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A year (plus a couple of months) in review

In the last twelve months I travelled more than any other year in my life. In parts post-COVID travel reauthorization and the desire to meet in-person again and the expansion of my professional network during COVID led to multiple invitations. The near universal need for shared cyberinfrastructure and growth of team science over the last four years also led to new funded research projects for me through CyVerse and ICDI.

Below, I summarize the trips and other professional meetings (22 in total) as they relate to AI, digital twins, and open science.

Late 2023

Let me indulge by covering my travel during the last few months of 2023,

08/31 - 09/03 AGIC, Prescott, Arizona

AGIC

The Arizona Geospatial Information Council (AGIC) supports GIS data across the civil government sector of Arizona. Jeff Gillan and I presented on Cloud Native Geospatial data sets and cyberinfrastructure to GIS specialists from state and federal agencies.

OSN

One of our goals in attending AGIC is to spread awareness of University of Arizona resources, like CyVerse, and our forthcoming Arizona Data Commons project in collaboration with the OpenStorageNetwork. For those who are interested, I already have data storage resources to support remote sensing data for the state of Arizona in the CyVerse data store.

09/04 - 09/08 Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

In September of 2023, Nirav and I visited Yale to meet with researchers working to expand a national infrastructure for monitoring natural methane emissions. Natural methane sources are emissions that originate from marshes and bogs as well as from agriculture, i.e., water intensive farming (e.g., rice) and livestock grazing. In contrast, point-sources of methane emissions, such as leaking gas wells, are specific, identifiable locations—often resulting from human activities where methane is released into the atmosphere.

Yale

The proposed observatoy would have been a compliment to the existing NEON and Ameriflux eddy-covariance networks. Unfortunately, this proposal was not funded and is again delayed.

10/23 - 10/25 NASA-ARID, Tucson, Arizona

ARID

In October, a national meeting held at the University of Arizona in support of the next NASA Earth Sciences mission, a next generation successor to Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE). This new proposal is called "Adaptation and Response in Drylands (ARID)", and is led by USGS and University of Arizona researchers.

11/29 - 12/01 SHEKATE, Salt Lake City, Utah

WestNet

In early December, I flew to a foggy SLC for a meeting of the WestNet consortium to hear about opportunities for regional innovation in cyberinfrastructure at the Southwest Higher Education Knowledge and Technology Exchange (SHEKATE).

Sun Corridor Internet2 The Quilt

In my daily work, cyberinfrastructure is more 0 and 1 than it is laying fiber optic cable or big iron servers and firewalls. The WestNet group included CIOs, CSOs, CTOs, DOTs, IT, DevOps, and Cloud managers from Internet2, SunCorridor & The Quilt. It was interesting to learn about the physical infrastructure side of cyberinfrastructure for several days and to gain new insight into how the physical grid of the research internet works nationwide.

12/4 - 12/6 NSF CISE, Tucson, AZ

WEST

The NSF CISE Research Expansion Aspiring Investigators Conference: Southwest meeting was held at BIO5 Institute, on the University of Arizona and hosted by the PI Vignesh Subbian.

CISE

Attendees learned about opportunities across the NSF CISE and CC* programs from NSF program officers.

2024 - a year on the road

01/08 - 01/10 OpenDendro, Tucson, Arizona

OpenDendro

As we approached the end of our NSF collaborative research award to update legacy software for dendrochronological research, we hosted a summit on the state of the scientific software used by the dendro community. Principal Investigator's of OpenDendro, Kevin Anchukaitis and Andy Bunn, brought a group of technically saavy dendrochronologists to the Laboratory of Tree Ring Research, where the science of dendrochronology was born, to learn more about the work we've achieved.

OpenDendro class OpenDendo Kevin

I am so proud of Ifeoluwa Ale's work to write the first Python package dplPy for time-series analysis in tree rings based on the dplR packages by Andy Bunn, and legacy FORTRAN77 dpl program.

01/12 - 01/15 Plant and Animal Genome, San Diego, California

PAG

CyVerse has been featured at the PAG meeting in San Diego for the last 16 years. This year however, the project began to show its change of direction. For the first time, we did not host a table in the vendor space. Instead we only held an early morning session on AI.

PAG Town & Country

Nirav and I presented on the new AI tools built by the CyVerse team to leverage open source large language models (LLMs) in private and secure environments, on premises. My recent GPU hardware acquisitions, funded by ABOR TRIF are supporting this effort.

PAG Nirav PAG Crowd

01/16 - 01/18 CI4MF, Long Beach, California

CI Compass

I have been a member of the CI-Compass Cloud Working Group for the last several years. This year, we presented our report on Cloud use for Major Facilities at the Cyberinfrastructure for Major Facilities (CI4MF) meeting in Long Beach.

CI4MF

Specific to the findings of our report and presentations by other speakers, the storage of scientific data on-premise (i.e., university hosted data centers), and the use of Major Facilities for research computing are massive cost-savings over commercial cloud solutions, saving tax-payers potentially billions of dollars.

01/23 M580, Tucson, Arizona

NAFRI

On my way to the airport, I stopped off at the National Advanced Fire & Resource Institute (NAFRI) to present on technology and data applications at the M580 Fire in Ecosystem Management course.

m580 Class

I have presented every year for the last four years at the meeting. It is nostalgic and bittersweet to watch and hear how fire management has changed over the last twenty two years since I started a first career as a wildland firefighter.

01/23 - 01/28 ACUASI, Fairbanks, Alaska

ACUASI

UAF minus 43

Jeff Gillan and I traveled to Fairbanks Alaska to meet with our colleague Professor Peter Webley at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where we met with the staff of the Alaska Center for Uncrewed Aerial Systems Integration (ACUASI). While the Alaskan weather greeted us with -43F temperatures, the visit was warm and productive.

UAF hanger UAF acuasi

This collaboration has resulted in the signing of a MOU between University of Arizona and University of Alaska Fairbanks. Both Universities are the land grant institutions of their respective state. We will exchange ideas, students and staff, around the shared interests of cyberinfrastructure, national security, UAS and sUAS, and AI.

02/05 - 02/09 Scientific proposal review panel, Virtual

In February, I served as a panelist for a scientific funding agency. All of the proposals focused on the use of AI, including large language models and generative AI -- which are things that were mostly unknown (at least to me) 24 months ago.

02/25 - 03/02 Sinbiose, Brasilia, Brasil

Sinbiose logo

Sinbiose

In February, I traveled with my colleagues from CU Boulder (ESIIL) and officals from the NSF to Brasilia Brasil for a collaborative Summit between Brasilian and United States ecological researchers.

CNPq

We also met with the Director of Brazil's counterpart to the US NSF, Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq), and discussed future opportunities for Brazil-US collaborative research, similar to the synthesis centers CyVerse are currently supporting.

03/26 - 03/29 Biosphere 2, Catalina, Arizona

B2 logo

B2

In March, Jeff Gillan and I hosted colleagues from Purdue, NEON (Battelle Inc), OpenTopography, and Alaska at Biosphere 2 (B2) for two nights to discuss the directions of uncrewed aerial systems research (UAS) and small UAS (sUAS). We are pursuing NSF funding for a larger data management and artificial intelligence platform for UAS derived data sets that is currently under review.

B2 DaveB2 sunset

04/03 - 04/05 Chishiki-AI, Austin, Texas

TACC

In April, Nirav and I went to the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), at UT Austin, to participate in a workshop on digitalt twins and AI for civil engineering, Chishiki-AI.

TACC racks TACC cloud TACC Tyson

Nirav and I also got [my first] personal tour of the TACC facility by director Dan Stanzione. It was incredible seeing the scale of NSF's major facility for AI and computational research. TACC will soon be the home of NSF's future Leadership Class Computing Facility, which is now breaking ground.

04/09 - 04/12 Ecological Forecasting Initiative, Portsmouth, New Hampshire

EFI

In April, I attended the Ecological Forecasting Initiative's Cyberinfrastructure Meeting. EFI discussions centered around the advancement of ecological research into digital twins, and hosting of large earth system scale datasets.

EFI panel

Challenges to EFI's cyberinfrastructure include "the development of standards and databases for transparent, open, and interoperable archiving and sharing or both forecasts and forecast workflows, and the development of shared community tools for data ingest/interoperability and for forecast workflow automation / continuous integration."

05/13 05/17 ESIIL Summit, Boulder, Colorado

ESIIL

ESIIL group

ESIIL hosted its second innovation summit, this year the theme was on environmental resilience and adaptation, and best practices of open science. Over 130 people from across the country came to Boulder to engage in new discussions around Tribal Engagement, Data Sovereignty, and to establish new working groups for synthesis research proposals.

ESIIL Ty ESIIL Banner

05/21 - 05/23 LTAR All Scientists, Tucson, Arizona

USDA LTAR

The USDA-ARS LTAR meeting was held in Tucson at University of Arizona this year. I provided a short talk about the use of Cyberinfrastructure and Open Science to the group. This marked a decade of collaboration for me with Phil Heilman, the Director of the Southwest Watershed Research Center (SWWRC).

LTAR Guertin

Earlier in February my master's advisor D. Phil Guertin, a longtime collaborator with SWWRC, retired from University of Arizona after a multi-decade career in Watershed Management (photo by Laura Norman, USGS).

06/20 - 06/21 SWEETER, Tucson, Arizona

SWEETER

In June, I attended the wrap-up of Arizona's collaborative effort on South West Expertise in Expanding Training, Education and Research (SWEETER) for AI with attendees from Western Arizona Community College and Diné College. SWEETER is a CC* funded program by the NSF.

Summer Break

Jemez Redondo

In late June, with my wife and children we vacationed in the Jemez Mountains at my parent's home. My sister and her family live in nearby Los Alamos, about 45 minutes drive around the Valles Caldera where my PhD research took place.

Jemez waterfall Jemez deck

In July, we travelled to Europe to visit with my wife's family friends in the Black Forest of Germany. While there we toured Switzerland and Italy, with a short stop in Copenhagen, Denmark, on the return trip.

Euro Black Forest

Euro Berlin Euro Copenhagen

08/12 - 08/16 GASC, Anchorage, Alaska

GASC

In August, I returned to Alaska to join the ACUASI group for their annual Global Autonomous Systems Conference (GASC). The various discussion panels centered around AI, UAS air mobility, and the use of foreign built small UAS by government.

GASC banner GASC downtown

The meeting was attended by numerous dignitaries, including the Governor of Alaska, the lone US Congresswoman for Alaska, and a US Senator. All relayed their wholehearted support of Alaska as a testbed for uncrewed aerial systems research and innovation. The majority of Alaska's villages and tribal communities live in remote areas that are only connected by aircraft for much of the year.

GASC panel

09/11 - 09/12 - MaGIC, Madison, Wisconsin

MaGIC

MaGIC Madison

In September, I travelled to the University of Madison to meet with a group of roboticists using AI and digital twins to build and to pilot autonomous vehicles many of which are operated in the vacuum of space and on other planetary bodies like the moon, Mars, and asteroids. The Machine Ground Interaction Consortium (MaGIC), led by Professor Dan Negrut and his Simulation Based Engineering Lab (SBEL) was a late highlight of my year travelling.

MaGIC group

I am now helping the MaGIC and SBEL teams to train and design generative AI tools with robots, leveraging the large GPU resources from the NSF ACCESS-CI at Texas A&M (ACES).

10/06 - 10/09 NCEMS, Chicago, Illinois

NCEMS

NCEMS hotel

In early October, I flew to Chicago and stayed at the O'Hare Hilton Hotel (never leaving the airport property) to attend the kick-off summit meeting of the NSF National Synthesis Center for Emergence in the Molecular and Cellular Sciences (NCEMS).

NCEMS Open Science

CyVerse will be providing the cyberinfrastructure resources to the new center, in the same design as ESIIL is using, for the next 5 and hopefully 10 years.