Information Technology News Archive

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About NACS

NACS and DUE Team Up

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In summer 2007, the Division of Undergraduate Education (DUE) and NACS agreed to partner in providing information technology (IT) support services to DUE departments and programs. Under the new partnership, DUE’s IT support team members joined NACS and became a part of the Web Technologies Group under the direction of Shohreh Bozorgmehri.

DUE has extensive IT needs in the areas of file and web server management, desktop support, database administration, and application development.

Its nearly one hundred staff members administer a wide range of support programs that serve the undergraduate population at UCI, including but not limited to tutorial services, academic advising, and study abroad programs. These needs are currently met by a DUE-IT team consisting of the Director, seven staff, and one student programmer.

The DUE-IT team members in turn have access to a range of technical knowledge and expertise within the NACS organization. Sharon Salinger, Dean of Undergraduate Education who proposed the partnership, praised the success of the venture. “By moving DUE-IT to NACS we capitalized on the depth and breadth of knowledge and support within NACS,” she said.  “Our IT staff joined a more productive environment and the Division benefited from superb leadership and project management.”

In the past year, the NACS DUE-IT team provided a range of services to DUE and through DUE to the campus undergraduate community. Student tracking, previously managed on paper and in Microsoft Office products, is now handled through a web-based system for Student Academic Advancement Services and Transfer Student Services. DUE-IT staff worked with the Office of Admissions to consolidate numerous separate data exchanges into one central and secure feed. Internal code, database, and file permissions audits were conducted and extensive searches were conducted for unsecured sensitive information, greatly enhancing DUE’s IT security.

Currently, the DUE-IT team is working on a range of projects, including the overhaul of the Undecided/Undeclared Office’s workshop systems, the consolidation and streamlining of central DUE data systems, and implementation of a central student ID card reader system to allow DUE offices to more efficiently serve students. Additional information about the DUE-IT partnership can be found online.

Online Telecommuncations Service Request Form

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NACS online Service Request Form

NACS Online Service Request Form

NACS clients are asked to use our online service request form for making network and telecommunications service requests.  Orders for telephones and lines, wired and wireless network services,  voice mail services, cellular services, calling cards, 800 Mhz radio services, conference unit rental, account fund changes and other telecommunications services are all possible through the use of the online order form.  Requests for telephone and network services at the same location can be ordered together with a single form.

Orders are reviewed, dispatched to the appropriate team for processing, scheduled, and completed typically within five business days.  Orders for 10 or more services require longer lead times.  NACS will do our best to meet any client deadline.

Once an order is in the system, you will receive email confirmation, and you will be able to check on its status online.  A set of administrative tools allows you to review or search through open orders.

If you need assistance with your order, need to make changes to it, or cancel it, or if you would like to check on the feasibility of a tight deadline, contact NACS Telecommunications Customer Support at x45123 or nacs-tcs@uci.edu.

Meet Stacey Rose

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NACS undertakes few projects more complex and demanding than creating the telecommunications infrastructure in each new building.  NACS has recently hired Stacey Rose as Assistant Project Manager under Communications Projects manager Diane Dunn.

Stacey found her way into the IT industry when she returned to school after a few years working as sales manager for the Desert Sun in Palm Springs.  She has worked in large corporations as technician, desktop support manager, and in project management.  Her position in NACS shifts her attention from computers and their software to the links that connect them.

Stacey’s approach to Project Management is understanding the “Big Picture” of each project, and also trying to be flexible.  Project management here at UCI is different from project management with an outside company.  The PMI methodology which provides a rigid structure that works in industry needs to be adjusted in this dynamic environment, with a heavy project load and limited resources.  Stacey says she is happy to be a part of NACS, and enjoying the people she’s working with.

GIS Technology in UCI Research

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Geographical Information Systems (GIS) is a technology which is finding ever broader use in the UCI research community. NACS Research Computing Specialist Tony Soeller has been supporting GIS software, teaching workshops, and working directly with faculty and graduate students on research projects to exploit GIS tools. Here are some recent examples.

Professor Bradford Hawkins in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology is tracking global species diversity in birds. GIS was used on a massive spatial data synthesis project on global bird ranges to georegister, digitize and rasterize bird range maps, then to summarize the number of bird species within discrete cells 27.5 to 220 km on a side. Numerous ArcGIS programs (ArcObjects and VBA) were written to help in the processing of the data.

Cristiane Surbeck completed her Ph.D. studies in Professor Stan Grant’s lab in Chemical Engineering and Materials Sciences and is now an Assistant Professor at University of Mississippi. Cris has been analyzing the Santa Ana River Watershed. Her research looked at the biological and sediment constituents of runoff into the Santa Ana River from three storm events within the watershed, and compared these data to rainfall volume and land use types which contributed to the runoff. GIS was used to synthesize land use data with rainfall data from the storm events, to delineate individual storm watersheds, and to determine the area of land within each land use type and the amount of precipitation within each of those land use types.

Satish Vutuku, a student in Professor Donald Dabdub’s lab in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering is examining the impact on air quality of distributed power generation.

In one project, Satish assessed atmospheric impact of emissions from distributed power generation (DG) sources. DG refers to “on-site” generation of power using technologies such as fuel cells and micro turbines. Such DG installations emit pollutants in an urban area in a highly dispersed manner, in contrast to conventional huge power plants that emit pollutants as a concentrated plume far away from urban areas. In order to analyze effects of such DG emissions, Satish created a set of “DG scenarios” that would predict the adoption of DG technologies and corresponding emissions. The development of DG scenarios was based upon highly-detailed land-use data and population data. The land-use data were obtained as GIS files and were formatted to fit the model grid and resolution with help from Tony Soeller.
This is just a sampling of the many projects at UCI which are making use of GIS software and Tony’s expertise. Please contact NACS if you would be interested in exploring the relevance of GIS to your research project.

And You Thought You Take a Lot of Calls

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You may not realize it, but NACS employs telephone operators as a part of the campus telephone service.

Two operators are on duty Monday through Friday from 8 am to 5 pm. The operators handle calls from campus telephones dialing “0” and calls to the University from all over the country and the world. The operators are the first contact the public has when calling the general telephone number listed for University of California Irvine (949-824-5011).

Not only do these professionals have to know a great deal about the units, services, structure, calendar, and activities of the University, they are called upon to handle an impressive number of requests.

In the course of a typical year, the operators handle almost 100,000 calls, with a peak day being almost 600 callers. Their goal is to help every caller quickly, and almost 80% of all calls are answered within ten seconds.

Should you ever need to reach someone by telephone while off campus, our friendly Campus Operators are ready to help you.