This summer brought big changes to Tufts University Information Technology (UIT), including a move for Tufts OnLine services, a revamped academic integrity tutorial for incoming students, an upgrade to the processing technology that supports research projects and a new mapping database that gathers information from multiple schools and organizations.
Tufts OnLine finds a new home
Tufts OnLine moved locations on Aug. 1 to the Academic Computing Building, located directly behind Pearson Hall.
The building had previously been occupied by other UIT employees who recently moved into the Tufts Administration Building near Teele Square, leaving the space open for Tufts OnLine.
Tufts OnLine was previously located in the basement of Ballou Hall, one of the oldest buildings on campus, which was subject to occasional floods, according to UIT Director of Communications and Organizational Effectiveness Dawn Irish.
The new building will give the Tufts OnLine technicians more space to work on the machines, Irish said.
"The technicians have a nice place to work so they can be a little more effective," Tufts OnLine supervisor Judi Vellucci said.
Tufts OnLine, a group of student technicians, provides support for students who need assistance to fix a technological issue.
The new building has a space, similar to the Genius Bar found in Apple Stores, where technicians provide hands-on support to students in need of computer assistance, according to Vellucci.
"It'll be interesting and fun for me to watch what develops in the building in the next year," Vellucci said. "It's going to be driven by what the students want."
Revamped online Academic Integrity Tutorial
UIT in conjunction with the Office of the Dean of Student Affairs this summer created an online academic integrity tutorial that all of this year's incoming students are required to complete through Trunk.
In addition to completing the online tutorial, students were required to attend academic integrity seminars hosted by Tufts Writing Fellows during Orientation, according to Sheryl Barnes, assistant director of educational and scholarly technology services client services for UIT.
The online tutorial, designed to simply expose students to the material, is not graded and allows students to answer individual questions until they get them right, Barnes said.
The program aims to ensure that new students are fully aware of Tufts' academic integrity policies, Irish said.
"Students, when they get here, aren't quite sure of what is appropriate and isn't appropriate," she said. "Students arrive here and they have all different backgrounds, in terms of their preparation. Just because some things might be obvious to one student it might be not obvious for another student."
Barnes hopes the new tutorial will help prevent students from getting in trouble for academic integrity violations.
"They'll know where the gray area is and where they need to be careful," she said.
Improvements to the high-performance computing cluster
Over the summer, Tufts UIT upgraded its computing cluster, a group of high-performance processors that allow students to compute quickly and store their research, according to Director of Research and Geospatial Technology Services Lionel Zupan.
"[The cluster] allows you to do experiments very quickly and using a lot of memory that you couldn't do on your regular desktop computer," Irish said.
When Tufts created the cluster in 2008 it consisted of 320 individual cores, or computer processing units, Zupan said.
This past June, UIT added 480 cores to the cluster. By the end of September, the cluster will consist of 1000 cores, which will equal the computing power of 500 MacBook Pro computers, according to Zupan.
The new addition will give researchers greater resources in conducting experiments, tripling their computing capability, Irish said.
Multi-school information mapping database
Tufts is currently working on creating a new mapping database into which researchers from multiple schools and organizations can contribute their data, Irish said. Students can then use the database, called the GeoData Portal, for individual projects.
The project, which will include data from MIT, Harvard, Stanford and the Massachusetts Office of Geographic Information, is managed by Tufts' Manager of Geospatial Technology Services Patrick Florance.
The GeoData Portal will display the information it gathers through a map, Irish said. She pointed to an example of a student who wanted to research which Medford buildings predated 1850, research that would be made possible through the portal, she said.
"[The portal] allows you to use this kind of mapping in research or within scholarly pursuits, to make it more relevant and interesting," Irish said.
