and the National Science Foundation, OSG provides access to its members’ independently owned and managed resources through a common grid infrastructure that uses high-performance networks to connect computing systems scattered across the country. As leader of  engagement activities for OSG, RENCI works with research teams such as the Kuhlman Lab to introduce them to the OSG and its resources and help them develop the skills needed to use the OSG national cyberinfrastructure.

Using the OSG’s distributed computing facility, Kuhlman’s team was soon running large-scale jobs with Rosetta, molecular modeling software used to study protein design, protein folding, and protein-protein interactions. Rosetta allows scientists to build thousands of high-resolution, three-dimensional models of proteins. It then samples some of the thousands of combinations of protein structures and determines how well each is able to bind with a target protein structure. This process helps the researchers determine which proteins are the best candidates for a more thorough investigation of their binding properties using real molecules in the lab.

Currently, the Kuhlman Lab focuses on designing proteins that interact with target proteins only when they are in their activated state.  The researchers use these designed proteins in experiments with living cells to detect when and where the target proteins are activated in the cells.  The information helps them understand normal patterns of growth and development in cells, and by extension, the misregulations in cell development associated with cancer and other diseases.

The team used more than 150,000 CPU hours on the OSG in the spring and early summer of 2007—work that would’ve taken years on computers in the Kuhlman Lab. Through the lab’s partnership with RENCI, the process was seamless: RENCI cyberinfrastructure experts and Kuhlman Lab scientists worked together to adapt the scientist’s application into a format that could easily take advantage of OSG resources. They then used OSG’s Resource Selection Service (ReSS) to select the necessary resources at OSG sites. For every job submitted, ReSS managed the submission, detected job failures, rerouted jobs as needed, and delivered the results of the computations back to the scientists.

“Having RENCI here at Carolina helped us access the OSG. That has been a huge time saver, but even more important, it has made it possible for us to examine questions that would otherwise be unanswerable,” said Kuhlman. “In the 21st century, these are the kinds of resources that will be essential to making groundbreaking discoveries.”

Kuhlman said his research team is now studying several protein sequences that were designed using Rosetta and OSG resources.

“We are excited because we now have experimental evidence that one of our designs binds to a protein, P21-activated kinase (PAK), that has been  shown to be misregulated in cancer.  Our collaborator, Klaus Hahn in the Pharmacology deparment at UNC, plans to use our design to visualize when PAK is activated in cells”.

The Kuhlman team continues to run jobs on the OSG, although they no longer need help from RENCI in adapting their codes and managing their submissions.

“We got them started and they are using cycles everyday, but they don’t really need our help anymore,” said John McGee, who leads the OSG engagement program at RENCI. “We worked hand in hand with them to get their jobs running on the OSG and to give them the skills needed to use distributed cyberinfrastructure. Now, they are bonafide users of cyberinfrastructure with a new tool at their disposal.”

More information:
Open Science Grid: http://www.opensciencegrid.org/
Rosetta Commons: http://www.rosettacommons.org/
Kuhlman Lab: http://www.unc.edu/kuhlmanpg/

The symposium, which will feature RENCI Director Dan Reed as a panelist, will explore cinematic artistry and the impact of technology and consumerism on artistic standards in cinema, music and multimedia productions. Joining Reed on the symposium panel will be Mikel Rouse, a composer, director, and multimedia artist who created the experimental multimedia piece The End of Cinematics, a hypnotic, sensory experience that pays tribute to the movies while lamenting the decline of cinematic artistry. The dream-like work includes digital video, live actors, live video on multiple screens and a surround-sound musical score.

Other panelists will be Martine Antle, professor of French at UNC-Chapel Hill; Kyle Gann, composer, new music critic for The Village Voice, and associate professor of music at Bard College; Mark Katz, assistant professor of music at UNC-Chapel Hill; and Joyce Rudinsky, associate professor in UNC-Chapel Hill’s communication studies department.

The symposium begins at 5 p.m. at the Carolina Inn, 211 Pittsboro St., Chapel Hill, and will be followed by a 6 p.m. dinner at the Carolina Inn. A performance of The End of Cinematics begins at 8 p.m. at Memorial Hall and will be followed by a 10 p.m. post performance reception.

Rouse dreamed up a high-tech framework for The End of Cinematics that turns Hollywood-style special effects inside out. Rather than placing actors in computer-generated landscapes, he has removed the images of actors from a film he shot on the streets of Paris, so that live performers can take their places on stage and, in a sense, on film. The result is a hyper-real live-action 3D movie. Some of the effects were created by Rouse in collaboration with visualization specialists at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Illinois, just before Dan Reed left as director there to develop RENCI.

Cost for the symposium, dinner and performance is $100. For more on the symposium, dinner and performance or to purchase tickets, please see http://www.fridaycenter.unc.edu/pdep/pas/.

Kenneth J. Galluppi will lead RENCI efforts to utilize advanced technologies in planning for, mitigating, and recovering from natural and man-made disasters, including hurricanes and their aftermath. He will work with university, business, and community groups to integrate high-end technology tools into development and emergency plans. These tools could include visualization for predictive and real-time models of environmental conditions, data mining algorithms for analyzing evacuation and rescue routes, and high-end computers for calculating changing conditions in near real time.

Galluppi was senior scientist and program manager at the UNC-Chapel Hill Carolina Environmental Program, where he identified environmental issues requiring multidisciplinary research and brought together project teams to address those issues. He was co-PI of the environmental program’s Carolina Environmental Bioinformatics Research Center, where he applied computational infrastructure and modeling approaches to a wide range of bioinformatics problems and managed multidisciplinary outreach and translation activities. Galluppi spent two years with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency National Exposure Research Laboratory and six years at the North Carolina Supercomputing Center as co-director, director of scientific and environmental programs and as a program manager. Galluppi also has been a consultant on air quality model evaluation, risk assessment and regulatory compliance and was a model and system developer for Computer Science Corporation. He has a master’s degree in meteorology and served as an officer and environmental analyst with the U.S. Air Force.

Chris Heermann comes to RENCI from Internet2, where he spent four years as a networking engineer for the Abilene national research and education network. Heermann’s duties included planning, designing and testing network initiatives, working with network operations, testing and evaluation centers, and collaborating with Internet2 members, corporate partners and network participants. He initiated and developed the Collaborative Wireless Infrastructure Initiative, a program that coordinates wireless access from the network infrastructure to the last mile, including remote sensor network deployments. He is a member of the design team for the Hybrid Optical Packet Infrastructure (HOPI), a national test bed that examines new network architectures capable of delivering next-generation services. With over 18 years of experience, Heermann has worked in both R&E and the commercial sector.

At RENCI, Heermann will lead efforts to improve connectivity among North Carolina universities, communities and industries in order to enable research, education and economic development. He also will work with scientists who use RENCI resources to ensure they have the bandwidth needed to use remote computing resources and applications.

“With the addition of Ken and Chris, RENCI has taken a giant step forward in reaching out to all the audiences we aim to serve,” said RENCI Director Dan Reed. “Technology and technical expertise are as crucial to disaster mitigation and recovery as they are to research and economic development. And stable, high-speed network connectivity is the glue that binds together the technologies and the people who use them.”

Reed had been a member of the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC), a group whose federal charter expired last June. In October, President Bush announced that the functions of PITAC – to advise the president on IT research and development – would be folded into PCAST and that PCAST membership would be expanded to take on the broader role. PCAST advises the president on technology, scientific research priorities, and math and science education. Its members are national leaders in business, research and education, including Dell founder Michael Dell, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, and MIT President Emeritus Charles Vest. Reed was one of 14 appointees announced Monday. Others include F. Duane Ackerman, chairman and CEO of Bell South; Paul M. Anderson, CEO of Duke Energy; Hector de Jesus Ruiz, CEO of AMD; Robert E. Witt, president of the University of Alabama; and Tadataka Yamada, chairman of research and development for GlaxoSmithKline and soon to be executive director of the Global Health Program for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

“The expansion of PCAST shows the federal government recognizes that IT is a pervasive element in science and education and that a holistic approach to these issues is necessary,” said Reed. “I am honored to be named to this prestigious council and I look at is as a chance to help our country realize its boldest dreams.”

Reed served as a member of PITAC and as chair of its computational science subcommittee for two years. He is the current chair of the Board of Directors of the Computing Research Association, a member of the National Archives and Records Administration advisory committee, a member of the Biomedical Informatics Expert Panel for the National Institutes of Health’s National Center, and chair of the policy board for the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center. Reed came to North Carolina in 2004 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) from 2000- 2003 and chair of the computer science department from 1996-2001.

Since 2004, Reed has focused on building multidisciplinary teams that bring together RENCI experts in high-end computing, applications, and cyberinfrastructure with scientists, educators, business leaders, and scholars in the arts, humanities and social sciences. As Vice Chancellor for IT, he has focused on integrating and improving the telecommunications, networking, applications, and computing infrastructure at UNC-Chapel Hill.

“I applaud the president’s choice of Dan Reed as a member of PCAST,” said Erskine Bowles, president of the 16-campus University of North Carolina system. “He brings a broad range of knowledge and experience to the job and will be a strong voice for North Carolina as the council develops national priorities for research, education and IT development.”

“Dan Reed’s experience as a researcher and a leader of major collaborative science and technology projects will serve the council and our country well,” said UNC-Chapel Hill Chancellor James Moeser. “He is a respected leader in the research and business communities and he understands that in the 21st century, issues in technology, scientific research, and education cannot be considered separately.”