Information Technology News Archive

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Staff

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.

NACS Shares at ACUTA

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Bruce Cotsonas, NACS Project Coordinator, and Todd Strand, NACS Infrastructure Engineer, co-presented at the 35th annual ACUTA conference and exhibition in San Diego on July 27th. (ACUTA is an association for communications technology professionals in Higher Education.)

In their presentation, “Visual Documentation and the Installation of Communications Infrastructure”, Bruce and Todd demonstrated the use of “visual documentation” (also known as “visual scope of work”) to portray telecommunications infrastructure before and after installation projects on the UCI campus.

Google Earth (TM) satellite photography of UCI building sites and digital photographs of construction details as well as text and other graphics were imported into Power Point presentations. The resulting “visual documentation” helps to reduce ambiguity and clarify the reasons for infrastructure work, solutions to problems, conduit location and excavation, cable pulling/splicing/termination, and the transferring of services.

Bruce Cotsonas coordinates NACS cabling projects with clients, vendors and staff. He is a member of ACUTA, BICSI, CSI and DBIA, and he has over twenty-one years of experience in project management.

Todd Strand designs, plans, and provides cost estimates during communications infrastructure projects. He holds the Registered Communications Distribution Designer, Network Transport Systems Specialist, and Outside Plant Specialist certifications from BICSI.

Bruce and Todd work for Diane Dunn, Manager of NACS’s Communications Planning Group, which plans and manages all campus-wide network and telecommunications infrastructure projects.

New Talent in NACS

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NACS would like to welcome Harry Mangalam to our Research Computing group, and announce that Isaac Straley has accepted the position of Interim Manager for our IT Security group.

Harry Mangalam earned his Ph.D. in Physiology/Pharmacology from UCSD, and has held positions at the Salk Institute, the National Center for Genome Resources in Santa Fe, and at Acero, a Bay Area commercial bioinformatics company, as well as IT support positions within UCI’s College of Medicine and Earth Systems Sciences. Harry has been under the thrall of computers since the days when floppy disks really were big and floppy.

Harry’s position is a joint appointment, with half his time supporting Dr. Falko Kuester’s HIperwall project and the other half with NACS Research Computing, assisting faculty with their computational science needs.

Isaac Straley’s previous position was within the IT Security group he now leads. Prior to joining NACS, he owned his own consulting business, providing services to financial institutions famous for their attention to network and data security issues. His background includes both technical and management experience. He is also a life-long computer fanatic.

As Interim Manager of IT Security, he will be working with NACS and the campus to ensure a continued safe and reliable computing environment.